We are experiencing growing pains as a family. We are struggling with how to communicate around our current needs and limitations. It’s not just me who is short tempered and sharp. I am probably the sharpest but I’m not sure my temper is the shortest.
The big kids want to be helpful. They want to be responsible for their sister. They want to feel competent. This is tricky because there are pieces they can help with… but those aren’t the times that feel most satisfying to them and I get it. They want to comfort the baby and it feels really bad to them that the baby screams until she gets mommy. That feels bad and I get it. It is also hard that when the baby is distressed and screaming I am not good at patiently saying, “Please move so that I can do what I am doing to help the baby.” Instead I am irritable and I want to just nudge their head the heck out of my way.
We are trying to talk gently about these things when everything is calm, but this is hard. None of us have experience with this kind of thing. When MC was born EC was only two. She didn’t push hard to be helpful in the same way. She was still nursing and wearing diapers. Now she is on the verge of being ten and she wants to be allowed to sling the baby over her shoulder and carry her off for a diaper change.
Can we have a couple of weeks to let the baby get more sturdy first? Newborns are so terrifying in their fragility. By the time she is three or four months old I will probably be comfortable with that. I’m still not going to direct/demand such behavior. You are not a little mama who has to be responsible for the baby. But since you want to so bad… I will let you… soon…
But right now when her hips could dislocate so easily if you just lift too hard… I’m scared to let you. Newborns are terrifyingly vulnerable to me.
EC is struggling with the mix of responsibility, limitations, and privileges she has. She wants more and less. MC is struggling in different ways. They are feeling overwhelmed by not being older/more competent already. They are really upset about the things they can’t do yet. The stuff might be minor.
We need to find ways for MC to feel competence right now. They have to be allowed to try at things. EC needs to have access to a little more time to feel smug and delighted over her privileges.
They are both running headfirst, as fast as possible, into their limitations and that sucks. I have so much sympathy.
MC read me a book today!!!! They read The Gingerbread Man and they only needed help with half a dozen or so words! That was super exciting!!!! EC has been a little bit of a punk with making fun of MCs reading mistakes. I pointed out that at this exact same age EC couldn’t read a board book let alone a long picture book so just shut all the way up. Don’t you dare mock someone who is younger than you for their growing competence not being exactly the same as yours. This is my grumpiest face of all.
MC has actually made waaaaaaaaaaay more academic progress than I expected this year. They are doing great. EC continues to resist making math progress but has otherwise made fantastic leaps and bounds of progress in writing, storyboarding, research and documentation, science, reading, grammar, spelling, javascript, and general logic. She is working on a whole bunch of stuff and I’m impressed by her dedication to every subject other than math. Math is pissing her off. But math is improving now that we bought a whole bunch of manipulatives and I’m making her sit down to work on making math visual instead of just in her head. I’m also forcing her to work with scratch paper to write down the entire process of doing problems because just doing it in her head is not adequate. She got far that way and now she needs to see how far she can get with the proper support of seeing the steps worked out.
I’m actually kind of weirded out by how well she does with doing math in her head. I struggle to keep some of those concepts in my head the way she does it. I have to write stuff out or I can’t manage some of the problems she can just do. I think that giving her a few more ways to visualize and a little practice writing the steps out will be all she needs to leap frog through the areas she has struggled. We’ll see. I’m really looking forward to quitting the charter school so we can go back to block units. Doing everything all at once is so much harder for us.
MC’s shrink is excited we are getting them screened for ADHD because the shrink has seen definite signs even in one on one non-stressful settings and they are happy that MC will get support/recognition for how hard focus is for them.
We all learn best when we can fully immerse ourselves in a single subject for a few weeks or months at a time. We can cheerfully spend 4+ hours a day on something we are trying to learn but we really struggle with covering four or five subjects in a shorter amount of time spent every day. We struggle with getting our attention to shift. We struggle with feeling like we get tired and we don’t want to think anymore after the second or third subject. When we do one subject in a day we can spend a looooooong time enjoying it and we don’t get tired in the same way. The transitions wear us out. It wears out our patience and focus and attention and we just can’t absorb very much if there are more transitions.
I feel so grateful that my children ended up with brains like mine so that I am not failing to provide the kind of change/stimulation that someone else would need.
The kids did like 80% of the work to make a cake today and I bet they will handle all the decorating. We have mixes that are kind of old so I’m thinking this will be a nice trick to play a few times over the next few weeks. MC got to practice splitting egg yolks from whites, which is tricky and gives a sense of satisfaction of mastery as they learn. EC got to feel hyper-competent as they read all the directions and bossed the shit out of the process. And then we will eat it for dessert over the next few days. The kids feel so happy when they are able to provide for the table. They do a lot of other types of food, but making a dessert feels like a reward to cook and then eat.
I’m trying to think of tasks to set them that will allow them to learn something and feel happy about doing it.
Making another damn savory food… isn’t quite as satisfying in this moment. Because MC isn’t as motivated to cook and EC is already so good at making so many things.
They don’t want more responsibility for cleaning. They are both actively resisting a lot of the out-of-the-house social opportunities… they like hanging out with me and Noah more than other people.
I never anticipated this. My children just flat like me more than they like other people. Being with Noah is awesome. Why would they want to go hang out with children who will inevitably get on their nerves?
It’s fascinating. I really didn’t think it would work like this. I thought they would be irritated with me. I thought they would be demanding more social opportunities and classes and maybe school by now just to have more freedom. They feel like they have as much freedom as possible being with me rather than risking being under the auspice of any other adult.
I didn’t think I would be so cool to anyone ever in my life.
It’s interesting how EC is talking about moving. She has pretty much decided that she’s not going to hunt hard for new friends in our area. The people she likes the most are GU (Geographically Undesirable) and she doesn’t get to see them much. The neighborhood friends she has made have all moved away and we’ve lost contact because their parents are not interested in maintaining contact. All the other moms work and don’t have time to facilitate a relationship and that’s totally fair.
EC is looking forward to independent teenage/tween friendships and she has flat stated that it isn’t that good of an idea to hunt hard for people like that when we are getting ready to move because then moving will hurt too much.
She is so wise I can barely stand it.
MC is still holding on to a few local friends who have mothers who will still do play dates. That’s continuing to be good for them.
I’m thinking almost constantly about why I want to move. I’ve written up a few long posts and shoved them in my draft folder and they will never see the light of the internet proper. Pieces of this thought process are disgustingly petty and about running away from problems. I think way the fuck too much about people who probably don’t think about me at all.
Other pieces… I feel like there are layers of petty on top of real stuff and I’m trying to figure out how to handle the real stuff moving forward.
How do I move into having real friendships that are less codependent? How do I teach myself to pick friendships based on factors other than people needing me to do a kind of work for them? How do I learn how to feel like I can be part of a community?
It’s really bullshit that I don’t feel like I belong in any communities here. There are a bunch of communities where 90% of the people involved either enthusiastically welcome me or are 100% neutral because I’m a stranger. There are only a few people in any community that don’t like me much. It’s not really about those people.
Those people might be lenses through which some of my issues are magnified, but those people have no power over me.
How do I teach my brain that before I go meet new communities?
How do I teach myself to not be such an asshole? People don’t need me to fix their problems. They need me to accept and love them. I don’t need to clean someone’s house for them to be worthy of a friend. I don’t need to teach someone how to do something in order to be worthy of friendship.
I don’t have to buy friends, not with money and not with time spent working.
Hanging out with my family so much really does make it easier to understand that people don’t just value me for how much work I can do. There are long stretches where I’m a useless motherfucker and my kids and Noah still want me around even if I’m just sitting in a chair and being kind of a butthead.
It’s really weird.
This is such a healing experience.
I’m trying to figure out how to have this experience be healing for all the deep inherited wounds my kids have. Sometimes when they get upset about something, I feel like I can see the edges of ancestral guilt coming out. Sometimes when I explain why something works the way it does and I see the kids visibly relax I feel like I am doing the only work that can be done to heal my family line.
Even though I feel very guilty about not “having a job” and “doing something useful for society” this feels useful too. Learning what being ok feels like and learning how to talk about it… that feels useful and like I will never be able to help anyone else until I learn this in my bones.
I have never been able to learn this at the speed of life while doing other things. I’ve tried. This family is the most healing experience of my life. In ways big and small I struggle with fully articulating. These people make all the suffering worth while. I am glad I am here so I can feel this good.
Even as my back hurts like a motherfucker. Let’s not discuss my arms. It’s bad.
There are many kinds of pain. Physical pain is really not the worst thing that has happened to me. I’m conscious that other people have had far more physical pain than me and maybe I shouldn’t have so much hubris about my insignificant bone breaks and maulings. I could experience far more physical pain.
But when I felt the ring of fire my internal response was, “Awesome! Now this is real!”
I was so glad to have that pain. It meant my baby was almost earth side and I wanted to meet her more than anything.
I’m not so good at the emotional pain. I have been in a loving family for almost 12 years. Almost 1/3 of my life. I feel so lucky that I get to be here with these people.
This is my dream come true.
And I want to move somewhere with my favorite people and build connections to new communities. Communities that I did not join when I was desperately broken and I felt like I had to earn my place with sex and pain and work. I want to know what it would be like to not walk into parties and be able to count off my lovers.
I want to know what it would be like to interact with communities from the point of view of coming from a family unit instead of being perceived as extremely expendable.
It’s going to be a whole new world for me.