I Yell

I resolved not to yell today.

Given, it's only 4:25 in the afternoon and the day is still young, but so far so good.

And some of you may clickety, click right away from this blog after hearing that. You think, how much does she yell? It was so bad that she had to intentionally zip her lip and bite her tongue? She had to discipline herself to keep the yells away from her mouth like a chocolate chip cookie waiting to be dipped in 1% milk?

If you've never wailed in agony at your kids feel free to click somewhere else right now. I'll wait. In fact, give me five minutes to find the perfect mother's blog and then put her link here.

[Google searching....]

Couldn't find it, but I'm sure she's out there. I'm just not her.

Last night I head my oldest daughter yelling at her sister. Top of the lungs. Screech. Shriek. Scream. It was like she became another person altogether.

Immediately I knew where she'd learned it. I sound like that at the end of the day when they won't get in the bathtub and they leave their toys in piles in the playroom. I sound like that when they bother and irritate each other with purpose and when they won't share. I sound like that and she learned it directly from the one she spends the most time with: me.

When I yell, I become a different mother. I know it. And I wouldn't want to be seven or three and be on the other end of me.

So I'm going to stop. Just like I will put down the chocolate chip cookie that begs to be devoured at 10:17 at night.

I refuse to beg my kids to obey. I will require it.
I won't plead or yell. I will be more patient.
I won't become hysterical. I'm going to try to be more calm.
And I'm going to really try hard not to yell anymore.

Do you yell?

Before She Gets Too Old

I look into her eyes, the same brown of mine, and want her to tell me everything behind them: Her innocuous seven-year-old secrets about dreams she's had and where she thinks the unicorns sleep and innocent thoughts sprinkled with anger about her baby sister invading her privacy. She keeps secrets about words girls say to her and what she thinks about God.

And I beg her to tell me.

She won't. She says that she can tell me everything but she has to keep at least one thing secret.

I ask her what that one thing is, if it is a good secret or a bad one. (what will I do if she says bad? and my mind begins to race...)

Good, of course. Mama...I have to keep one thing to myself.

Okay, as long as it's a good secret. Do you think you'll ever tell me?

She smiles, and says maybe.

Because I'm already worried that the dialogue will close. That I won't be able to say anything to her that she will trust or believe. I'm worried about all the non-innocent secrets she will have soon and that she'll still keep them to herself.

I don't need to know everything. I don't need to know how many times she'll be embarrassed by me or when she thinks that she hates me. I don't need to know that when she's twelve she might wish she was born into a different family.

So I'm trying to talk. A lot. And I'm trying to listen more than I talk and show her that I hear her. I want to be the one she tells the big secrets to.

And maybe one day, before she gets too old and forgets it all herself, she'll tell me where the unicorns sleep at night.

Humility

I find myself being humbled by my own children every day.

Standing at the checkout counter at the store my seven-year-old asks for a toy. And she asks again. And a third time. After two no's I tell her, "We buy what we need, not what we want." I even repeat it. And then I repeat in my own mind all the way home. I wonder how much of the contents of my own bags was want and not need. I'm the one who wields the wallet so I get to make the choices.

After my three-year-old turned 2 or so, I stopped requiring her to eat vegetables. Its a horrible confession, I know. But its true. And now, I am trying to undo the effects of my own laziness by bribing, hiding and sometimes forcing the issue. Its an uphill battle to teach my girls healthy eating habits: getting the right amount of fruits and vegetables, eating only when they are hungry and not summer-afternoon bored, and making the right choices when it is left up to them. And then in the evening I look at the remnants of two scoops of rocky road in my bowl. The ice cream I ate because I wanted it, not because I was hungry.

Hope has graduated past the loving-milk stage. She used to consume it by the gallon toting her sippy cup around like a hip flask. But a couple years of packed lunches with water as refreshment and her need for her milk in an almost icy state of cold has made her not ask for it anymore. Halfway through her breakfast this morning, she proclaimed that she couldn't drink it any longer because it wasn't cold enough. I was angry that she'd wasted it and went into a tirade about children in Africa without clean drinking water and no milk to nourish them. I made her pour it out and fumed for a couple minutes. Until I looked into my own garbage can. Toast crusts, leftover meat sauce I'd let sit out for too long, stale crackers. I'd done my own share of wasting and on a much larger scale than four ounces of nonfat milk.

Live what I teach. Be the woman I want them to be someday. And above all, allow my daughters to show me my errors.

A Choice

I could repaint my bedroom a perfect shade of a dusty, dusky blue that I've been lusting over for a couple months.

I could hang the photos that sit, framed, leaning up against the hallway wall. Ready. Waiting for a nail and a capable hammer.

And I could clean all of the clutter out from all the corners of my world. The papers, unintentional words and hurt feelings that get pushed to the edges of everything so they can be forgotten easier.

I could clear the canvas of my life so that it feels better to start again. I could.

Paint makes a bedroom feel cleaner, newer. Photos make my heart feel lived in. The cluttered-papers and words need to feel the bristles of a broom.

But I have to remember that I don't have to start over to accomplish something. I can begin with the walls I have and recognize the askew beauty of frames resting against the wall. I can start with the clutter I hold in my hands and then move shyly toward the clutter that resides in my heart.

I can start right where I am. Without being perfect. Before my clutter is filed and shredded. Before my walls are painted blue.

Because starting over is
sometimes
simply
a choice.

Explosions of Grace

From where we live we can see the Pacific Ocean.

We are over 20 miles from it, but we can still see it.

It's because we live in a hilly area of Orange County and we have an unobstructed view of the L.A. basin all the way out to the most famous of the Channel Islands, Catalina. But only when it's clear.

When there's no smog. And the June gloom has melted into July. And there are no smoky wildfires obscuring the view. And when it's really windy, we can actually see the ocean.

And at night we can see the lights. We've lived here for six years but it was only last year that we discovered that at 9 o'clock PM on the fourth of July, we can also see fireworks from our deck.

So on Saturday (after having put the kids to bed early because we'd done our fireworks duty on the third) my husband and I went outside to watch the shows. I counted about twenty distant fireworks shows across western Orange County.

And they were tiny.

I mean tiny. Itty bitty little explosions of gold and white and red in the night sky. Like sparklers held in a five-year-old's hand.

But If I'd been lying on a quilt underneath the display the blues and the greens and reds would have been absolutely huge. When they explode right above my head because I'm flush up against the shell-zone at the end of the field, I can't help but watch. I'm in the middle of it so I'm engulfed by it. And sometimes it even scares me.

But not from my deck. I can watch all the shows from one spot, never being startled by an explosion, never rattled, never worried, like I was when I was a child, that hot fireworks fallout would light something on fire. I could watch objectively from my deck comparing the finale of one to another. My perspective in the hills is far different than the perspective on the picnic blanket.

It's just like pain in childbirth. Or the hurt from family. Or when I think my marriage will never be healed. Or the year we got sued and we thought it would never end.

Inside and underneath the explosion, I can only see one thing. And it's huge. It infuses my sight and my hearing and I can't see anything else but the hurt and difficulty. The pain is everything.

But I have to remember that it really is tiny. In the scheme of life, with a God who cares intimately about my hurts and hardships, the big displays of difficulty are tiny in comparison to His grace.

But he doesn't just watch from the deck. He crawls down close and waits with me on the quilt. He waits until it's over and the explosions don't seem as big any longer. He helps me to realize that it's temporary and that someday, our hardships really will seem small next to the extravagant explosions of His grace.

Fireworks

I haven't always had a fascination with fireworks.

I don't know. I can't explain it. But I know I didn't have it when I was a kid. I mean I loved fireworks as much as any other kid, but not like this. It started sometime around 12th grade.

An almost abnormal fascination. Or an obsession, maybe.

They stop me. I know it might seem silly, but I am in total awe of them.

It's something about the otherness-power of them. A little like riding a horse. There is something so not-me about the magnitude of a horse, something so strong that doesn't have anything at all to do with me.

And there is the light. The light exploding in front of me as soon as the summer sky darkens. Blankets spread on the grass, and then the light behind me when I turn to look at everyone's faces. And then I laugh because I know I'm not alone. Everyone else is in the same awe that I am.

My girls scream with happiness. And it's all that I own not to scream with them. And they continue to fascinate me, right up until the very end when we all begin to guess the finale. This is the finale... No this is! NO, THIS has got to be the finale!

And it is. And it's amazing.

But that's the best thing about being a mother. I can be a little girl all over again.

Loving Most

Today she is learning about girls.

She is learning that girls will hate each other. And that they say mean things. The kinds of things that you have to go to therapy about when you are 29.

She is learning that girls don't know why they feel the way they do sometimes. She is struggling with this herself, fighting frustration daily.

She will have to learn that girls will say, "I don't want to be your friend." Sometimes they will say it with words. And sometimes they will say it with secrets whispered to someone else, a subtle scooting away from her on a bench, a seat saved for someone else.

I have to teach her that girls turn into women who act the same way. And that little girls who act despicably sometimes act that way because their mothers do. So I have to act like the woman I want her to be someday.

She will have to learn that as the girl who will always love more, she will always be left out.

But then sometimes someone comes along who knows you inside before you even meet. And she's the one you call on the phone and say, "It's me."

She might hurt you too, but at least you know she'll always love you.

She'll have to learn, as she grows, to do what she can to protect her heart from the girls who will never like her, but keep it soft enough to be open to love. I will have to teach her something I don't even know how to do myself.

But then there is love. And there's nothing wrong in that.

We'll get through this together. I'm learning as much as she is.