Bumblebee Sweet Potato

For me, there is no vacation like a beach vacation. I grew up summering on the Jersey shore–my parents usually rented in the same general area, but not the same house–and a vacation really doesn’t feel like a vacation unless a considerable part of it is spent near sand and salt water.

As I’ve gotten older, the addition of rum drinks or gin and tonics, also help to promote a summery feeling.

We’ve spent a great 6 days here, and we’ve still got a day and a half to go–including the Fourth of July holiday, with its attendant festivals (both pancake and strawberry!). I’ll be sad to leave on Saturday, even sadder to return to my overflowing work email inbox, which I’ve been triaging daily while the kids are in bed.

The Bee continues to brown like a nut. I’m not sure which gene pool she slipped out of of–both landisdad and I are burners–but that girl is an easy tanner. The Potato has conquered (mostly) his fear of waves, and spends most of his days dancing in the surf, shaking his butt at the ocean, laughing his fool head off. And me? I’ve managed to read my way through all but one of the books I brought with me (The Alienist is still to come), plus picked up a copy of Netherland from my MIL.

After inspiring the Potato and the Bee to build the ‘great wall of grandma’ out of beach stones on the first day, the kids and I have been building a variety of rock structures, including ‘the biggest mound on earth’ and an underwater sea wall. It never fails to amaze me when we go back the next day (or sometimes even later the same day) that the sea has unrelentingly claimed our structures. But it invariably does.

So after my bad parenting moment of a few weeks ago, I’ve been working overtime to keep from losing my patience with the Bee. Which has not been that easy, as she has been a holy terror to live with, of late. I have, however, managed to keep my temper, although it did at one point require locking myself in my room to read a book.

Distraction (my own), it turns out, does wonders for extending the patience. So far, I have sewed, read, done laundry, set the table for dinner and gone out in the yard to weed, in order to avoid yelling at the Bee while she was yelling at me.

It’s starting to pay off. On Sunday night, when we returned from the beach and she had to live with the fact that her temper had lost her tv access for the whole weekend, she started screaming at me again. I blithely continued on my way, doing whatever it was that I had been doing, and eventually, she went to her room and calmed herself down.

When it was over, I told her that it was great that she had calmed herself down, and that it seemed much quicker than the other times she’s totally lost it (okay, I didn’t say totally lost it to her, but you get my drift). I asked her if she thought there was something different this time, or if she had used a different technique to get her composure back.

She said, “No.” Then, “well, there was one thing.”

“What’s that?,” I inquired.

“I got bored of fighting with you.”

Victory through boredom. I’m on to something here.

ETA: She also told me, in a later conversation that night, “Mom, sometimes I just feel like a toy that someone took out and played with, and just used me up till all my insides were gone, and that’s when I lose my temper.”

Melting much?

A confession:

Sometimes, I really am the world’s worst mother. It’s not just something that my kids say to hurt my feelings.

On Thursday morning, I got really fed up with the fact that the Bee was dawdling about getting ready for school (like–it was 8:15, she needs to be at school by 8:30, she was still in her pajamas). This is a dawdling that’s been going on for a week, and I was/am so tired of having to nag my kid out of the house every day.

We got into a huge fight about it–at one point, she, landisdad and I were all screaming–and finally I yelled, “what’s wrong with you?” at her, and she broke down in tears and told me that one of her friends has been making fun of her clothes every day. Because they ‘don’t match.’ And because she wears the same sneakers every day. And that two days ago, this other girl pointed out to her several times that she was wearing a purple shirt and brown socks. And that the Bee, for the past week, has been freezing up every time she opens her dresser before she gets ready in the morning, because she is afraid that she will pick the wrong thing to wear.

Gulp.

Was. Not. Prepared.

I honestly believed that we had a few years before this “I’m telling you this hard truth because I’m your friend and I want you to be a better person/popular/cuter” kind of bullshit started.

And I honestly believed that, when it happened, I would actually help my daughter through it in a calm and supportive way, instead of screaming at her.

We’ve had a bunch of conversations about this topic since then, and come up with some strategies for her to call out the other girl for bullying her, and enlisting some of her other friends as a support network. I told her a story about how I ran away from school when I was in the fourth grade, because I was getting teased for an outfit that I was wearing. I’ve asked her repeatedly why she didn’t tell me and landisdad what was going on earlier. You know what she said? “It’s embarrassing, mom.”

So we talked some more about that, and about how there are other adults that she can talk to, if she doesn’t want to talk to me and landisdad about things like this, and about how we live in a country where people will judge you on your appearance, and you have to learn to be happy with the way that you look, or else there will always be someone making you feel bad about it because you’re too fat, or your skin is too dark, or your nose is too big, or you wear too many stripy clothes, or you have feet that are too large, or eleventy-million other things that are not “the norm.”

And I feel like she’s going to be okay about this, in the long run, and she will learn to stand up for herself against bullies, and she’s a tough kid.

But I also feel like I fucked up, and that at a time when my kid really needed me to pay attention to her, and notice things about her, what I chose to do was make her feel worse about herself, because she was making me late for work.

The thing about parenting is, you can’t wallow in your own feelings of fucked-up-ed-ness. I’d like to spend a bunch of time lying in my bed, curled in the fetal position, but that’s not going to make the thing I fucked up better. I’d like to invite you, oh people of the internets, to come over and kick me in the head, but that’s not going to make it better either.

So instead, I post this cautionary tale:

Sometimes, your kid is not dawdling just to get on your last nerve. Sometimes, your kid has a rich and fascinating (and even scary) interior life that has nothing to do with you. Pay attention.

I took two third-grade girls to the mall today, and got an ugly vision of my future. The Bee and I had to go buy some pants for spring, and one of her friends tagged along for the ride. One thing I wasn’t expecting was the playing-at-being-big-girls that happened.

And that said playing would involve telling each other how skinny they looked in various outfits.

I’m not sure where the girls picked up the idea that the best compliment that one woman can give another is to tell her she looks skinny. I don’t like the idea that my daughter has embarked on a journey that can end in body-obsessiveness and feeling bad about herself.

I was watching the Bee at softball practice the other day, and she struck me as such a tomboy, wearing the same dark blue hoodie that she wears every day, with some jeans and her cleats. She and the other girls on her softball team were running around in that way that only tweener girls can–part gazelle, part ballerina, sometimes both at once. She looked so strong and graceful, with her braided hair and her her long legs.

I hope that she can always look at her body in the mirror and see that graceful girl, but I can see that she already knows that society wants her to look a certain kind of way. I just wish I could keep her away from the idea that anything less than perfection is no good at all.

Like most parents, I typically check on my kids before I go to bed. The Potato has a tendency to climb out from under the covers, and I cover him back up. The Bee gets to read in bed for a half-hour or so, and she falls asleep while reading at least once a week.

Lately, I’ve developed a new bedtime ritual.

My daughter has really dry skin, especially in the winter. Her hands are sometimes so chapped that her knuckles crack and bleed. Landisdad and I supply her with lotion, and remind her to put it on constantly, but she hates having lotion on her hands, which makes it worse.

A few months ago, I started sneaking into her room at night and putting Vaseline on the backs of her hands while she’s asleep. I thought I would do it once or twice, and then tell her about it, to prove to her that using it would actually make her feel better.

After a couple of days, I asked her if her hands were feeling better, and she said yes. I told her that I had been putting on the Vaseline, and suggested that she keep it up.

About three days later, she said, “Mom, you need to sneak into my room and put Vaseline on my hands again.” When I asked her why she couldn’t just do it herself, she said, “It’s gross! and it gets on my book!”

Sigh.

So I’m left doing the midnight Vaseline treatment a couple times a week.

What kinds of things do you do in your kids’ rooms at night, while they’re sleeping?

The Bee is experiencing the joys of state testing for the first time this week. She was tremendously stressed out about it all weekend. There is something deeply wrong with a society that believes that 8-year-olds deserve academic stress.

I told her, during one of several conversations we had about how her performance on the statewide test of third graders would not unalterably determine her life’s path, that in a way, the test was more a test of her teachers than it was of her. That she would do well, but that the thing that was really being tested was how well her teachers were teaching all the kids in the class.

And you know what? I don’t really think that’s a great idea for our society either.

One of the things that I love about the Bee’s school is that it is very small. It’s so small that there is only one class for each grade. Lots of the parents know lots of the kids–not just the kids in their own child/ren’s class, but in the whole school. And it’s really a community, where the teachers know all of the kids, and the principal can not only greet each child by name, but really knows something about who they are as students.

Last year, her school had an impressive improvement in the third grade test–the scores were significantly improved over the prior year. But I’d guess that has about 80% to do with the fact that the current fifth grade (the third grade of two years ago) is filled with kids who are overactive and have a lot of attention problems. This year’s fourth grade (last year’s third grade), on the other hand, is a much quieter and better-behaved group of kids.

The Bee’s class? My bet is they’re somewhere in the middle. Does that mean if they slip ten percent from last year’s testing that the teacher was ten percent worse at her job this year? or does it speak to the vagaries of kid personalities, and attention spans more than anything else?

When the Bee came home last night, she ran up to me, gave me a great big hug, and said, “you were right Mom, it was easy!” She went to school this morning without being stressed about the test, and I’m happy about that. I just hope that the teachers  get to relax about it soon too.

Yesterday, the Bee brought home the following essay:

I have a little brother who turned four on August 11. His name is [redacted] and let me tell you something, the day he was born I knew the new baby was going to be a pain. Well I turned out to be right, he is. He doesn’t even go away when I asked him to. And something else, he’s a crybaby. Sometimes he cries when I poke him playfully. I want to get rid of him, but whenever I mention this to my parents they say no.

You can feel the love, dripping off the page.

And the teacher’s comment?

Try working on great openings and endings! This was good and well-written.

Sigh….

I spent a good deal of this evening trying to figure out how to make a wreath with candles a la Saint Lucia. Yes, I’ve reached that parenting milestone–the elementary school holiday play.

The Bee’s class is doing a production of “Winter Holidays from Around the World,” and she’s playing the Swedish kid at Christmas.

White robe-like garment?  check

Red sash? check

Tray of buns and coffee to deliver to her parents? check (hey, maybe there’s something to this whole tradition!)

But how on earth do the Swedes (who actually use lighted candles–we don’t have to go that far) get the candles to balance without toppling over?

I’m curious, if there are any Swedish readers out there, how this works. I’m also assuming that you don’t use twist ties and paper clips for your children.

I saw this website recently, and I had to blog about it. In many ways, I think that environmentalism is the easiest political movement in which to engage kids. After all, kids generally love animals, and it’s an easy road to talk to them about how humans’ ability to affect the environment can make life harder for animals.

In our house, we are more vegetarian than not. Perhaps one or two nights a week, we’ll eat some kind of meat–but only fish or fowl, not mammals. If I’m out of town, landisdad may indulge in a beef or pig moment–I think this week, he’s brought real (not turkey) bacon into the house.

We’ve brought our kids to anti-war demos and other rallies, of course, but in some ways, I think the thing we’ve done that will stick more effectively, and make them less demanding of the planet’s resources throughout their lives, has been to raise them in a (largely) meat-free household. I suspect that someday, one of our kids will come to us and tell us they want to be a vegan, or an ovo-lacto vegetarian, or some new kind of diet that doesn’t even exist now. I’m dreading that moment a little bit. But I’ll enjoy it, at the same time.

The Bee’s counselor called landisdad today to talk about her progress. The Bee has only had two negative interactions in class since the school year started, and the counselor feels like she is managing her mistake-handling fairly well. She suggested that we sit down and have a conversation with her about how she thinks she’s going to do on her report card, to see if she has unrealistic expectations of perfection, and try to defuse that in advance. (Not that we expect a bad report card, just a less-than-perfect one.) The counselor also said that she would be spending less time with the Bee after this marking period, because there are other kids who need her help much more.

On the other hand…

last week the counselor and the Bee made worry beads. Today, they strung the beads, and the Bee was supposed to name them after 12 things that made her happy or relaxed. She could only come up with 9 things. (I was a little surprised to see that her brother made the list, but her dad and I did not.) The counselor said that, overall, the Bee has not really opened up to her. I’m happy to be able to have another adult’s perspective on her emotional state, but it’s disconcerting to think that she’s not just a happy-go-lucky kid when we’re not around. I guess I have this fantasy that she’s just acting miserable at home, and then going off to school and being happy there.

I think that landisdad and I don’t do a particularly good job of talking about things that make us happy, and that’s rubbed off on her. We have a lot of conversations that involve indignation (righteous or otherwise), and I know that the Bee could tell me 12 things that make her mad in a heartbeat.

During dinner tonight, I asked everyone what made them happy today. The only person at the table who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—come up with something was the Bee. I didn’t press her on it, because I don’t think that would be particularly helpful. But I do think we’ll be starting our dinner conversations with some similar topic from here on out.