To my US readers and to those of you outside the United States, may you have a lovely Thursday!
This is EXACTLY how I look when I'm baking a cake!
Nov 252010
I have this earache. It started sometime last week but I thought it was just a cold. By Sunday my ear was killing me and it’s kept me low and mean off and on since then. I get these earaches when I’m tense because I clench my jaw in my sleep and I have TMJ. It causes earaches and I found out it’s also what could be making my eyelid twitch.
It’s not like I’m making myself have an earache because (this is what my MIL would say) I don’t want to hear what people are saying but I am making myself have an earache by clenching my jaw so tight that I send shooting pains through my head. So it’s not quite psychosomatic but it’s not like it’s a virus either.
Can I tell you something? I don’t like Thanksgiving. It’s my least favorite holiday.
Thanksgiving was our big Divorce holiday when I was a kid. It was the only holiday we spent with my dad (we spent Christmas Eve with him, too, but that was never anything particularly special when we were kids so that wasn’t a huge big adjustment). It was a guilt-ridden holiday because we were leaving my mom in the big, cold, empty house and no matter how much she said she didn’t mind I didn’t believe her. (She just asked us to bring a plate of left-overs and my sister still brings her one from my dad.) Then when my dad moved in with his girlfriend and then married her, well, Thanksgiving felt like even more of a betrayal.
Now Thanksgiving is still me disappointing people because we have more families than we did before. We’re spending it with the inlaws this year because they are heading out of town for Christmas so we do Thanksgiving with them since we won’t see them for Christmas. Only first I had to tell my dad since he still hosts Thanksgiving in the family and he was fine but I felt guilty. And then we had to tell Pennie who was hoping to host so that was more guilt. And because the inlaws invited us to some dinner out of town, I can’t even invite Pennie like we did one year when we ate at our dad’s.
Ugh.
Also? I don’t even like the whole Thanksgiving dinner. I’m not particularly fond of Thanksgiving food; I don’t like stuffing or green bean casserole and we have turkey an awful lot around here anyway. If I had my druthers I’d go eat Indian.
But mostly Thanksgiving to me is not about togetherness because for most of my life Thanksgiving has been more about disappointing people or leaving people out (for a couple of years the person out was me because I wasn’t talking to my dad so I went with my mom to a Chinese restaurant instead) or plastering on fake smiles to keep everyone merry even though someone there was simmering with rage or unshed tears.
I’m sure my kids will feel differently about it and I know Brett does (and he loves Thanksgiving food) so obviously I cannot crawl into my bed with my head under the covers so instead I get earaches and I think to myself, “Why is this? I’m no more stressed than usual. I mean the Great Big Wish List Giveaway has got me wincing away from the computer but heck, I’m always wincing away from the computer these days.” Then Brett says, “So my parents said that if we leave by X we can be there by Y.” And a pain shoots through my ear and I realize I’ve clenched my jaw so hard my teeth squeak and then I remember. Damn. Thanksgiving.
Did you know that dreaming is a little like defragmenting your brain?
I don’t have to defragment my computer anymore (does anyone? or is it just a Mac thing that my computer does it for me when I’m not looking?) but I used to like doing it because I liked watching everything get consolidated on the progress screen.
This is how my friend Mart explained computer defragmentation to me. I don’t know if this is his metaphor or not but it’s a good one.
Let’s say you wrote a 500 page paper. It takes up a tidy little space on your desk in your office, it’s all consolidated and in order and you can read through it quickly to find exactly the information that you need.
Now let’s say that you take those 500 pages and you head out to a football field. You toss all of the paper up into the air and the wind catches it and blows it all over the field. Now can you read it easily? Can you find the information you need quickly and easily?
When you defrag your hard drive, you re-consolidate all of the information so your computer runs more quickly and more smoothly.
I listened to this old show from Radiolab awhile back on Sleep and they describe dreaming a little bit like Mart described defragging your hard drive. At least that’s the way I heard it.
See, you only have so much room for memory in your brain and you are like a little PacMan during the day, eating up events and storing them in your head. At the end of the day you sleep and your brain defrags your brain to make room for the things you need. It discards little things (the name of your server at the restaurant you ate at that morning, the color of socks your co-worker was wearing) and consolidates the things you paid more attention to. The more attention you pay to something, the stronger the signal that this is something for your brain to hold onto.
Radiolab explains that this is why a musician can practice a song all day, trying to get it right, and then wake up the next morning and play it perfectly. It’s why sometimes I go to bed at night fretting about an essay I’m working on and wake up and know how to organize it.
As our brain quietly re-organizes itself, it puts the pieces back together so that the thoughts that persevered through our day — through chit-chat with the server whose name you forgot, through your overview of your co-worker’s outfit right down to the socks — are finally reunited and you are better able to tackle the things that matter to you and that you’ve been working on and thinking on.
When you think of dreams this way they make more sense, too. It’s your dream mind rummaging through your day’s events — every little thing you did or said or thought — and rearranging them. No wonder your sixth-grade crush might show up sitting next to the canned ham you put aside for the food bank on the boat you’re thinking of renting for next year’s vacation.
Now isn’t that interesting? And see why you need to make sure you’re getting that all important REM sleep?
Nov 192010
Well, it could have gone better. It could have gone worse (like I could have fallen off the podium only there was no podium or I could have spilled my water down my front because I’ve been known to do that) but it’s a casual, friendly class and my presentation was the last of two other dynamic, interesting presentations. We were all punch drunk by then and I was running out of time (I went way over class ending time).
I didn’t get to say a lot of what I wanted to say. I didn’t get to call out the MN/TX Research Project, for example. But I did get to say these things:
- I said that I was way sluttier than Pennie but because I didn’t get pregnant people don’t immediately judge me the way they judge her when they find out she’s a birth mother. I kind of hammered this point home because we had an earlier presentation on teen moms and it was very negative (I mean the statistics are negative, I get that). I started the presentation by saying, “The young pregnant woman sitting in your office trying to figure out what to do is not a statistic. You have to see her in the context of her unique circumstances.” I did not intend to announce my former sluttiness in class but it seemed like the right thing to say so I went there. Heck, I ain’t ashamed of my wild youth!
- We talked critically about adoption agencies and whether or not we as counselors can assume they have our clients’ best interests at heart. I said that relying on the adoption “experts” (agencies, attorneys) is not a good idea. I said, “How do you think they’re getting paid? I’ll tell you. They get paid when I write them my check for a baby. So where is their motivation?” I said that there were good agencies and attorneys but we as counselors needed to advocate strongly for our clients and not slack off.
- We talked about the way historic shame and secrecy have created adoption policies that do not serve adopted people. I accidentally called a woman a bastard, I’m serious. I’m such an idiot. There’s a student who is adopted and she was talking about not having access to her medical records. And I said, “And you know why that is, right? It’s because the state wants to protect you from your bastard origins and the shame of your illegitimacy. And it’s wrong and I’m sorry that you don’t have access because you should.” So. That was probably awkward for everyone. Argh.
- I got to point out the blogs on the presentation and finished by saying, “If you want to know more about the experience of birth mothers, you should talk to them.” But I don’t know if people wrote down the url so I don’t know if they’ll go read the blogs. At least they know they’re there, right?
- [I'm editing to add this.] I also said that when I hear happy adoption stories I always think about that unseen woman who is missing her baby and I wanted them to start seeing her, too. And they nodded so I hope that they will.
There’s a lot I didn’t get to say. I’m sad about that.
It’s a life span class and we were supposed to relate the issue to life span development so I focused on women under twenty; there’s a whole lot that I left out.
Ok, here is the presentation but it won’t make sense if you don’t have my notes so here are my notes in .pdf format. (It might not even make sense with notes but I’m sharing all of this with you because I consolidated some good stuff on the resources page.) I did use Juno as my stand-in and since pretty much everyone in the class had seen the movie I think it worked.
But I spent all of last night feeling bad about not keeping it more together and wishing I’d gone earlier so I’d been able to keep everything in there and not rush.
On the bright side, I got 106% on my midterm. (He threw out three questions because too many people got them wrong so anyone who got them right got extra points. Noah said, “I didn’t think over 100% was possible!” and I said, “It’s not really.” And he said, “Are you going to put it on Facebook?” because he is a child of the internet!)
In my Lifespans class my professor likes to talk about the difference between self concept and self esteem. She says self concept is what other people give to you — the way they define you via word or action. Self esteem is something you give yourself — it’s how you feel about your self concept. (Note: In another class we’re using self esteem in the more traditional way where we talk about how other people can raise or lower your self esteem but my Lifespan professor’s definition makes more sense to me.)
I have been thinking about this A LOT. I’ve been thinking about in with my kids and with myself and with my other school projects.
This is how someone can be an absolute total jerk loser and still have high self esteem. You know how people talk about that? “Bullies have low self esteem,” they say. But then they interview the guy shoving kids into lockers and he’s all like, “Yeah, I’m shoving them because I am KING and they are IN MY WAY!”
(I knew a grown-up like this — I say knew because I chose to stop knowing him. He’d always brag about how mean he was to customer service people. He was very proud of this. I hope that most of his restaurant servers were spitting in his food because boy did he deserve it. Anyway.)
So in one family the parents could say to a kid, “You’re such a bookworm!” and the kid would be really proud. And in another family the parents could say to a kid, “You’re such a bookworm!” and the kid would be really ashamed. Because maybe the first child believes being a bookworm is of high value and in the other family the child believes that being a bookworm is about being lazy or wimpy or self-indulgent. They have the same self concept but different levels of self esteem.
I was thinking about this when I got mad at Madison the other day for making (another) mess. Madison is a great one for making messes. You have a kid who is curious, who is sensory seeking and who is creative and you get a lot of messes. (Many of you are nodding and sighing and wringing out a sponge ready to clean up your own child’s brand new mess.) She finds new ways to use things in weird ways that cause messes. She finds a particularly sticky or wet or ooky mess and she has to make it messier because she wonders how it feels or how it smells or how it might look over here instead of over there or what happens when you dip a Barbie headfirst into it.
Now Madison will clean up messes if she realizes they’re messes and if she doesn’t realize it then she is generally amenable to being handed a sponge and being told to go to work. And most of the time I’m pretty calm about it. I know how it is for her — she often doesn’t realize that the mess has begun until it’s already pretty crazy. At the first part she’s in the moment. She’ll be humming and swishing her hands through the soapsuds for quite some time before she realizes that the soapsuds have spilled out of the sink onto the book she brought into the bathroom with her. Or the new toilet paper roll she got out. Or the front of the dress she just put on because we’re leaving soon. She is very in that moment, focused, experiencing the mess. And when she does realize it, she is often dismayed. She does not WANT to be that messy girl all the time. She doesn’t LIKE having to come tell me what happened so I can help her figure out how to clean it up.
But she has gotten more and more responsible and my way of dealing with it is to emphasize how responsible she is. So when I came into her bedroom the other day and saw that she’d found a stray bottle of black tempera paint and that her resulting art projects have gotten out of control I said, in a calm but simmering voice, “I know you are s responsible person so I expect you to take responsibility for this.”
And she did.
Then later that night when she spilled her soup when she decided to fix herself a little snack she said, “Don’t worry, Mommy, I’m responsible. I’ll take care of it.”
I was thinking about this because we have had to fight to NOT give Madison this negative self concept because she happens to be a currently messy person. It’s hard. Because she IS messy and because it DOES sometimes cause us to grit our teeth angrily so that we don’t say anything we might later regret.
When things are NOT messy, I will sometimes talk about what a creative, curious person she is and how sometimes this makes for messes and then I add, “But you are so responsible, you always clean them up. Even if you whine a little first, you take responsibility for it and you take care of it.”
I said this before it was true. I said this when the only reason she took responsibility was because I stood over her and coached her through it. I said this even when her efforts made things worse as she toddled behind me imitating me cleaning it up. I said it to make it true. Brett and I gave her that self concept, “You are responsible” and we are still giving it to her because we are like Picard, we are saying, “Make it so.”
The other thing is that I rely on Ames & Ilg for my kids’ information for me but for them, too. I will tell THEM my secrets of child development (Noah is horrified to know that there are entire books that explain the psychology of kids, by the way). So I will say, “Yes, you are having trouble with X but that’s because you are X age and kids who are X age are learning about that.” So when Madison is lamenting her propensity for messes, I say, “You make messes because you are learning. You will get bigger and you will make fewer messes. Besides it doesn’t matter as long as you take responsibility for your messes, which you do.”
I’m not trying to pretend that I don’t tear out my hair or stomp around or holler because I do those things, too (ask Noah — he would love to tell you about my tantrums!) I’m human, too. When I see yet another roll of toilet paper ruined I sometimes lose it, which is why I try so hard to undo that damage by focusing on giving Madison a self concept that she can feel good about. Because she is messy. She’s way messier than Noah was at this age and I am sometimes exhausted by it but I believe in her and I see improvements all of the time. And the very qualities that make her such a messy girl are the very qualities I love best. I always wanted a Ramona and here she is. She may not have wasted an entire toothpaste tube into the sink (yet) but she has used up an awful lot of shampoo, conditioner, lotion, soap, etc. in various experiments. (Oh so many experiments! Oh so many squishy, wasteful, glorious messes!)
So that is my parenting technique for a self concept that leads to high self esteem: Act like Picard (“Make it so”) and give them a little Ames & Ilg (“It’s normal to do XYZ but my job is to help you grow out of it”). Not necessarily in that order.
