what is time

Here's Duchess (and Skipper) on her first day of kindergarten.

Here's Duchess (and Skipper) today, on her last day of 12th grade. (Skipper was not yet awake enough for the sunny morning.)

I took Duchess out for mediocre pizza to celebrate at the end of the day. She has a weekend of parties and sentimental weeping over yearbook notes to come, and then graduation next week. 

Summer Pt 2

Summer continues!

I got my eyelids cut open! It was another Real Surgery, with comical hat and IV and sedatives (hooray!) but it was very quick, and the recuperation is barely a thing at all - basically just getting over the sedative fog immediately after surgery and then putting antibiotic ointment on my newborn eyelid for 2 weeks. I am extremely relieved to have two eyes again, after 5 weeks of 1.5 eyes, and now I'm very antsy to get my contacts back in (which I guess has to wait until I finish the course of antibiotic ointment). My vision is so poor that glasses can't correct it fully, and wearing my glasses makes me feel very vulnerable and kind of half-asleep. Anyway, that adventure seems to be done. My rebuilt eyelid (about half of the margin of the lower lid was built out of tissue cut from the inside of my upper lid) is weird-looking and missing eyelashes, but good enough to pass casual inspection from anywhere more than a few feet away from my face. Cook thinks it's very funny that I am now a person who has had multiple plastic surgeries.

Skipper's Swedish adventure continues; it has been a big one for her. So far she has done all kinds of Swedish things (picked blueberries, gone swimming at 10pm, eaten many meals outside, been very bored at a summerhouse), and some American-person-in-Sweden things (fielding questions about America, being unable to manage Swedish "R"s, hating salt licorice).* She has met a score of Swedish cousins (half of whom I've never met) for the first time, used a credit card, put her contacts on by the light of a phone flashlight, swum with jellies, learned a bunch of solitaire games, and read Pride and Prejudice. She has eaten shrimp that were served whole, Swedish Swedish fish,**and many kanelbullar, and also experienced for the first time a wonderful food that she described as "cold hot chocolate" which was of course ... chocolate milk. This is a photo, courtesy of my mom, of Skipper and cousins swimming at 10pm, dodging jellies. 

When I was a kid, we visited Sweden sometimes, almost entirely in the summer, and I experienced it as a really Different place. The kids I met in Sweden were notably independent and creative, and everybody was outside all the time.  People had less stuff and lived in smaller spaces. Everybody spent long vacations at summerhouses, but the experience was always more or less like camping - even in the relatively palatial family summerhouse, there was one bathroom for the gajillions of people, supplemented by an outhouse, so everybody had to be thrifty with water and bathroom time. I guess my sense of (summertime) Sweden was a combination of thrift or moderated consumption balanced by an abundance of both time and light, and none of that seemed true about the United States in any season. I look forward to hearing Skipper's impressions. 

Duchess was house-sitting for nearly three weeks, and Cook and I had a strange preview of a future empty nest. On the one hand, it has been unexpectedly emotionally hard for me to have both my daughters elsewhere. I feel like my emotional center is reaching constantly for both of them. I don't know how the separation happens - I have to assume that this feeling fades as they grow older and build their own lives and we all become accustomed to being apart, but it feels like maybe it'll be harder than I guessed. 

On the other hand, it is really, really, nice to be able to decide what we want to do/eat/watch/listen to/etc without having to anticipate and/or deal with the kids. We have been eating and enjoying a lot of foods Skipper hates, like spinach and chard. Cook and I decided to go for a little hike, and we just went. We had a great walk. Nobody whined or dawdled, nobody complained about the drive or about being dragged on a hike, and nobody got cranky that we had packed only snacks and didn't get lunch until we got home. It was wonderful. (I told this story to a couple of my childfree-by-choice friends and they were very smug.) 

Duchess is working as a camp counselor, her first full-time job, and finding it very tiring. She got her first full paycheck, and marveled that she was getting so much money and also that it seemed like much less money than the work felt worth. 

*Over the last few years I have begun to recognize some ways in which my mom's Swedishness has affected my life and personality. I never thought of myself as a child of an immigrant - my dad is American, my mom speaks perfect American English, and I don't speak Swedish and am entirely a tourist when I visit Sweden. But some of my approach to the world is informed by a Swedish perspective (pragmatic, fond of pale wood), and some of my lifelong sense of not-quite-fitting is probably informed by growing up in a Swedish-inflected household, in which candy was eaten only on Saturdays, shoes were never worn in the house, and performativeness and excess were avoided.  There was always something un-American about us (though admittedly that was probably in large part due to my weird American dad's insistence that we not have a television). Anyway, it's just that I always thought I was all American, and now I see there's a little bit of something else there, too.  

**She claims they're different than American Swedish fish - larger and more delicious. 

Summer

 It's summer. It's a weird one. The day after school ended, Cook and Skipper went to Detroit, realizing a longtime dream of Skipper's. They watched three baseball games at Comerica Park, and of course the Tigers lost every game badly. Fortunately, Cook and Skipper were emotionally prepared for that outcome, and took it in stride. They did some other touristing - they saw the Little Caesars global headquarters, and looked across the lake to Canada. They seem to have had a very good time. They even got to attend a game with one of my excellent cousins, who schlepped up from Champaign for the occasion. He's a White Sox fan, but Cook and Skipper forgive him. While they were gone, Duchess and I ate snacks for dinner. It was delightful.

Once the dust settled from that adventure, Duchess started work (as a camp counselor at the Dungeons-and-Dragons-in-the-wilderness program she used to attend herself), and moved into her boyfriend's family house to dogsit for them while they were in France for 2 weeks. She found this much more taxing than she expected - long days of non-stop child-wrangling followed by dog-wrangling and house-keeping feels like a lot. And then a crow got stuck in the chimney at the house, and died slowly and horribly over three days (in a heatwave) while we slowly figured out a) that something was in the chimney,*b) that it was a crow, c) that it couldn't get out, d) which organizations/companies will remove a live crow from a chimney,** e) that the company that WOULD remove a live crow from a chimney couldn't come onto the property without signed permission from the homeowner, who was asleep in France at the relevant time. It was awful. And then their refrigerator died, and Duchess and Cook spent hours cleaning up the mess. The lesson here is NEVER HOUSESIT.

And then we sent Skipper to Sweden. By herself. For a MONTH. She was very clear-eyed in the planning that it would be challenging and lonely for her, but she wanted to do it. However, as the date approached, she felt increasingly terrified, and so did I. But she set her shoulders and got on that plane, and launched into the unknown. She is spending a couple of weeks couchsurfing with our generous relatives, including a long stint at the family summerhouse, and then attending a 2-week Swedish language camp in Stockholm. (I'm going to Sweden for the last week of her tenure, to see friends and family and do some touristing in Stockholm before retrieving her.) Here she is (photo courtesy of my mom) with another of my excellent cousins. 

And here is that same cousin with me and my brother at the summerhouse a long time ago.

And here she is with my mom (photo courtesy of my excellent cousin).

We miss her terribly, and it's really weird being without her. Duchess is still housesitting, and Cook and I are getting a preview of empty-nesting (except that Duchess comes over for dinner and drops off her dirty laundry, and needs our help with crows and other crises). It is clear that I need something to do with myself in the post-children-in-the-house era; I think I need to invest over the next few years in figuring out some hobbies.

* Please, for everybody's sake, CAP YOUR CHIMNEYS.

** Chimney sweeps, for example, won't remove a live bird.

It's messy and weird in here.

I've been thinking a lot about pain over the last year. I haven't experienced very much pain, personally. I occasionally get headaches, of course, and I've had a few minor injuries that were painful (fireworks are BAD!!!!), including sports injuries that still occasionally hurt, decades later. I'm not like that lady in Scotland. But pain hasn't really been a feature in my life. When I was a kid, my family didn't really do over-the-counter medicine. We definitely had aspirin or ibuprofen or acetaminophen or something that was occasionally used for things like headaches. And band-aids, I guess? But I don't remember pain or discomfort being really a thing in our life. The sense was that discomfort is a symptom of something that might need to be treated, but the discomfort itself doesn't necessarily or even usually merit treatment. Pain felt (and still mostly feels) like a clear, direct and actionable communication from my physical body to my thinking. Your head hurts? Drink some water. Take a nap. Your stomach hurts? Drink some water. Rest. Wait and see what happens. For now, for me, this mostly works. (Except chest pain associated with anxiety. That's weird and confusing and unproductive.)

For the last few years, Duchess has had lots of experience with discomfort. She was a pretty robust kid who didn't get sick often and rarely complained of pain. Since adolescence rolled around, though, she complains of menstrual pain, knee pain (from ultimate frisbee) and now back pain (from rowing). She has had recurring episodes of dizziness and fatigue (we thought she was anemic, but she wasn't even close - turned out that MY iron levels were low, though). We've vacillated between telling her to just suck it up, and taking her to the doctor, where the diagnosis is always that they're not sure what's going on, but there's nothing seriously wrong. My paradigm isn't working here.

And then there the emotional pain. Duchess frequently talks about how her friends have "hurt" her or other friends. Usually by saying something casually or even accidentally mean. She is very, very upset and righteous when people hurt her. I find most of the the "hurt" she's describing to be far below my threshold for "hurt," even in 14-year-old-adjusted terms, and the grandiosity of it feels off to me. This makes me feel like she (and all her friends) put far too much weight on Being Hurt. My theory is that girls are socialized to feel that being hurt and feeling pain are legitimate emotional experiences for them. Being angry or annoyed or humiliated or indignant aren't okay, because they're more outward-facing, but being hurt and being a victim is.

Some of Duchess's friends are also engaging in self-harming activities like cutting or disordered eating, and I think this aligns with my theory - they're embracing Being Hurt as a way to focus and feel in control of the emotional chaos in which they live. I looked up self-harming on the crisis text line website recently, and was surprised to see on the list of self-harming activities something that Duchess actually does right in front of me, which is hitting herself in the head (with her hands). I've only seen her do this a few times, and never actually hard enough to do damage, but it is shocking every time. She does it when she's upset, and it does seem to be a way to channel her emotions, so I guess it makes sense that it falls into the same category as cutting.

Both my kids do a thing when they're upset that also seems similar, though less controlled - they move around the house in a way (fast, careless, flailing) that makes it inevitable that they'll bang into a doorframe or a table or fall down or hurt themselves physically in some other way. I think they're experiencing an imbalance - an inner storm and an outer calm. I believe that girls, especially girls like mine who are deeply invested in being Good, don't feel entitled to just let out that inner storm into the calm world. So they have to create an outer context that is acting on them that feels like it rationalizes the inner storm. They have to Be Hurt.

I recently listened to an interesting Invisibilia episode about girls and pain, exploring the phenomenon of people (mostly teenage girls, I think) with "amplified pain" who feel unexplained pain, and following a girl who was pursuing a treatment involving doing a lot of painful things to sort of retrain her nervous system not to respond so sensitively. (There was also a kerfuffle of angry responses to the episode, apparently, pointing out that dismissal of women's pain, and particularly girls' pain, is a long and bad tradition and should be vigorously challenged.) I guess what I'm coming to is mostly just an awareness of how little I understand. I can't tell Duchess how she should experience pain, or what she should do when she's experiencing it. It's real pain; she's feeling it. But what it is, how it should be labeled, where it comes from, and what it means, I have no idea. For now, we talk about it with her, and try to help her unpack what she's feeling. She's emotionally wise for an eighth-grader, so she can understand what we're getting at (when she's not in the throes of The Feelings). But none of us have any solutions.

What I think Duchess might have, though, thanks to her ridiculous, masochistic sport, is evidence that if she keeps going, if she moves through pain, she gets through it, and sometimes she also gets something more - in this case, mighty thigh muscles, strong calloused hands, and an improved ability to make boats go fast. Rowing is pretty much entirely the practice of enduring physical discomfort. The coaches set out barf buckets next to the rowing machines. So Duchess experiences something nearly every day that I almost never experience - pushing her body to the point of pain/intense discomfort and having to keep going through that. (Note that I don't necessarily recommend this approach. I have a lot of qualms.)

Discomfort is usually associated with change. If we don't see it for what it is, if we avoid it (hi, Skipper!) or explain it by tying it to external circumstances that are unrelated (hi, Duchess!), we can miss the opportunity that change offers, whether it's physical, intellectual, or emotional. But not all change is good, either, and it's often hard to tell if it's the kind of discomfort that will tear you down or build you up. Basically, I have no idea what we're doing here.

Momentum and inertia

Summer is rapidly approaching. The kids have reached the point in the school year where everything is pointing toward end-of-year performances/tests/celebrations/field trips. The weather is leaning hard toward shorts. The trees are leafing out. Cook is mowing the lawn right now.

I find myself even more than usually lazy. I literally lay in the hammock yesterday and did nothing but lie there and grow my ennui. It was pretty nice, but I do recognize that weeds need pulling and dishes need washing and dinner needs cooking, and it's probably not a great marital-maintenance plan to just let Cook do all of it. Last weekend I forced Skipper to accompany me to the library and grocery store, and she objected strenuously. I said she needed to leave the house and do something other than loaf, and she said "WHY!? What's the POINT? Why can't I just read books and do word searches?" and I didn't really have a great argument for that. So maybe she's just persuaded me to give in to the sloth.

It just seems like there's so much schlepping; a classic middle-class middle-aged person's complaint - orthodontist appointments, dentist appointments, eye doctor appointments, regular doctor appointments, vet appointments, roller skating lessons, grocery shopping, hardware store trips, bike repair appointments, car repair appointments. Plus, you know, work and housework and the normal slog of shepherding everybody through the day. It feels like A Lot, even while it also feels like a great stroke of luck to be able to have this particular bag of A Lot.

We're all doing the same old things. Skipper is walking herself home from school every day and latchkeying it. She likes that a lot. She instant-messages us when she gets home to tell us she's home, and then she just reads for hours. The third day she did it, I was at a meeting when she normally arrives home, and didn't look at my phone till a little later when I was alarmed to find no message. I got a text pretty much right away from Father Blond, saying that Skipper was at his house and that she was "Wet. Unhappy." Turned out Skipper had run home in the rain (she had no raincoat, due to poor planning) and couldn't find her key in her backpack, so she left her backpack on the back steps and walked to the Blonds' house. She knows she's not allowed to cross the major street between our house and theirs except at a controlled intersection, but she got disoriented and walked much further out of her way than she needed to to get to a light. She walked 16 blocks in the rain, terrified that she was going to get arrested (she actually saw a school friend of hers and hid behind a corner until the friend's family was out of sight because she was afraid that they would call the police if they knew she was unescorted), and arrived at the Blond house weeping and soaking wet. She was upset, scared, embarrassed and uncomfortable. After I retrieved her, I pointed out that she had in fact just demonstrated her coping skills by solving the problem in a fairly sensible way, and she made a bunch of good decisions. I felt a lot more confident about the whole thing after that episode. I'm not sure that she shares my confidence; as always, she was pretty focused on the stressful and humiliating elements of the experience. I did reassure her that the police are NOT going to arrest her for walking alone in the rain.

That's pretty much the news.

Parenting; or Fumbling Around in the Dark Trying Not to Break Things

Hello, my wee piece of the internet. We're all fine. It's sunny and warm here today. We took the guinea pigs outside, and they cowered in terror, too afraid to do more than nibble tentatively at some of the delicious fresh grass (which they will savagely devour if we tear it off and bring it inside and feed it to them in their cage). I'm afraid the guinea pigs are too perfect a metaphor for our family. We should have gotten a less fear-based sort of pet.

Things go on. Skipper is currently doing occasional rollerskating lessons, because she "likes the gliding part." She is finding third grade very stressful. She has a teacher who is fairly harsh and sarcastic, and Skipper lives in terror (see above) of the teacher yelling at her. It doesn't actually ever happen, but she's afraid ALL THE TIME (see above).

Duchess and I got in an unpleasant argument on Friday night. I told her she was signed up for a beginner rowing class in the morning and she freaked out. (Back story: this is a sport I have long thought would be perfect for Duchess. It's intensely team-oriented, it has a lot of rules, you don't have to be super-humanly athletic to succeed, and it takes place on the water. She has expressed interest in the past, but when I mentioned it recently, she was tepid on the idea. I decided to just barge ahead and sign her up and not mention it till the last minute, because she's usually pretty pliant.) She was really mad, and made some excellent points about autonomy and her right to make her own choices. Her excellent points, however, were embedded in a petulant and bratty tantrum, and I responded like a jerk.

We got over it, because Duchess is a forgiving person and I apologized for railroading her autonomy. She's right that she should be able to make her own choices. To a point. And I need to cede that, to a point. But I said that she should go row unless she had a really good reason not to - she was interested in it, and a sunny spring morning is a good way to try rowing out.

She sulked all morning, sulked and whined all the way to the class, and told me that she hates me (semi-joking) when I left her at the class. When I picked her up, I was resigned to a wave of righteous petulance, and resigned to the fact that I would deserve it. As we walked away from the "boathouse"(actually warehouse) where they keep the gear, she turned to me and said with a faux-angry expression "I HATE that you were right," and then she beamed her full-on, all-in Duchess grin. She loved it, for all the reasons I had listed off to her. I thanked her for being generous enough to allow herself to enjoy it, in spite of her determination to punish me. I would like to think that I have learned a lesson and will be more respectful of her autonomy in the future, but I'm not sure that I have.

Summer winds down.

Hello from steamy Portland! We've been in an oppressive streak of hot days, which combined with a few days of terrible air quality to make a miserable end-of-last-week. But we survived. We try not to move very much. Skipper has been sleeping in the basement because the upper bunk in a west-facing bedroom is unbearable at her bedtime.*

Updates: 

1) We had our third weekend in a row of camping, and it was a lot of fun. The camera ran out of batteries, so I have no photographs. But it was fun. There were a LOT of my relatives, and dogs, and an adorable toddler, and there was river floating and swimming. The kids were thrilled. Duchess paddled an inflatable kayak by herself, and she loved that - she was afraid at first, and then super-pleased with herself for not falling out in one of the little rapids. Skipper got to ride in a canoe, and also was afraid at first and then delighted by the experience. And now we're home for a weekend, scrambling to catch up with all the stuff that went undone for nearly a month.

2) Duchess is gone, off in Minnesota competing in an ultimate frisbee tournament, under the quasi-supervision of some young volunteer coaches (thank you, volunteer coaches).** After the tournament, she's going straight off for a few days at a lake house with a teammate and the teammate's relatives. She'll be gone for a week total, and doing stuff that requires her to take more responsibility than she ever has before for both logistics and her own emotional and physical well-being. She seems to be having a great time so far, as far as we can glean from her cursory, infrequent communications.*** Cook and I fully expect she will return home completely converted to ultimate frisbee. Duchess was born to be part of a team,**** and ultimate has some fundamental characteristics that really appeal to her, plus she loves the people. One of her communications was pretty much a lot of squee over a player she thinks is AMAZING! 

3) Skipper has been muddling through all her activities in a storm of anger, fear, and resentfulness.  She's been struggling with swimming - she has missed so many practices due to vacations and camp that she hasn't ever really settled into it, and she still feels very uncomfortable. She has also continued to struggle with ultimate - she enjoys it but feels really uncomfortable because she's so bad at it. She went to her first ballet class today very anxious, and came through it okay. She's talking and thinking a lot now about her habitual thought patterns, though, which is potentially a very good development. (Actually, having Duchess gone is giving her a time and space to do a lot of interesting processing. Last night she asked me where love is stored in the heart - if there's like a big reservoir or what.)

That's pretty much it. We're turning the corner toward school now, and I think both kids are looking forward to settling back into it...

* I have also learned this week that Skipper is extremely embarrassed by the way I look in a tank top. I've been trying to explain to her that body-shaming is not okay, and also I'm HOT and I'm going to let my blotchy upper arms fly.

** To clarify, Duchess is now playing ultimate frisbee at an elite level not because she's good (she's mediocre, though being tall is helpful), but because teen girls who play ultimate even mediocrely are scarce in Portland, and an even smaller number of them have families who can be suckered into buying their kid a plane ticket to Minnesota.

***Either she's having a great time or she's joined a cult. I guess we'll find out when we go to pick her up at the airport.

**** Left alone, she's pretty much an inert lump. Put her in a team environment, and she instantly kindles into life and becomes an energetic, responsive, thoughtful, engaged participant. Take away the team, and you have a lump again. It's an amazing social alchemy. 

Summer, part two

I still haven't really settled into summer. (We're coming up on a streak of camping trips three weekends in a row, so that will be hectic.) I keep starting my bike ride home from work, and realizing I don't know what route to take, because I haven't thought through who needs to be picked up from where. The thing is, nobody needs to be picked up, because the kids are already home. Nothing needs to be picked up, because I can just send the kids to get groceries or pick up library books if needed. Bliss. Also, nobody has homework to throw tantrums about!

The kids haven't really worked out how this is going to go, either. They swim in the morning and then they bicker and read and are bored.*

Skipper is, as I mentioned, very angry that I have signed her up for some activities (frisbee, choir, and some dancing) - I secured her grudging agreement when I signed her up, but now that the activities are getting closer, she's getting very upset about it. I don't think she's ever going to be comfortable being bad at things. This weekend, I finally just handed it all over to her, because it's time for her to own her discomfort.  She needs to take responsibility for her choice to try or not try things (and she frequently does want to try, deep in her terrified little heart). It can't be me or Cook. I told her I'd withdraw her from any or all the activities she's registered for, no questions asked. She said she needs to think about it. (She least wants to do ultimate frisbee, but she's very seduced by the new cleats we got her, so she's waffling on that. Gear is really compelling.)

This wasn't a principled parenting decision, made calmly according to all available information. I'm just tired of doing the work for her, and I doubt that it's the best way forward anyway. I'm just giving up on the emotional effort, basically. It scares me, though. I am afraid that she will cramp herself into the smallest possible life; she is actively afraid of taking up space, of being seen and heard and acting in the world. There's nothing wrong with a small life,** but I would like it to be an informed choice instead of an entirely fear-based choice. However, I don't get to choose for my fierce little fear-monkey, so it's up to the siren song of the cleats.

I will note, though, that her swimming skills, and her confidence in them, have improved enormously already after a few weeks of swim practice, so at least she'll be a fear-monkey who can swim.



*They get really bored. Cook and I are 100% unsympathetic.
** I have a small life, and I really like it. It's definitely somewhat fear-based, but there were choices involved, and I know I turned away from the wider world. (I was just listening to a podcast interview with Denis McDonough, and I realized that I would really like to be White House Chief of Staff.  If any of you become President, please keep me in mind for the job.)

Day

Skipper is singing (over and over again) a chant that goes like this:

Alchemist
Arborist
Who likes snot?

The kids, particularly Skipper, are driving me bats today.  Skipper works SO hard to continually monitor the way all good and bad things are allocated to her and her sister and over-react to any perceived imbalance, however slight. If she channeled even half that energy into, say, a hobby, she'd be a master of that hobby by now. I guess she IS a master of this one terrible hobby.

What's up with us? Not much. I'm fine. Cook's fine. Kids are fine.

I have been driving lately, after about 15 years of not driving. Driving sucks. I can't wait for the self-driving cars to take over; I cannot believe that we let humans drive cars. I think it's be the kind of thing where Skipper will look back over her childhood 50 years from now and says to Duchess "Can you BELIEVE that PEOPLE were responsible for navigating huge, heavy, polluting metal vehicles at high speed when we were kids? That was insane! Also, did that drone just give you an infinitesimally bigger serving of virtual dessert than me? That's NOT FAIR!!!!"

I am still Eating Less. Eating Less sucks. However, I weigh 20% less now than I did two years ago, and am warily pleased. I am unambiguously pleased to report, however, that I am also 14 days into a series of 30 days of youtube yoga videos, and am very much enjoying it. It's gentle yoga for inflexible idiots, which is perfect, and it's short, only 15-35 minutes per video, so I just do it in the evening before bed, and I usually wrap it up with a few minutes of lying on the floor staring at the ceiling. This is not the kind of yogic Mindfully Breathing While Being Present In Your Body lying on the floor you may be thinking of; I literally just lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling. Sometimes I listen to music. It's pretty great, even without mindfulness.

Also, I want to say that I misreported a few weeks ago what Skipper says to express astonishment. She doesn't say "holy crackers!" - she says "holy cackles!"

That's all I've got.

My daughter, Marie Antoinette.

We're alive. Not much in the way of news. The roof sprang a leak (or rather, we became aware of a leak). Duchess continues to be insanely adolescent (and we have all learned not to talk to her at all until after she's eaten breakfast). Skipper, with all the hiragana characters under her belt, has begun learning katakana. Cook and I are both scrambling at work to get a handle on our workloads, but are remaining more or less above water. Both girls brought home rave review report cards. Skipper has, in the last few months, quit two extracurricular activities,* bringing her to a more sustainable activity level of after-school kung fu every weekday, and piano once a week.

Skipper's fairly dramatic quitting of gymnastics raised a question for me that keeps coming up in my parenting of Skipper. She has a very strong aversion to making choices - I believe it's because she is so afraid of making the wrong choice, or having to feel the responsibility of having made the choice. She much, much prefers for others to make choices for her so she can freely enjoy the benefits and hold others responsible for the negative outcomes, keeping her spirit totally unburdened. This goes for everything - choosing what clothes to wear, choosing what to eat, choosing what book to read, and choosing whether or not to go somewhere to do something. My instinctive feeling in parenting Skipper is that there is a line in there that we need to find - we need to help her practice making choices and working through her feelings about the consequences, so she can learn how to be a functioning human being, but I think we also need to assume the responsibility of making some of the bigger choices, because they're too big for her still.  I don't know if Cook and I came down on the right side of the line in this situation. Here's what happened. Skipper often says she doesn't want to go to gymnastics. We always tell her it's her choice, but that if she chooses not to go to class, it'll mean that she's deciding to quit gymnastics, and she always eventually decides to go, and she ALWAYS really enjoys the class. Last Saturday,when I told Skipper it was time to go to gymnastics, I reminded her that it was her last day in her current class, before a switch to a new class at a more convenient time slot, with an older group of kids. She got very upset, because she didn't want to switch (forgetting that she had previously grudgingly agreed to the switch), and said she didn't want to go. Over the course of the next half hour (in which she dressed for gymnastics and we all got in the car and drove to the gym), she raged back and forth, saying she didn't want to go, she did want to go, she didn't want to go, she did want to go, etc. She repeated many times "You're forcing me to go!" which was such a ridiculously obviously untrue statement that it was pretty clear she was saying "PLEASE force me to go so I don't have to negotiate my maelstrom of feelings about my fear of change and transition and my enjoyment of gymnastics, and make a decision!!!!"

We kept saying "You don't have to go, but if you don't go, that'll mean the end of gymnastics. It's your choice." We might as well have been saying "It's your torture chamber."

The back and forth continued way past the duration after which we expected it to stop, and way past when it's stopped before (even at the worst, it had never gone past the moment when we go out the door of the house), and then, AT THE GYM, four steps away from her teacher, she said "I don't want to go." and I said "Okay. You understand you're choosing to quit gymnastics." And she said "Yes." and we all left. (I will note that Cook and I were both pretty pissed off, though sympathetic.) And on the way home she said in a shaky voice, "I think I'm going to regret my choice." and I said "Yes."

As I work through the consequences of her choice, and the parenting choice that we made (because working through consequences is something functioning human beings have to do), I wonder if we should have lifted this choice, which was so painful for her, off her shoulders and "forced" her to go to an activity that she enjoys and that I think is valuable for her. I don't know the answer. I think regretting your choices is an important experience, and I think it's important to learn through experience that it's not usually that big of a deal when you screw up a decision, even if it's painful. But maybe the lesson wasn't worth the cost. I don't know.

Why parents drink.

The scene: Skipper has just gotten out of the shower, and flossing and tooth-brushing before bedtime is the next step. She is feeling fairly jaunty and pleased with herself for having (finally) executed this weekly chore. Because the mood is positive, I dare to suggest a minor break in routine.

Me: Hey, do you want me to braid your hair before you go to bed?
Skipper: (puzzled silence)
Me: It would help keep your hair contained so it won't get tangly while you're sleeping. And it would be kind of curly in the morning!
Skipper: I don't want it to be curly!
Me: Okay. No braid. That's fine.
Skipper: It's not fair! I don't want a braid!
Me: Okay.
Skipper: You can't make me have a braid!
Me: You don't have to have a braid. I was just offering to braid your hair if you wanted to try it.
Skipper: Fine! I'll have a braid! But you can't make me floss and brush if you're making me have a braid!
Me: You don't have to have a braid. I'm not making you have a braid. If you want a braid, I would be happy to braid your hair. But I'm not making you have a braid. (I walk away with an armful of dirty laundry, attempting to avoid escalation, but inevitably enraging her further by making her feel that I am diminishing the significance of her feelings.)
Skipper: YOU ALWAYS DO THIS! YOU MAKE ME DO THINGS AND THEN YOU GIVE ME STUPID LECTURES ABOUT IT!
Me: (unable to resist engaging in petty argument, even though I actually do know better) I'm pretty sure that doesn't count as a lecture.
Skipper: YOU'RE MEAN!!!!!!!
Me: (walking down the basement stairs with the laundry, thinking "And you're a PSYCHOPATH!!!!") I know you're feeling really angry.

Raising an adult

I've been thinking about parenting.* Both the kids right now are storming through growth periods, transitioning more or less into being A Grade-Schooler and A Middle-Schooler. Both these stages involve increased rights and responsibilities, and they're working out how to balance these things. I have been reading a book about the perils of helicoptering, and considering how to balance things in our family life.  In general, I think Cook and I are pretty good about giving our kids opportunities to handle stuff on their own, though of course we can do better. However, some of the cautions in the book, particularly about overscheduling and under-responsibility-ing, ring alarmingly true to me. Since reading the book, I am considering how to deschedule the girls a bit. It is very evident how much Duchess is benefiting from her free time in the afternoon (which will be somewhat less expansive when she starts Chinese one day a week next week). She loves being home alone to do homework, practice flute, and lie around reading or playing Minecraft. She listens to music and podcasts and practices being a teenager. More free time for everybody would clearly be a good thing.

I am also stepping up chore expectations a bit (though not as much as apparently I should). This school year we have a chore chart on a whiteboard, with chore cards affixed by magnets. The cards get moved to "done" when they're done, and it means much less nagging.** I've added a few new chores since reading this latest parenting book, mostly after a review of the annoying small tasks that I do that make me crazy - I realized that the kids can do many of them. The first thing I punted to them is the packing of lunches. (I think I need to next get them washing the lunch dishes, since the endlessly repeated washing of those damned small containers remains pretty much my least favorite chore.)*** This is working out okay. Not great. Okay.

The trick here is to make these tasks so consistent and regular that they become automated and the girls stop complaining/arguing/resisting. Skipper in particular is so relentlessly awful about doing chores that it is very tempting to just give up. Duchess tends to flare up, yell, cry, and then angrily do the chore very ostentatiously and then be quite pleased with herself for having done the chore. (She usually brags about it.) Skipper never moves past the yelling and crying. She's actually kind of a genius about resisting things. She ends up taking so much time and energy to do the chore that we subsequently ALL consider the chore as much larger and more painful than it actually is. While her schedule is far busier than it should be (and I'm just talking about the aftercare required by having two working parents, not an overscheduled life of extracurriculars), she has plenty of time to get her chores done if she just did them. She does not have plenty of time for extensive screaming and crying AND doing chores.****

This weekend, Duchess is gone on her 48-hour ninja adventure, and we're having an unusual stint of weekend time with just Skipper. Turns out she's MUCH nicer when she's an only child. And it also turns out that she's more willing to do chores. The presence of a sibling creates an additional energy-drain because each kid has to constantly assess the Fairness and What She's Doing While I'm Doing This. It's exhausting for them, and for me and Cook.

Anyway. Oh! The other thing I've been meaning to tell you (all of you) is that we have been trying to do Movie Nights on Friday nights. And right now there is ONE thing that we can all watch and enjoy together as a family. ONE thing. Skipper likes incredibly mild television (Caillou!) and cannot bear more than a frisson of possible danger, and Duchess still has pretty unsophisticated tastes as well (she loves a TV show called Lab Rats). Cook likes depressing, complicated movies and TV shows. I like silly TV shows. The ONE thing we can watch together is Mythbusters. That's it. Thank goodness there are so many seasons.




*I always think about parenting; I suspect I think about parenting as a way to love my kids without actually being with them, similar to my diligence about reserving books from the library for them.

** Or at least different nagging - I say "How's the board coming?" instead of "Did you brush your hair? Did you brush your teeth? Did you pack your lunch? Did you pack your lunchbag? Did you pack your flute?")

*** The girls spent a few days this summer at an expensive day camp which has a few major selling points, but key among them is that you can drop your kids off any day you want, without reserving a day, and the camp provides ALL THE FOOD. No small containers!

**** Want to know what they do for chores? Of course you do. Duchess does the family's breakfast dishes every day, changes all her bed linens once a week and cleans the toilet once a week. Skipper cleans the bathroom sink (when Cook doesn't get impatient and clean it first) and strips her own bed every week. They both are responsible for at least one irregular household chore (like organizing and cleaning the spice rack) per week as assigned, tidying their own things daily, and periodically making their room less miserably messy. They both are (now) responsible for packing and unpacking their own lunches and backpacks for school. Their non-chore daily tasks are practicing flute/piano, homework, and personal care. We need to start moving Skipper into dishwashing and Duchess into cooking...

Reason #45709 why parenting is very hard for me.

Skipper is at a weird point right now. She is pretty comfortable in her school and aftercare. She has friends and an active social life at recess. This is all great, of course, and it means she's working through some of the selective mutism, and actually expressing herself sometimes. However, a new problem is developing. What she's is expressing at aftercare is mostly her manic goofball show-off side, and she combines the selective mutism with the manic show-off in a way that comes off to older kids and adults as rude and weird. (Like silently making weird faces at her teacher when greeted and then ostentatiously turning away from her.) Her aftercare teacher, who is kind but strict, does not tolerate rudeness. This is problematic, because any kind of correction is enormously painful to Skipper, and just pushes her back into herself.

In our experience, the only way to correct Skipper's behavior effectively is through descriptive praise.  (This technique entails describing every positive thing that the kid is doing, no matter how ridiculous. As in "I see that you did not hit your sister, even though you wanted to, when she walked past you while you were screaming and writhing on the floor. That took a lot of self-control." It's really hard to do this when what you actually want to do is leave the house and spend the next few hours in a dark quiet bar. It does, however, work.) Punishment is useless, or worse than useless, because it just sends her directly into a world of despair and self-loathing, and she learns nothing except that the world is so painful and she is failing. She BELIEVES that she is awful and bad when she is behaving badly, and she seizes on any evidence that supports her belief. Offering her instead a narrative that identifies (honestly) places where she is making good choices gives her a chance to be a person who makes good choices.

I find it extremely difficult to take this approach, even though I both understand it and see that it works where punishment does not. It feels really unfair to me, and to Duchess, who sees that her sister is treated differently than she is. (We should, of course, use the same approach on Duchess, because it's a solid approach for everyone, but it's so hard that we almost always take the easier route with her. Because we can.) Duchess and I are both people who like things to be FAIR.

Anyway, it's not an easy thing to explain to an aftercare teacher, and it's not easy to ask her to do. It would be pretty tough for her to implement, even if she was totally on board, as she has a bajillion rowdy kids she'd have to treat the same way, for the sake of fairness. I'm not sure how hard to push this.

Things Duchess and I Say to Each Other Lately

Yesterday, hustling for the bus stop, Duchess freaked out because she thought she heard a bus coming, and started yelling frantically for Skipper to run. Skipper, predictably, completely freaked out, too, and I (tired, grumpy, and already irritated at Duchess, who had been a piss-ant all morning), said angrily "Shut up, Duchess. YOU KNOW NOTHING."

Tonight, at dinner, Duchess said, half amused, half-appalled,  "Mom, you're such a clown! My whole family is a clown car!"

Just punching my card today

• We're busy. 
• I just finished a big deadline at work, and am picking up all the other things I abandoned in order to get the big one done. That feels both pretty good and also scary, as many of those little things have become bigger things...
• The weather is gorgeous. 
• Yesterday Skipper started plucking at the strings of my very-neglected guitar, crouching beside it and listening intently to each note ring out and fade. "Mom, I'm listening to The Whole Sound!" she said. 
• Skipper has been enthusiastically playing a game she was given for her birthday, which is like Uno in that all her family members are willing to play it; it's a pleasant, not-too-taxing mix of luck and strategy.
• Duchess has nothing to show for hours spent working with her partner on an engineering-y science fair project, because neither of them are interested in taking the time to READ THE DIRECTIONS or to be at all careful in construction, so their constructions keep disintegrating. I'm happy to go with natural consequences here, but Cook pointed out that Duchess, due to her tendency to be satisfied with pretty much anything, never actually learns anything from natural consequences. That is why he is in the living room with her while she builds, monitoring her for slap-dash heedlessness, and I am in here, blogging.
• Last week Duchess and I had a terrible morning (Skipper and Cook usually leave about 20 minutes earlier than we do, because the girls' schools are on different schedules) in which she aggressively and irrationally blamed me for the disappearance of the raincoat which she wanted to bring in case of rain. I totally lost my temper. On the walk to school, she was trying to chat about something, and I told her "I'm having a really hard time just conversing with you right now, because I'm still feeling pretty mad about being yelled at and blamed for stuff that's not my fault. I need to finish being mad before I can be pleasant. Do you understand how I feel?" and she said (I'm paraphrasing, but this is pretty close) "Yeah. You were trying to get lots of stuff done and you were doing stuff for me, and you were stressed out and it makes you angry when I blame you for stuff that's not your fault. I can see why you're so mad. I'm sorry I did that." I was pretty staggered. Duchess's deep flexibility and willingness to see other perspectives, while sometimes worrisome (as when she sees the perspective that an extremely sloppily-executed science fair project is really no big deal), allows her (when she's in the mood) to be sincerely sensitive and generous in her relationships in a way that makes her sound like she's read a bunch of therapy books.
• However, I still don't know what she did with the raincoat. I suspect she lost it, which is why she so badly wanted it to be my fault...

Brief recap of stuff I've written before

Duchess went to the first in a series of five three-hour programming classes today. I signed her up at the suggestion of a parent of a friend of hers (Spruce, whom Duchess has known for seven years), who is also signed up for the class. Duchess really enjoyed the class; she said it was "awesome."

My goal for Duchess's extracurriculars have changed. I initially thought I'd sign my kids up for a range of activities so they could find a thing they loved to do. When it became clear that Duchess likes to do almost everything, I found myself casting around. for a reason to keep lining up activities for her. For this class, though, and also her after-school electronics class, I know exactly why I want her taking them. I want her to enter college (or at least middle school) feeling competent and confident in skills that open the doors for careers in tech. Playing with tech stuff is still the province of boys. Duchess is the only girl in the ten-kid electronics class, and she and Spruce are two of the three girls in the ten-kid programming class. It will take a lot of confidence to sign up for computer science classes in college, and I want her to have that.

Long time!

It's been a while, eh? We've been busy. My work has had a series of nutso deadlines (actually, there's been a series of nutso deadlines over the last three months), and then there's so much TV to watch!

Bullet-point updates:

• Cook has finished building his bike. It's pretty cool-looking. He fears that it will suddenly fall apart on his commute to work, but I think it probably won't. And it hasn't yet!
• I continue to exercise daily (this is very time-consuming - I don't know how people who exercise a lot get their TV-watching in), in pursuit of my goal of someday being anywhere near as fit as my in-laws. I have a long way to go.
• Duchess has another week to go in the cast. She thinks she dropped a resistor into it during her last electronics class, but it doesn't seem to be bothering her.
• Skipper is getting excited to turn six. She is thinking that this year she may want to have a party. A party! With actual human beings who are not her immediate family! We'll see if she goes through with it, but it's cool that she's considering it.
• Duchess and Cook are plotting that if I get a permanent job (IF), we will sell our house and move to a bigger new one, so that Duchess can have her own room and not have to argue with Skipper over who's responsible for cleaning which mess. Skipper and I say no. We want to stay in our safe place, and Skipper wants to avoid mess-cleaning responsibility.
• Duchess has completely embraced the wilderness-dork program that she has been enjoying so much at day camps, and has decided to spend her considerable savings on a program next school year in which she will meet up with her group once a month for a full day of running around in the woods, practicing archery, and foraging plants to eat. She says she feels like she really fits in with the kids and adults associated with this program. It's a weird hodgepodge of LARPers, homesteaders, wilderness folks, and hipsters, but the general zeitgeist is pretty much nerdy-teenage-boy. (There are always a few kids with seriously dubious social skills in her camp groups, and the girls are always outnumbered significantly by boys. The adults, however, are the real draw for her - they have tattoos and piercings and cool punk hairstyles, they wear homemade tunics and leather boots and carry large knives, and they are sarcastic and playful and knowledgeable, which is a very powerful combination for Duchess.)  However, she has quite a bit of cultural catching up to do.  She has begun reading the Lord of the Rings books (mostly because Cook declared she can't watch the movies until she has read the books), and I got Monty Python and the Holy Grail out of the library for her, too. (Cook and I support all this; we're making her watch The Simpsons.) She asked if we thought she could start a Dungeons and Dragons club at her school...

That's about it. Happy spring!

there wuns wus tow grls

I just ushered Cook and the kids out the door - he's taking them to gymnastics (and running errands while they gymnasticate). Skipper yelled and cried for the preceding 15 minutes, and Duchess yelled and cried for 5 of those minutes. I was very glad to see them go.

Cook and I are both finding it difficult right now to be with our kids a lot of the time. A lot of the time, it is not pleasant or restful or joyful to be with them. Duchess is pretty happy right now, generally, but also very reactive, and her reactions can be very unpleasant. Her default response to any kind of challenge to what she's doing (such as, for example, a mild advance notice that she needs to get off the couch and get ready to leave for school) is to lash out verbally. She can be very nasty and self-righteous.

Skipper is, as I wrote before, often similarly nasty, but for her it's kind of a general approach to everything. She seems to feel most comfortable when she's feeling wronged and aggrieved, so she sets up every situation as a lose-lose scenario every which way. Say it's time to go to swimming, and she freaks out and screams "I don't want to go to swimming!"  - if I then say "Okay, let's not go to swimming," she immediately makes an about-face and screams "I want to go to swimming!" - there's no way any of us can win here. She doesn't feel safe expressing (or, I think, even feeling) enthusiasm or positive expectations for things, because that would make her vulnerable to disappointment or to what she perceives as humiliation, being made to feel a fool. She doesn't really seem to have a natural groove in her temperament for optimism, contentment, or for feeling good about the way things are going, and she has some very deep grooves for anxiety, defensiveness, anger, irritation, and scorn, so it is easiest for her to just file all her life experiences into those grooves. That's a tough, painful way to live, and it's also painful for the people with whom she lives. I think that this acute misery right now is partly a developmental stage, but it's clear that it's also rooted in her temperament. We try to coach her in identifying and naming her feelings, and in any coping techniques that we can muster up, but I don't think it's working. I'm not sure how much can be done, honestly, other than to support her as she works out for herself how to live her own life.

Extracurriculars are hard with her. I have signed her up for extracurricular activities (three separate activities a week, at the moment) because I feel like it's really important for her to get started early on a few things in which she can be a beginner with similarly-aged kids, and gain mastery that will make her feel competent. This seems like really important experience for someone who is afraid of trying things for fear of failure. However, now that she's thrown a tantrum before gymnastics three weeks in a row, I don't really want to keep taking her to gymnastics. With every kid, a big part of parenting seems to be figuring out how hard to push on what, and with Skipper I have no idea even how to see the line at which I need to stop pushing. She says she wants to keep doing all three of her activities (gymnastics, taiko, and swimming), and she clearly enjoys them and feels good during and after the activities, but she's pretty much a turd about going to them.

This week, she was super-stressed about going to taiko. The teacher had (apparently) given them a casual "homework" assignment to come up with a rhythm and make it active. Skipper wasn't sure what she was supposed to do, and I gently suggested a few approaches she could take (based on my personal experience that if you can't figure out what you're supposed to be doing, it's usually better to wing it and do SOMETHING rather than nothing), and she reacted with predictable angry tears. She couldn't wing it, because she was so paralyzed by her fear of doing it wrong, so all she did was worry and worry and worry and worry and worry, and by the time Wednesday rolled around, she really, really didn't want to go to class. I said she absolutely had to go - she could quit after that class, if she wanted, but she had to face the problem. So I more or less dragged her to class, walking half a mile holding her hand while she wailed and sobbed, and then I more or less shoved her into the classroom. (I was not nice about all of this. I can only imagine what a stranger observing us would have thought about my parenting skills.) And, as it turned out, the teacher never even mentioned the "homework" at all (I'm not even sure she ever actually assigned them anything), and Skipper was so relieved and happy after class, and said class was "really fun." I don't know what we take away from that.

I don't mean to imply that it's all rage and beastliness around here. Duchess, as I said, is pretty happy and is on a good trajectory, and Skipper, for all her assholery and misery vortex issues, seems to be feeling relatively comfortable at school and aftercare. She's usually great when you have her one-on-one. I took her by bus to swimming this morning, and she was really good company.
























Report cards came home yesterday. Both girls continue to be academically successful by report card metrics. Unsurprisingly, most of the things in which Skipper rated "often does" rather than "consistently does" have to do with participating out loud in activities. Skipper tested at a Developmental  Reading Assessment level of 16, which is more or less the baseline they want all the kids to hit by the end of first grade, news which allowed me to relieve her of her apparently-long-held and totally unfounded anxiety that she's not going to be promoted out of kindergarten.

Skipper has been reading up a storm, and seems more willing to actually commit writing to paper. (Where it might be judged! And found to be less than perfect! This is a big step for her.) This is a piece of writing she started before school on a recent morning. I don't know what the two girls were going to be named, and I also don't know what's up with the small character she drew.

Also, here are some bonus photos of Duchess, waiting with me outside Skipper's taiko class two weeks ago.

Agency

I am still alive! Everything is fine. No big news. I've been busy, and distracted by other forms of navel-gazing.

First, news of the kids:

• Skipper can read. 
• Duchess is currently pretty much delighted all the time (except for breaks for door-slamming tantrums) right now. She's got a potpourri of good stuff going on.
• Her "Battle of the Books" team is doing very well and providing a lot of really joyful socializing (which was very timely, as she had been very sad for a few weeks about her lack of friends) at her team's "practices." 
• She has been hanging out more with her best kung fu friend, which makes her also feel much better about her social life in general.
• She and her best kung fu friend are officially starting to prepare for their next big promotion.
• She's been getting more playdate invitations lately, from unexpected quarters, mostly from boys. I think she may be the practice Girl for many of the boys in her grade, as her temperament (flexible, enthusiastic) and her activity choices (electronics, frisbee, basketball, running club) have made her the girl that most of them know the best, and as they look ahead and realize that they are going to have to start having actual human relationships with the girls they know, Duchess seems like the easiest entree. I am crossing my fingers that being the practice Girl will turn out well for her. 
• Skipper is angry a lot lately, and blames everything on everybody else. We're weighing whether we want to try to figure out a therapy route or just wait and see how it goes. Being a rage monster seems like a bad strategy for life, but therapy seems like a big, time-and-money-consuming step that may or may not be helpful. 
• We've all been sick this week, with some kind of cold/flu thing.
• We busted out the extra twin bed, so now the girls have three beds in their room. Duchess sleeps in the twin bed (which she fills alarmingly full - it won't be long before we have to invest in an extra-long bed) and Skipper has moved to the upper bunk of the bunk bed. This means that Skipper no longer gets a parent lying down with her at bedtime, which is kind of a big change. It has gone very smoothly, and she is very pleased with her new sophistication. Duchess is also pleased with what she feels is her new sophistication (a bed of her OWN!), and they're both excited to host sleepover guests in the empty bottom bunk.

News of the adults:

• Cook decided he needed a project, and is accumulating the parts he needs to build himself a bike, which is pretty cool. 
• I've made self-improvement my project, and have added a daily half hour of exercise to my life, which is also cool. The main reason I kicked off my project is that lately I've been feeling like I had a little more agency in my life, and this seemed like an important way to deploy that agency.

Talking to a friend last fall about the experience of being unemployed, under-employed, and tenuously-employed  (not to mention employed with an abusive boss who considered me to be useless), I realized fully for the first time how destructive that has been for me. It left me feeling like I could not change anything about myself or my environment, like I was an inert, useless person to whom things just happen willy-nilly.*

Having now been employed for nine months at work at which I am successful and where I am appreciated and welcomed by people I respect, I think that I have been slowly rebuilding my feeling that I am NOT actually a useless failure of a person. I'm at the point now where I feel like maybe I can make small gestures at changing things in my life that aren't working well.**

I'm not going to write about my exercise program here, because I am well aware of how incredibly tedious that is.*** I will say, though, that starting an exercise program at my current advanced age is really different, and much less rewarding than starting an exercise program 14 years ago, so it's requiring every bit of that feeling of agency. Further behavior change will have to wait until my confidence is bolstered more.


*Weirdly, the symbolic representation of this helplessness for me is my teeth. The last year has been an ongoing misery of fillings for me, along with dire warnings of future misery to come. I have tried to do everything I have been told might help, but the cavities keep coming, and I don't see a way to make them stop.

**Even more weirdly, the symbolic representation that started making me feel like maybe I can change things is that I've been doing self-care for blepharitis.  This involves putting a warm washcloth on my eyelids, and then wiping my eyelashes, so it's not exactly the most empowering or exciting lifestyle change, but it is a thing I can do that actually improves something about my moment-to-moment life. That's kind of powerful.

*** Yes, even more tedious than keeping an unremarkable blog about one's unremarkable parenting of unremarkable (but much-loved) children. 

The things you can control.

Skipper continues to refuse to wear anything but a very small roster of clothing items. Every night and every morning we have been having the same insane discussion* with her, and Cook and I are both extremely over it. Yesterday I took everything out of her dresser and closet that she hasn't worn in the last month (she has a ton of clothes handed down from the twin Blond girls), stuffed it all in a large duffle, and put it in the basement. Her wardrobe is now composed of the following clothes that she will consistently or occasionally wear: four t-shirts, three pairs of shorts, one pair of pants, seven pairs of days-of-the-week socks, three pairs of underpants, one hooded sweatshirt, two raincoats, one pair of sneakers, one pair of too-small crocs, one pair of rainboots she will wear only if the alternative is getting her sneakers muddy, two hankies, three kung fu uniforms, a leotard for gymnastics, and a swimsuit for swim lessons. Period.

While this is plenty of clothing for most purposes, it is problematic because a) it is difficult to launder her clothes quickly enough, given our schedules and lack of a dryer,** b) several of these most-loved clothing items are getting very ratty, having experienced several owners and now getting worn and washed at least twice a week, and c) the wardrobe is really not warm enough for the kind of weather we're getting into. Also d) it's a little embarrassing to send your kid to school every day wearing the same clothes, especially when they're ratty.***

I ran into an acquaintance recently, and in the course of our conversation I discovered that her kid has very similar issues, that also seem to be a blend of control and sensory issues. (Her kid also has very conflicting reasons for disliking different pieces of clothing, and abruptly decides she doesn't like a piece of clothing she has loved for months.)  It was a relief to hear that, but also alarming, as her kid is nine and has been like this for years, which suggests that this is not necessarily a short-term problem, as I had been hoping.

I can't figure out how to solve this. My acquaintance has her kid wear clothes she dislikes in the evening for an hour at a time, so she can get used to them without having to wear them all day, and we may try something like that. It isn't very helpful to take Skipper shopping, as she has no interest in it, and doesn't want to try anything on, but it's also very risky buying her anything without her trying it on, because odds are extremely high that she will dislike it. It also pisses me off to have to buy her anything at all, given that she has an enormous collection of clothing already.

Anyway. Presumably the situation will improve. I expect.


*"I don't have anything to wear! Waaaaahhhh!" 
"You have a dresser stuffed with nice clothes," 
"NO I DON'T!!!! WAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!"

** Skipper has several times gone to the basement to dress herself in half-dry clothes off the line. Sending your kid to school in DAMP ratty clothes that she's already worn to school twice that week provides bonus mortification. Also, clothes hung to dry in our basement this fall smell slightly unpleasant in a dank way, which suggests that we need a better dehumidifier and makes us all smell like maybe our family lives clandestinely in an elderly person's unfinished basement, which further increases my anxiety about what Skipper's teachers think of us.

***I must acknowledge here that I also very much prefer to wear baggy, comfortable, ratty clothes, and I also have a uniform that I wear when I have a choice - it is notably comprised of two hooded sweatshirts, one ratty cotton cardigan, one pair of jeans, and my four favorite t-shirts. The main difference between my choice wardrobe and Skipper's is that there are fewer pictures of animals in mine. However, unlike Skipper, I am willing to wear other things when I must.