Gryffin on Mother’s Day — looking lovingly at his slice of coffee cake

Take the sex question.  Jason and I are open about our bodies and our body parts and have always tried to answer the boys’ questions honestly and factually.  No shame.  No big thing.  But it’s still… awkward.   Picture Isaiah, hands on his knees, curiously peering up my legs and saying “Mama… mama no ha’ penis?”  Nope.  Nope, I sure don’t, son.  Or explaining over breakfast how exactly that baby DID get into Emily’s belly and praying like mad that Gryffin won’t bring it up at the baby shower later that day.   But the thing with the sex questions is that they are really only awkward for ME.  The boys don’t find it awkward at all.  And why should they?  They move seamlessly from chatting about their penises to chatting about the tractor they saw yesterday on the way to preschool.   No big thing.

But death?  Death is so much harder, so much messier and painful to discuss.  It’s not as easy to be factual and straightforward about death.  We were driving in the car Saturday morning and Gryffin asks me, completely out of the blue, about my grandmas.   I told him about my still-living grandmother, Pat, and left it at that.  But he kept pushing.  He’s got two grandmas so he knew that I’d left one out.   I continued to evade his questions because I was scared and I didn’t want to have this conversation by myself.   I told him that my other grandmother’s name was Nancy, like mine, but that we called her Ed.  I hoped he would be sidetracked by the cool nickname but no.  He was feeling relentless and asked where she was and why he didn’t know her.

I don’t usually sweat much but I honestly felt a little clammy as I answered that she had died a few years ago.  If you don’t have kids, maybe my reaction sounds a little… over the top?  Like I’m making a mountain out of a molehill?  I think that’s what I would have thought 5 years ago.  But this was Gryffin’s very first time hearing about death.  And it pained me to tell him about it.  He seemed instinctually to have imagined something so different than what I was telling him and he had so, so many questions.

Jason and I are Christians but answering, “you go to heaven to be with Jesus after you die,” while ultimately part of our theology, seems too glib, too easy and ultimately limiting in scope and imagination.    Even if they one day choose something different, a different faith or a different path, or no faith at all, I want to give Gryffin and Isaiah a wide open, breathtaking, beautiful theology of heaven.   And that started last Saturday in the car on the way to a birthday party.

Isaiah was not feeling cooperative about photos on Mother’s Day.  This was the best I got!

Here’s how part of the conversation went, in all it’s winding 4-year-old and 3-year-old fashion… don’t judge, I did my best!

Gryffin: What is “died”?
Me: Well, people don’t live on and on and on forever… here on earth…in this life.  People die when their life here is finished.  My grandma died.
Gryffin: And then what?  Where do they go when they’re died?
Me: Papa and I think that after you die you will live forever in the presence of God
Gryffin: Is it heaven?
Me: Yes, we call it heaven.
Gryffin: Have you been there?
Me: No, I haven’t been there.  That’s the hard part — nobody has ever been there and come back to tell us about it.  Maybe because it’s just too awesome to come back?  I don’t know.

Isaiah interjects: But how will we get home?
and before I can come up with an answer, he gives his own answer…
Isaiah: Maybe at the airport…
Gryffin: I don’t think there is an airport at heaven, Bups.  Is there, Mama?
Me: No, I don’t think there is an airport like we know it.  But I really don’t know.
Gryffin: Will we be together, you and me and Buppy and Papa?
Me: I think so, yes.  I don’t know if we will finish our life here at the same time but I do think we’ll be together in some way.  And I think we will love each other more than we ever have before.

Long pause

Gryffin: So God isn’t here?  With us?
Me: Well, that’s the amazing thing about God.  God is everywhere.  God is in heaven, with people who are no longer living here with us.  And God is here, with us.  God is in all things and through all things, above all things and underneath all things…
Gryffin: Is God in our car?
Me: Yes!  God is in our car, God is in you, God is in me, God is in the water, on that boat, in your bed, God is in the jail (a big topic of conversation lately, jail), in our house, in the garden, and the sky and…
Gryffin: Mama!  Is God in our exhaust pipe?
Me: He’s totally in our exhaust pipe!
Gryffin: Cool… I wonder if God is all smokey in there…

I sure hope that God in our exhaust pipe isn’t too sacrilegious but that’s about as holy as it gets for my four-year-old.  Anyhow, the conversation moved in a new direction after that and it left me feeling grateful that this will be an ongoing conversation (yes, like the sex one… seriously, it just keeps going and going and going…) and that I will have more opportunities to answer these unending questions in a way that inspires my kids to hope rather than fear.

It’s not that my faith is unwavering.  Sometimes I feel paralyzed with the fear of death, the fear of dying before my boys grow up, the fear of Jason or Isaiah or Gryffin dying.  Life feels so sad and overwhelming at times, more so than ever lately.  But my theology of heaven has taken root over the years and what was once a boring one-dimensional similitude of sitting around singing for all eternity has given way to a vision that far surpasses what I ever dreamed it could be.  So I choose to keep hoping even when I’m in the throes of doubt; I choose to keep tugging and pulling at my image of heaven until it can sweep me up in it.  Books have always helped me expand the outer reaches of my imagination and although I think I have quoted it before, this has been my most stalwart image of what it might be like to die and see what comes next.  It’s from The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis, when the unicorn glimpses Narnia for the first time.

“I have come home at last. This is my real country. I belong here. This is the land I’ve been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now!  The reason why we loved the old Narnia so much is because it sometimes looked a little like this.”

I sure hope that’s what it’s like.  In Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone, Dumbledore tells Harry, “…to the well-organised mind, death is but the next great adventure.”  Good theologian, that Dumbledore.  I’m not sure my mind is all that well organized but I like to think of death that way.  And I’d like to impart at least some sense of that adventure to Gryffin and Isaiah– you know, amidst all the endless Q&A about sex and death and armadillos and jail and such.

——————————-

“Hmmpf, it’s good, I guess, but I think you took the easy way out.  You neglected to address what makes a boy a boy if he’s NOT playing with guns, being too loud or staring at women.”

To which I responded maturely with a “but, but…but that’s hard,” and a “hmmpf!” of my own.  We ended up tossing around several ideas about what exactly makes men men and women women but ultimately we came to no good conclusions and we tabled the discussion for the night.   

The conversation left me wondering, though.  Is this something I need to figure out?  Clearly there are differences between boys and girls, like testosterone and estrogen levels, different chromosomes and the like.  But what is a parent supposed to do with those differences?  Do I need to teach my boys to be “manly?”  Does manliness matter?

A couple days ago I read this quote by Cesar Chavez…

I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally non-violent struggle for justice.  To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men!

For a split second I envisioned my boys throwing their arms up over their heads like William Wallace, shouting “God help us be men!” and I thought “Here it is!  This is what it means to be a man.  I’d be happy for my boys to strive for this.”    And I would.  But wouldn’t I also be happy for my (admittedly hypothetical) daughter to strive for these things as well?   What about this particular description of struggling for justice and suffering for others is particularly manly?

And there’s the rub, I think.  That’s why it’s so daunting to try to figure it out.  Because if I did somehow manage to come up with a list of what it means to be a man or what it means to be a woman, there are bound to be countless men and women who would not fit the description.  Probably my own kids wouldn’t even fit the description.  And then what?

Our culture typically assumes that “manly” men are tough.  Stoic.  Firmly heterosexual.  And sports fans.  Definitely sports fans.   What about my husband who wouldn’t know an NBA player from the high school MVP?  Is he not manly enough?  Or my firmly NON-heterosexual friend, Michael…where would he fit in here?  He’s certainly a man but he doesn’t meet all the criteria on that list.

Maybe it’s all in the “equipment?”   Is that what makes a woman a woman?   Her breasts, her vagina, her uterus, et al?  What about my good friend who had a hysterectomy several years ago?  Is she no longer a woman?   Or my friend who lost her breasts to a double mastectomy.  Is she less female without them?  No, certainly they are still women!  Right?

You see the trouble?  Other cultures, other people, have their own lists, their own assumptions and expectations, and many of them are in complete contrast to our own.  What then?  Which one is correct?  Which parts of us are nature, which parts nurture?   Which parts biological and which parts cultural?  We will probably never know.  And I’m not sure it really matters. 

In our house, there are some things we do that are stereotypical (Jason usually takes out the trash, I do the laundry) and some ways that we go against the grain.  We’ve figured out where we each excel (me = cleaning, J = not so much) and fought over figured out what works well for us as a family.  But there isn’t anything specific that Jason does because he’s the man.  I don’t think that it’s important for Jason to be the “man of the house.”  I do think that it is important, vital even, for him to be the Jason of the house; for him to be his fullest and most real self, whatever that may look like.  Because being a man (or a woman) is apparently not something that can be nailed down or boxed in.  I don’t deny that there are differences between the two of us but I don’t ever worry about whether Jason is being “man enough.” I do worry about whether he is being Jason enough.

I know that this is just a tiny cross-section of the larger discussion surrounding gender and identity and sex and attraction but rather than teaching my boys to be men, I think I’ll focus instead on teaching them to be themselves.   To be Gryffin and Isaiah in all their Gryffin and Isaiah-ness.  Because in the end, I can’t think of a single quality that I would want to teach my boys in order that they be good men that I wouldn’t also want to teach my daughter.

Forcing my kids to be someone other than who they are so that they can fit into the restrictive “man” box our society or our church or we ourselves have constructed for them would do them harm.  I’m sure that they themselves will try to fit into one of those boxes as they grow up and start to sort things out on their own.  We’ve all done it.  But I hope they don’t stay in there too long.  Brene Brown (I know, my new BFF) writes in Daring Greatly,  “We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known…” and that is one of my deepest and dearest dreams for my boys; that they would be willing to show me and Jason and the world their most vulnerable and powerful selves.  And that seems hard enough, don’t you think?

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What do you think?  Do you teach your kids certain things because they are male or female?

I could spend my days in blissful silence, sipping my latte, a la Carrie Bradshaw, writing  relevant or witty or possibly even beautiful essays.  Maybe an advice column like Dear Sugar.  Or a collection of letters to my kids.  Or a parenting journal like Anne Lamott.   Wouldn’t it be grand if I was supposed to be writing all the time?  You know, because it was my job.

I enjoy my work as a birth doula immensely.  It has challenged me and changed me and moved me in ways that I never imagined for myself.  I won’t be changing careers.  Not a chance.  But there IS one catch to the doula-ing gig.  You can’t do it by yourself!  Ever.  There is almost NO aspect of my job that involves sitting at my desk in silence.  With the exception of billing, scheduling and responding to client emails/calls/texts, every part of my job is face-to-face.   I think I might have one of the best, most fulfilling jobs possible and I feel so fortunate to have stumbled upon it, but my need to recharge in solitude is sometimes impossible (remember my two kids?) and that’s when my dreams of writing full-time take flight.

My friend, Laurel, and I were talking about our introverted (me) and extroverted (her) natures and I remember trying to describe to her how I was always dreaming about more alone time.  She nodded thoughtfully and said, “hmmm… when I’M with my kids all day, I imagine all sorts of wonderful conversations that I’d like to have with other people… and you imagine all sorts of wonderful conversations that you’d like to have with… yourself?”

Exactly.

I enjoy writing because it’s like having a conversation with myself.  It’s like putting my jumble of thoughts into a juicer.  It somehow takes my chaotic assortment of musings and contemplation and theological pondering and compresses it to release something coherent.   I find it exhilarating and cathartic at the same time.

Every night at dinner, our family goes around and shares our “favorite part of the day.”  The highlight, of course, is hearing Gryffin and Isaiah’s favorite parts.  Or, “fay pah day” as Isaiah currently calls it.  If I’ve posted here that day, my favorite part is almost always writing.   I guess everyone daydreams about being paid to do that one thing that they enjoy so very much.  And I’m no exception.  Everyone’s got to have a dream, right?

So now you know mine.  What would you pick if you could be paid to do that ONE thing?

——–

A few favorite parts from this weekend…

Isaiah, post jelly sandwich

Gryffin waking up from a nap yesterday.

We’ll take what we can get.

The famous cherry blossoms.  These ones at the Washington Park Arboretum near UW.

We’re all smiling – it’s a springtime miracle.  Half my head is gone but we won’t sweat the details.

Jason pretending to be Sleeping Beauty.

The view from the kitchen. I really like how the setting sun hits those trees beyond the pond.  Such light and color in the evening.

And when it’s clear, we can even sneak a peak of the downtown skyline on the left.

Aaaaand, back indoors on a rainy day.

My folks left town on Monday so we’re back to folding our own laundry and acting like grown ups again.  Jason is heading to Portland for a conference next week so I need to get back on my game before he heads out as well.  For now, I’m off to enjoy the sunshine while we’ve got it. 

You are 3-years-old today.  Three years ago you left my body for this grand adventure we call Life.  And what an adventure it has already been!  I am so eager to see how you will walk through life in the years to come.  You, my boy who has always seemed so at ease in the world; so content being YOU…  with your adventurous spirit, your uncanny ability to read people’s emotions, your unbelievable negotiation skills, your joy at all things jogging and your easy affection, you are already well on your way, sweet boy.

But this, your birthday week, has been a heavy one. Tragic and terrifying and almost too much to take in.  A bombing at the Boston Marathon.  A massive explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas.  Two people I know lost family members.   So much death and despair and sadness.

The reality, I know, is that this sort of thing happens all the time.  All over the world.  But when it gets close like this?   When it feels like it might just reach all the way out and actually touch me, it makes me so much more afraid.  And it makes me want to tighten my tenterhooks around you.  To pull you in and never let go.  But it’s your birthday today.  How can I celebrate your birth, your ever-onward-and-upward, with this fear that might suffocate me?  How can I cheer you on as you continue to walk forward in Life when all I want to do is pull you back in?

When I feel afraid like this, my sense of foreboding joy kicks into high gear.  Foreboding joy is another piece of vulnerability armor that Brene Brown writes about in her book, Daring Greatly.  It’s the inability to fully and deeply experience joy without a sense of foreboding attached.    It looks like this…

• You’re driving in your car with your kids, loving the way their voices sound as they sing along to the music, feeling the sun on your skin, looking at the gorgeous views all around you… and then you let your mind wander to what it might happen if you got into a terrible wreck.  Moment ruined.
• You just had a great conversation with your husband, you’re feeling connected and alive and happy about your relationship.  Then you flash forward to his funeral and try to come up with something to say for his eulogy.  Moment ruined.
• You are watching your kids sleep and you are overcome; absolutely flooded with love for them.  Instead of enjoying the moment in it’s fullness, you think about the kid you know who is dying of cancer.  And you start to imagine walking down that road yourself.  Moment ruined. 

You get the idea.  I do this sort of thing all the time, Isaiah.  It’s a piece of “vulnerability armor” because I do it in order to avoid feeling vulnerable.  When I watch you and your brother sleeping or enjoy a meaningful conversation with Papa… those are some of the very best moments in my life.  But they are scary, too.  They are scary because when I am happy, the possibility for profound sadness feels unbearable.   Because there is the possibility of a bomb.  Or an explosion or, or,…  And I mistakenly think that by rehearsing grief or tragedy, I will somehow make it easier on myself should one of those terrible outcomes actually came to pass.  But there is NO way to prepare myself for such grief.  There is nothing in the world that could prepare me for the complete annihilation that would be mine if I lost you.  All I’m doing is ruining the incredible moments that I DO have by allowing a sense of foreboding to enter into my joy.

Brown says that in order to lower our vulnerability armor, we need to walk toward the joy we feel rather than run from it.  We need to feel it in all it’s fullness, acknowledge that we are scared, and leave it at that.   Easier said than done.  I’m good at rehearsing eulogies and all sorts of grief and sadness.  And it has always felt safer to do it that way.  But now I know it’s not.  I’m no safer and I’m only missing out.  So for you, my wild and wonderful 3-year-old boy, and for me, I want to jump all the way in.  I want to to lean toward the joy instead of pulling back with the false pretense of protection.   And I hope that as you grow you will learn to jump in with me without fear.

This week, amidst all this sadness swirling about us, I feel SO happy when I gaze upon your sweet face.  I love you immensely.  I am so happy that you are alive.  I can’t believe that we belong to each other.  I’m also scared. The grief and fear is palpable and always will be, I suppose.  But you are and always will be one of the greatest joys of my life.   I can’t wait to jump into more and more joy with you as the years unfold.  Happy Birthday, Bup.

Love, Mama

In your new “jogging” outfit.

Birthday breakfast

Three!

I feel like time is running out when it comes to holding him that way.  The gig is almost up. With kids you never know when you’re going to do or see something for the last time.   You only know it in hindsight, in retrospect, when you suddenly realize that your kid isn’t, say, sucking his fingers anymore and you only just now noticed.  Or that your baby is pronouncing “three” as clear as day instead of “flea!”   When did that start, you wonder.   Or maybe that your kids have stopped singing to the dessert fairy and just ask for a brownie now like… well, like a regular person.

It’s not always sad.  I don’t think I’ll be bumming too hard when Isaiah misses his aim and pees all over the floor for the last time.  Or when Gryff stops wiping his nose on my shirt (every.single.day).   No big loss there.   But some things are harder to let go.   And holding my  boys with their heads resting on my shoulder ranks up there at the very top.

Me and Gryff, 2008

]]> http://www.therustylife.com/2013/04/statute-of-limitations/feed/ 3 http://www.therustylife.com/2013/04/boys-will-be-boys/ http://www.therustylife.com/2013/04/boys-will-be-boys/#comments Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:16:43 +0000 nance http://www.therustylife.com/?p=1653 Continue reading →]]> What does that phrase actually mean?  More often than not, it just seems like an excuse for a man to do something thoughtless, violent, cruel or stupid.  It’s kind of like when someone prefaces a sentence by saying “don’t take this personal, but…”  That’s really just code for “I’m about to say something really hurtful and rude but since I opened with don’t take it personal, I get a pass to say it anyway.”

Anyhow, now that I have two boys I find myself wondering what boys will be boys really means?  Here’s how I’ve heard it referenced in circles surrounding my kids…

Example A: Gryffin and Isaiah are playing with a couple other boys about their age at the park.  I don’t know the other kids or the mother.  They start getting REALLY loud, whooping and hollering and roaring, pretending to be pumas and dragons and I don’t know what.  Unknown mom kind of grimaces and says “well, boys will be boys, I guess” in an apologetic tone.

Example B: Gryffin and Isaiah are with me at a coffee shop, playing next to my table with some of the toys provided at the cafe.  Another mom and her boy come in.  The boy looks to be a year or two older than Gryffin was at the time.  Almost immediately he picks up one of the blocks and pretends it’s a gun or weapon or something and starts saying “bang bang” and “pow pow” and what not while pointing it at G and Z.   My kids, who don’t yet know about weapons, look kind of bewildered for a moment before going back to what they were doing.  The mom turns to me, no joke, and says knowingly “I can just see his primal warrior instincts when he gets like that” which I think is a Seattle version of boys will be boys.

Example C:  We are with a group of friends. There is a baby girl there.  Both of my boys are attempting to touch her cheeks and one of them tries to give her a kiss.   Everyone laughs.  There are jokes about future dating possibilities and as the attempts continue, someone chuckles and says “well, boys will be boys.”

Minor examples.  Sometimes it’s harmless. Sometimes not.   With my young boys it mostly comes in the form of (A) I’m embarrassed that my boy is so loud and wild, (B) I’m kind of worried because he’s playing with weapons or (C) over-sexualizing the situation.  With older boys and men, I hear it when they get too raucous or a little too rough with each other, when they look a little too long at a woman walking by, when they are making fun of each other, when they drink too much, when they don’t help out around the house.  With both it’s like a blanket.  Something to toss over boys behaving badly so that their behavior is somehow acceptable, or at least excusable.  So long as it can fit under the blanket, it’s cool.  Boys will be boys.

When I think about all of this within the context of parenting Isaiah and Gryffin, I don’t want to let my boys off the hook by tossing them under that blanket.  And I don’t want them to let themselves off the hook, either.   So here’s my take on the examples listed above…

• Are my boys loud sometimes?  Absolutely.  Are they loud BECAUSE they are boys?  No way.  They are loud sometimes because they are Gryffin and Isaiah.  They are loud because they are 3 and 4 years old.  I’m not embarrassed by their loudness and I don’t (usually) need to apologize for it.  Are girls equally as loud?  You bet.
• Weapons.  This is the one I have been thinking about the most lately.  Here are the two things that stand out for me  ——-
  1. As a person of faith I’ve been trying to figure out how my Christian theology informs the topic of my kids and weapons, particularly guns.  I don’t believe guns are part of the kingdom of God.  So in an effort to live proleptically, I don’t want to normalize something that is not part of the kingdom of God.
  2.  I’ve heard of a study (can’t find it, though) that proved that if left to their own devices in front of a mirror, little girls will talk to themselves and little boys will pretend to use weapons to shoot at their reflections.  This implies that it’s just innate, just part of a boys’ “hard wiring” to be violent and to fashion weapons.  I don’t know if this is true or not.  But I DO know that neither one of my boys ever pretended to play with weapons before the age of 3.  They didn’t fashion swords out of sticks or make their legos into guns.  Isaiah still doesn’t.  Gryffin, at 4.5, has only recently picked up on the idea of weapons and I think he now has a very loose understanding of the concept of a gun.  But only after he was introduced to them by some friends.  It didn’t just happen naturally.  It was a learned behavior.  I explained to him that our family does not even pretend to play with guns, told him why, and that was that.   He took it in stride.  It hasn’t hindered his play in the slightest and he is no less boy because of it.
• Is there something sexual about my boys touching a baby girl and trying to kiss her?  No.  They are mimicking the things they see Jason and I doing with them and that’s a great thing.  I continue to teach both my boys about personal boundaries because I want them to learn to how to respect another person’s space.   Responding to their repeated and over-eager attempts to kiss a baby with a laugh and a “boys will be boys” will wrongly teach them that that’s just the way they are.  It’s expected.  Nothin’ you can do about it.   Boys will be boys.

Ultimately, I think succumbing to the boys will be boys mentality is the easy way out.  It’s SO much easier to just chuckle and chalk it up to boys being boys.   It’s much harder to go against the cultural grain, to have to teach our kids appropriate ways to behave, to intentionally work through the assumptions and the expectations that just seep in.  

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Those are my thoughts.  I’m curious to hear yours.  Will boys be boys or will we dare to imagine something better for them and have the courage to put it into practice?

• Immediately after birth (within an hour), he had eczema all over his body
• The eczema ebbed and flowed the whole first year.  He constantly scratched behind his ears and we would find him scratching his arms/legs/belly in his sleep.
• He also coughed constantly.   At every well child check, we’d ask the ped to check his lungs.  They were always clear.  But he coughed and coughed and coughed.
• A few weeks before his first birthday, we let him have some scrambled eggs at a restaurant.  He swelled a little around his lips and cheeks and I kept thinking he was choking on something, checking his mouth, and he seemed agitated.   Within an hour, he threw up, and then seemed perfectly fine.
• Given the history with the eczema and the reaction to the eggs, our ped sent us to an allergist.
• The allergist (April 2011) tested him for the most common food/indoor/outdoor allergies.  He was diagnosed with egg, peanut and tree nut allergies.  She also suspected he had some form of asthma.  We were given inhalers, ointment for the eczema, and schooled in the proper use of an epi-pen.
• Jason and I assumed that because we knew about these specific food allergies, that the eczema and the coughing would subside once we had entirely removed the peanuts/tree nuts/eggs from his diet.  Not so much.  The scratching and the itching continued.
• At his follow up with the allergist one year later (May 2012), we retested and he did not test positive for a tree nut allergy.  Score!  One down!  Still allergic to eggs and peanuts, though.  She gave me new ideas for treating his eczema and the chronic coughing; new ointments, new inhalers.
• September 2012 – I found him banging his head on the wall in his sleep.  Hard.  I’d heard him doing it for weeks but assumed he was kicking the wall with his foot.   He had goose-egg lumps on the back of his head, indicating that he’d likely been banging his head the whole time, not his feet.  This sent me on a crazy search to find the cause, as this was new behavior and my research led me to believe it was likely food-related.  We tracked it down (we THINK) to annatto.  Never heard of it?  We hadn’t either.  It’s a natural food coloring, derived from the seeds of the achiote tree, to make food yellow or orange.  It’s considered organic because it comes from a tree.  It’s in the cheddar cheese that Isaiah had recently started eating from Trader Joes and it’s in goldfish crackers (among many other things) which they serve at his preschool.  We took it out of his diet, the head banging stopped almost immediately and he hasn’t done it since.  His eczema also seemed to improve for a short time.

So here we are, gearing up for his yearly check up with the allergist.  He has recently (once at preschool this past February and once while we were in Santa Barbara) had some minor episodes, probably due to exposure to peanuts.  Both times he was with someone else so we can’t be sure.  But he ate something that might have had traces of peanuts and both times he broke out in hives on his belly and back, cried inconsolably and then threw up.  Then he was fine.  Kind of like that first exposure to eggs.  So who knows?  Maybe he’s got something new going on?  Maybe he was just exposed to peanuts?

I go back and forth.  Sometimes I worry a lot and frantically research online, trying to find new ideas to relieve all his itching, soothe his cough, and trouble-shoot all things allergy.  Then there are days when I think eh, he’s going to fine.  There are days when he refuses food and will only drink almond milk all day and the occasional piece of fruit.  But there are worse things in the world, right?

One thing that has improved lately is his cough.  At some point (I’m fuzzy on the date), we learned that he has reactive airways, which is a form of asthma.  He doesn’t wheeze when he’s exercising but when he gets sick, especially with something respiratory, his reactive airways act up BIG TIME.  He got a terrible flu this past January and ended up coughing so hard that he threw up several times and burst some blood vessels in his eyes.  Poor guy.  But that illness and all the calls to the doctor led us to carefully using a cough suppressant (not expectorant) at night and eliminating milk from his diet.  It has made ALL the difference.  It has been such a relief.  The cough suppressant, which you are typically told NOT to use for kids under 6, has been a total game changer for him.  We’re all sleeping better now that he isn’t coughing all the live long night and it’s been a big relief all around, to have something that actually works for once.

So I’m eager to see what happens at this year’s appointment.  I’m going to ask our doc if she suggests blood work.  Would it give us more detailed information?  Maybe there are other allergies that we don’t know about?   Can she test for annatto?   What does she think of the two recent episodes of throwing up and hives?  There seems to be so much guess work involved with allergies, so much that is unknown.

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Do you know anything about bloodwork versus histamine-response testing?  Ever heard of Nambudripad’s Allergy Elimination Technique?   There is even evidence out there that hookworms can rid you of allergies (did you hear that NPR story?)!   Who knew?
I’m aware that our allergy issues are relatively minor and we’ve been so fortunate to avoid ER visits and we’ve never even come close to using our epi-pen.   But I sure love this guy and I’d like him to feel his best.

My two closest friends were in a different class that year and it was the first day of school.  I couldn’t wait to see them and was counting down the minutes to recess.  As soon as the bell rang I raced across the breezeway to stand outside my friends’ class.   I was straining my eyes trying to find them and I remember smiling this huge smile as I saw them walking up to the front of the class together. They were laughing and swiping at each other and I started laughing, too.  It was going to be just like last year!  What fun we were going to have!

They walked right past me.  And ran off to the playground without me.   They hadn’t even seen me.  And they certainly weren’t looking for me outside of my classroom.  I remember standing there for a long time as all of this sunk in.  I felt small, insignificant and stupid.   I walked slowly out to the playground and tried to look like I didn’t care, like I had other things to do.  But I didn’t.  I just watched some other kids play basketball and tried like hell not to cry.  It was the first time I remember feeling like I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t cool enough, fun enough, popular enough.  And I KNEW that I couldn’t let any of it show.  I don’t know how I knew it.  But I did. I had to keep it hidden.

I’m reading Daring Greatly by Brene Brown (which is excellent, btw) and she’s got a section on being cool.   It’s part of a larger segment of her book on what she calls “vulnerability armor.”   According to Brown, we all use various forms of armor to protect us from being vulnerable, which, she posits, is the key to living a wholehearted life.  One of them she refers to as the shield of cynicism, criticism, cool, & cruelty.    I’ve always thought of coolness as something for the adolescent years, if you were lucky enough.  I clearly wasn’t.  So I figured that wasn’t part of my armory.  But then I read this line…

As adults, we can also protect ourselves from vulnerability with cool.  We worry about being perceived as laughing too loud, buying in, caring too much, being too eager.

 

…and I thought ahhhh, yes.  

About 10 years ago, Jason and I were helping our friend, Kelly, with an overnight for a group of high schoolers.  Kell was the youth pastor at the time and she somehow convinced us introverts to come along as chaperones.   One of the activities was a human scavenger hunt for the kids at a nearby mall.  The chaperones were all dressed in disguises of some sort and stationed throughout the mall.  The kids had to answer clues and then find us to get their next clue.  Jason and I decided to go gothic so we donned some dark clothing, put on some really dark eyeliner and black lipstick.   I looked like a watered down version of Bellatrix Lestrange.  We didn’t look good.  But I remember that folks gave us a wide berth and I saw people looking at us with curiousity.   I’m embarrassed now to admit it but I also remember thinking this. is. AWESOME.  I love this!  I feel so edgy, so aloof.  It made me feel kind of powerful.  And good.  Cool.

Obviously my day of cool quickly came to an end but I’ve never forgotten how good it felt.  After Gryffin was born, during those long winter days of bleary-eyed nursing, when I was burning the midnight oil every night, I had an epiphany of sorts.  It wasn’t a lightening bolt.  It was a more of a roll out epiphany, this one.  It slowly dawned on me, as I looked down day after day at the little boy in my lap, who had split me open and made me more vulnerable than I thought was humanly possible just by showing up, that I was finally ok being me.   I was ok being me.  It was one of the most freeing, empowering, expanding realizations of my life.

Now, over four years later, I’m still ok being me. I thought, though, that being “ok being me” would translate into never feeling afraid or insecure or less than.  But I still do sometimes.  And occasionally I feel the urge to replicate the feeling I had that day when Jason and I dressed up at the mall; the urge to appear aloof and mysterious, to feel cool, so that I don’t have to show people how desperately I want something, how much something means to me, or how deeply something hurt me.   And I have to fight that urge if I want to live wholeheartedly.   I have to give up being cool.  Shooooot.  Coolness!  It’s part of my armor.  Who knew?!  

 Sorry, couldn’t resist a little HP humor.

This trip was officially booked because of a wedding.  My college roommate and wonderful friend, Kristy, was tying the knot so we tacked on a few extra days to make it a “work trip” for Jason and a vacay for me and the boys.   Here’s a look back over the week in pictures…

Outside our hotel lobby, waving Jason off to work for the day.  That’s me thinking Oh man, what am I going to do all day with a 4-year-old and an almost 3-year-old?  No worries, I got this.

The view from the porch of our hotel room.  Not too shabby.

Here’s what I did with the boys all day, btw.  Hit the beach.  Hard.  After picking up some coffee.

And met up with old friends, Stacy and Sarah, and their kids, throughout the week.

Stacy and her oldest, Jane, who reminded me on SEVERAL occasions that she is almost four.

Sarah and her oldest, Charlie.

Sarah’s youngest, Max.  This is one mellow fellow.  I don’t think I heard him make a single peep the entire week.

Gryffin, Isaiah and Charlie playing outside our hotel room.



Gryff having a jump on Charlie’s trampoline.  He was REALLY excited about it.  I was really excited about that netting.

Isaiah… not so much into the bouncing yet.

Waiting for our breakfast Saturday morning.

Jason and the fellas found an old swiss army knife in the fountain, which we brought home, of course.  The boys call it their “magical treasure from Santa Barbara.”

The wedding was incredible and full of so many personal touches.  From the song that played while Kristy and her dad walked down the aisle, to the children’s book excerpt included in the ceremony, to Biff the dog walking down the aisle… we were so happy that we were there to celebrate with Kristy and Carlos.

A mariachi band led all of us down the street to the reception following the ceremony.

Kristy’s dad had EVERYBODY crying during the reception.

More beach time on Sunday morning.  

Followed by lunch downtown with some of my college girlfriends in town for the wedding (and Jesse… we let him crash our lunch).

And… yet more beach time on Monday.   This time I took along Greg & Kim‘s girls, who were so much fun.  And, I must admit, made my job considerably easier, since Macy & Phoebe (9 & 10) did things like fetching water and sand monster games in my stead while I looked on from my beach chair and chatted with my friends.
And we’ll close the post out with a shot of G and Z sawing logs on the fold-out couch in our hotel room.  ”Naps” got the air quotes on this trip and bed time was stretched on more than one occasion so this was a welcome sight indeed.  

Overall, a great trip.  I might even venture to call it “a raging success.”  Hooray!