It never fails. We’re coming up on bedtime, and my boys lose their minds and, somehow, forget what it is we’ve done every single night for the entirety of their lives, which, for some, is arguably more than others. But still. Every single night. How do you deviate from an every-single-night routine?
It usually happens right when we’re getting ready to start story time. The 9-year-old thinks it’s run-around-the-house-naked-and-see-who’s-fastest time. Nope. The 6-year-old thinks it’s stand-on-my-head-without-any-underwear-on time. Nope. The 5-year-old thinks it’s antagonize-his-4-year-old-brothers time. Nope.
The 4-year-olds think it’s play-chase-and-try-to-jump-over-pillows time and try-to-eat-as-much-toothpaste-as-we-can-while-Mama-and-Daddy-aren’t-looking time and throw-stuffed-animals-in-the-air-and-watch-them-destroy-the-room time. Nope, nope, nope.
“Okay,” I’ll usually say, in my best fake enthusiastic voice (because I’m usually just about done this time of night. Not because I don’t love stories. I love stories. I don’t love trying to shout above the roar of five boys doing exactly what they’re not supposed to.). “It’s time for stories. Remember the consequences?”
No one hears me, of course.
I say it a little louder. Still nothing, at which point I yell at the top of my lungs, “Sit down, or it’s early lights out for you.”
I know it’s not the best way of handling these wild animals, but our megaphone went missing, and I need something effective. Mama doesn’t yell a whole lot. So when I do, they pay attention. Well, about 2 percent of the time. It’s something, though.
You know what? I was mistaken. The mysterious short-term memory loss doesn’t start with story time. It actually starts right after dinner. We get to chore time, and everyone high-tails it outside, because I guess they forgot that they have to wipe the counters and the table and do the dishes and sweep the floor and take out the trash, like they have EVERY OTHER NIGHT OF THEIR LIVES (starting when they turned 3). So we have to waste our own valuable time rounding them all up to complete their chores, so they can all run outside again once they’re finished, even though then it’s time for a little Family time, and then it’s time for bath time. Playing outside time is done.
Every time I announce to all of them that now it’s bath time, this is the response I get:
“WHAT?!!!!!!!” (It might even be a few more exclamation marks. They’re always completely surprised. It’s like a surprise party every night.)
They’ll stomp up the stairs, while I clean up the baby and Husband wrangles the twins, and somewhere in between the time they stood at the bottom of the stairs and the time they get to the top, they have forgotten what it is, exactly, that they’re supposed to be doing (again), because now they’re flipping off they chaise in the home library, and one of them is rolling along the floor with a stuffed animal and another is doing sit-ups for his “workout.”
Let me just interject here that we run a very tight ship in our home. They know the schedule. Baths between 7 and 7:20 p.m., story times between 7:20 and 7:50, prayer time between 7:50 and 8. Bedtime, 8:15 sharp.
But every one of those transitions is news to them.
They forget it’s time for dinner, because they’re out in the cul-de-sac playing with their friends, and not stuck inside, bored, so they don’t know that the grumbling in their bellies is telling them they’re hungry. They only know that they want to keep playing. They forget it’s time for chores, because they were having so much fun they want to go back outside with their friends, who must not ever eat, instead of staying in the house, doing boring chores. They forget it’s time for reading, because they’ve just gotten out of the bath, and it feels like maybe it’s time to wrestle with their brother instead of time to wind down for bed.
When it’s get-in-bed-and-stay-there time, it’s much more fun to wander downstairs “accidentally” to “check on a LEGO Minecraft construction” and start playing with the LEGOs again.
Me: It’s not time to play with the LEGOs. It’s actually time to get in bed. Playing with LEGOs is not getting in bed.
9-year-old: But I didn’t get to play with the LEGOs all day.
Me: You mean, you didn’t get to play with them for five hours? You only got to play with them for four? Because you’ve had a long day of LEGO playing. I can tell by the mess on the floor.
9-year-old: I didn’t make that mess.
Me: Oh, that’s right. It must have been that other 9-year-old who lives in our house.
9-year-old: Yeah. Probably.
Me: Did you even hear what I said?
9-year-old:
Me:
9-year-old: Wait.
I get it. It’s really fun to be a kid, especially when kids are permitted to play. But, unfortunately, there is such thing as a bed time, and if my kids are going to make it to bed at a semi-decent hour, we have to have routines and schedules.
So it is that we keep on keeping on, We keep telling them the same things every night, keep reminding them that it’s not play-with-LEGOs time and it’s not jump-on-the-couches time and it’s not plunge-the-toilet time (actually, there’s not even a time like that in our house, 4-year-olds) and it’s not draw-in-notebooks time and it’s not technology time and it’s not run-around-like-crazy-people time and it’s not change-your-clothes-again time and it’s not need-a-snack time. Those things (or at least some of them) have a place in our schedule. That place is not this minute.
I’m not sure what causes this forgetfulness. I suspect it has something to do with wishful thinking. It’s like how, when a parent no longer has a 3-year-old, she forgets how excruciating it was to raise a 3-year-old and has another baby, because surely this one will be different (they’re all pretty much the same). We varied up the routine once. And kids are really, really good at remembering That One Time and forgetting Every Other Time. The exceptions, especially when they’re fun, become the norm in their minds. So, I don’t know. I might not even want to uncage that beast.
Just about every night, Husband and I will look at each other and say something along the lines of, “Really? They don’t know it’s time for chores, even though we do this every night?” But here’s something I’ve tried to remind myself in those perplexing moments: This is called Being a Kid. I remember being a kid and hoping that, just this once, the rules would be different and I could ride my bike out on the street, because I was now in third grade and knew how to watch for cars, and then I’d just do it, because my logic, even then, was about on par with a deer trying to decide whether he wants to cross the street or stay put. My kids clearly got it from somewhere.
So maybe tonight I’ll give them a night off. Maybe we’ll all eat outside and won’t worry about sweeping or wiping off tables, because nature does that pretty well. Maybe we’ll let them take a swim suit shower out on the back deck and read stories while they jump on the trampoline and then carry them all up to their beds when it’s time.
Saving Lucas Biggs (MG sci-fi), by Marisa de los Santos and David Teague, has been on my reading list for a while. I listened to half of this one on audio book and then read the rest of it, because I found it hard to jot down notes and locate quotes when I was only listening to the audio. And because there were so many passages I wanted to highlight, I had to switch to the hard copy version.
The story begins in a compelling way: with a trial and a guilty verdict. We learn early on that the trial is for 13-year-old Margaret’s father, and, also, that he didn’t commit the crime. This immediately sets up a reason for readers to continue reading. What’s going to happen to her father? Will Margaret be able to save him?
Not only that, but the judge who proclaims the guilty verdict and the impending death sentence is named Judge Biggs. Because he shares the same name as the title, the title becomes another reason readers keep reading—is he Lucas Biggs? Why does he need to be saved?
The story flips back and forth from the perspective of Margaret, who lives in present day, to Josh, who lives in 1938, when Judge Biggs was a young boy. Margaret, who can time travel, tries to prevent her father’s sentence by preventing the chain of events that caused Judge Biggs to become who he is today.
The only problem is, history is trying to work against her.
What I loved most about this book is that it told a story of innocence and good that was corrupted by power and disappointment. It told the story of a boy who was enticed to act outside of who he was because of circumstances that felt too painful for him to bear. It told the story of good and evil in a way that showed evil is not born evil but sometimes comes about due to circumstances or ignorance or desperation.
The authors crafted their two different voices beautifully. Here is Josh, talking about a miner’s strike and a subsequent massacre:
“After the massacre, our job was to keep Canvasburg alive, because if we left, or starved, or froze in the fall wind that’d started cascading down Mount Hosta, everything that’d happened to us would disappear into thin air, and everybody who’d died would’ve died for nothing.”
He’s a valiant child, one who believes in what the miners are doing, because they’re not treated justly. They must demand justice. He doesn’t think their town will be served by giving up. It’s a very heroic standpoint, after so many died because of what they believed. In spite of fear, he believes the miners are right to keep fighting for what they believe.
Here’s a descriptive passage from Josh:
“Fall kept falling, and the desert nights grew cold. I got to thinking that if we stacked rocks around the edges of our tents to stop the mountain wind from whistling straight through them, then maybe our blankets wouldn’t blow off in the middle of the night while we tried to sleep, leaving us dreaming of glaciers and hugging our knees. What I didn’t foresee was how hard it would actually be to find a rock to pick up. Even one. I mean, the desert around there, the whole shimmering thing, was like a work of art. It should’ve had a guard in a uniform with a sign: Do Not Touch.
“It was perfect. It was beautiful. Red! Green! Yellow!
“Brighter than you ever imagined! Every rock fit into every other rock like the pieces of a mosaic.”
This description endeared me to Josh, because it contains so much hope. That time of year, the desert was a perfect work of art. It was beautiful. Beauty can always be found in even the most dire of circumstances. Josh and his family is camping outside their town, and they don’t have much to eat, and they’ve just lost a bunch of their friends and neighbors, and still he’s able to find beauty in the landscape.
In Josh’s description of his brother’s chronic cough, you hear how much he knows and loves his brother:
“The shadow that fed on Preston’s cough grew like a storm loud over us. ‘I’m not complaining,’ he said one night before bed. And that was true. Preston had a nonstop mouth, but he never used it for complaining. ‘I’m just hungry.’
Josh gives us great characterization of his brother. It’s clear that he cares about his brother and that he is worried about the cough that has come back around, even though it was supposed to get better in the desert.
Here Josh is speaking about the day’s beginning:
“I watched the first sunlight of the day boiling over the desert like a tide of red falling up to drown me. I held my breath, as if that would save me, but I couldn’t go without air forever, and as I breathed again, a ruby crescent peeked over the rim of the world. In seconds, it had grown into a scarlet crown; then it was half an orange globe, and then a yellow ball, huge, glued to the horizon, and thwack, the ball pulled itself loose and floated up into the blue sky, burning whiter as it rose.”
The way he describes the sunrise is captivating; it’s as if I’m watching it with him.
And here Josh is speaking of Margaret, when he sees her for the first time after she’s done her time-traveling thing:
“Suddenly, I spied a girl. I’d never seen this girl before. I’d never seen a girl like this girl before, flitting from tent shadow to tent shadow. She had hair as red as the sunlight that’d just singed my retinas. She had eyes so green, I could see them fifty yards away, and her feet were really large.”
What he chooses to highlight in his description—the green hair that tells him who she’s related to in that small town, the red hair that also gives a hint of this ancestry, the large feet, which is a humorous observation for a boy to make—shows a lot about his personality. He’s curious, trying to figure her out. And of course he had never seen a girl like her before; she was from 70 years in the future.
It’s clear that I felt more drawn to Josh’s voice than Margaret’s, since I didn’t jot down any notes from Margaret’s point of view, but all in all the book was an entertaining read full of adventure and all the themes I love most—family, perseverance and good triumphing over the evil that may not be as evil as we had, at first, thought. Saving Lucas Biggs is a treat for adults and kids alike.
Nothing makes me realize how much I miss my boys when they’re at school like a holiday or a bad weather day, when they get to wake up at 6 a.m., even though there’s no school, and hang out with me all day. I’m not even being sarcastic (yet). They’re really cool kids, and even though it’s hard to handle the dynamic of six little ones all the time, I really do enjoy spending time with them. When they’re home and not at school, they show me all the stories they’re writing, and they show me their LEGO creations, and we get to read books together and talk about what we learned from the books and imagine what it’s like to live in a world like this one.
I like seeing them walking around the house. I enjoy staring at their faces that have gotten so big, more like young men instead of little boys. I even take pleasure in hearing the refrigerator door open every other minute, for at least the first ten minutes.
But, lest I miss them too much while they’re away at school, they leave me constant reminders that they are still here.
I’ve found their reminders in the refrigerator, where they stash their cups of milk they didn’t finish this morning that will usually curdle before they remember they had a cup of milk in the first place, because as soon as they get home they’ll pour another giant glass, without even considering the first, and then they’ll wonder why the milk is gone three days before the next grocery trip.
They leave their reminders on the floor, where I’ll trip all over the pajamas they stripped off and left where they fell while I was distracted trying to keep the twins out of their room and away from their stuffed animals, so I didn’t have time to remind them before we flew out the door. (It doesn’t matter how many times I remind them to pick their clothes off the floor—it doesn’t even matter that it’s even part of the morning routine, and they have a checklist in their hands—their pajamas will still litter the floor tomorrow morning, and the next time I’m lunging to keep one of the 4-year-olds from swinging off the ceiling fan in his room, I’ll trip over it. It’s just a fact of life.)
They leave their reminders out on the back porch, where they left their good tennis shoes, which are now baking in the sun and Texas heat, and sometimes (bonus!) they’ll leave their socks in those baking shoes, so by the time they’re brought back in, they now have tie-dyed socks. Not only that, but they leave their underwear, which I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how (or why) it got there and who was the parent on duty when it happened (probably me. I like to take bathroom breaks when all six of the boys are my responsibility).
They leave their reminders on the stairs, where they dropped an armful of stuffed animals on their way down, which will sit there, taunting me, until I kick them out of the way and hope to God I don’t trip and fall down the stairs again. They leave their reminders in puzzle they took out and didn’t clean back up but left in the corner of the room, right where the 11-month-old could find it and will now wash every piece with the gallons of slobber he carries around in his mouth for purposes just like this one. They leave their reminders on the couches, which they probably just mistook for their jacket hook because there’s no resemblance whatsoever.
They leave their reminders in my bathroom, where they took off their underwear to change it, because, apparently, a boy needs to change his underwear every twelve hours. They leave their reminders on my bedroom floor, where they spread all their school papers out, looking for that one drawing they did for their teacher this weekend. They leave their reminders under my covers, where they put that stick they found on their way out the door, and they knew the only place their twin brothers wouldn’t go was my bedroom, and what better place to put it than under the covers, where no one would find it?! Genius!
They leave their reminders on the counter, where they put that book they were reading—the one that made them miss the caravan walk to school, because they didn’t hear a thing until the house got eerily silent and they realized they’d been left behind. They leave their reminders on the table, where they forgot to put their plate away when they were done with their breakfast, even though it’s a very clear expectation in our house. They leave their reminders on the dining room table, where I’ll find a coloring sheet they took out for drawing, which the 4-year-olds will ruin while they’re at school. They leave their reminders in the awesome LEGO house they built that the 4-year-olds will demolish in half a second of beating me through the front door on the walk home from school.
They leave their reminders in the toilet.
And you know what? I’m glad, because what in the world would I do without these reminders? Forget that I had six boys, three of whom are away at school?
Of course not. The real reason I’m glad they leave me all these reminders is something I think about every now and then. It’s not an easy truth, but it’s this one: One day they’ll be gone for good.
So I’ll take the reminders wherever I can find them.
But next time, boys, let me know about the stick under my covers (or anything else under the covers, for that matter). My backside will thank you.
It doesn’t take us long, does it? We have only to look at those magazines to think, Not me. I could never look like that. Ever. We have only to look at each other—the thin, the round, the short, the tall, the fair, the dark—to remember that there are standards for this, that there are outer attributes that matter more than others: thin, big-breasted, long-legged, large-eyed, shiny-haired, smooth-skinned, thin, thin, thin.
We have only compare.
That’s where it all begins. At the comparison between her and me and you and me and you and them. We are women. We’re really good at comparing.
Comparison doesn’t stay in just the beauty places. We see it, too, in careers, in parenting, in marriage, in influence, in finances, in success.
We read about that author who did something we’ve wanted to do all our life, and we think, Well, guess I’ll never do it now. We hear of parents who never yell and parent in the most empathic way possible and, bonus, have perfectly polite and wonderful kids, and we think, She must be much better at this than I am. We listen to our friends talk about their new opportunities and we see the new cars of acquaintances and we can’t celebrate, not really, because it’s exactly what we wanted, or the idea of it is, at least, and now we’re never going to get it because someone else got it first.
When other people show up with the things we want—the perfect body we’ve been trying so hard to scupt, the accolades we dreamed about, the promotion we should have gotten, the book deal we set out to snag, the song we should have written, the children we long for, the popularity we deserve, the love we desire—we think that means those things aren’t for us, too. We think we should have gotten there first, if only we had done the work it required back when we actually had the time to do it. We think we should be different—flatter stomach, more muscular legs, bigger eyes, more defined chin, bigger breasts, everything that comes with beauty.
But sisters, there is something we’re missing here, and it’s this: There is room enough for all of us.
There is no better or worse, no more womanly and less womanly, do you see? There is only us.
I know it’s not easy to remember, exactly, but it’s true. Someone else having what it takes to be beautiful doesn’t mean that we don’t have it, too. Someone else finding love doesn’t mean we won’t. Someone else walking away from anxiety because they got lucky in that exploration of their past and found the root and pulled it up fast, doesn’t mean we won’t ever be able to do the same.
We think that there is only one space for people. Only one small space to be beautiful, and it’s already occupied. Only one small space to be successful, and it’s already occupied. Only one small space to be adored, and it’s already occupied. So, then, what is left for us?
There is enough to go around, sisters. We live in a world where scarcity is the truth of the day, but it is not the truth of us. Sure, the marketers will try to make us believe it is, because scarcity is what makes people buy, buy, buy, but while there might be a limited supply of products and a limited supply of resources and a limited supply of people making products and securing resources, there is not a limited supply of the things that really matter—love, beauty, family, success marks of a career, dreams come true. And so there is room for all of us in this world. There is room for all of us to be beautiful, for all of us to be successful, for all of us to be loved.
I know how it is. I know how we can get caught in the web of thinking-that-becomes-believing that someone else got something we should have gotten and now there’s nothing left for us. I know, because I have to shake off the stickiness of getting caught every single day when I read writing and blogs from women and men who are trying to do the same things I am—blast the world with truth—and the market feels saturated and water-logged and too concerned with shallow words instead the deeper ones, and maybe I just don’t belong. Maybe I should just stop trying.
But there is room enough for me, too, if I’m willing to carve and bare and build. And I will find my space, because I am unique, and I am my own person and I have something to offer the world from my own individual perspective, which no one in the whole world has exactly.
I only say all that because I want you to understand that there is space for you, too.
Just because the beauty magazines define beauty in those you-don’t-have-it ways doesn’t mean we can’t make our own definition. Just because the world tells us what it takes to be successful people in today’s reality doesn’t mean we don’t get to make our own definitions and shove it in society’s face. Just because that person who was dealing with infertility like we were and now has two babies of her own and we still have none doesn’t mean that there is not space for us here in this miraculous world of parent.
We’re beaten down and kicked around by the subtle message society tries to tell us—that only a select few matter. That we are not, in fact, in that select few. That we should move over and let others take our stage.
It doesn’t matter how we think or how we live or how we love or how we dream or what we do or what we look like or what we see or what we need, there is space for all of us. One’s beauty doesn’t detract from our own. One’s success doesn’t detract from our own. One’s love doesn’t detract from our own. One’s good-mom-ness, good-wife-ness, good-worker-ness, good-citizen-ness, good-decision-ness doesn’t detract from our own.
We are each as different as those stars hanging the sky, and there is nothing that will make us the same, and when we’re thrown together into the black, that’s when we really start to shine. That’s when we begin leaving space for each other.
In this episode, Rachel talks about two fantastic middle grade graphic novels, a parenting book that all people who are in contact with little boys should read, a healthy eating challenge, how she survived a writing crisis, and a fascinating series on the human brain.
6-year-old, to 3-year-old brother: I feel really angry at you, but I don’t want to hurt you.
9-year-old: I want to pee outside
Husband: No. You’re 9 years old. You can no longer pee outside when you’re 9 years old.
9-year-old: Why not?
Husband: Because—
9-year-old: Can I do it in the pits my brothers dug?
Husband: You’re really grouchy.
Me: I know. It’s been a hell of a morning.
9-year-old: You said a bad word.
Me: I don’t care.
9-year-old: Well, you’ll go where you said then.
Me: I said don’t eat yet. We haven’t prayed. Do you listen to anything comes out of my mouth?
3-year-old: No.
Me: What did I just say?
9-year-old: That I need to listen to you because one day it will help keep me safe. And so I’ll stay out of things. Like drugs.
6-year-old: We don’t have drugs in our house. We can’t get into drugs.
9-year-old: But we have alcohol.
Me: [shrug] It’s your dad’s.
9-year-old: Don’t worry, Mama, I’m not packing anything inappropriate.
Me: What would be inappropriate?
9-year-old: I don’t know. A poster that says, ‘This car used to be a butt.’
We have this crazy expectation in our minds about what it looks like to be a writer. It means standing (or sitting—though I hope not!) at our computers all day and producing great pieces of literature several times a year. It means the only thing we do is focus on that literary masterpiece that’s been waiting for years to climb out our fingers. It means giving up unnecessary components of our lives so that we can focus on this one thing.
Well, yeah, some of it is like that, but if our expectations of being a legitimate writer are tied to whether or not we get to do it full-time, then we’re going to be sorely disappointed (and, also, we’ll never get that book finished).
Even writers who have their books published by large publishing houses are not always able to write full time. You hear about all the ones who do, but what you don’t hear about is all the other ones who work other jobs (or do other make-an-income things) while they’re trying to build a writing business and a back-list of books.
I’m incredibly fortunate to have a husband who supports my family in just a half-day of work, so I get to use the other half-day to create. This means our budget is superbly tight. We have six kids. It’s not an easy task for him to support us all, but he believes in what I’m doing and in what I’m building, and he’s willing to make that sacrifice while I’m working on a business that can help out.
But it wasn’t always like this. For eight years, I worked a full-time job and pursued my writing in small little patches on the side. I wrote three books like that, and it was hard work—harder work than I’m doing now, without the pressure of making money on my back.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t matter whether you do this full-time or whether you’re working on it in the margins of your life, you are still a legitimate writer, because you put in the work.
[Tweet “There’s no one right way to be a writer. It looks different for all of us.”]
Some of us write in the morning, some of us late at night, after the kids are put in bed. Some of us write full-time, some of us for only fifteen minutes a day, but, hey, at least we’re trying. Some of us write novels, some of us write memoirs, some of us write self-help books, some of us prefer all things children’s literature. There’s no formula for being a writer.
Well, actually, there is a formula for being a writer, and it’s this: We do the work.
We are legitimate writers when we decide we’re legitimate. No one can make that call for us. We don’t have to get on the bestseller list before someone takes us seriously. We call ourselves a writer, and we do the work. We publish our own books, or we send them out in hopes that someone else will publish them—either way, we’re writers.
It’s not an easy task to be a writer, of course. It’s a solitary pursuit, for the most part, unless we can find a community of people who are working hard at doing it, too (because the other thing is this: we’re not in competition).
There are always people who tell me they want to write, once they’ve asked me what it is I do, or maybe they’ve seen me sitting on a picnic bench writing and ask about it later, when I run into them in a church cafeteria. They say they would like to write a book, but they don’t have the time. They’ll typically express their sadness that they aren’t pursuing what I’m pursuing, and I always think, Well, then, why not? We can always find time for the things we love, and, for me? Writing is like breathing. I’d die without it.
We decide to do the work of writing, and we make the time, and we’re the ones who will hold a book at the end of all those hours (and it will take many).
If we’re just making the excuse that we don’t have the time to write, because we don’t have hours-long stretches at our disposal, then of course we’re never going to get that book finished.
[Tweet “Sometimes a writing career has to begin at the tiny margins of our time.”]
I don’t have to get a great publishing deal to be a legitimate author. I don’t have to sell a certain number of books to be considered a legitimate writer. I am a legitimate writer because I put in the time and I do the work.
If you want to be a legitimate writer, you will too.
Takeaways at a glance:
1. We control when we consider ourselves a legitimate writer, not anyone else. 2. There’s always time to write. We just have to find it. 3. We are in charge of our lives. When we say we really want to write but we just don’t have the time, what we’re saying to writing is that sacrificing to find the time is not worth it. Writing time happens when we schedule it. 4. It’s not easy to be a writer. It’s actually hard, hard work to do it every day, no matter what. But it’s also worth work. 5. There is no one right way to be a writer, but millions of them. Run your own race. Do your own work.
Week’s prompt
Write whatever comes to mind when you read this quote:
“I shall give you hunger and pain, and sleepless nights. Also beauty, and satisfactions known to few, and glimpses of the heavenly life. None of these you shall have continually, and of their coming and going you shall not be foretold.”
-Howard Lindsay
I used to care a whole lot about EVERYTHING. And I mean, everything. I was quite a terrorist, if you ask Husband and my firstborn. I used to care what people thought about me and my parenting choices. I used to care about what my kids looked like, because, of course, they always had to be dressed impeccably—in the right shoes and the right shirts and the right pants, with their hair combed just so, because people needed to know we were killing it as parents of six. I used to care about getting places on time and how we looked walking the streets of our city and what my kids’ behavior said about me.
I know better now.
My kids are their own people, and while I’m the shepherd who guides them in their journeys, they are not exact replicas of me (nor would I want them to be. I’m far from perfect, too.).
What I have realized in my years of parenting is that I often care too much about what the people think. So I’ve resolved to stop caring. Here are the top things I will stop caring about:
1. I don’t care what you think about how many children swarm around me and call me Mama.
We get a whole lot of stares when we’re out in public, and we’re out in public a lot, because we like doing things together as a family. And I get it. We have a lot of kids, and they’re all boys. We’re quite a sight to see, honestly. I’ve started telling myself that people are staring at us because they’ve never seen boys so well behaved. But every now and then, someone walks up to shatter that perception, because the judgement is practically dripping from their eyes, and if it wasn’t dripping from their eyes, I would find it pretty quickly in the tone they use to say these words: “These all yours?” We’ll politely say, yes, they all belong to us. “My God,” they’ll say. “Ever heard of birth control?” or something along those no-filter lines, at which point we’ll walk away, because our kids deserve better than that. They really are good boys, and they don’t need to know how ugly the world can be just yet.
So I’ve stopped caring about what people think of my choice to have half a dozen kids. You can think what you want. You can think I’m ruining the planet because I’m contributing to overpopulation. You can think I’m irresponsible and selfish in this irresponsible and selfish choice. You can think it’s just a waste of space in our society. You can think I’m crazy or ignorant or unschooled or back woods or ridiculously ridiculous. I don’t even care.
2. I don’t care if you could never imagine yourself doing what I do on a daily basis.
Recently I read an essay urging the moms of the Internet to stop being so sensitive to the things that people say to them. Maybe it’s true that sometimes we get a little sensitive about the things people say. But I like to think that I can always tell when people mean well and when they don’t. There’s something in the eyes. I’ve always been good at reading the eyes, because I was a political reporter for a while, and I got really good at spotting the liars and the judgmental and the hostile. There’s always something in the eyes.
The ones who mean well, there’s a lot more forgiveness and grace for them, in my book. Go ahead. You can joke with me about how I have a basketball team with a sub or how I must have been going for a girl or how there are so many of them, everywhere, you can’t get away from them because I can see in your eyes that you mean well and you’re actually quite delighted.
But the ones who don’t mean well, they should just stop talking.
It’s often that we will hear from people, “I don’t know how you do it.” Mostly it’s said out of admiration, but every now and then, there’s a crazed person who makes a beeline for our family when we’re crossing the Alamo Plaza in the great city of San Antonio, just so they can say, “I can’t imagine having that many kids,” and look at our kids like they’re some kind of monsters who will take over the planet and eat the brains of all the much-more-capable-and-desirable adults.
Call me crazy, but I’m not a big fan of my boys standing in front of a person who makes them feel like there’s something wrong with who they inherently are, just because there are six of them. The oldest is getting old enough to pick up on this scorn. But you know what? I don’t care anymore if you think you could never imagine yourself doing laundry for six kids every week or teaching six kids every day or feeding six kids every hour. I don’t care if you think I was a nutcase for choosing this kind of life for myself. I don’t care. Shut your mouth and move along. This is family time. Not let’s-see-what-a-stranger-thinks-about-all-these-children time, despite what you may think.
3. I don’t care if the way my kids are dressed makes them look like orphans.
My kids dress themselves. That means many times, they don’t have matching shoes or they’re wearing one flip flop and one tennis shoe, because their solution for “I can’t find my other Iron Man tennis shoe” is to leave one tennis shoe on and let the other foot carry green flip flop. They have holes in their jeans, because they walk on their knees half the time. They have unbrushed hair, because they can’t be bothered to put a comb through their tangles, and I’m too busy feeding a baby or cleaning up another glass of spilled milk or hugging a 4-year-old. They have smudges on their faces, because they’re like magnets for dirt.
All of this doesn’t mean we don’t take good care of them. It just means kids get to dress however they want (with gentle suggestions from Mama and Daddy) and deal with the consequences of their choices. Like shorts in 40-degree weather.
So I don’t care what other people think about what my kids look like. I don’t care if you think we’re not taking care of them or if you wonder whether we’re those crazy people who don’t bathe our kids every day (we don’t). I don’t care if you think I’m a negligent mother (I’m not) or if you think I have no style (not much) or if you think they just get to run around like hoodlums outside (yeah, mostly).
4. I don’t care what you think my kids’ behavior says about me.
It’s amazing to me how much people forget about the day in, day out battles of raising children. I’ve heard already-raised-their-kids parents rake younger parents over the coals, because their kids never had a tantrum, and even if they did, it was only once, because blah blah blah. Whatever.
So my kid had a tantrum. Stop giving me the stink-eye. So my kid won’t stop whining and it’s super annoying. So my kid didn’t want to leave the park and kicked some of the mulch, and it got in his twin brother’s eye. Yeah, that’s not allowed, but you know what? It happens. Emotions can’t always be controlled perfectly. And just because I understand that doesn’t mean he’s not gong to deal with the consequences of his actions, but it does mean that I’m going to first empathize with my kid about how hard it is to leave a park when we’re having fun. Mind your own business and let me take care of it.
I don’t care if you think I’m too strict. I don’t care if you think I’m too lenient. I don’t care if you think I’m probably not the best one for this job. I don’t care. I’ll parent my kids however I want to parent them, because I’m the one who knows them best. I know their tendencies and their struggles and their pitfalls, and, most of all, I know their hearts. You don’t, in your one glance my way.
I don’t care what other people think about us anymore. I don’t care if you hate families and despise children, because you think they have nothing to offer the world. I know who we are, and I know who my kids are, and I know how much value they have to offer, and I know that they will one day change this world they’re living in.
I’ve mentioned before that I run a book club where some women and I get together every month to talk about some books we’re reading. We take turns picking a book each other, and then we discuss any other books we’ve read that we’d recommend to each other, which means our book lists are miles long. A couple of months ago it was my turn to pick the monthly read, and I chose Rain Reign, by Ann M. Martin.
If you don’t recognize her name, Ann M. Martin is the author of The Babysitters Club series. I didn’t actually know this when I chose Rain Reign, because I hadn’t read The Babysitters Club books since I was about eight, but I like to google authors to see what I can find out about their inspiration for writing particular books, and that’s when I made the connection. This made me even more excited to read her book.
Let me just tell you, Rain Reign was one of the best middle grade books I’ve read in a long time, and I read a whole lot of them. The emotions, the situations, the innocence, the lessons, the voice, every part of this book was so beautiful. The story follows Rose Howard, who is a little girl with Asperger’s. Her teachers and her father don’t always understand her, but she has an uncle who loves her for who she is. She also has a dog named Rain. But then a major storm hits her town, and Rain goes missing, and the rest of the story is about her quest to find her dog that is really a quest to find herself and the truth about her mother and what it means to be a family. I still get chills talking about this book. It was so well written, so lovable, so charming—one of those books that grabs hold of you and won’t let go. Readers will not forget Rose or her story.
What I loved most about Rain Reign was that it was told from the perspective of Rose. Martin captured so eloquently the voice of a kid with Asperger’s, and I believe this book will not only help other kids understand that the kids with Asperger’s are not weirdos but ordinary people who see the world differently, but it will also help Asperger’s kids feel like they have a voice, that they are understood, that they are not expected to be someone different. What a great contribution to the world of children’s literature.
But lest you think this is just a story about a girl with Asperger’s, I must make it clear: this is a story about a girl and her dog. The story about a girl with Asperger’s takes a backseat to the story of Rain and Rose.
Martin skillfully characterized Rose within the first few pages, as Rose got straight to the point:
“I like homonyms a lot. And I like words. Rules and numbers too. Here is the order in which I like these things;
“1. Words (especially homonyms)
“2. Rules
“3. Numbers (especially prime numbers)
This is a perfect way to show how a kid with Asperger’s would have listed something out, because they are very precise and matter-of-fact.
Here’s another great passage:
“I’m going to tell you a story. It’s a true story, which makes it a piece of nonfiction.
“This is how you tell a story: First you introduce the main character. I’m writing this story about me, so I am the main character.”
So much voice contained in this short passage. It’s as if Rose is just reciting facts, which is what Asperger’s kids love to do.
Martin also deftly showed how Rose was obsessed with details, another characteristic of Asperger’s kids. Talking about her teacher’s helper, Rose says this:
“She sits in an adult-size chair next to my fifth-grade see chair and rests her hand on my arm when I blurt something out int he middle of math. Or, if I whap myself in the head and start to cry, she’ll say, ‘Rose, do you need to step into the hall for a moment?’”
It’s such an innocent observation—Rose doesn’t realize there’s anything unusual about having a helper in the classroom. I just love this innocence.
In other places, Rose used precise numbers to communicate details:
“Down the road, 0.7 miles from my house is the J&R Garage, where my father sometimes works as a mechanic, and 0.1 miles farther along is a bar called The Luck of the Irish, where my father goes after work. There is nothing between my house and the J&R Garage except trees and the road. (Tell me some things about your neighborhood.)”
“Uncle Weldon lives 3.4 miles away on the other side of Hatford.”
She’s practicing normal conversation, which is hard for her, but it’s easy to see that her conversation is anything but normal, because how many kids would know precisely how far something is from their house?
Rose doesn’t show much emotion but only communicates information (later in the book, we know of her emotion by the way she recites prime numbers during the overwhelming scenes. I thought that was a fantastic way to show readers that Rose is overwhelmed, because she falls back to her safe place. I didn’t want to share examples here, because there would be spoilers.). I also love that in the simple sentence about Uncle Weldon we not only get information about how far Uncle Weldon lives from her and her father, but we also get an idea of how large the town is.
Martin also utilized humor in some of Rose’s observations, like this one:
“Now he’s supposed to go to Hatford Elementary on the third Friday of every month at 3:45 p.m. To discuss me. This is what he said when he read that: ‘I don’t have time for meetings. This is way too much trouble, Rose. Why do you do these things?’ He said that at 3:48 p.m. on a Friday when there was no work for him at the J & R Garage.”
Rose has just gotten some notes sent home, saying that the principal and Rose’s teacher would like to have some regular meetings with her father to discuss her progress. She delivers her observation with such innocence and shows us many things: her father’s refusal to understand the way she is, her teachers’ concern over her, and how well she knows and observes her father’s activities.
Rose knows her dog just as precisely, too:
“Rain’s back is 18 inches long. From the tip of her nose to the tip of her tail she’s 34 inches long.”
This will help her later, when Rain is lost in the middle of a storm and Rose must call all the nearby shelters to see if they’ve found her.
Rose lets her reader understand the trouble with her father, with small mentions of hard eyes and annoyance, even though she can’t really tell what they mean. Here she is talking about how to know when she and Rain should stay away from her father:
“Rain is smart. She never goes near my father right away. She stands in the doorway to my bedroom while we wait to see whether my father will say, ‘What’s for supper?’ If he says, ‘What’s for supper’ then it’s safe for me to serve him and for Rain to sit by the table while we eat. She can stare at us and put her paws in our laps wanting food until I see my father’s eyes get black and hard and that’s the signal that Rain should go back to my bedroom.”
It’s clear that Rose is a very observant child, even though she can’t interpret the looks on people’s faces or, necessarily, the tone of their voices. But she gathers all the information and keeps it for herself, analyzing it in a very non-emotional manner.
Here she tells us a little about her diagnosis:
“I hear lots of things I’m not supposed to hear, and lots of things nobody else is able to hear, because my hearing is very acute, which is a part of my diagnosis of high-functioning autism. The clicks our refrigerator makes bother me, and so does the humming sound that comes form Mrs. Kushel’s laptop computer.”
“I hear clicks and humming and whispers. And conversations in the psychologist’s offie when the door is almost closed.”
Throughout the book, we are peeling back the layers of Rose. She doesn’t give us all the information up front, but they come out eventually. It’s one of the best things about the book.
After Rain is lost, Rose repeats the story as much as she can:
“This is because my father let Rain outside without her collar during a superstorm.”
Her repeating is a sign that she is upset, that she is still trying to come to terms with the loss of her dog. It was endearing.
Here’s the closest we get to her emotions, which she says after Rain gets lost:
“The afternoons are long. They seem to be full of empty space—space between looking through the box and starting my homework, space between finishing my homework and starting dinner. I don’t know what to do with the space. Rain used to fill it.
“How do you fill empty space?”
It was so sad, such great commentary on how it feels like when something goes missing from your life, delivered in such an innocent way. She feels very sad, but she just feels it as empty space.
This was one of the most beautiful passages in the book, showing, once more, the sorrow Rain feels at losing her dog:
“When I am at home alone I study my list of homonyms. I look through my mother’s box.
“That is all.
“There is an ache inside of me, a pain.
“Is this what bravery feels like? Or loneliness?
“Maybe this is an ache of sadness.”
As soon as I finished this book, I had to pick it back up and read it again to my 6-year-old, who is a dog lover. He can’t get enough of it, and even after the second time through, neither can I. Rain Reign is a book that will remain in the hearts of its readers forever.
We live in a much different world than we used to. This is a world where kids are kept close to home and parents call out other parents and, also, everyone and their dog has a food allergy.
It’s become the cool thing to be a kid with allergy. At least according to my kids and their friends.
I’m not trying to make light of a very real danger. I realize that there are many kids with severe allergies who could die if they sniff peanut butter or eggs or shellfish. I realize this is serious.
It’s just that the other day, my 6-year-old came home and said, “Mama, I found out I’m allergic to tomatoes today.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said, knowing better. This kid isn’t allergic to anything. None of our kids are. We’re super fortunate to have escaped the misery of food allergies. “How do you know?”
“Well, this girl was sitting next to me eating tomatoes, and I sneezed,” my boy said. His blue eyes looked up at me expectantly. I looked back at him expectantly, thinking surely this wasn’t the end of that story. Lip swelling? Upset stomach? Skin rash, maybe?
Wait. Just a sneeze?
“Maybe you just needed to sneeze,” I said.
“No,” he said. “I’m allergic.” And then he skipped off to tell all his neighborhood friends that he is allergic to tomatoes, blissfully unaware that we’d had tomatoes in our chicken salad last night and he hadn’t died overnight.
This is the same kid who once told our pediatrician that he had a milk allergy. The pediatrician raised his eyebrow in my direction, and I shook my head, and he smiled a little knowing smile, as if all the kids were saying things like that these days. And I wouldn’t put it past them. Maybe it really has become the cool thing to be a kid with allergies, according to the kids who don’t have them. The cool kids get to sit at their own table. The cool kids get to have special lunches and snacks. The cool kids get to have different treats than all the others at the holiday parties.
The cool kids get a little more attention from their teacher, who has to pay more attention to what they’re eating and what they’re touching and whether they’re having an allergic reaction to the marshmallows they used in today’s science experiment (I think I’ll tell the teachers my kids are allergic to marshmallows. I hate marshmallows. They make my kids CRAZY.). Every kid wants his teacher to pay more attention to just him. Attention is love. I get it.
All that can seem like a luxury to kids on the other side.
As much more logical adults, we know there’s nothing cool about having an allergy. We know it’s dangerous and inconvenient and super scary. The kids, well, they think that having an allergy is some kind of “I’m cool” badge, because, at the depths of their hearts, they’re all just looking to be distinct and unique and set apart from the rest of the herd. Or, at the very least, included in the cool kids group.
My 6-year-old has several classmates who have allergies. I don’t envy their parents at all, trust me. But sometimes I wish allergies didn’t even exist so my first grader didn’t come home every other day to tell me that he’s allergic to something else because his leg went numb after he ate it (pretty sure this is because of the way he sits on his legs at the cafeteria table) or because his nose got itchy or because he lost a hair on the back of his head, and he has the evidence to prove it.
Until our kids start understanding that allergies are something that could actually kill a person and that they’re taken very, very seriously, I think we’re probably going to see more and more of this silly phenomenon. I’ve seen it in more than just my kids. When a neighborhood kid comes over, he’s always got an allergy (even though I always check with parents). One kid is pretty insistent that he doesn’t eat carrots or celery or broccoli or cucumbers or beets or cauliflower, because he’s allergic to them all (guess he’ll go hungry at our house). Right now, to all these kids who don’t have them, allergies seem like a desirable thing—just like having glasses can seem like a desirable thing until you’re the kid who can’t see two feet in front of your face and your parents slap on you some ugly purple frames that reach all the way to your jawline and you have to wear them every day because you just realized the world is full of color and, later, you’ll try to hide all those pictures of your massive purple glasses from the man who’s just asked you to marry you, because, of course, he can never, ever, ever see you like that (I know what it’s like to be the un-cool kid. Thanks, Mom.).
So I’ve tried explaining to my son that having an allergy is no small thing, that it’s actually a really big deal, that we can’t just play around with those words, “I have an allergy,” because there are people who could actually die if they eat what they’re allergic to, but all he said was, “Well, my legs hurt when I eat salad. Maybe I’m allergic to lettuce.”
Well. He’s still young. I’ll wait until he’s old enough to spell “asphyxiation” before I try again.
Which means I might be waiting forever, because spell check just helped me out.
