Mom Mom Mom #39: You’ve Got Your Hands Full

From our garden - Mary Lee Shalvoy 2009

This ran in the September 24, 2009 issue of the Alameda Sun. They edited it a bit, but here’s the original.

You’ve Got Your Hands Full

When my three girls were very young and we were still married and living in northern San Diego County, we lived in a house in a development that sat on a ridge above a golf course. Our street was actually a very long, winding circle that weaved through the entire neighborhood.

On nice days—and let’s face it, most days are nice in San Diego—I would strap the girls into the long triplet stroller, baby in the front, twins each in the second and third seats, and push them the 2.5 miles around the neighborhood. As in most housing developments, the homes were nearly identical. I think there were two models—a tudor style and a non-tudor style. These homes were built in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s and the primary differences were the yards. Each yard had a different shape and landscape.

On these excursions, the girls and I would pass one house on the circle with a particularly gorgeous front garden. The gardener was a master. Throughout the year, she displayed a gorgeous array of seasonal plants. As we passed, I pointed out colors and flowers to my captive audience.

One day, as the gardener was gardening, I shouted out a greeting and my envy. How I always wanted to garden and how beautiful it looked. How my grandfather grew up on a farm and how he, too, had a garden that he timed to have something blooming from the dwindling snows of early spring to the first frost of fall.

“Well, thanks, but this takes a lot of time,” she shouted back. “You’ll have time to garden someday, but you have your hands full right now with those little flowers.” The girls waved and the baby woke up and made some noise, letting us know that it was time to go. Now.

“You have your hands full” has been mentioned to me more than a few times since I’ve had my daughters, but the association between raising kids and gardening really hit home this summer.

We planted crops this year in big container buckets in the small backyard of our house here in Alameda. We started from both seed (beans, carrots, cucumber, herbs, zucchini) and plants (tomato). We used a mix of regular soil and Miracle-Gro. We bought a new hose to water, and, damn the drought, we watered every day. It was thrilling to see the young green sprouts; the girls fought over who was going to water each day.

It took some time, but the original gusto and excitement of our urban victory garden lost some of its luster as the summer wore on. Maybe it was when we left for our east coast trip. Maybe it was the cold summer weather when we returned. I do think the neighborhood critters had something to do with it. As soon as any of the fruit, especially the tomatoes, were just ripe enough to pick, they would disappear. One morning, I found a large, juicy, half-eaten tomato on the ground. Now, there’s school and activities that steer us away from the containers in the yard.

What really got in the way, I believe, was the lack of knowledge about how does a garden grow. Why are the leaves brown and shriveled on one plant, but not the other? How do you know when to pick carrots if you can’t see them ripen? Why does only one cucumber grow at a time? My kids have completely lost interest and I am just frustrated.

It takes time to grow and nurture a garden, as it does to raise children. With kids, there are so many unknowns, but as soon as they can talk, they help you out with the process. Tomatoes don’t talk, yet, and there are thousands of variables in the success of their growth. Yes, there are resources, but I realized that the master gardener of our neighborhood in San Diego was right, it takes a lot of time to work a garden. You need to fully invest in the success of each plant for a garden to truly thrive.

The same can be said for kids. My investment right now, as it was 12 years ago in San Diego, is still in the growth of my family. Even though they’re older, they still need me and I am still excited by the sprouting of their minds and lives.

I will have time for a garden some day. Maybe by then, the tomatoes can help me along.

Mom Mom Mom #38: Home Again

A day at the beach in New Jersey.

This column runs in the August 27 edition of the Alameda Sun. Comments are always welcome, here or on Twitter!

You can Go Home Again

We made our annual trek to the east coast again this summer, the girls and I. Although it was our third summer vacation east of the Mississippi in a row, this time it was different. This time we spent either every day or part of every day with family. Depending on your perspective (and your relationship with your own family), that kind of trip could be a heavenly experience or a harrowing one. For me, it was a little bit of both.

Usually on these vacations, we spend most of the time with friends and let the family see us coming and going, literally. The real difference this year was that my brothers and sisters and I found our way back home together with our father at the same time. It’s a rare occurrence—the last time we were all together was at my mother’s funeral 11 years ago. A lot has happened since then and I didn’t want my girls or me to miss this opportunity.

We covered a lot of ground during our trip. We caravanned up to Vermont to see my younger sister and got a quick taste of her family’s country living in a beautiful, pastoral setting. With her infinite hospitality, she managed to entertain 18 people throughout a very rainy day. Then we headed back to New Jersey, spending a good chunk of the remaining time driving from the New York to the Pennsylvania borders and down to the shore. In fact, one day, six of us packed into my Dad’s Buick to drive 200 miles, never leaving the fourth-smallest state in the union, to meet my father’s first great-grandchild (a girl, of course!) and then to see more cousins.

It’s amazing the dynamics that happen when you reunite with your family. I guess I should limit that statement to just one person—what happens to me. I return every year thinking that I have changed so much, seen so much, been through so much and I think people, both old friends and family, will see that, notice that I’ve changed and grown up into this fabulous person. What I noticed was that as soon as I land, I turn into an awkward teenage girl all over again, all the benefits of my age and wisdom quickly dropping to the wayside. It took a few days for me to realize this and I had to really shift my awareness. I am not a teenager anymore. This time, when I left the east coast, I left feeling like a grown up.

I wonder if it’s true for families that don’t separate. If I saw my brothers and sisters every day here in Alameda, would I still turn into the awkward teenage girl that I become now when I see them all? Or, if I hadn’t left New Jersey, would I be the same person I am today?

I don’t believe that people really change that much. Things happen to you—college, marriage, the deaths of loved ones, the birth of children, divorce, illness, careers—but what changes inherently? I often wonder if it’s all of your successes and failures that determine who you are or if it’s who you are that determines your outcome. Maybe it’s a little bit of both.

Thinking back over the journey, I can’t help but think, “Wherever you go, there you are.” The good news is that this time, I have realized what triggers the emergence of that awkward teenage girl and am learning to be the Mary Lee she has grown into. It’s a lesson I want to somehow teach my girls. That you are just you, a combination of all ages of you, and maybe it’s not all that bad.

Mom, Mom, Mom #36: Make it Harder

It’s been a busy time. Here is the latest Mom column, that ran in the Alameda Sun on Thursday, April 23, 2009. Here is the link (in case you’d rather read it on the site). As usual, I welcome any and all comments.

Make It Harder

Just the other day in the car, I caught the end of a broadcast of City Arts & Lectures on KQED. Somebody was interviewing Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling author of such books as Blink and Tipping Point. In his latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success, he explores how luck, skill and hard work affect your chances at success.

I didn’t hear the entire interview, and, unfortunately, there is no podcast or MP3 version of the discussion online, so I can’t listen to it again to get direct quotes. We will have to actually listen to NPR to hear the interview again.

Gladwell was taking questions from the audience and during this time he actually had an “a-ha!” moment. He was talking about how 30% of all entrepreneurs had been diagnosed with serious learning disabilities at some point in their lives. He pursued this statistic to say that it was because of their desire and willingness to work hard to overcome their challenges that these people succeed in business (and life). He gave several examples of this situation and noted that these people have learned the right skills (delegation, oral communication, etc.) to get ahead. (On the flip side, the same percentage of people diagnosed with learning disabilities end up in jail, but let’s stick to the positive here.)

Gladwell went on to say that maybe if we make it difficult for our kids, purposefully give them some hardship to overcome and work through, it would be the best education we, as parents, could provide. To paraphrase, he said that maybe our country’s educational approach should shift from trying to provide as much as possible to our students, to taking opportunities away from kids in order to help them become successful.

His comment made the audience laugh, but he challenged them to stop laughing and actually take in the astounding thought. By not providing more to your children, actually giving them less and making life harder, you might help them grow into successful adults.

It became my own “a-ha!” moment and offered a sense of relief for always feeling that somehow I am a bad parent. I think it’s natural that parents want to make their children’s lives better than their own. We want to give them opportunities we never had, eliminate the struggles and hardships. Some people actually call it progress. Think of the parents who survived The Great Depression. They did not want their kids to endure the same hardships. At the same time, great things happen because—just as Gladwell noted—people pushed and worked through hard times, resolving in Scarlett O’Hara fashion that “This will never happen again!”

In my case, I have carried some strong guilt about the divorce and the effect it has had on my daughters. It was at that moment in the car, I shared the epiphany with Gladwell. Maybe having to deal with their parents’ divorce offers my daughters a hardship that will help them develop skills left dormant if they lived with married parents. With any luck, it will be organizational skills culled by living in two separate homes. But, based on the state of their bedrooms and the constant driving back and forth from house to house picking up forgotten items, that hasn’t manifested yet. Or, perhaps they will develop exceptional people skills refined by having to negotiate terms at each location.

It’s a long list of possibilities and the thoughts made my day brighter, but it’s clear I haven’t figured all of it out yet. In the meantime, I am going to enjoy the rest of their childhoods and keep watch, acknowledging a step forward when they overcome obstacles on their own.

The Mom Timeline

Here is a piece I wrote for MediaPost’s Engage: Moms newsletter, called “The Mom Timeline.” I added the live links to this one.

Mom, Mom, Mom #29

This should run in the July 24 Alameda Sun. 

 

What Would Your Six Words Be?

There’s a site on the Internet called Smith Magazine (smithmag.net) that I’ve only recently discovered. It’s a storytelling site and on it are a few creative writing exercises. One has really stirred me up, called “Six-word Momoirs,” in which the site poses the question:  What can you say about motherhood in just six words? The entry I submitted was:  “It’s all going by too fast.” Not as clever as Michelle Norman’s “Stretchmarks are the roadmap of life,” but it’s pretty much how I feel these days. How did it get to be summer already? And soon school will open and then it’s Christmas and then high school and college and, well, you get the picture.

 

For the two or three of you paying attention and remotely interested, I am still pursuing a near-vegan lifestyle. (A near-vegan is someone who doesn’t eat meat or dairy, but might eat honey and wear leather.) It’s been an incredible learning experience and I continue to learn new things everyday, some good—like, quinoa (keen-wa) is a power food! It’s a whole grain with a lot of protein! and some not so good, like Trader Joe’s Joe-Joe cookies are vegan! After consuming several boxes on my own (It’s vegan! It has to be good for you!), I must now look away when I get to that section of the Trader Joe’s at South Shore.

 

I am enjoying this focus on food. I haven’t been as obsessive as I usually am when I “diet,” which is a method that always ends in ruin. This time, I am approaching food with a researcher’s eye, as well as an open mind and palate. It has been a challenge to feed the girls and me, for now we have a near-vegan, a vegetarian and two carnivores in the house. I work hard to have a dinnertime, when we sit around the table, eat roughly the same meal (with a few alterations depending on who you are) and spend some time together.

We leave soon for our summer trip to the east coast, and I am curious as to how I will handle being a near-vegan on the road. I have already told the girls that I am eating pizza—the horribly unhealthy New York style with mounds of melted cheese, cut into triangles you have to fold and hold over the plate letting the grease drip off before you take the first bite. Oh, yes, and I will have a soft-serve vanilla cone dipped in chocolate on the boardwalk down the Shore. I am not even sure it it’s truly ice cream, but who cares?

 

People have been asking me why I am doing this “whole vegan thing,” as my sister calls it. What was at first a lark, a “can-I-make-it-through-Lent” experiment, has morphed into a daily trial and error of healthy living. I haven’t lost much weight, but I feel better—lighter, somehow. I also can’t help thinking that I am contributing to the fight for the environment in my own small way. Maybe this will lengthen my time on this earth, help reduce my carbon footprint while allowing me to take a few more steps and spend more time with my family, my beautiful children. Because these days I feel it’s all rushing by me too quickly.

 

So, my near-vegan experience can be expressed in six words:  An attempt to add more time.

Mom, Mom, Mom #2

“Would You Rather…?”

My nearly nine year old, Natasha, and I play a gleefully horrific game called “Would you rather…?” She learned it from watching some kids’ TV show that I probably shouldn’t let her watch. Although I pretended to be shocked at first, I find that not only do I enjoy the game; I am really good at it.

“Would you rather… stick a pencil in your eye or your hand into a bucket of cockroaches?” (Cockroaches) Score one for Natasha. “Would you rather… eat a slug or be covered in them?” Tough one, Mom.

Okay, so I probably shouldn’t encourage her. But, come on, it’s fun! And a nearly-nine-year-old is the perfect foil in this gross out competition. Natasha gets such a kick out of creating disgusting scenarios. “Mom, the grosser the better,” she told me with a confident gleam in her eye.

Recently, I stumped myself in a very personal version of the game. “Would you rather… go to a child’s birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese’s or Club Libby Lu?”

I was so relieved as my girls and their friends grew past the phase of having birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese’s—a cavernous, deafening games arcade with horrible food and enormous puppets performing on a stage “Where a kid can be a kid” (but this parent really was the one who suffered).

To my despair, there is a recent replacement. The description on its Web site poses Club Libby Lu as “a special secret club where super fabulous girls can get makeovers parties, play games, get advice, and find really cool princess paraphernalia.” Translate that into a mall store where 14 screaming girls are getting made up to perform in a “show” while loud pre-teen pop blares in the background and mothers navigate the crowded merchandized floor replacing the stuff your kid hands you while inaudibly screaming “No” as your child piles stuff into your arms saying, “Here, Mom, I really need these.”

Wait, I need a moment. I thought I was out of the woods with obnoxious venues when I declared that if anyone wanted to go back to Chuck E. Cheese’s, they would have to go with their father. But fathers can’t go to Club Libby Lu. It’s like going into a Ladies’ Room. I personally witnessed four fathers, looking like deer in headlights, standing outside the mall store, shifting uncomfortably watching their little girls getting made up to look like the latest pop queen. The mothers had to go in and brave the fray.

Looking forward, I suppose I should count my blessings: “Would you rather… go to a party at Club Libby Lu or come home to one of those teenage parties with a keg provided by somebody’s older brother or sister and hundreds of kids camped out in your living room?” Club Libby Lu may not be so bad.