A Part in the Clouds

The storm has broken. At least that's what life feels like lately at my house. After months and months of working on making our son feel good again, I think we are close. There are still some cloudy days with short spurts of storminess, but I feel like we're finally hitting a good stride with him.

That said, my entire body feels exhausted! We've had an entire summer of being on high alert. We've analyzed every move we make, trying to make sense of what might trigger our son's mood swings. Ultimately, there is no one thing that predictably triggers the roiling storms that sometimes take over our house, but we are getting better at battening down the hatches and trying to tame the beast within that looks a lot like my son.

One of the most profound events of the summer happened just last week. My daughter, whom my husband tells people "basically poops sunshine and rainbows," and who has born the brunt of our son's malice for months on end, finally broke down. This bundle of joy has spent months shrugging her shoulders whenever her brother is mean to her and rationalizes "it's not my brother, that's just Bull (the bully in our son's head) acting out again." I've been amazed her how well she's taken the abuse from her brother. I've marveled at how calm she is while I feel like throwing a fit of equal proportions to our son's when he's mean to my daughter. So, when our son finally turned the corner and we started to feel like we were getting our son back a little more each day, a couple of unexpected blow-ups felt especially heart-wrenching for all of us.

Well past bed-time, our some was treating us to a major fit, when I thought to send our daughter up to our room to hopefully get her to sleep. As I walked into her room, I was welcomed by a sobbing girl, so different from her usually amiable self. Between jagged breaths she cried out "I miss Jojo! I miss Jojo!"

I felt the same way, but it was a million times harder to hear her say it. This struggle has affected all of us in different ways, but to see this eternally bright spot in our house finally hit the breaking point was beyond tough. I made our daughter tell her brother what she'd said, then held her, tears streaming down my own cheeks.

The next day, our house free of turmoil, I made sure to tell my son once more what his sister had said,  and hoped it would sink in. I don't know if it did, but I feel like my kids are enjoying each others' company more these days. My son is nicer to his little sister. My daughter's glow has returned. And hopefully, just hopefully, the worst of this storm has passed.

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.

What's A Mother To Do?

So I recently wrote a post about bullying, which my husband asked me to unpost because my message wasn't clear enough.


My son is not a bully - I will say that right off the bat. My point, however, was that there is a fine line between the perception of bullying and being irritating. As a family, we've worked hard with our son to get him to understand that not everyone wants to be touched, hugged, or wrestled with. We all get that. He gets that. But could others think he's a bully? I don't know.  I do know he means well, but that he does crave a physical boyish ruggedness that I think is sometimes hard to control.

That said, I think the main point of my other post was not that my son could be a bully, or even that others could perceive him as such, but rather that I don't know how to provide a safe and acceptable outlet for rough housing. There aren't many sports at his age where it's ok to tackle others, nor do I necessarily want him to. But what's the solution here? As I said in my erased post, so many experts over the last few years have talked about needing to let boys be boys, but how do we do that? Our society is no longer built for that. Kids don't wrestle because we've taught them not to from a young age. Please know that I'm not saying that we should allow our sons to go start a Fight Club or anything, but what do we do?

I don't have the answer. Do you?