notes to self
Tales of a reluctant sports fan
It has been a trial for me to marry into, and then breed, a family of jocks. In theory, I believe that sports are good for kids. But in practice, I am not the least bit interested in them. My daughters have played soccer for a combined total of twenty-seven years and I still don’t know what “offsides” is. I have attended at least a hundred lacrosse games and I recently cheered when the other team scored. Pretty much the first thing I do when I go to my daughters’ games is look for other mothers to talk to. My husband has been known to sidle up to me and whisper,” Your daughter is on the field,” or “We just scored” more times then I care to count.
This behavior is in direct and vivid contrast to my husband who actually believes that he is on the field with them. Needless to say, they vastly prefer his enthusiasm (except when screaming “Dig, Dig, Dig!!” from the sidelines so loudly that he embarrasses them), to my indifference. He goes to every game he can and will go through torturous logistical scheduling in order to do so. I tag along because if I don’t, he makes me look bad.
For a while, my daughters were young enough that I could fool them. When children start playing soccer at four, all you really have to do to be a good sports mom is bring the Crispy Creams. But now they have caught on to me. Where sports are concerned, I am the family joke. So when Annie texted from college last month; “When you go to your children’s games they learn that you think they are important.” I was in no mood to be teased. Indignantly, I texted back, ”I think I know that?? Who went to every single game you played in high school?
And let me tell you, there were a lot of them. I want credit for every single one.
Later, Annie explained that she had heard this comment in a psychology lecture and it had made her think of me. Her reluctant fan, ever present on the sidelines. I promise you that I am not going to tell you to go to all your children’s sports games. But when you go, however unenthusiastically, they will remember it. Just as Annie, months after her last lacrosse game, recalls the presence of her reluctant fan, and recognizes what it meant to her. In the words of her psychology professor, my attendance showed her that her life was worth my time.
I was thinking about Annie’s text (note to self: and my belated appreciation), when Kate, a client with two young sons called. Kate was distraught because she had just been invited to spend half a day per month “participating” in her son’s kindergarten class. As Kate said, her son only goes to school from 9-12 By the time she drops him off, she has very little time left before she is scheduled to pick him up. The last thing Kate wants to do is spend one of those mornings in his kindergarten class. She feels like a bad mother, she thinks she “should” want to do it, and she can’t figure out why she doesn’t enjoy all the things that she does with her kids. Mostly, she wonders if she will ever get her life back.
Kate’s boys are five and eight. Chances are, they aren’t telling Kate how much they appreciate everything she does for them. Chances are, they can’t recognize it. Chances are, her husband doesn’t completely understand the rhythm of her day, and how much of it is dedicated to Sam and Will. I am pretty sure that no one is saying “Great job, Kate!” regularly.
And Kate does do a great job. But at the moment, it’s not recognized. Which can leave you feeling a bit resentful.
How well I remember those years. A mother with young children lives in the moment, a blur of school schedules, dinnertime and soccer games. So from the benefit of the other side of those years (note to self: whew!), I want to tell Kate what her children can not yet articulate. I want to remind her of how Sam will feel when she goes and sits in a tiny uncomfortable chair in his classroom. Not to make her feel guilty, but to tell her how much she matters. I want to say; ” Stop. Breathe. Imagine how Sam’s face will light up when he shows you his world. He will be so happy and proud.”
But I will let Annie do it instead. So from Annie, to Kate. No one can be present all the time, or do everything your children expect of you. But when you can, your presence will matter. They will remember it. It will make them feel valued. Eventually, they may even sit in a psychology class, send you an email, and make your day.
Three good links to stay in and check out
My friend Pam sent along the first, a blog entry offering “uncommon sense” from Michael Grogan. ”Parents, Planes and Management” describes how mindful parenting strategies can be applied to managers. I particularly liked this part:
“There could be many factors accounting for the two different parenting scenarios. We all know that some kids are easier to “manage” than others. The temperaments or circumstances of the parents might also have played a role. But putting those elements aside, what I found most compelling, and most transferable to management, was how the second parent took time to explain things to her daughter. It was not a story of convincing the little girl to do what mommie wanted, but rather she told the girl a story about a compelling future that easily aroused the girl’s interest and enthusiastic followership. Perhaps just as important, the parent began the conversation by getting on her daughter’s level, in effect seeing the world through her daughter’s eyes (italics mine)”.
The second comes from Goldie Hawn. This website describes MindUp, an educational curriculum which enhances learning by teaching children to practice “mindful focused awareness.” Their research shows that this approach develops “empathy, perspective taking, helpfulness and kindness.” This just came to my attention, but I really like what I’ve read, especially the link between mindfulness and optimism.
The third is from The Wright Institute in LA. Their website describes an attachment- based reflective parenting program that is very similar to Mind to Mind. The founding director is John Grienenberger, one of the pioneers of reflective parenting research. The website is insightful and informative and offers lots of resources, especially for those who live in California.
Parents, planes, Goldie Hawn and The Wright, all in one day. I love the web.
Especially in January.
Navigating boundaries in the Sexy Beast
My oldest daughter Lily went to Cape Town, South Africa, to study last semester. Lily is twenty-one and in her junior year of college. I hadn’t planned to visit her, but around Thanksgiving I had a fit of intense homesickness for my two older daughters. Lily had been 11,000 miles a way for three months, Annie was deliriously happy in her freshman year of college and (notwithstanding dump phone calls), not checking in a lot. I missed them. I longed to see them.
So I made a last minute decision to go see Lily in Cape Town for a week (Note to self: too far, too short). This prompted everyone I knew to email a suggestion for what to do, eat, see, photograph or climb in South Africa (Who knew that so many people had been to South Africa?). I am a planner. I like to read, and do research and make lists. My entire family would accuse me of … ahem…. over- planning, but since they invariably benefit from this trait, I never pay too much attention to them.
But I had no time to plan. So I called my friend Cathryn, an ardent and intrepid traveler. Cathryn pointed out that at least insofar as Cape Town was concerned, Lily was the expert. She suggested that I let Lily make the plans; reminding me that this was Lily’s place, Lily’s semester and Lily’s …..life.
So when Lily asked me what I wanted to see in Cape Town, I told her that she was in charge. Jubilant, she rented a car (a.k.a “the sexy beast”), for five dollars a day. She decided that I didn’t need to rent a hotel room. I could share her room in her apartment with her two roommates and we would save money. On our last night, we would stay at “Daddy Long Legs,” a Cape Town hotel with a themed penthouse trailer park on the roof. She wanted to rent the “Yoko Ono” airstream but was willing to settle for “Dorothy” if Yoko proved unavailable.
Twenty-two hours later, Lily picked me up at the airport in the Sexy Beast, expertly shifting gears left handed. The Sexy Beast lacked seatbelts, windows and part of the floor. It smelled strongly of gas. By the time we got to Cape Town, my eyes were burning and my head ached. I wanted to Google carbon monoxide poisoning, but that would have required a stop at an Internet cafe.
Lily and the Sexy Beast
For five days, Lily was in charge. And what a ride it was. Supremely confident and infectiously enthusiastic, she darted around Cape Town in her element. She drove like a pro, bargained ferociously, arranged for all our Christmas gifts to be shipped to the U.S. (Note to self: they still haven’t arrived), and ordered wine with lunch. Cathryn was right; she knew what to do, eat, see, photograph and climb in Cape Town. By the end of my visit, I knew she could take care of herself almost anywhere.
For our last night, we went to a “Killers” concert in a field hours away. (I know, but it saved me from “Yoko”). As I watched Lily dance with all the other teenagers, I wondered how long it was going to take us to get home. I felt old. And more than a little irrelevant. I was accustomed to being the caretaker in our relationship, not the recipient. Much as I was thrilled to see her so comfortable in her new role, I was beginning to miss my old one. And having Lily plan everything for us made me feel feet a bit… incompetent.
Our last day in Cape Town, we went to the mall. I hate malls. Lily, a city kid, loves them. But in this instance, she thought that I wanted to go. And she was probably a little tired of trying to please me. So we were both unhappy. This prompted a mutual meltdown in “Country Roads,” where I refused to go in and she yelled that she was only there because of me (Note to self: A complete role reversal of so many shopping dramas over the years). With great relief, we each confessed how difficult we were finding it to be the “other”. At that moment I think we both would have been very happy to have our old mother-daughter relationship back. But the boundaries between “mother”, “child”, ”peer” and “friend” become more fluid as children become adults. They shift and change all the time, which makes it even more important to be mindful of them. One moment Lily and I are friends, the next she the expert, the next we are mother and daughter. As Jane Isay (2007) said, it’s like “walking on eggshells,” a delicate dance that requires constant and careful navigation.
And no, we didn’t drive to the “Killers” in the Sexy Beast. I insisted that we return it immediately return it and rent a real car. There are some boundaries not open to negotiation.
Orchid Children: Risk and resilience
This is my favorite article of 2009, maybe my favorite article of all time. It’s cutting edge and enormously hopeful research for anyone who has a challenging and/or fragile child. Bottom line: the very genes that make children vulnerable to a variety of negative outcomes can produce society’s most creative, successful, and happy people. These “orchid children” need sensitive parenting, but can bloom spectacularly if given greenhouse care.
The researchers discussed in the article, Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg and Marinus van IJzendoorn, are noted attachment researchers who have done groundbreaking work on how attachment patterns are transmitted intergenerationally; that is, how we unconsciously parent as we were parented.
So we can stop doing that.
Their new research demonstrates that good parenting can dramatically improve outcomes even in children who are genetically vulnerable. In this study, toddlers with a risk allele for ADHD and externalizing behavior did far better than their low risk counterparts (a “protective” allele making them less vulnerable to bad environments), when provided with an eighteen month intervention. As pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce describes it, “We see that when kids with this kind of vulnerability are put in the right setting, they don’t merely do better than before, they do the best (Dobbs, 2009, p.5, italics original).
This is a transformative, even startling view of human fraility and strength. For more than a decade, proponents of the vulnerability hypothesis have argues that certain gene variants underlie some of humankind’s most grievous problems: despair, alienation, cruelties both petty and epic. The orchid hypothesis accepts that proposition. But it adds, tantalizingly, that these same troublesome genes play a critical role in our species astounding success (Dobbs, 2009, p.4).
So if you are struggling with a difficult child, take heart. And parent mindfully. There is an orchid in that jungle.
For more information about intergenerational attachment patterns:
van IJzendoorn, M. & Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. (1997). Intergenerational transmission of attachment: A move to the contextual level. In L. Atkinson and K. Zucker (Eds.) Attachment and psychopathology.(pp. 135-169). New York: Guilford Press.