Ha, and I thought perimenopause was crummy!

We're "social distancing" here in Oregon. Today was the first day for me of working remotely. My office is encouraging everyone who can to work from home with no/limited in-person meetings, and Cook's office is reorganizing around staggered shifts and partial teleworking so they can all stay six feet away from each other all the time. (All the meeting rooms have been assigned quotas based on their size, so the smaller meeting rooms can now accommodate two people who sit pressed against the opposite walls.) I was supposed to go to a conference in Chicago next week, but it was cancelled. (And I was really looking forward to it.) Skipper's school trip to Japan in June has been cancelled. (Though our family trip to Japan is not cancelled- we're going to hope as long as possible that we can pull that off.) Skipper's baseball season and Duchess's ultimate frisbee season (long story) have been postponed. All my meetings have been cancelled or turned into video chats. THE LIBRARY SYSTEM HAS CLOSED.

All the stores are out of toilet paper, which briefly seemed very problematic when I thought this morning that we had only two rolls left in the house. Turned out we had an unopened box in the basement containing 36 rolls, so we'll make it a bit longer.

The kids are out of school as of today, through next week and the following week (which is spring break) and half the week after that (unless they extend it). All activities are cancelled. I'm not sure how that's going to go. Based on experience so far, Duchess will spend it lying in bed texting, and Skipper will read a bunch of books and periodically appear to ask questions like "What's communism?" or "What's a nuclear family?" or to startle me as she did this week when we were talking about COVID-19 and she said "Well, Mom, one death is a tragedy, and a million deaths is a statistic" and I said "ARE YOU QUOTING JOSEPH STALIN AT ME?!?!?" and she looked at me with a puzzled expression and said "Yeah!" like that's a normal person thing.

None of us know how to prepare or what to do. Skipper had a sore throat and abdominal pain this evening - do we now all stay in the house for 14 days? Are grocery stores going to run out of food as the supply chain falters? Should I have bought more canned beans today? Is it really going to snow tonight? The future, even the immediate future, feels wildly uncertain. And yet, people are still out and about, going to work and to bars like it's normal. I met a colleague at a coffee shop this morning; he was firmly in the this-is-overblown camp, and mentioned that his 75-year-old mother who has compromised lung function is really paranoid right now and makes everybody wash their hands. Sitting there, eating an almond croissant, with people socializing cheerfully all around us, I felt crazy. (And I told him his mom is right and he should wash his damn hands.)

Anyway. I bought a puzzle and the new Hilary Mantel book. We may starve to death, and/or have to wipe our butts with rags and moss, but we're not going down without reading material.

Duchess has a lot to say after rowing practice.

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.

Interruption

I told Skipper, who was deep in an enormous pile of library books, that I was going to the basement to exercise. "I'll be down there for about an hour," I said. "Okay," she said.

Half an hour later, I heard her running footsteps overhead, and then thundering down the stairs. I assumed something had happened, like maybe a package was delivered, or an injured pedestrian at the door needing help. "Mom!" she said, "listen to this awesome tongue twister! Two witches watched two watches. Which watch did each witch watch?" and then she ran back upstairs.

There's a huge stack of books on the living room floor, not all of which have tongue twisters. I've been putting a lot of books on hold for the girls lately, many of them unsubtle attempts to encourage them to recognize a variety of life experience by taking advantage of their baked-in a) love of reading and b) strong desire to empathize. Thumbs up from both of them for Number the Stars, Esperanza Rising and What the Moon Saw. Duchess liked Jazz Day. (Skipper independently checked out of her school library the books George and Wonder, and liked them both very much.) I put a library hold on The Hate U Give for Duchess,* but of course if it's in the house Skipper will read it too. This is a very privileged-educated-white-person approach (one that would be decried by my social-justice-focused coworker, who likes to tell me that "white women cry, black men die"), but I guess it's a starting place.



*Duchess asked me last year "Mom, the kids have been talking about Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. Which side should I be on?" 

Skipper is reading in the living room. I'm washing dishes in the kitchen.

Skipper: Mom! I have a predicament!
Me: Yeah?
Skipper: What's a predicament?
Me: Um... a problematic situation that you need to solve.
Skipper: My predicament was that I didn't know what predicament meant.

Ice dragons and television

Oh hi.

We're fine. We're kind of grumpy. (Actually, Cook isn't, but the rest of us are. Okay, FINE. I'm kind of grumpy.) Kids are still thriving, while also going through normal developmental ugliness. Duchess trick-or-treated with her friends on Halloween, leaving poor Skipper with nobody to lead the way up every set of porch stairs. You have never seen such tentative body language on an ice dragon before - she shuffled cautiously up to each door with hunched shoulders and said very quietly "trick or treat..." Even after she got comfortable in a groove, and even skipped a little, it was a careful, tense skipping. Skipper's world is a fragile place.

I, on the other hand, am feeling weirdly powerful lately - I think it's because I turned forty and decided to just be an old eccentric lady with a beard and weird pants and loud opinions. I've taken to just saying things assertively at work meetings even though I have no reason to think that I deserve to take up airspace and I have no particularly great insights. (I figure if men get to do this, I might as well get to, too.) I'm really enjoying it, and so far experiencing no negative feedback. (Hey, this is what it's like to be a man!)  And I'm also feeling really joyful, as well as grumpy. The world feels enormous and indifferent and amazing - and I feel like I have room to be expansive in a way I haven't before. Forty, you guys. It's awesome.

And I get to balance my growing and definitely unhealthy addiction to political podcasts* by watching so much awesome TV,** which just reinforces my understanding that I'm incredibly forking lucky.




*NPR Politics for the win. Keepin' it 1600 for the chance to listen to nerdy frat boys obnoxiously saying everything out loud that I think inside my head. (Oh my god. I am, deep in my heart, an Obama Bro. This explains the entitled talking at work meetings, too.)
** I finally know who I am, after forty years on this planet. I am a person who really enjoys watching Brooklyn Nine Nine and The Good Place. And yes, New Girl. And, yes, unlimited reruns of Parks and Recreation. We live in a golden age of television that was apparently designed in a laboratory to please me.

My life skills

Skipper and I are walking to meet Cook at a restaurant for dinner. I am texting Cook to specify when and where to meet.

Me: Hold on. I need to stop because I can't text and walk at the same time.
Skipper: Mom, you really need to work on your life skills.

Glimpse inside Skipper's brain

Skipper is eating a sandwich, sitting alone at the dining room table with her hand-me-down Furby "sleeping" in a box beside her. I'm washing dishes in the kitchen, ten feet away.

Skipper: Mom, why did the Titanic sink?
Me: It hit an iceberg.
Skipper: But how did that make it sink?
Me: I don't know. It broke in half?
Skipper: But all six of its tanks filled with water. How did breaking in half make that happen?
Me: Sounds like you know more about it than I do.
Skipper: I keep checking a book about it out of the library but I always stop reading it because it makes my mouth hurt because I know what's going to happen.
Me: Oh.

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.

Life wisdom

Skipper is very amped up on the walk home from aftercare, most days, and usually talks non-stop. Tonight she told me about the (latest) misdeed of one of the boys in her class, who today tried to convince Skipper and some other girls to jump in a pile of leaves at recess. Skipper said "I did NOT do it, because I have learned, the hard way, THROUGH EXPERIENCE, that when boys want you to do something and they're smiling and laughing, it's almost always a bad idea."

(It was a thin layer of leaves over a pile of dog poop, as it turned out.)

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.

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...

Social

Duchess got a love note this week at school, ostensibly from a boy of whom she is fond and who is widely acknowledged to have a Crush on her.* (Duchess is suddenly, and somewhat surprisingly, popular these days. There are a handful of boys who have acknowledged Crushes on her, and some of them are social leaders.) She thought it was probably a forgery, and she wanted to know. So she promptly asked the boy if he had written her a love note. He said no. They spent some time speculating together about who was responsible. Everything ended well.

Here's the thing. I can't imagine this scenario playing out for me when I was ten.** I can't imagine getting a note and then asking the kid if he had written it. Ever. At ANY point in my life. I would much rather deal with the ambiguity than confront anybody about anything uncomfortable. But Duchess has a different threshold than I do for social discomfort, and more confidence in her own social power. Watching Duchess make her way in the weird world of almost-adolescence makes me feel like I'm looking at entirely new territory, because her path is so different from mine. It's really interesting.

Anyway, Duchess has a new cast. It's green. She'll get it off in three weeks.


*I am also fond of this kid, who seems very ethical and thoughtful for a 10-year-old, as well as endearingly forthright.

** If I had not been a hopeless social outcast, I mean. I didn't get notes.  

Things I overheard Skipper say to Cook today

"Achew! THAT was the sneeze I was waiting for!"

"Dad, what's a seizure? School is so boring! All we do is talk about friendship. I don't want to talk about friendship! I have lots of friends; I want to learn about seizures!"

Words for living

My bike commute to work involves a long downhill stretch that is turning out to be a kind of barometer on how confident or optimistic I'm feeling each day. On Monday I barreled down the hill at (relatively) high speed, heedless of pavement imperfections and the possibility of getting t-boned by a driver making bad decisions. This delirious positivity was the result of a weekend that made things feel pretty good.

Here's what happened this weekend:
1) I recovered from the flu! The flu is terrible, and just the pleasure even of being able to lie in bed and NOT feel like a damp bag of scrap metal was pretty tremendous.
2) The girls and I went with friends to a Renaissance Festival. It was very hot, and I was still maybe slightly delirious from fever, but I can't even describe how weird that was. We saw a magic show, a rat circus, a falconry show, a joust, and, weirdly, an air show going on above the whole time, and it was all really fun and strange and disorienting. The girls loved it. Duchess wants to buy a corset. Skipper said later that she married one of the jousting knights.
3) I read three parenting books while lying in bed feeling like a damp bag of scrap metal, and found a strategy in one of them that seemed very silly, but, when I dutifully deployed it on Skipper, WORKED.  It worked, you guys. We finally have a way to help Skipper correct her own behavior, and it works at least a little bit some of the time. Yay!
4) On Monday morning, when Skipper came out in the kitchen seeking breakfast, I said, in greeting, "Hey, Skipper, what's the word?" (this sounds ludicrous but is a greeting I fairly frequently use because I am ludicrous), and Skipper said "Awake! Happy!" and I was so happy to hear that those were her Monday morning words. (Duchess, following in her wake, said "Sleepy! Zombie!" to balance it out.)

That's the words. Happy Tuesday!

extra

Yesterday Skipper brought home a flyer advertising an after-school yoga class. I know that some of her friends are doing the class.
Me: Hey, Skipper, do you want to take this yoga class with Pitstock?
Skipper: Sure.
Me: Sure meaning yes or sure meaning I don't care?
Skipper: Well... I would really prefer to take a fighting class.
Me: A fighting class?
Skipper: Yeah, like martial arts.
Me: Oh.

Today, I picked up some books on hold at the library. Skipper examined them after school.
Skipper: Thanks for not getting me any more of those learn-to-read books!
Me: Yeah, I figured you're just never going to learn to read.
Skipper: Mom!
Skipper: I pretty much have to learn to read, don't I?
Me: Yup. It's very hard to go through life not knowing how to read.
Skipper: I would starve to death if I didn't know how to read! Unless I got married really soon.

Busted

Last night, after a long, fruitless discussion about the issues with each of her underpants  (too tight/too loose/too lacy/too ribbony/too scratchy/etc.), Skipper said angrily "Mom, what is the purpose of you? I've never understood that." And then she stomped off to the bathroom and said to Duchess, who was showering, "Duchess, what's the purpose of Mom? All she does is hang around."

This is a small town.

Today Duchess "tried out" for one of the local fancy swim teams.* While I was standing around waiting to write down our contact info, I noticed a mother and daughter speaking French behind me. I surreptitiously studied them, and realized that they were there for the beginning of Duchess's swim career 5 years ago; I had sat by the pool for a week with brand-new Skipper, chatting with the mom while the daughter participated in the same swim lesson as Duchess.  I talked to them briefly (the mom is one of these super-physical people who wants to hold your hand while she's talking to you, which I find a little uncomfortable but also very endearing), and discovered that the daughter went to the school that Skipper now attends, before moving on to the middle school that Skipper and Duchess will both attend, AND that the mom is an assistant teacher at the same school where our lovable summer nanny teaches. In Portland, it's really more like 2 degrees of separation.



*They don't have space at most of the sites, and they don't actually kick anybody off the team once they're on, so it's more like an in-person application for the waitlist. However, Duchess is not particularly interested in escalating her swimming at this point, and Cook and I are not interested in adding another activity that requires time, money, and energy, so it was pretty much just a reconnaissance trip, in case she decides to quit kung fu and go for swimming in a serious way next year. It turned out to be a good reconnaissance trip, as the event included open swim time, so Duchess and Skipper both cavorted joyfully for an hour in the pool, and we even got some free pizza on our way out.