Parenting – Page 7 – Mary Tyler Mom

February 17, 2017

When Your Toddler Is All Up In Your Business

My toddler loves me. He loves me and his Dad so much that many of the hours he is awake are spent all up in our grill, yo.

Our little guy is the third and final toddler we will raise. I am reminded of the sometimes overwhelming nature of raising kids this age. Toddlers love you. Like, really, really, really love you. And, having buried a four year old daughter, I am a bit ashamed to say this, but, sometimes, that love can feel a wee bit, a tiny bit, perhaps just a smidge oppressive.

It’s just as horrible to type that sentence as it is to think that sentence. What kind of a monster feels oppressed by their kid’s love? Me, it turns out.

In those moments when I am standing in the kitchen, cooking or doing dishes, and, out of nowhere, my three year old tackles me with a bear hug from behind, or, nuzzles his face into my rump — a unique sign of affection we termed “Kitchen Hug!” when we experienced it with our first so many years ago, or snakes his hand into my nether regions, giggling all the while with the joy of being so close, I fight the instinct to jump and instead, breathe, reminding myself of the intense and innocent love behind those hugs.

The love of a toddler is like the chaste version of those intoxicating first days of amorous love — it is overwhelming and all consuming and so very sincere. A toddler’s love is so pure that it can create sunshine on a stormy day, cast the city slush out of week old snow, and turn politicians into puppies. Well, maybe not all politicians, but many of them.

Some days, I simply don’t feel worthy of being loved to that degree.

Ultimately, I think that is why the love of a toddler can feel so overwhelming. Are any of us worthy of that pure, intense, innocent love? I mean, the other day I had to sit my little guy down to have a discussion about his behavior and how he needed to reign it in at certain times. His response? Tears. My clear statement that he was not meeting expectations was enough to make him cry. Like all toddlers, he just wants to please, to be loved, to make his parents proud and happy. And there I was telling him he wasn’t doing it right. See? I told you I was a monster.

My takeaway from all of this is to just try and appreciate the transitory nature of my toddler’s love. Love evolves, you see. Today my boy can’t get enough of me, wants to smother me with his sticky fingers and face most days, I am the epicenter of his little universe. In a few years, after I have blinked just a few times, he will no longer want to hold my hand or so gleefully accept my hugs and kisses.

When that happens, there I will be, crying in my soda, pining for the days when my toddler was all up in my business.

February 11, 2017

Turning Bystanders Into Upstanders: We Have Higher Expectations for School Children Than Our Senators

by*stand*er – a person present at an event or incident, but does not take part; onlooker, spectator, witness

up*stand*er – an individual who sees wrong and acts; a person who takes a stand against an act of injustice or intolerance

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On Thursday, President Trump hosted a lunch with ten U.S. Senators, four Democrats and six Republicans, for the purpose of building bipartisan support for his SCOTUS nominee, Neil Gorsuch. Seems fairly innocuous, even hopeful, right? Reporters were allowed to cover the beginning of the event, making for a positive photo op. Look! Blue and Red can sit down together! Progress!

Nope.

Reports are surfacing that right after the departure of the press, Trump turned to the Democrats in the room and said to them (“mocked” and “taunted” is how it has been characterized), “Pocahontas is now the face of your party,” referring to their fellow senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren.

Trump has a history of using ‘Pocahontas’ as a pejorative term in referring to Senator Warren, after she identified herself as having Native American heritage. It is considered by most to be an ethnic slur and Trump has been roundly criticized for using it on the campaign trail last year.

But this is not a post about Donald Trump, a man I personally believe exhibits many of the accepted signs of being a bully. Most experts agree those traits include (sourced here):

Impulsiveness
Anger management problems
Tries to control other people, rather than inspiring others to follow
Easily frustrated and annoyed
Lacks empathy, isn’t sympathetic to anyone’s needs or desires but their own
Blames a victim for his own behavior by saying things like, “If that geek didn’t look so stupid, I wouldn’t have to hit him.”
Difficulty following rules and little respect for authority
View violence in a positive way, such as a form of entertainment or a good way to get needs met

There is a growing awareness in America of the detrimental nature of bullying and how it negatively impacts our children. Much research has been done, many dollars have been spent in order to better understand how to curb bullying in our school environments. A growing number of schools in the U.S. have enacted a zero tolerance policy for bullying behavior. Along with increased awareness of the act of bullying has been an increased understanding of how the community can help contain and directly confront the actions of bullies.

Teaching children to be “upstanders” rather than “bystanders” is one of those methods getting a lot of traction and is endorsed by bullying experts. In simple terms, the idea is to teach those who witness the bullying behavior to challenge it. That can be accomplished by either confronting the bully in the moment, or standing up to call out the bullying behavior and label it for what it is. Research demonstrates that when one witness to the bullying, a bystander, challenges it, others are more likely to follow. The bystander, in doing so, has now become an upstander.

You can read and watch more about being an upstander here or here.

And this is where I struggle. Schools across America are investing time and money — both scant resources in education these days, which gives an indication of how much these lessons are valued and needed, in helping school children gain the necessary tools to combat bullying behavior themselves. There are increasing expectations and motivations encouraging children to stand up to bullies, call them out, shut them down. And the efforts seem to be working.

Cut to Thursday’s meeting at the White House where our Bully in Chief, President Trump, speaking to an audience of ten U.S. Senators, calls one of their colleagues “Pocahontus.” Immediately after the cameras left, of course. The same senator who was silenced on the floor of the senate just days earlier after being told not to denigrate her colleague, Jeff Sessions, during his confirmation hearing debates. The irony is staggering.

I have read several reports of the meeting and what is most troubling to me is the fact that not a single senator challenged President Trump for mocking a fellow senator or abusing his power as President. They sat there, silent and complicit, both Democrats and Republicans. Turns out, being cowardly is not restricted to a single political faction. Someone or someones leaked the story, as both Politico and CNN reported on it yesterday.

Stories indicate the climate in the room during the exchange was “awkward,” awkward, apparently, being code for knowing something was transpiring that was wrong, but no one present had the will or courage to challenge it. Instead, they relied on the press, an institution already in Trump’s bad graces, to let Americans know what had happened.

Should we expect at least as much from a sitting U.S. Senator as we do our school children? Why, yes, yes we should. These elected officials could learn something from children across the U.S. who are encouraged to do something they themselves are unable or unwilling to do.

Is it harder when the bully is our president? Certainly. Is it any less important? Definitely not. I’m talking to you, Senators Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp, Jon Tester, Lamar Alexander, Chris Coons, Shelley Moore Capito, John Cornyn, Chuck Grassley, Joe Donnelly and Michael Bennet.

January 6, 2017

Bridges and Threads and Sundaes: Connecting Our Kids to Those Who Would Love Them, But Are Dead

My Mom died when I was pregnant with my first child, a daughter who was named for her. Four years later my daughter died. And five years after that my Dad died. Three of the most important and loved people in the world to me will never be known by my two sons. That just plain sucks.

As a child myself, I was born with three grandparents, as my Dad’s father had died when he was just 18. I knew my paternal grandfather’s name, but not much else. He was never real to me in the same way as my three living grandparents. My Irish grandmother died when I was just seven. I was named for her, Sheila being the Gaelic form of Celia. I remember a bit about her, but not much.

Oddly, I remember snapshots from my grandmother’s funeral that are still potent. I wore a red calico print skirt with matching shawl to her graveside service. I loved that outfit, as it made me feel like Half Pint from Little House on the Prairie. A cricket landed on my sleeve and I wanted so badly to scream and shout and jump up and down to get it off of me, but I didn’t. At seven, I was old enough to appreciate the solemnity of the situation, so my cricket freak out was silent. I remember seeing my Dad cry in the front seat of the car as we drove away from the funeral home, telling my Mom he was an orphan now. He was 44.

My other grandparents died when I was in my early 20s. My memories of them are fond and much more well grounded. I can easily recall details about their East Side bungalow, the smell of their basement, the tile in their bathroom, the grape arbor and vegetable garden in the backyard, the drips from the small window air conditioning unit that would fall on my head as I played in their gangway with my cousins.

They were kind and loving and generous and my life is a better one for having known them.

My sons will grow up knowing and loving two of their four grandparents (*my youngest, who is adopted, will have a more complicated relationship to all of this, I know, as he has biological grandparents, too). Given that my oldest boy was six when my Dad died, I am aware that his memories will be there, but tenuous. My husband’s parents are super grandparents — loving, generous, supportive, interested, but, alas, from a distance, as half the country separates us. I wish my boys were able to have a more day-to-day kind of relationship with them, but feel grateful they are as present and involved as they are.

The question for me, then, becomes one of how to make my Mom and Dad (and daughter/sister) real to them in a meaningful way. How do you make the dead come alive? How do you create a sense of relationship to someone they never met, or only knew as an infant or young child? Is this even possible?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, as my brother and sisters and I got together last week and pored through boxes and boxes of family photos, scanning and separating until we couldn’t see straight. I felt a deep relationship and connection to my Mom and Dad during this process — one that feels deeper after seeing both their lives, from childhood through death, be sorted and scanned in such a concentrated period of time. 81 and 70 years condensed into 48 hours. Would these photos matter to my boys? Will I hang on to them, clinging to my connection, only to have my sons discard them after my own death?

Ugh. And sigh. And sniffle. And ugh.

I felt a bit of hope while scrolling through Facebook the other day when I saw a friend post a photo of he and his daughter enjoying ice cream in honor of his Dad, gone many years before his granddaughter was born. The ice cream sundae was a tradition, a connection to a father and grandfather gone too soon. There was joy in the photo, potent joy, that transcended hot fudge and cherries.

Seeing the photo helped me realize the power of storytelling. Stories are how my boys will come to know their sister and grandparents as people that would have loved them silly, given a chance. An ice cream sundae can magically transform into a bridge when its story is told. An ice cream sundae can be the invisible thread that connects father and son and granddaughter. It is possible.

Grief can lead to helplessness and isolation, a shutting down and a retreat. But at its core, grief is evidence of love, an intangible residue of the relationships that were, the people that existed once, but are no longer. When those people we grieve are people that would have loved and enriched our children’s lives, the onus is on us to find that bridge and thread that can connect them.

My boys are young — 8 and 3. I still have the opportunity to tell the stories, hang the pictures, buy the sundaes and do my best to flesh out the grandparents and sister that are not part of our day-to-day, but who would have made their lives immeasurably better. Anything I do will be a poor substitute for living grandparents and sister, but it is so much better than nothing.

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