It’s Been Lovely, But I Have to Scream Now

I love my Secret Santa Christmas present from Peter so much I can hardly stand it.  He gave me a coupon for 20 babysittings of any or all combinations of my chidren.  I think it is overly generous and a crazy amount of time to give to me, but I am having a hard time restraining myself from using it all up before Easter.

I love that the girls get so excited when it is an “Uncle Peter Day” that I only tell them about it 30 or so minutes before he comes over or they will be at the door looking for him and asking when he will come over and jumping up and down off the couch and the walls.  Sometimes Jer and Ariel and I go out, sometimes Gage comes with us, and last weekend Peter watched all three kids for three hours plus and it was just me and my husband.  We did everything I have been wanting to do for a month.  Well, almost everything.

Christmas really IS magic.

Thanks Peter.

Gage sits at our new dining table, which is a few inches taller than our old table. So when he is in his restaurant-style high chair, only his little round head is visible above the table. He grins at us, a little bobbing head. He babbles a stream of lilting syllables, da da da da da da da. And lately he has been getting lots of laughs by moving his lips and tongue around as if he were talking but MAKING NO SOUNDS come out. It looks like a video of himself with the sound turned off, and we all crack up. We also laugh when he makes his sound “AHH-zhussssh zhussssh zhussssh zhussssh” — snakelike, barely audible, with his little lips pursed and his brow furrowed. We all think that this, combined with his fantastic spell-casting trick of taking any stick or stick-like object, pointing it at people and saying a breathy “AHH-CHA-KAT-CHA-KAA”, would make him a shoe-in for the role of VOLDEMORT in a homemade Harry Potter parody video.

So at dinner, Gage is doing these tricks, interspersed with rounding his back, hunching his shoulders, lowering his head and bobbing up and down while giggling. Jerry says. “I think Gage is going to be a joker when he grows up.”

“I am going to be a sing-ger!!,” pipes in Piper.

Then Ariel joyously yells, “I am going to be a children’s author!” She has just finished reading RAMONA, AGE 8 by Beverly Cleary and loved it. (Thanks Grandma Betty!)

I smile a big grin to hear my children happy and confident and excited about their futures. Later in the evening, I recount this event and my good feelings about it to Jerry, and notice a definite pall over him. Tangibly NOT excited.

“What?” I ask Jerry, “didn’t you think that was great, how excited the girls were about themselves and their futures?”

“No, it’s not that. It is just that when they were talking about their futures, I was thinking about myself, and that all I could say is ‘I want to be a computer programmer.’ “

I found this quote in the most recent issue of ALTERNATIVES magazine. It is completely out of context, but I love it. It kind of nails what I am trying to reach for in my life these days, which is, I guess, a strong sense of hope.

“You have to do what’s right because it’s right, not because there’s a reward, or because you can win…” Whether we come out of this OK or not is not a very important issue to me. What’s important is that we figure out how to do what’s best for all of us, not for just a few of us, and DO it. If it works out, that’s a bonus, but it’s not the reason to do it. You do it, as one of the farmers I was talking to says—he raises pigs using the deep straw system—because, “It just seemed like the right thing to do.”

I am excited about trying to write down observations from my life, real (kind of) and objective (kind of).  It seems a great way to help me notice what IS happening and pay attention to the events, people, and changes that inhabit my day to day.  Especially as a contrast to my general train of thoughts, which tend to be a practice of simply shifting around vague, unrooted  generalities that may be months, years, even decades old.

So here are the latest in my family observations:

Jerry has been eating lettuce and spinach.  On his own.  Even requesting leafy things to eat.  One evening he said “Is this all the romaine we have left in the house?”  To which I replied “Who are you?”

Ariel has been working hard on the violin.  We play a racetrack game-board like contest on her chalkboard, she gets one or two points for playing a song, I get one point for giving her a compliment about what she did well.  She wins.  Sometimes she gets so distracted by getting points or how many more points she needs to get to the end that she kind of forgets about playing violin.  Sometimes I am not sure whether I am helping her learn violin or helping her learn competitive gaming strategies.  Also, she has been playing her violin songs on the piano, playing with chord harmonies.  She does this totally on her own, without any games or competition involved.  Sometimes I even tell her to just stop playing for a while so I can hear.  Which of course only encourages her.

Piper encouraged Gage to race her to get his nerf football the other day.  He loves his nerf football.  But what shocked me was she pretended to run to get it and just pantomined running in slow motion, saying “Oh Gage, are you going to get the ball first?  You are so fast.” She was both imitating the way Ariel sometimes plays with her or Gage, but also doing it in her own unique way.  And it showed such an awareness of who Gage was and what he likes and what his abilities are.  I still monitor them together pretty carefully, because for instance just this afternoon Piper tried to “help” Gage do a somersault by lifting his legs and body and folding them backwards OVER HIS HEAD, essentially attempting to fold him in half as he lay on his tummy.  I feared for his head snapping clean off and yelled “NO PIPER!!  LET GO!!!” as I panicked and ran over to pull Piper away.  The aftermath was Piper crying and Gage giggling and throwing himself over and over onto his stomach on the basement carpet.  Maybe he did have a head injury after all.

Gage finds my glasses on the bedstand, or my extra pair of glasses wherever they may be and brings them to me, yelling Mama!.  He will insist I put them on, jamming them into my head if I allow it.  It doesn’t matter if I already have glasses on.  Sometimes I turn away from him and pretend to put them on and say “THANK YOU!”  I also say thank you when he helps me unload the dishwasher, kind of like every utensil he pulls out and hands to me is just exactly what I have always wanted, yelling his explosive “MAMA!!”  and then grunting UHNN UHNN so I will please notice and take it.  Sometimes when he helps I say 50 thank yous to him.  He loves this.  He also loves feeding me crackers.  He opens the cracker cupboard, UHNNs and points his way to a cracker, then when I pick him up he waits for me to ignore him for a minute and open my mouth a little and then, in it goes.  He doesn’t really like these crackers.  Maybe that is obvious.

I made Tan a new logo for her blog. See the “Dramatic Chipmunk” videos on YouTube for the inspiration.  Maybe Tan will post something about the mantra “Feel the Darkness”.

-Jer

Merry Christmas, Jerry

Sometimes I wake up with these impulses of ideas which only form themselves in my head as words or phrases I could google.  Today I googled “consumer culture means of production control manufacture of desire” and found the following, which seems incredibly close to what I meant and have been thinking about yet unable to think and write myself:

. . . the emergence of the modern consumer society - a site wherein self is constructed through acts of consumption rather than through relationships with family bonds and kinship ties. This society arises in the age of increasing concentration of strangers in urban areas unified only by mass mediated advertisements. These ads sell products whose planned obsolescence affirms the need to train consumers to purchase more products from the inevitable surplus generated in a capitalist system. Thus advertising invokes the ideology that consumption is essential for happy citizens. The phenomenology of consumption becomes increasingly based on spectacle and mobility, most illustrated by the nineteenth century flaneur and the contemporary shopping mall stroll. Given the seemingly perpetual movement of individuals and shift of scenes in which individuals find themselves, the visual image must be reformatted to accommodate continual change and an ever fickle eye. Moreover, the authors note the rise of Late Modern or Postindustrial Capitalism defined by the global exchange of objects and, increasingly, nonmaterial items of consumption. Thus, brands, fashions, and images become less connected to material resources even as their production, distribution, and consumption continue to possess material impacts.

I want to create traditions and culture in opposition to this, and this pull is especially overwhelming during the holidays when the call to be caught up in the past and present consumer culture is so pervasive.  I am having a hard time not just resisting and fighting, a hard time figuring how to put my energy into something I want to move towards.  I have to process and discuss so much before I feel able to get unstuck.  I guess that is what I am doing lately on this blog.  Working on figuring it out, thinking publicly.  I appreciate the collective pool of readers that I imagine as I write, (especially you jer) and thank you for being a necessary witness (even if you are imaginary, you help me.)

peace

 The moon shines in the darkness,

bringing joy to all.

A dog howls in response,

according to its nature.

We can’t blame the moon

just because the dog disturbs us.

—-  RUMI (as quoted in The Sufi Book of Life:  99Pathways of the Heart for the Modern Dervish)

I found this verse in an overdue library book which fell back into my possession as we were re-arranging the living room to accommodate the tree (thanks Mom and Dad!).  This verse seems so relevant to my daily parenting ups and downs, the minute by minute swings between joy and frustration.  I love it.  Maybe Rumi knew Piper in one of her previous incarnations.

I recently got an email informing me that poet Daniel Beaty is leading a writer’s workshop here in Portland for teachers who have been part of a writing project. I knew nothing about this guy so I looked up his video “knock knock” on YOUTUBE to learn a little. I thought he would be witty and entertaining like, maybe Dr Seuss or Shel Silverstein. It was not exactly what I expected.Check it out for yourself.