Parenting: Things you Already Know but We All Need to Be Reminded Of

It's been a (whole lotta) minute(s) since I've written anything but I've been thinking as we slowly start to scatter again ...

You can wish for a confirmation email that the Universe has your order every time you release your child into the wild. “Hello, your order’s in the kitchen! Track the status of your order here.”

Or, you can remember that contract provision came baked in when you got their birth certificate. We’ve never been their sole carer. Monsters under the bed. Mountains in real life. It’s all a risk and it's all above our pay grade.

You can anticipate a whole bunch of things your child might do or say, and worry about a thousand more things someone or something could do or say to them. “Danger. High voltage. Child on my mind.”

Or, you can position yourself to be surprised by them and rewire your thoughts to new patterns that are quieter then what the world is shouting or moaning about.

Your child may be a thousand miles away or in the next room, but their thoughts are and have always been beyond our reach. Their hunger and need for us to make them food, on the other hand, cannot be dodged.

They give us words. Sometimes so many words, our heads combust, and other times so few words, our hearts fold in on itself. But their thoughts live under their own jurisdiction, evolving with each new experience, only a fraction of them turning into things said out loud and within our earshot.

You can be skilled in your ability to detect your child’s mood in the brevity of a grunt or text, but clueless to how rarely you are the source of them.

You can provide your child a good education, but if you obsess over the best possible one, you may inadvertently paper over a dream that will carry them farther than any official piece of paper.

You can warn them about the agony of a broken heart, even see one coming before they do, or you can tell them the road to love is littered with micro and macro sacrifices but also where all the best blessings are found. A road you can't ride shotgun but one not to be missed.

You can give them a pep talk and your confidence, but not confidence itself. That they have to find for themselves. Not once and for all, but again and again, just like it happens for us.

You can point out a thousand things you child still doesn’t know, or remind them of something they already do but got buried in the rubble of having to remember so much.

You can tell them to do it right now or do it the right way, which will get reinforced wherever they go because a sense of urgency and excellence are table stakes for good living. Or, you can honestly tell them your predictions are meaningless but your bet is always ALL IN on them.

Living the Life You Love

My husband and I recently went away for the weekend, leaving our two teenage boys home alone.  Thankfully our boys have the responsibility and kind of relationship to make that work, even if it does mean they subsisted on bagels, Goldfish and Deliveroo for 48 hours.

When we got home on Sunday night, we got their weekend report which included soccer practice, a cycling race, homework, and a lot of and likely still underreported screen time.  But our thirteen year old was most excited to tell us that while he and his big brother were Home Alone, they had not wrecked the house but rather he had written something. 

He didn’t write it for school (our first question.)  He wrote it “because I realized I am happy right now and I thought writing might help me understand why.”

Thirteen is not the most becoming of ages.  I’ve been relaying an analogy I heard recently about parenting teens.  Our teens are now out in the pool (the world) swimming on their own but occasionally they get dunked or tired and need to come back to the pool wall (their parents).  We are there to hold them up to catch their breath but as soon as they do, they are off again — usually with a push against the wall (forceful words, attitudes, behavior) to get back out there.   

I know I am prone to hyper focus on the challenges of each age.  And thirteen has a lot of them but thirteen can be beautiful too.  In that push for independence, when we give them space — they aren’t just swimming in the world.  They are also figuring out for themselves how they will react to life’s curve balls.  Their thoughts are as deep as the waters they are swimming in.

And so, on this Valentine’s Day, I share with you what one 13 year old boy — Lawton Ballbach - has to say about Living the Life You Love:

“All of you sprouted and flourished into this earth, to live. To let yourself flow and become the best version of you. We don’t pummel life with anger and jealousy, but sometimes it seems the easier option. There’s no way to describe life, there’s too many ways. We love, we learn and we believe. We look at problems and turn them to a different angle to find the solution. A wise man once said ‘no one ever injured their eyesight by looking on the bright side’. Proven studies have shown that you, and everyone else around us lives longer, dies happier and brings joy to those around us, by just stopping and taking the time to appreciated and fulfil the life we were meant to love. Me writing this doesn’t have to make you change your way of thinking or acting. But I can guarantee that if you dig a little deeper inside your mind you’ll find what you’re looking for. “ 

Menopause

Menopause, or whatever this thing is that happens to a female’s body when it’s winding down from any future tenancies, is not a friend to your sleep or your mood.  It wakes you up in the middle of the night to change tee-shirts and then has you pulling off your jammy pants at 7am because you’ve accidentally knocked an entire cup of hot coffee and coffee grounds onto yourself.  Then adding insult to burn injury, you feel like you can’t  trust yourself to make a second cup.  

It’s exactly those kind of unrested, uncaffeinated, unsteady mornings that you should not ride the bus into school with one of your old tenants who vacated thirteen years ago.  Because whatever they say - bold or benign - is bound to storm around with your hormones making you feel worse.  “Please don’t come because your exercise clothes are a little embarrassing” is hardly warfare but when your defenses are down, it finds a crevice.

“Wait, don’t tell me. Kate!” beamed the Starbucks barista who surprised me by remembering my name later this morning.  I’m sure he recognised me in my exercise clothes.  That too finds a crevice. 

Whether it’s menopause or something else that robs you of balance, there is some shame in admitting you feel empty or have longer lapses of joy when you have a life littered with good things.  You feel like you should be able to hold on tighter to the many things you’re grateful for when a challenge comes.  But I was reminded today, it’s exactly those moments of challenge that are our signals to stand up and work to find strength. 

“I know, I know …” said my wise Psycle instructor as we climbed through a particularly tough stretch of the workout.  When things are hard we don’t want people to tell us how to fix it, or that we are doing a great job, we want them to say “I know.”  We want to know this is hard for other people too and not just us being a wimp.

Maybe - I’ve been wondering as I learn to befriend this stage in life - even a forced-upon-you imbalance in your life can been a grounding force for good to help you cycle through admitting need, building strength and receiving grace. 

Most importantly, regardless of the thing that has you out of sorts, the people in our lives are too interested in loving us than keeping a record of our grievances.  

“I like you.” texted my husband out of the blue today.  But of course it wasn’t really out of the blue because the people in our lives know exactly when we need to be reminded we are not only loved, but still good company too.

An Ode to 49

You're all I need
You're all I need
You're all I need to get by.

It had been a long time since I’d heard Marvin Gaye. But there I was this past Saturday night having a late dinner in front of a video screen looping through the Best Soul Music of the 70s: Marvin Gaye, Barry White, The Temptations with some 80s George Michael thrown in for good measure. It happened, of all places, in a small village bistro in the south of France.

I could never have guessed that I would be spending my 49th birthday week reliving moments of my early youth over a plate of oozie camembert with this 16 year old son of mine at a place called Chez Vous. Ain’t no mountain high enough to have seen this moment coming.

I recently scrolled past this quote: “The best gift you can give yourself at 50 is sunscreen at 20” and I thought “Shame, if only the Internet were around in 1990 to tell me that.”

Though it made me chuckle and the advice is sound, the 49 year old you knows what the 20 year old you could never have guessed. Laugh lines, yes. Folding like an accordion around the middle, oh baby. But sunscreen guilt and the larger troublemaker called self-loathing loses some of it’s power when you’ve had a couple more decades of encounters with real beauty in others and even yourself.

We figure out that though our bodies may not be built to last, there’s reason to be bullish about the rest. And so the chatter of appearance quiets down while the chatter of presence starts to heat up. At 49 now instead of never leaving the house without mascara, you can’t leave the house without a green smoothie and quiet meditation. And while you still notice and appreciate the gorgeous eyes that could grace a magazine cover, you are more taken with the ones brave enough to open up a window to their soul.

At 20 we rightly predicted the shape if not the details of much of the hard that lay ahead — wrinkles, work instabilities, friends divorcing, friends getting cancer, kids struggling, parents ageing, and so much more —but our imaginations grossly undershot all the moments of joy and laughter and wonder and connection on offer. We learn that real beauty isn’t cultivated in the salon or gym but intertwined with the the company you keep. And we learn that moments of wonder can’t be earned, bought, saved, traveled to or housed in a church building, only embraced.

I long ago wrote down this quote in my journal because it seemed worth remembering. It’s a gift for any age and any time, even a time such as this: “The world as we find it is neither a guarantee of happiness nor a condemnation to despair.” Though conditions might be unfavorable, a river of peace is always running through it. Sing it, Marvin.

With my arms open wide,
I threw away my pride
I'll sacrifice for you
Dedicate my life for you
I will go where you lead
Always there in time of need
And when I lose my will
You'll be there to push me up the hill
There's no, no looking back for us
We got love sure 'nough, that's enough
You're all, You're all I need to get by.

"Come on, let's get acididic!"

It’s a statement my youngest son says regularly. He made up the word about a year ago. To get acididic is to to have full intensity about the thing you are doing. So much so that you don’t think about what else is going on and don’t care how you look doing it.

It’s a word that can only be properly said while scrunching up your face, biting your tongue, and gathering the fingertips of both hands to one imaginary point and gesturing wildly. We know his acididic face well by now. What follows is never quiet. His appeal is to take what you are doing, ratchet up your commitment to it, and see what happens.

I’m the only family member he can count on to get acididic with. We speak a similar language of exuberance, though mine is often tired and not always keen to involve by whole body. But to be acididic is also to be relentless and so this summer I have been roped into getting acididic in a few ways.

Getting Tactile Eating a Plum. It may not be as glorious as a peach, but to take whatever fruit is growing in your yard and to inhale as many as you can and as messily as you can, sacrificing what you please for inspection or perfection, while in the shade of the tree’s canopy and with company at some non-sanctioned meal time is a thousand times sweeter than the best plum pudding. Yes, that’s a run on sentence and I don’t care.

Clowning Around Under Water. As adults, we think a good back float is a wonderful pleasure in the pool. And it is until an unsuspecting ball hits you in the face. Clowning Around Under Water, as I’ve been urged to do, however has no such hazards. It only requires you to put on goggles, drop your head below the surface of the water and start slapping your arms violently which makes both amazing bubbles for your visual pleasure and your own beats for your auditory pleasure. I was doubtful at first but how many other things allow you to simultaneously blow off steam, create your own music, and feel weightless.

Grunting like a Tennis Player while Playing Badminton. Unlike tennis that requires more skill and technique, badminton is kind to beginners and makes you feel like you have more game than you do. With a long racket to reach those over your head shots and the weirdly satisfying feeling of sending a birdie flying through the air, the only way to play badminton with Lawton is to dive (him only), grunt (both of us), and contest line calls like it was Wimbledon (guess who?) No one likes to be around us when we are channeling our inner animal on the court but oh does it feel good.

It’s easy to get fired up about things that make us mad. Getting acididic about little things like a plum, leaving your comfy pool side chair, or playing a leisure game with total abandon takes a little more effort and while it won’t fix the things that make us mad, it’s the kind of explosion of life that has the possibility of moving us in a different direction.

I’m now being called to a Badminton game in the pouring rain … because apparently getting acididic means you aren't bothered by a passing shower or two.

Caution: Deer Delight

There are many beautiful animals you are likely never to chance upon. Take the tiger. Unless you traveled to India, southeast Asia, or Siberia - with serious intention - you would never catch a glimpse of one in the wild. Add endangered to that mix, and your only real hope for a spotting would be standing three people and two strollers deep at a city zoo.

All it not lost however. There are other magnificent animals, like the deer, that hang out in so many different kinds of ecosystems that your chances are good for seeing one in it’s natural habitat. Just hopefully not through your windshield.

To see one of the leggy, well proportioned animals out in a thick forest, in the mountains, on the savanna, or in your garden (just hopefully not nibbling away at your plants) is one of nature’s calls to be still. Alert but daring, deer stand close enough to be admired so long as you keep your end of bargain by staying quiet. It’s hard to imagine any deer being mean. They even come across as an animal that wouldn’t smell.

Whether foraging or passing through there is something graceful and effortless in a deer’s movements. So serene they make our daily work by comparison look like a motorcyclist revving up their engine at a stop light.

If it’s not you, something else will soon startle the deer, and so the posture of stillness is never really that long. But it’s enough. And while you’re sorry to see it go, it is something to watch a deer run and jump as if there were no physical barriers between it and the world.

No fence is too high, no terrain too rough for it to fully accelerate once it’s decided to take that first step. It reminds you of the ancient wisdom that says we too can be agile and make progress upon the high places.

Now that we have a house in the French countryside, we see enough deer in our own yard to consider it routine. I still like to see them but admittedly I don’t always stop what I’m doing to watch them anymore.

My husband, on the other hand, still does. Every single time, And every time he sees one, you’d think it was the first time. He flickers with the excitement of an 8 year old boy, quietly motioning to whoever is nearby to gather an audience. He exchanges texts and photos with his Mom. His delight in them is never-ending and it’s adorable. It's the way delight should be. It never dims.

And while it’s corny, and I am clumsy, sometimes not nice and nothing like a deer, he gives me that same level of attentiveness every single day. Like each day with me is another potential day for delight.

Today is our 27th wedding anniversary. My husband is in London and I’m in France. I’ll be on the lookout. Happy anniversary, my dear.

Do You Have an Open Hand?

You know it’s not been your finest day when you end it with strained vocal cords, not because you were at an exciting game or excessively talking or inhaling smoke, but because you live with children. Yesterday was that kind of the day.

The reasons for the yelling were understandable: losing one of the few things I asked them not to lose, the same sibling squabble from yesterday, a new but equally sorry excuse for doing the same thing I asked them not to do approximately eighty-eight times, and the “sure I see your mountain of laundry, but where is my bathing suit?” All stuff justified for correction, but delivered in a cloud of anger. And while the message(s) might have been received, by the end of the day, I felt drained.

Being responsible for people can be exhausting. What I most wanted was to go bed and start over tomorrow. Instead, to make it through dinner, I called for a family huddle and apologised for the yelling. I felt marginally better but my throat still ached and my desire to serve had temporarily expired. That night my youngest and soon to be teenager wanted to sleep with me since my husband is away. Bless his heart, this was not exactly my plan for a good, recovery night’s sleep. Nevertheless …

Minutes after I thought he was already asleep, he whispered: “Do you have an open hand?” When I said yes and offered it up, he clasped my hand and pulled my arm tightly around his chest. After a few more beats, he breathed out: “I love you, Mom.” Not the cheap, rhetorical “I love you” but the muscular kind that deposits something intangible but true in your heart.

Staying in that cradled position long enough to lose feeling in my arm and watch him drift off to a deep sleep, I received the only thing big enough to take away the lingering ache. Not just his love but a deeper love that speaks gently, forgives our shortcomings and renews our resolve.

I’m up early today. It’s a new day. There will surely be new (and old) reasons to get frustrated today but I believe that last night’s dose of love has the potential to create a pattern different from before.

Love is the stitch that mends both our private and public impasses and gets us out from under the clouds of anger or despair. But in order for it to be realized, it must first be received. “Do you have an open hand?” If we know that a data packet can travel the globe in a second, surely we can believe that love can do circles around that.

How (the Idea of) A Rebel Book Club Helped me Find the Jet Stream

Sometimes finding the jet stream or seeing an old challenge in a new light be like this: 

1. You browse through (last week’s edition of) Time Out London because better late than never.

2. You see an article titled “Eight Bloody Brilliant London Book Clubs.”

3. Before you can even finish the bloody article, you’ve already started the google search “Rebel Book Club” - the editors pick for Best Book Club for non-fiction fans.

4. Within 90 seconds, you’ve decided that you will apply to join.

5. You shove the website under your husband’s nose and he says, “Why would anyone pay a monthly fee to read a book?”

6. You meekly say something about community and cocktails, but then within 90 more seconds, you have a new plan that involves printing out the library of 48 book titles the group has already read.  

7. Armed now with the list so you can read like thinkers & doers, you pull up an app you’ve already paid for called Blinkist to start getting the book summaries.  After all, you are a doer even if you have chosen to lay forth and conquer.

8. Since it’s too early for a cocktail, you make yourself a second cup of coffee, wish for a donut, and settle in to the first book summary: Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth.  

9. You are intrigued enough by the key messages of the book to send your Economics major son a WhatsApp about the book suggesting *he* read the full thing.   

10. Since you need to set your sights on something more doable than building an economic system that encourages growth while also preserving the environment, you move on to the second book summary: Atomic Habits by James Clear.

And there it was.  The actionable thing I wasn’t actively looking for but needed to hear.  

The main idea in Atomic Habits is that small changes in behaviour done over time can have a big impact.  The author described it with this analogy:  if a pilot of a plane taking off from LA to NYC decided to move the nose of the plane 3.5 degrees to the south - a change so small that it would not be felt by passengers -  at the end of the flight, you’d be in Washington DC not NYC.  Small change, big impact. 

Patience then is having confidence that though you may not be seeing immediate results, you know you are on the right trajectory.  Habits are one way to get yourself on that trajectory.  I may still jiggle in the middle but I’ve got enough of a habit around exercise that should I stay the course (and manage my chocolate intake), things will eventually firm up.  

Things however have not been looking so good in regard to my getting any closer to having a basic conversation in French. With a French home, car, and bills to pay, I have an incentive to learn.  I have plenty of learning materials.  I have had fits and starts with using them but absolutely no habits that have stuck.  I have tutors - who can’t charge me - living in my house.  But I have had this massive mental block. “Bordeaux, we have a problem. We can’t figure out how to take off.”

Since the whole point of personal growth book is to do something, I decided to apply the principles described in summary on Blinkist to my challenge of learning French.  The first thing I did is reframe my goal.   It’s no longer “Learn how to speak French,” my first goal is “Learn how to be more comfortable and not panic when someone is talking to you in French.”  Along with a more realistic goal, I’ve set a smaller daily habit of 10 minutes a day and bundled it with my use of my laptop.  Now when I fire up my laptop, I made a rule that the first thing I force myself to do is go to one of my paid online programs and listen to one audio conversation in French with subtitles, on repeat, for 10 minutes.  That’s it for now.

We are still in the very early days but another thing they tell you to do is to us trackers, make contracts or in my case - write about it - as a way of making you more accountable.  I was telling my youngest son about my breakthrough and he said: “Isn’t that just common sense?”  Probably. But dude, I wanted to tell him, sometimes you need to travel a curvy road, take a pass on a Rebel Book Club, and relax into something you kind of knew but didn’t know how to start. 

It seemed apropos that todays’ conversation included this:  “Ah ben ! Ce n'est pas simple, hein. Mais on essaie.” Translation: “Oh well ! It's not simple, is it ? But we try !”

Video Ready ...

I know there’s an easier way to do it — in the same way I know I can speak my texts — but it’s hard to teach an old Blackberry user new iPhone tricks.    And so when I want to free up storage space on my iPhone, out comes my laptop and cables.  Excuse me, my MacBook Pro.

I’m making room on my phone this morning in anticipation of taking some videos later this week. My youngest son has a role in his all school play.  There will be 3 performances this week and so 3 opportunities for me to take poor quality, zoomed out, shaky hand iPhone videos that only a grandparent can love.  I’m sure I’ll give you the chance to like them on social media too.  Best of luck finding him.

As I was clearing off some videos on my phone, I couldn’t help but notice how bad so many of them were.  The videos where you start recording 20-30 seconds too early and still nothing very interesting happens.  The videos where you start recording too late and miss the goal or save.   The ones where your subject is altogether not happy about you videoing.  The ones where a random head enters your frame and obstructs your view.  The ones where you try to capture a moment that has passed and it’s so..not..looking..natural. 

Sometimes we do get the timing right and we are able to capture a moment.  It’s rare when it happens but the authenticity of the moment makes those videos instantly shareable.  This video of my son serenading me with this of-the-cuff beat box six years ago was on of those moments.

It got me thinking however that we don’t have to wait for the iPhone to be turned on at just the right moment.   We are the official storytellers of our lives.   We are the only ones with the full length footage and we are the only ones with exclusive editing rights on how we share our experiences.  There are some bad experiences but most of our experiences have a shareable moment and it’s our job to mine it.  Not just for the world, or our friends, but mostly for ourselves.  We get to decide where the close ups will be and where to fade out.   Your best stuff probably won’t have the Eiffel Tower in the background or you in a duet with Bradley Cooper. But it will have some gold.

It’s an awesome creative task to decide what bits to leave in and what bits to cut out.  We can replay all the borings bits, or the missed opportunities, or the obstacles in the viewfinder, or the conflicts, or chose to tell the put ons rather than the naked truth.  Any story finds an audience but the ones that have an impact, the ones worth sharing, are the ones where something authentic was able to shine through.  

You don’t need a laptop or cable to make room in your heart,  but you may need to siphon off some garbage saved in anticipation of moments ahead you won’t want to miss.  And good news is you’ve got a front row seat.

Rinse + Repeat

All the big grocery stores in Europe seem to have at least two sizes of coin operated trolleys. This is moderately convenient until you go to return your trolley and there isn’t any of your kind to attach to and release your coin.  It’s one of those “how much is a pound worth to you” questions on whether you persist to another trolley return location or abandon cart and coin.  

Yesterday I was standing at a row of grocery trolleys and noticed that someone had solved this dilemma. They had taken their wrong sized trolley, saddled it up perpendicular to the row of other sized trolleys, and stretched the chain just far enough to release their coin.  The chain of nesting carts was broken but this geometrically-gifted shopper found a way to leave with her pound. Wa-lah!

I know this isn’t as groundbreaking as something really useful like having your trolley do your shopping for you, but it was one of those things that stood out for it’s simple ingenuity.  In my six years of scrambling around for spare change because I’d like more than a hand basket to carry my groceries, I had never seen someone have their coin and tether their ill-fitting cart too.  It was only a passing thought but it landed:  “See! sometimes the solution is right there, you just have to pivot 180 degrees to see it.”

All Moms chose their furniture carefully.  When we moved to London I bought the dining room table of my dreams and the dining room chairs of my reality.  They have dark, durable, washable fabric seats.  It’s a draw on whether more spot cleaning would be required if my children or hamsters roamed freely.

After the grocery run, I was arranging cascading bowls of fruit on the dining room table hoping to have answered the after school snack question with a visual aid.  In that process, I caught sight of my durable fabric seats and decided the ice cream to put away could wait.  I mean how much ground in chocolate can one Mom survive?  As I started to wipe down the seats, watching them magically look like new again, another thought attempted landing: “Just like you.”  

Kind of vague, honestly, but this was a situation where the possibility of negative thinking was ripe and so why complain for lack of clarity. 

That thought was unspecific enough that I didn’t think much of it until later when I was washing up.  I noticed a new hand soap at the sink.  Now I don’t have a hand soap fairy but I do buy in bulk at TK Maxx and so it caught me off guard when I saw the label on the new soap: Rinse + Repeat.  Incoming: “Just like you … all things are made new …over and over again.”  

Take in that thought on its second try and add in the smell of coconut and jasmine and you have yourself a little buzz.

Yesterday was also my son’s 16th birthday.  That by itself is a special day but then I showed up for my spinning class and realized I’d blindly signed up for bike number 16.  In case you need more information to be moved by this coincidence, there are 53 bikes and I had never ridden bike number 16.   

Some might still say “yeah, so…” (some of those people live in my house!) but when you are about 30 minutes into your workout and the endorphins are going, and you think about the beautiful life that was birthed out of your body 16 years ago, and you feel that older but still able body crushing it on bike number 16, and in comes the thought: “your body is a temple” accompanied with not just a buzz but pure pleasure … well, you believe it. 

It wasn’t a newsworthy day.  No personal productivity records were set.  I didn’t make any money and spent very little of it.   I didn’t accidentally bump into Russell Brand in my neighbourhood and have that imaginary conversation I’ve been planning.  No, none of that.  But when I hit the pillow last night and felt that quiet peace that envelopes you in the dark, it was confirmation that it had been a very good day indeed.

We think we want what people flaunt - power, prosperity, fame - when really our deeper needs are much more understated and accessible:  knowing that an a-ha moment might be right around the corner, the chance to start again and experiencing the thrill of living in your own sanctuary.