Boo! Ooops! Sorry I Scared You!

I love Halloween! I don't know if it's always been my favorite holiday, but as an adult I look forward to decorating for this holiday more than Christmas, and have much less stress associated with it, after all there are no presents to buy, just costumes and candy and a few decorations.

That said, I had an interesting conversation with my good girlfriends last night.

As a little background, we all live in the same community here in Minnesota. It's a small first-ring suburb of Minneapolis that has a quality of a small town in that you get to know people in the community by sight just by living here long enough. You can't make it through a Target trip without running into several people you know, and it seems like everyone you know knows several other people you know, even if you did't know they knew them. :)

My aforementioned girlfriends and I all have kids that are roughly the same age, but many of them go to different schools, my kids' school being the strictest and sometimes too PC of them all. I will frequently ask if new policies enacted in our school have been mirrored in theirs and usually the answer is no, with perplexed headshakes and chuckles. Last year it was the institution of a very strict snack policy which allowed only certain very healthy foods in the classroom. Last night, my question was on Halloween in their schools.

Officially I think all or our schools have "Fall Parties," with the understanding that we are really celebrating Halloween, though we're not allowed to say so. The kids are allowed to dress in costume and we play games, have snacks, and do art projects with a leaning towards the Halloween theme. This year, however, is different - at least at my kids' school. It was announced this year that some students find Halloween too scary and therefore our Fall Party will indeed be a Fall Party with no ties to Halloween.

It doesn't seem like it should be a big deal, right? And it's not really, but part of me is really sad about this. Like Thanksgiving (which we are allowed to acknowledge in my children's school even though they go to a Spanish Immersion school where the countries focused on do not celebrate it), Halloween is a distinct American tradition. Sure, it's celebrated in some other countries, but it's as American as football, baseball, and apple pie. The value of dressing up and being able to create another identity for yourself - being able to express some part of you in a way that isn't done so on a daily basis through normal, everyday clothes and routines, is so important and enriching (as said by my friend Rachel, who is a kindergarten teacher).

All of the schools in our community are IB schools - that's International Baccalaureate for those unfamiliar. This means that they have a distinct focus on a global view of the world and their educational focus. Though my kids' school is not an official IB school, we follow they same curriculum and have a global viewpoint simply by being a Spanish school. My friend Jen had a fantastic point, which is, we seem to have adopted such a global point of view that we are no longer able to embrace and celebrate our own culture. We have devalued uniquely American traditions in an effort to embrace everyone else's.

Is there something wrong with being an American in a global society? There are very few things we seem to be able to claim as American. We are such a hodgepodge of other cultures and traditions that we don't have many things that are just ours. We've gotten rid of all ties to religious holidays in the schools, which I see as fine as an effort to include all, regardless of religious affiliation, but Halloween is a completely secular holiday and should be looked at as such.

I've frequently questioned why, as a Spanish Immersion school we don't celebrate Dia de los Muertos, a Mexican holiday which honors and celebrates deceased ancestors and incorporates elaborate skeletons in it's decorations. There is no answer for this question, other than my own assumption that if Halloween is too scary, then the skeletons of Dia de los Muertos would really be too much.

I'm sure these policies will not be reversed now that they are set in motion, but I for one will be mourning the loss of my favorite holiday in my kids' globally minded school.

Keep That Spark Shining!

I realized the other day that I have written about being a mom, being a job seeker, and being a person, but not much about being an artist. 

At my kids' school their counsellor has worked hard over the years to get them in tune with their "spark" - you know, that thing that makes them who they are. I love this idea - it is a great way to show the kids what they are good at and focus on the positives in their lives. 

I would say that I am good at a number of things - writing, relating to other people's children, putzing in my garden, making lasagna, you get the idea. But the thing I've always felt a special connection to was art. It's the one thing that as I do it, time escapes me and I don't know if minutes or hours have passed. Most of what I do is self taught - though I've taken a couple of classes here and there, I don't have a degree in fine art. All I do comes from inside me somewhere. I've always loved to draw, and was fascinated by paint but was too scared to try it. For my birthday one year, my awesome husband bought me everything I needed to paint, and said "There, now quit your whining about not know how to paint and just do it!" It was a struggle at first - mostly in figuring out what to paint and how colors work together - but one day I copied a painting by an artist I love whose painting was used on a CD cover we had. I realized I'd done a pretty decent job and started studying her works to emulate her style. After many years my style has become my own with obvious influences by this artist - Pattsi Valdez, a contemporary artist in LA. 

The dumb thing is, though, that when I'm stressed or feeling blue, the one thing that should bring me out of it, falls to the wayside and gets neglected in the corner until I'm feeling better about things. I've tried to paint or create when I'm unhappy or stressed and I usually wind up making mistakes and getting frustrated and just walking away from it. Art is my happy place, where unhappy thoughts aren't welcome. i know some people explore those deep, dark, brooding places within through their art, but I just can't do that. There's enough of that stuff in the everyday world. I need to create places that make me happy. Places that I would love to crawl into with a book and just live for a while. All that said, I'm very happy that in the last couple of weeks, the cobwebs have been wiped off of my brushes and paints and I've been working on several pieces simultaneously. I've even been exploring some new ideas, and even using people as subjects, which rarely happens in my works as I'm not so good at painting them. 

So what's the point of this blog? It's simply this: don't lose your spark! Hold it near and dear, and even if you have to set it aside for a little while, always, ALWAYS come back to it. It's this spark that defines us, if not in the world, to ourselves. 

I Plead Guilty

The dog is whining, the dishes await, dinner isn't cooking itself, and yet I'm here writing this blog. There's this part of me, some rebellious part, that loves that I'm not doing these things I'm "supposed" to be doing. And another that feels guilty for not tackling my long to do list and a million other things that could be done around the house.

This brings me to todays topic. Mom guilt. It's neck and neck with Catholic guilt but unlike being a Catholic if you're really good at being a mom, your guilt probably never goes away. My apologies to Catholics if this offends - I am only speaking from my experience through friends and family with ties to the Catholicism.

We mothers are champions at feeling guilty about everything we do and everything we don't do. We feel guilty about passing along genetic factors that we have no control over. We feel guilty for not spending every moment of the day with our babies. We feel guilty when our children say we're being too harsh or too overprotective, and we feel guilty when we are too lenient or relaxed.

If you're not on high alert every minute of the day, you must be a horrible mom. Right?

Why don't we as mom's seem to talk more about the hard things we go through? I'm not trying to be whiney here, I promise. My point is more one of community building. I meet so many young moms going through the same things I went through 5 or 6 years ago when my kids were toddlers and preschoolers, but I assure them it's all normal and give them advice on how to help their situations. They are so grateful and almost surprised that other moms go through the same things. Are we, as a society too concerned with appearing to have the perfect family that we can't open up to others who could probably use an ear or at least a reassurance that they and their children are normal? That what they are going through is the same thing you are? I wonder if we could get more respite from guilt if we chose to see other mothers not as competition in the game of who's family is better, but rather as other passengers on the same ride down a bumpy and rough road.

It's not easy being a parent. Why not try to help others along the way? You may just wind up helping yourself.