Would I like to spend an entire day hanging out with Amy? You bet I would! Last Sunday Amy and I spent the day together driving to Cleveland so she could meet Clawed Beauty, a person she follows on YouTube. We knew we would have close to three hours of driving each way, but we did not expect to wait in line in the cold for three hours once we got to the venue. Luckily, we dressed as we always do in the winter, with coats and warm clothes. Clearly, many people in line with us did not expect to be in line for so long and were not wearing coats or warm clothes! By the time we got inside we were freezing. We had some cold pizza and cake, which seemed like the best food in the world given that it was 3pm and we hadn’t eaten since 9:30 that morning. We waited for another half hour for Amy to have her couple of minutes to deliver the drawings she made and say hello. It was all worth it for Amy’s smile spreading ear to ear as we left. Plus, it would all have been worth it no matter what because I got to spend a day with Amy, so if she wants to go to another event like this one, I’m all in. I will pack snacks and chairs, but I’m all in.
While Amy likes to watch Clawed Beauty on YouTube, Sarah likes to watch videos that parents take of their babies crying while getting bloodwork. She likes other medical videos as well, none of which are my favorite, but I don’t want to squash her fascination. This might be how she belatedly processes the various things she has experienced, and she also loves pretending to be a nurse. This week she started playing the B-52s on her phone at the same time as she was watching the crying babies. I realized she was holding her phone at an angle, not so she could see it, but so the crying babies could see it! She was trying to comfort kids who were upset at the hospital!
I have a dream vision that maybe Sarah could have a job that involves connecting with babies or greeting people near hospital elevators or clearing hospital food trays, but the thing we need to resolve first is the screaming meltdown moments. They don’t happen often but when they happen they are really big and require me to get Sarah from school, as I did on Wednesday. So much of my parenting life has been consciously or unconsciously structured around avoiding screaming upsets, but now I am very consciously trying to steer my parenting truck directly into the headlights of oncoming FEELINGS. I now want to lovingly encounter Sarah’s edges, asking her to clean her room or practice piano more often since those usually receive resistance. I asked her to do those on Wednesday and Thursday so that I could give her space for the feelings, but then she did everything I asked with no upset! When she picked out a new pair of glasses (a belated birthday present), I was thrilled that she would then have to wait for two weeks. Usually waiting is so hard for her, but as we left she looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and said she would have to be like Toad and wait! Can she smell my fear or lack thereof about her upsets? Is she not getting upset precisely because I’m steering straight for the screams and thus not scared of them? Not that she hasn’t had her moments, but I haven’t been able to elicit them.
I think we all process feelings in different ways at different times. When Anna arrived on Wednesday, Sarah was ready to process through play. She and Anna spent many minutes pretending to be Gerald getting frustrated in Elephants Cannot Dance by Mo Willems. Sarah likes to grimace and make fists while saying “Argh I did the wrong thing!”
Thursday morning Sarah woke with many feelings regarding her upset at school on Wednesday. Carl listened to her talk and cry before breakfast and the feelings took a long time. She was later than usual in coming down to breakfast, but she had clearly moved through her feelings. She was sparkly and present. She was more focused than ever with eating and getting dressed. Then she went to her backpack and took out the schoolwork that had been the reason for the upset and did the work all by herself!!!! Time and again I learn the lesson that we don’t have to fix or force things if we can just help a person (kids or adults) move through their feelings. When the feelings are cleared then whatever seemed insurmountable can be surmounted easily. You would think that since I was raised with this perspective that I would have always had more comfort around Sarah’s upsets, but you would be incorrect. I can handle crying much more easily and comfortably than I handle screaming, perhaps because I feel screaming to be an accusation rather than simply an expression of frustration or despair, but I’m on a new path now and you can remind me of it when I forget.
Ever since Sarah was a baby she has had times where she wakes in the night and is up for a while. We used to call these moments parties and the term is still apt. Twice this past week she woke in the middle of the night, loudly and gleefully announced that she was going to sneak downstairs and watch the Wiggles, watched for two minutes and then went back to bed. One night at dinner she said she wanted to set her alarm for the next morning. I asked if she wanted to set it for 3am to watch the Wiggles and was rewarded with a snort laugh as Sarah got my joke.
Carl and the girls are having a fun Dad Weekend. He ordered a new gymnastics mat so Amy can do cartwheels at the mountain house without hurting her feet. That’s the only place she can really do gymnastics in the winter because she is too tall to do cartwheels anywhere at home unless we change the light fixtures. In the summer she can be outside, although then one always runs the risk of putting a hand or foot on a walnut shell, and those things hurt like crazy. Sarah joined her for cartwheels and splits, or attempts in that direction anyway. Carl also joined them, with his usual over the top bravado of being the best in the world and then not actually being capable at all, garnering many laughs from Amy.
Dad Weekends are always fun, even though I know we all miss each other, but they are also important because Carl is better at encouraging the girls to be independent. Last weekend I asked Carl to help me get Sarah to prepare her own breakfast. He calmly and easily did so. Meanwhile, I had a hard time not being involved! It felt physically stressful not to help and hover. Carl was amazed to notice how hard it was for me, and I was too. So we have lots of new parenting goals and I’m glad to have help with getting out of the way more often because it is harder than I thought it would be.
I’m in Philly at the moment for a book event at Booked. in Chestnut Hill at 4pm today. I’ll be talking about my book and also focusing on how the Alexander Technique informs my parenting and life experience. I will be talking with Joseph Arnold, a fellow AT teacher and author of Soulforce. I drove out early so I could have some extra time visiting my family and that has been wonderful. I keep picturing the bookstore as being in the location where Encore books used to be looooooong ago when I was little. It’s not in that location at all! I know where it actually is, and yet I can’t override my cellular sense of where an independent bookstore ought to be! Anyway, I’m excited to do another event and to see the people that I know are planning to attend.
Thank you to all of you who have written Amazon reviews. It’s a weird situation to know that I don’t want to support Amazon but also to know that those reviews can make a huge difference in helping a book get legs. I know that in most independent bookstores my book is not being stocked. People can order it, but that means they need to know about it to begin with. They won’t be seeing it on a shelf or a display as they wander through a store to browse. Getting enough Amazon reviews, I think, is the electronic equivalent of getting my book put on a shelf or display for people to see as they wander past. You can write a review even if you bought the book elsewhere. If the review gets taken down, you can repost it, and it will probably stay. That happened for at least one person who reviewed my book. Sometimes I think I should just sit back and let this all unfold as it will and stop working to get more notice because that can feel uncomfortable, but then I come back to realizing that I do have perspectives that aren’t always the mainstream way of parenting. I feel strongly about sharing the message that people don’t need to stop repetitive behaviors and that we don’t need to stop people from having feelings. Both the repetitive behaviors and the feelings are the bridge not the barricade. Clearly I myself need to learn that lesson repeatedly. Not that I’m the only person with this message, but my book is one way to help get the word out.
May you clear any feelings that are in your way so that your dreams can seem ever more surmountable.
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