Girls Rock

Parenting 4 Responses »
Dec 042008

We’re seeing a bunch of movies playing at the Wexner Center family film festival. Four of them we’re seeing as part of an in-school (for us, homeschool) program but tonight Kristen got us member tickets to Girls Rock. It was fab. I cried off and on through it and I’m sending Madison straight to Rock Camp when she’s eight (quick note: Susie Simpson, local camp founder, was also a HighBall Volunteer and works at Stonewall Columbus –obviously she rocks, too). 

Besides making me think of my own growing up and my ex-boyfriend who is apparently dating a founding member of Bikini Kill, (which makes me wonder how he’s changed since he was no feminist back when I knew him), and about Madison’s future especially given her small tantrum before we left because none of her dresses have BOWS and she likes her dresses to be FANCY and have BOWS, it also made me think about Noah.

See, it’s not just girls who get screwed by gender roles and even though boys have the power and the privilege, as the mother of a boy I have to worry about the cost for my son who is currently sweet and kind and gentle (like his father). After all, I’ve seen the hits his dad has taken and my own brother and even that jerk of a boyfriend who may or may not be a nice guy now.

I wish there was a camp for boys that would be less about learning to be loud and take up space (since boys don’t need to be told they can do that) and more about having feelings and owning feelings (since that gets kicked right out of them.) Although I think there’s more leeway for boys to be who they are (and not diet, pluck, shape or cinch themselves into something else), I do think they get wedged into other roles that can feel if not as dangerous certainly stultifying. 

I feel an urgency for both my kids. This stuff is pretty easy when they’re little but as the teen years loom, I can sense how much trickier it gets to be. But the movie made me feel hopeful. I feel like there’s a lot we can do as parents if we keep our eyes (and our minds) open.

Good things

Friends 5 Responses »
Oct 102008

Watching Abby‘s kids is easier than watching just my two because they’re keeping each other entertained. Thanks Abby! Thanks for loaning your kids and thanks for volunteering to make Obama our next president by helping out at the rally!!!

I used to think I couldn’t even bother to try to make friends with Abby because our kids didn’t match up right. See, when it comes to parent-friends, if your kids don’t match up right it’s not worth hanging out because the kids will just clash and make the grown-ups miserable. Abby’s daughters are two years younger than Noah and her youngest daughter is a year older than Madison. Age and gender, I assumed, would keep us apart.

But! Fortunately boys mature later than girls and Noah has never been hung up on gender as a prerequisite to friendship so eventually the big kids discovered each other and lo! A friendship was born. I believe video games is what brought them together but maybe it was Neopets. I can’t really remember.

Anyway, they are bestest friends now and Noah’s day isn’t complete without at least one speaker phone call with them.

Then Maya, her youngest, is willing to play with Madison (even though Maya is more mature — she is, I’m not being facetious) so that means both our big kids and our little kids happily playdate, which means the moms can playdate, too! Oh joy!

Now Kristen, I’ve know her for 11 years now — she was my La Leche League leader. I was at the first meeting she led solo (I remember they gave her a mug filled with chocolate to honor her new leaderhood the day I came). Her oldest, Jake, was then her only and he was two. I remember this because she said, “This is my son, Jake. He’s two and he is all of that!” meaning that he was the two-est two he could be. (This was true! Jake has always been the most Jake-est that he could be!) Noah was about eight months old. So there, too, I thought, well, I love Kristen and we’ll be friends but I won’t see much of her because our kids don’t match up right.

When Molly was born two years later, they still didn’t match but then Ginger came along about six weeks after Madison’s arrival and our daily friendship was cemented! And as it happens, the boys mature late thing works for us there, too, because Noah likes hanging with Molly now, which is something that didn’t happen until they both his these tween years. (I mean, they’ve known each other all of their lives but it’s only been this summer that Molly and Noah have had anything to say to each other and now they’ll happily spend the afternoon just hanging out.)

Becca asked where this spate of socializing came from and I wrote her back and explained it so I thought I’d explain it here. Although Thursday has always been Thursday because that’s when homeschool gym is and so there’s a lot of meeting up at parks after or trading kids or carpooling. And before THAT we used to have a rotating playdate at people’s houses and that happened to be on Thursdays, too.

I guess Thursdays are just my days. (And I like Thursday, too, because of the T and the R, which make it a nice purpley-green color in some stable but friendly serif font.)

The (temporary) end of an era

Family, work work work 1 Response »
Aug 102008

Brett goes back to work tomorrow and he will be missed. Things I will miss most:

  • His morning pancakes
  • The way he brings me a second cup of coffee while I’m sitting at my desk
  • Being able to start the morning at my desk undisturbed
  • Knowing that he’ll run the kids to the park and/or library and otherwise fill their lives with wholesome activity
  • His annoying singing in the morning
  • Having him open the window I can’t reach above my desk
  • Chatting with him over lunch
  • Talking myself through writer’s block will he patiently listens
  • Watching him serve dinner with a flourish and more singing
  • All the errands he somehow finds time to run

Well, now I’m a little sad.

This has been a difficult year full of growth and struggle. I’ve learned more than I really wanted to know about the inner-workings of my financial fears and we’ve worked through so much as a couple. I’m excited about this next stage because I think it can get us where we want to be faster (mainly, getting Brett home again with a more stable budget — unless he loves his job so much he wants to stay there, too) and I’m also nervous about keeping up this level of work with a more challenging schedule.

The flipside of the challenging schedule is that I’ll be forced to leave work with work instead of carrying it along with me. I think if I drop most of my pro bono efforts that it’ll go a long way to freeing up my time. I also am going to do a lot less in-person networking and more working the network I already have (because I need to think about marketing, which always seems counterintuitive when I’m really busy but eventually the slow times will come back). And having the one car is going to be annoying. (There’s a bus that we think runs near his job but how near and the length of the commute have not been confirmed. We do know that it’ll be a trade-off: Having a car or having Brett home in a timely manner. It’s not economical to drive him myself gas-wise.)

I got most of my business systems worked out so that I can work more effectively and it’s going to be easier now than it was before Brett came home. (I wasn’t juggling nearly as much work then but what I was juggling I was handling badly.) Besides, it’s only seven weeks of Brett being gone days and then it’ll be a lot easier. (I do my best work in the morning and tend to burn out by about 2pm, which is when Brett will be heading out when his schedule changes.)

So we will be back to a 2-income family. I made a full-time salary in my ePreg days but since then my paychecks have been very much of the part-time variety so this will be the first time in quite awhile that our coffer will have the benefit of two folks throwing money at it. We’re thinking six to eight months and then we’ll reassess barring any exciting developments on my end.

I will also have less time to write for myself for the next two months, which makes me sad/frustrated. Thing is, it’s about long-term plans and knowing that it’s a priority for our future does much to ease my grousing.

Sometime I want to write more about how it’s been to change out our traditional gender roles (husband working, wife carrying for kids & home) and how it has and has not impacted our marriage. I will say that it’s been a bigger deal for people around us than for us although it did force us to confront some of our ingrained ideas about how our family works.

My husband is funny

work work work 3 Responses »
Jun 082008

Brett just awarded me employee of the month at, you know, Smart Cookie Communications. I guess we’re going to take turns with that. I hope he’s buying me chocolate to celebrate.

When people ask me what my husband does (or ask Brett what he does) we’ve been saying he’s home with the kids but now we’re going to say that he handles the accounting for our business because:

1. He does.

2. It engenders less discussion.

3. It’s easy for the two of us to forget how vital he is to our daily operations and we need to put it at the forefront of our minds.

I can write for days and days but am easily bored by mundane things like billing and keeping track of W9s and remembering to send back contracts. If he didn’t help me with that stuff things would be so much more muddled around here. Plus he chases down people who haven’t paid, he handles all the insurance and retirement issues, and he deals with our tax records. I would be drowning in a sea of paper (and likely not even noticing) if he didn’t handle all that.

But this month I get to be Employee of the Month because I promised to catch up on the book reviews even though I am easily bored by them and he’s trying to cheer me on so I can get ‘em off my desk. Whenever I send an invoice out, I cc him for his records and I just sent one so he emailed me back and let me know I’d be getting my plaque any minute now. Maybe they’ll put my picture in the company newsletter!

If I hadn’t already snatched him up, I’d just marry the heck out of that guy.

I tag YOU

Parenting 5 Responses »
May 152008

Kateri got tagged to list three things she does well as a mom. No hemming and hawing, no excuses or defensive explanations. I tag myself and I tag any of y’all who want to play, too:

1. I listen to my kids and I take them seriously. I’m interested in what they have to say even when it’s hard to hear.

2. I don’t try to talk them out of their feelings. Being someone enamored with my own feelings and anxious to share every little one with long-suffering Brett, I figure my kids have a right to theirs.

3. And I talk to ‘em. Noah and I watched our favorite songs on Rent last night (Tivo, who knows my every want and wish, recorded it off F/X) and talked about why the kids — most of ‘em — are choosing to be poor and why the homeless people were mad at Mark and why everyone gave Angel a standing ovation in the stage version I saw and the kinds of exciting/scary/interesting choices Noah will face as he gets older — see more below. I talk to my kids before they ask the way I wanted grown-ups to talk to me. And then — I take them seriously and I don’t try to talk them out of their feelings when they talk back.

I do a lot (oh lord, a lot) of things wrong but those are three things I know I do right. (And I’m hoping those three things give them the strength of mind to recognize that the wrong stuff is about ME and not about THEM and that they will have the fortitude to tell me because they will trust that I will listen.)

More on what Noah and I discussed: Specifically we talked about how most of the characters — Mimi being an exception and maybe Angel because I don’t remember Angel’s past coming up as a topic — have educations and job skills that they’re choosing not to use because they want to live authentically and creatively. And we talked about what that means and how part of growing up is finding the balance of living authentically/creatively and responsibly and that the right answer is different for everyone. Certainly this is a something we live with day-to-day in this family with our wacky writing and freelancing and homeschooling and thrift shopping.

And we talked about the homeless woman who confronts Mark for filming her and then hits him up for a dollar and who likely feels frustrated by Mark’s good intentions that do nothing to impact her immediate life.

And how Angel is someone who loves herself although she is outside of cultural gender norms and how she celebrates who she is and how much this meant to people in the audience who have struggled to love who they are and also how she brings everyone together in the show and can of course how she can play a mean pickle tub.

And we talked about how Noah is on the edge of adolescence and how his interest in friends more than family is appropriate and something that Brett and I enjoy seeing in him. And how we might struggle — even argue — as he explores what his own values will be and that trying on values that don’t reflect the family’s is part of growing up so that even when we fight we both need to remember that we love and trust each other and most of all that he knows that WE know that he is meant to find his own way so we won’t see his choices as disloyalty (Lord grant me the serenity to accept this especially if he becomes a Jew for Jesus or something equally insane and difficult).

It was a good discussion and I sent him off to bed feeling cozy and loved and secure in himself. That’s what inspired the three “what I do right” things above.

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