Wild women don’t get the blues

Posted September 8, 2010 by raisingable
Categories: Self-care for mothers, belonging, mothers, set boundaries
Tags: , ,

Mom-baby play groups and a woman’s book group saved my sanity and made me a better mother.

I loved the Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues Book Group. We met one Friday night a month and tried to talk about the book in between comparing kids and men, and supporting each other through life’s passages.

We came together to read other people’s tales, and ended up sharing our own. My friends reminded me I was “normal” and normalized my expectations. Some stories made me grateful to have my husband.

We Wild Women went away annually for the weekend and left the kids home with dad. We rented waterfront , stayed up late drinking wine, told stories and occasionally talked about the book.

Those weekends were like therapy to remind us of US, the non-mom person. We got up late, went on walkabouts with no agenda, no children or men to feed or drive somewhere. We skinny-dipped and cooked for each other.  New members were regaled with Wild Women adventures to initiate them into our clan.

Even though conversation drifted towards those we had abandoned for the night or weekend, we celebrated the freedom of gathering in a circle of women to nourish our souls.

With great sadness, as our children graduated from high school, women began dropping out of Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues Book Group. They stopped prioritizing our Friday night meetings. We were lucky to get a few women to our once sacred meetings. Some women said goodbye, moved and got divorced. Some disappeared without a goodbye.

When we finally dissolved the group, we had a meta-meeting and invited everyone who had been a member over its 15 years tenure, sat in a circle and had a bittersweet reunion.

Other groups have filled the hole left by the Wild Women, which I had envisioned belonging  to until I died. I will cherish the memories of our meetings and weekend jaunts. They introduced me to many good books and cultivated the art of friendship and conversation.

I’ve coached moms who have forgotten about THEM. They’ve sacrificed everything for their families and get depressed. Motherhood is like that. It’s easy to get swallowed up by the Great Mother archetype, taking care of everyone else, and forgetting about our own needs.

As all archetypes do, they will drop us, and the drop is HARD. Children grow up. Mothers and marriages need to remember who they were before children invaded.

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Tune into wireless camping

Posted September 7, 2010 by raisingable
Categories: boredom, family camping, summer vacation, traveling with children, vacation
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They're about as cute as they come. Children love camping together. It's a great adventure. Raising children outdoors teaches them to appreciate the planet.

BFF. Camping will do that for people, even when things go awry.

What a glorious view. Dry weather out west helps make camping more enjoyable. Even though camping with young children is a lot of work, it's worth it. Camping together connects families to the great outdoors, to each other and to friends.

Two families bond with each other and the great outdoors.

Hey Grandma, look at me! I can roll out dough with my cup. THat's what I love about camping- improvising. Camping is most fun when done with groups of people

Grandma and Bree roll out pie crust together at camp.

This guest post is from my nephew Sean who touts the virtues of family camping.

After a 10-day tent camping trip with my wife, daughter (almost 2 ½) and my parents followed by another 3 night tent trip with another family of 4, I said to Susan that camping “is a time to really tune into your family.”

There was a lot of “tuning in.”  As new parents, we were a little nervous about driving thousands of miles with a 2-year-old strapped in the back of our Suburban.  We had space to bring lots of camping amenities and plenty of toys and books.

We decided to forgo electronic gadgets and screen devices and stick to our convictions to use screen time very sparingly.

Our goal was to make it out to Glacier National Park in Montana, which meant about 9.5 hours of driving from our Seattle home.  We chose to divide up the drive into two segments, stopping in North Central Washington for the first weekend.

That drive went uneventfully as Breanna slept about half of the time.  We strategically plan to drive during nap times, so this one encompassed her afternoon nap.  Two days later, we were on the road again, headed to GNP.  After arriving in the park and the rendezvous with my parents, we realized that we had not even turned on the radio the entire drive.

We became so in tune with our daughter’s banter or sleep that we didn’t even need the background noise.  In fact, Bree kind of kept us entertained after learning a few driving games.  Soon she was asking things like “What do you see, Daddy?” or “What color, Mommy?”  Those games translated into object identification games including barns, animals, and various trucks.  So we learned together, and what started out in fear ended up in learning, listening and tuning into one another’s sights and sounds.

The camping trip had lots of outdoor time, inter-generational cooking and discovery time outdoors seeing wildlife, trees, lakes and plants.  We made it through several long days of driving and ended up with in Bend, Oregon– all without a single DVD player!

Back home, one of the biggest realizations hit me.  Breanna had a chance to really tune into us as well.  I was printing and trimming some pictures from our trip; running around as I sometimes do.

Breanna was in the room with the printer and paper cutter.  Suddenly I heard, “Daddy, look!”  I called back “What, Bree?”  “Campfire!” she exclaimed.  I ran around the corner to see the most meticulous campfire built with kindling and all.  Bree had squirreled away the steps in making a campfire during our trip, and without even knowing it we had taught her a new skill.

She had placed the paper strips on the floor as kindling and found some table legs to use as logs over the kindling.  I was excited to see that Breanna had a chance to learn from and tune into us without us even knowing it.  Of course this reinforced my motivation for always being the best person I can for the sake of my family, especially my child(ren).

We spent 25 nights in a tent this summer and learned a lot about each other.  We spent time with several other families and became more intimate friends through cooking, doing camp chores and having real-life sleepovers.

For me, there have been great opportunities to get away from house projects, computers and phones.  Road trips provided great talking and tune-in time for our whole family and camping allowed us to divide up tasks and learn new chores.

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Green beans and eggs from my backyard

Posted September 3, 2010 by raisingable
Categories: raising vegetables
Tags: ,
local organic produce, backyard garden, gardening with children

The green beans were there and me, the city slicker didn't know it.

keeping backyard chickens is a good family project.

The one on the left is Houdini. She likes to escape. The white leghorns produce an egg a day - no matter what.

I grew up in a city on a bus route with a small backyard. The first time I smelled clean air and saw clear water in a lake was on a camping trip to Maine. I never knew city air and water were dirty. They were just normal. Farms were a primitive place that smelled kind of shitty, where we bought produce.

So it’s a shock when I’m able to produce food in my backyard. I’m so green [novice] about farming that Bob said this morning, “There are green beans ready to pick!” I thought that row of plants was eggplant. I couldn’t see the abundant beans hiding under the leaves.

Next year I’ll be planting green beans again because they grew in spite of me, like rhubarb, mint and cucumbers. I like food that’s easy to grow.

Eggs have been easy to produce, too. After much trepidation and research, I started keeping chickens about a year ago. Not raising — that would imply caring for little chicks that can drown in their water. Keeping, which means I buy them at age 4-5 months, when they’re about ready to start laying. And their eggs are delicious. They are the payoff for the hassles of keeping chickens.

My son Ian, the organic farmer, has been coaching me in land cultivation and animal husbandry. Our children love to be the expert and change roles with us. I wish we had grown more vegetables when he was growing up, but he seems to have compensated.

Growing a few easy-to-cultivate vegetables and keeping a few chickens are good family projects as well as opportunities for children to take responsibility. Gardens provide a natural place for children to learn to eat vegetables, too. It feels organic and connected to the earth to eat my own produce, eggs and yes, rooster meat when available.

My chickens gobble up kitchen scraps and relish food turned slightly bad. In return, they provide eggs and plenty of crap that makes excellent fertilizer. All with a very low carbon footprint. I like the feeling of my farmette, especially at mealtime.

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Empty nest isn’t so empty

Posted September 1, 2010 by raisingable
Categories: college students, empty nest, marriage first, prepare, teenagers
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Empty nest comes and goes. Empty nest is an opportunity to re-discover couple hood. Empty nest is hardly and empty feeling. This is a shot of our full nest, with four chidren. Raising children is one of life's greatest challenges. Raising children together meant a lot of good parenting and sacrifice of our couple-hood.

The gang. It feels so normal when they're home, and equally as normal when it rebounds back to the two of us.

“Be prepared for the possibility of your parents divorcing during your freshman year,” read the letter from my daughter’s college in 2006. I, too, wondered if our marriage of 26 years would survive.

Our youngest had prepared us for empty nest during high school with a universal strategy.

  1. Avoid parents.
  2. Get involved with a job, friends and school activities.
  3. Interact with enough courtesy to access the car and money.
  4. Be out when parents are home, and home when they’re out.
  5. Claim, “I can’t eat dinner with you tonight, I have to work.”

When Saturday soccer abruptly ended during her freshman year, it opened up possibilities I had forgotten existed. When she quit Sunday afternoon soccer, whole weekends arrived with no demand for our witnessing, wallet or chaffering.

Even weeknights brimmed with possibilities — no need to whip up dinner, wolf it down and drive someone somewhere.

Her senior year of high school launched us into unfamiliar turf: home alone together often. It was like visiting a foreign country I hadn’t been to in ages, with an old friend, who I hadn’t had time for in a while.

At first, our couple-rebirth was awkward and unfamiliar. Then it blossomed into glorious, fun and eventually, normal.

With our new life for two, we moved into a house in need of total renovation, a distraction for our first two years of empty nest. We’ve always shined under a full-court press.

Next, we took some trips together and rekindled an old interest, duplicate bridge. We play with gusto at least twice a week. It’s a partnership game that’s a lot like staying married. The best teams succeed under duress, don’t berate each other too much for mistakes, and celebrate victory.

The college schedule brought them home with astonishing regularity for a dozen years. As soon as we got used to them being home, filling the fridge with food, sharing cars and TVs, they departed. Silence and stillness descend, until another holiday.

The final curtain has fallen with youngest settled in graduate school. We’ve rehearsed during the renovation project, across the bridge table, and in the quiet of the dinner table set for two.

I fell in love with him. Again. It’s hardly an empty feeling.

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Calling photos of children — even you — doing chores. Win $50.

Posted August 31, 2010 by raisingable
Categories: Raising Able: how chores cultivate capable confident young people, chores
Tags: , ,

Little kids ADORE chores. This is me at age 4 or 5 ironing. I couldn't wait until I got a pillowcase or handkerchief to iron. Chore make children feel good about themselves. Chores nurture self esteem. Chores teach responsibility.

That's me ironing at age 5 in about 1963. I eagerly waited for handerchiefs, dresser scarves and pillowcases to iron.

This photo says so much about how my parents raised their nine children. We all had chores and those chores taught us self-discipline and nurtured our self-esteem because we contributed to the family. Today, most of us are in business for ourselves. We’re very self-directed and I attribute that to doing dishes regularly.

Do you have a photo of YOU doing chores? Or of your children doing chores? Post it on my Raise Able Young People Facebook page. While you’re there, vote (LIKE) for your favorite photo of a little person working. The winner – to be determined by Sept. 7, 2010, will win a $50 gift card.

Chores are the anti-brat remedy. It’s impossible to be entitled when you take out the trash, scoop dog poop and sweep floors. Chores teach children about life. Sometimes we have to do things whether we want to or not.

Some of my best memories growing up are doing dishes with my brothers and sisters. It was fun to rake leaves, clean out the garage and paint the house together. I felt important.

I loved when I was old enough to paint a radiator while my older brothers painted the walls. They carefully instructed me, “Watch out for drips!” I didn’t know that painting radiators was boring and time-consuming. I relished being part of the action. Painting the radiator was challenging. Instead of bugging them or tagging along with them, I was helping.

By the way, today I don’t iron very much. I got into the Zen of Ironing then. The skill has transferred to other areas of my life :-)

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