My Mom | this woman's work

High anxiety

Grad School 15 Responses »

Aug 202010

Mel Brooks in High Anxiety -- this is how I feel RIGHT NOW

Did you know I start school next week? I do! I start grad school! I’m freaking out!

I didn’t know I was freaking out and then I realized I was when I heard my teeth grinding.

How in the heck am I going to do all of it??? Will I have enough time and headspace to:

Be with my kids all day (you know, with the homeschool thing)
Get my work done (the work I’m keeping)
Get Support for Special Needs done
Get grades that won’t make me ashamed

People, I am a little nervous. I am a lot nervous.

Things that will help:

Julia has been very kind about trying to get SforSN stuff squared away so that I won’t feel as overwhelmed and arranging a regular Monday editorial phone conference
My mom has offered to help with the kids (but she’ll be helping my sister for awhile because my sister’s car died and she’ll need a hand with kid transport.)
(Oh shoot that reminds me of another anxiety: Just having one car. There are some tricky evenings coming up. Ack! Wait, back to the helpful list)
It will be cooler soon. It’s hard to feel hopeful when it’s too hot to move (and it’s not as hot as it has been, mind you)
Brett will be knocking back his weekend hours soon (he’s down to one weekend day and may go down to none, I hope)
I only have actual classes two nights a week
School is going to be FUN!!!!!!
I closed out all but one client and this one client really only calls on me every couple of weeks and he never calls me with emergencies so there’s always time to do stuff and he knows I’m going to grad school and I love this client because he is so nice and always says please and thank you and PAYS ME WHEN HE SAYS HE WILL (I love him so much)

I will just have to be freaked out for a little bit.

But you want to hear something funny? Sure you do! I got a letter from the book store addressed to THE PARENTS OF DAWN FRIEDMAN

So I sent it to my mother. Let her deal with it! Ha!

It’s an annual tradition. My mom celebrates her birthday by taking my sister’s family and mine to the fair and spoiling the kids rotten. My kids look forward to it like they look forward to Christmas or Halloween. The very first words Madison said to me that morning were, “I’m going to have Italian ice and an elephant ear both!” The kid was still trying to focus her eyes but she was already planning ahead!

The fair we go to is the local county fair and it’s teensy-tiny, which makes it absolutely manageable on a weekday night. It’s always brutally hot and humid and sometimes it rains (not this year thank goodness) and there are just a handful of rides. It’s smallness makes it perfect because the boys can take off on their own without worrying anyone and it’s pretty impossible to lose anyone. You can also do every single thing two or three times if you want and still have time to check out the animals.

This year Madison was too big for some of the little kid rides and too small for most of the big kid rides. That was hard on Noah when it happened (later than it happened to Madison — she’s very tall for her age) but Madison took it in stride. And that picture there is her with Brett riding The Drop. First words when she came down the stairs after? “I am never doing THAT again!” But said laughing and excited and she is already planning to do it again next year.

The fair bookended a week of crazy fun for Madison. She had the PDX cousins in town and that meant visits to the ice cream shop and late nights through the week. Then Pennie took her out on a date (we watched Roscoe and Tommy had to work so it was just the two of them). Then Pennie and Tommy and Roscoe took her swimming and out to dinner and for more ice cream.

Let’s just say Madison’s bedtime routine has been a wee bit ganked and now with this awful heat, none of us is sleeping all that well so it’s been a bit crazy around here.

After her swim date with Pennie and family, Madison came home and cried and cried. She was sorry that it was over. She said, “I don’t want to be home with you! I want to be having fun with Pennie!” I said, “It’d be great if fun things never ever had to end.” And she said, “I don’t want them to end!” Then she conceded that I was fun “sometimes” because I let her walk on the low wall by the ice cream shop but that I am not as fun as Pennie because I was making her brush her teeth. I said, “Listen, honey, when Pennie chose me to be your Mommy Mama, she assigned me the job of being the mama who makes you brush your teeth. That’s my job but we can sit here while you’re sad for awhile more.” Eventually Madison brushed her teeth but she did not like it! And she only sorta liked me.

Honestly sitting there, I felt kinda like the divorced mom with the non-custodial dad who wines and dines the kids and then drops ‘em off, you know? I felt a little bit like that. I felt a little bit sad that I couldn’t be the Fun Mama. It’d been a long day and I was hot and tired and I’ll admit that I drooped and had to close my eyes and take a deep breath about it.

I want my kids to have great times with lots of folks and I don’t always have to (or want to) go along. And of course, I especially value Madison’s relationship with Pennie and I am grateful when they get to be with each other. I also LOVE that Madison is old enough to grab her carseat out of the van, stick it in Pennie’s car, climb in and wave good-bye. I love that she is old enough to take ownership in that way. Still. I had a moment there on the couch. A droopiing moment.

I was thinking, too, about them all heading out to go swimming. Roscoe looks just like Tommy and Madison looks just like Pennie and they are a beautiful little family together. I was thinking about that and about the glorious intimacy of swimming. Yanking on that sticky swimsuit, washing Madison’s hair free of chlorine afterward in the shower. The two of them having that time together makes me very very happy. (I know that being Pennie’s best beloved fills Madison’s heart up in indescribable ways and I believe it fills up Pennie’s heart, too.)

But, as I was telling LiaNotJuno (not linked here because I’m not sure that she needs/wants the traffic), I can see how this can be a challenge for people.

LiaNotJuno asked me how I got to this place in open adoption and I told her that in general (because in particular it has so much to do with Pennie) I can see three things that played into my orientation towards open adoption:

I’m a feminist so I believe in Pennie’s right to create her own version of motherhood. (Note: My feelings about her freedom to do this have changed since learning more about the way the adoption industry works but I still absolutely believe every woman has the right to create her own version of motherhood.)
I’m a crunchy granola earthmama who believes in a child’s intrinsic tie to the woman who grew him and gave birth to him.
I’m a child of divorce and I understand that the boundaries of family are permeable.

Although I felt like the put upon divorced mom for a minute there sitting on the couch, I also know that in a zillion ways our open adoption is nothing like that. But I get that feeling and I was thinking on how that feeling might sit with someone who has a more troubled open adoption or has less faith in (or is more threatened by) the idea that their child has a profound tie to this other parent or who is a child of a much more contentious divorce and experiences that feeling as CONFLICT.

I have been trying to put myself in the place of parents who struggle more with their children’s relationships with their first parents because I feel like I really need to learn some more compassion and understanding around this. Earlier this summer I was put in the position where some parents with whom I philosophically don’t agree have been reaching out to me for support and even though some of what they said made my spine freeze up, I realized that if I want to be a counselor, I really need to tone down my activist reactions and start listening. Obviously online discourse is very different than one-on-one in-person discourse and I learned a lot by listening and then trying to dig through my own experiences so that I could identify with what they were seeing even if I still had strong feelings about what they needed to do. And what I found is that if I’m listening, it’s not that hard to understand where someone is coming from and I become a lot more useful to them AND a better advocate.

So as I sat there on the couch watching Madison drag herself to the bathroom to brush her teeth (tears, oh the wailing and the tears!) I thought, “Remember this right here and imagine what it would be like not to be interested in shrugging it off or not being able to shrug it off. Imagine making decisions from THIS PLACE of exhaustion and insecurity.” Because I want to be able to be a counselor who can say, “I get that. I hear you” but who still is working to get people to work through that and get back to where they need to be for their kids.

I hugely value the online activism that I have been fortunate enough to witness and sometimes participate in but now I want to do less of that to focus more on in real life service and learning, which is why I’m excited about school. I think that will make me a better activist long-term, too. So I’m gonna shut up and listen more.

Mostly. Because I’m still gonna talk.

Sensory Perception Sensitivity

Parenting 15 Responses »

Jun 182010

This is so amazingly nifty — Maryanne is right that I do have more going on that straight-ahead introversion:

About 20 percent of people are born with a personality trait called sensory perception sensitivity (SPS) that can manifest itself as the tendency to be inhibited, or even neuroticism. The trait can be seen in some children who are “slow to warm up” in a situation but eventually join in, need little punishment, cry easily, ask unusual questions or have especially deep thoughts, the study researchers say.

The new results show that these highly sensitive individuals also pay more attention to detail, and have more activity in certain regions of their brains when trying to process visual information than those who are not classified as highly sensitive.

…

Individuals with this highly sensitive trait prefer to take longer to make decisions, are more conscientious, need more time to themselves in order to reflect, and are more easily bored with small talk, research suggests.

Previous work has also shown that compared with others those with a highly sensitive temperament are more bothered by noise and crowds, more affected by caffeine, and more easily startled. That is, the trait seems to confer sensitivity all around.

The researchers in the current study propose the simple sensory sensitivity to noise, pain, or caffeine is a side effect of an inborn preference to pay more attention to experiences.

via Study Sheds Light on What Makes People Shy | LiveScience and shared with me by reader Kate!

My mom always said that where she’d be yelling at (or spanking) my brother or sister, she’d only need to shoot a look at me to bring me back into line. And that caffeine thing? I’m very sensitive to caffeine (and alcohol and other substances).

Noah is like this, too.

It also makes me think about how discipline techniques worked with Noah that don’t work with Madison. I worry that we’re too hard on her but now I think we’re actually just instinctively understanding that she needs a firmer hand.

(Example: It was enough to say, “Noah, I am frustrated when I trip over your toys!” when he was six and bammo! He’d clean up the room. With Madison you have to stand over her be pretty dang bossy when it’s time to clean. Although she’s getting better about this as she gets older and her attention span gets longer.)

Personality traits are interesting and learning more about them will be a very exciting thing about school. I want to understand better why some people need X and some people need Y and learn how to meet those needs but also help us to meet each other’s needs as partners and parents and friends.

Word to my mother

Adoption, Parenting 7 Responses »

Sep 242009

I already wrote this to Roni but I wanted to write it out here, too.

So Madison called my mom yesterday morning to gush about baby Roscoe and about how fun it was to hold him and her little monologue went something like this.

“And he’s so cute and he knows how to swallow” (because she was really impressed by the fact that he is an actual working person and can do things like swallow and blink) “and I know how to hold him and he smells good and he looks like me” and she finished with, “And I want to tear him limb from limb!” in the same happy voice that she praised his swallowing capacity.

When I got on the phone with my mom after, my mom said, “Good for her! Better she put it all out in the open then let it fester!”

See, I come from a mother who says, “Good for her!” when her granddaughter casually mentions her interest in dismembering her baby brother and that’s why I don’t say, “Oh now, you don’t feel that way! Oh no, you don’t mean it!” My mom knows that we often DO feel that way and we often DO mean it but that feelings are not actions and because of her, I know that, too.

See? My mom — she taught me good.

Finding Friedman

Family 10 Responses »

Jul 152009

I had a falling out with my dad a couple of weeks ago. He didn’t do anything unusual to warrant it — he was just being himself. Accepting my dad for his (flawed as is all humanity including yours truly) self is something I’ve worked to do mostly with success. And in fact my freelancing struggles helped bring us closer because if anyone knows about cold-calling, networking and difficult clients, it’s my former insurance salesman dad.

But a number of things happened that just put me over the edge and I canceled the father’s day dinner I was going to cook him.

I’m not proud of this; it’s just true.

You know what it was, it’s that the Friedman Family reunion was just about to happen and I couldn’t go (neither could my sister). (It happened this past weekend.) And it made me think of all the visits my little sister’s have gotten back there courtesy of my dad and how he never flew us (myself and my full siblings) out there. How my big sister missed my grandfather’s funeral and how much this still devastates her. I can’t help it — it makes me feel like the forgotten post-divorce kid again. Apparently I’ve got an inner 12-year old who holds grudges.

I’ve always identified with the Friedman side of my family because I am a Friedman (in name) and because I look like a Friedman (in stoutness). Also I more strongly identify with my Jewish heritage, which is my dad’s side of the family. Finally we lived in California for awhile, where much of the Friedman family lives, and so when I was a kid for three halcyon years, we felt very Friedman-ish.

But once we left California and once my grandparents died, we had no real contact with that Friedman side. None. My dad’s brother came out a couple of times but the extended family? No contact. This was before the internet age, of course, and casual relationships were harder to maintain.

In my late teens, the whole Friedman family mystique kind of took hold. It’s when I took (and failed) Russian. It’s when I first started thinking about identifying as Jewish and learning more about Judaism. It’s when I knew I’d never change my last name if I got married. It’s also (early college) when I quit talking to my dad. Coincidence? I think not.

I had this idea that there was some place I belonged without question and that when I found this place my life would start to make sense. I was eighteen, searching for myself and desperately seeking guidance on the journey. And like many kids my age, I was looking for those answers in my family tree.

So I was/am miserable about missing the Friedman family reunion not just because it reminds me of how much I don’t have as far as those extended family ties but also because I realized I had this very quiet, very childish inner dream that they were all missing ME like I was missing THEM. Like they were all sitting around going, “There’s a place in our heart that is just so Dawn-shaped but where is Dawn?”

It’s funny how those childish dreams just keep on powering our emotions even when we’re not aware of them.

But what made me identify this was thinking about how adoptees in reunion are sometimes disappointed and I thought about how family ties can matter to us in a way that is different than how they play out practically and what would I tell an adoptee who was trying to find herself in old photographs and failing as often as she’s succeeding? I would tell her — they’re your family no matter what and you can take what you need but you also have to accept the limits of the reality of your relationships. Which is what I’m working on for myself. (And as an aside, I am of course thinking about Madison and her family ties and her losses and feeling grateful — dare I say it — for this hard-earned empathy so I can help her if her struggles are similar.)

I told my sister (my full sister, Erica, who is also pretty devastated about Friedman family reunions that don’t seem to miss us as much as we miss them) that I was going to try disengaging my fantasy. I was going to try interrupting it. I was going to try to say, “Yes, that’s where I got my Russian peasant physique but it’s not where I’m going to find all of my answers.”

I wondered to myself, why so much with the Friedmans? What about my mom’s side of the family, which is rife with passionate, smart, hard-working heroines and which has been so much more welcoming and so much more available? And the answer is — because my mom was there; I didn’t have to yearn for her. I could take her (and her ancestors) for granted. They were already mine. But the Friedmans — I lost them when I lost my dad.

I will always have lost my dad. I can’t help that. Even he can’t help that. We can’t fix the way back when. I can, however, heal some of the hurts by adjusting my point of view and letting go of daydreams I didn’t know I was holding onto. Only I’m not so hot at it right this very minute so I’m still not up to calling my dad. (Especially because he is totally impatient with this stuff — I think it’s the guilt, which he covers with exasperation because I do think he feels guilty and really, he ought to although I’m not sure if it does any of us much good. I’m just still mad enough to want him to feel lousy, too.)

Who knew that growing up could be so painful four decades into this living thing???