mystic_savage

The kids got up early today -- Sar woke up at 5:30 & we lounged in bed for an hour before Penny woke up. I asked him to get me a tissue and he pointed his hand across the room and said "I'm using the Force." "Good," I said. "If that doesn't work, will you get out of bed and just go get the tissue?" He pointed both hands at the box and said "I'm using two Forces." Eventually, I got my own tissue.

Penny has been super cuddly today and has demonstrated the kind of grace not often found in kids. She and Sar got into an argument and Sar kicked her. I was putting Sar in time out until he apologized, and he swore he'd never apologize. I told him that it was going to be a tough day then, because I wouldn't let it go until he did. And Penny said, "Mom, I'm ready to let it go." Once Penny was over it, Sar had no problem apologizing.

So: it's not yet 9 and we've been up for three hours. Karen takes the kids at 9 and Kevin at 2, so I have the day to myself until dinner. I started the rewrite of Dear Cruel World this weekend. Have found a voice that works and am gaining some ground on the second draft. (Need a better title of course. But there's time for that later.) Am going to shower, head out for coffee & do some free writing, then come back and work on it today.

Still feeling antisocial, but am going to meet someone after work for an hour to do freewriting. It's been too long since I've written in a spiral notebook, longhand, whatever the hell I want to write.

Just have to share a couple of cute things Sar has said to me in the last 24 hours.  This is a kid who is 6, loves Star Wars, seems totally sophisticated about things, and then out of the blue will say something totally innocent.

Last night, I was talking to him about not doing drugs.  And he nodded and said that he wouldn't.  And then he said, "Remind me of what drugs are again?  Is that when you go down the stairs on your belly?"

***

Tonight we were in the grocery store and we were talking about, I dunno, asking for things and not asking for things.  Nothing heavy.  I think we'd just finished a discussion about whether he could have some chocolate milk.  And all of the sudden he turns to me and says "Mom, do you love me more than you love God?" 

How do you answer something like that?  As honestly as possible I think.  I said "Loving you is one of the ways that I love God."  He thought about it and said "So you love God more."  And then I had to be really honest  "I love you more," I said.  "Because you're more real to me than God is."  

I had a bunch of stuff to do this weekend, but my main task was to get my floor painted in the bedroom I'm moving into.  I had to have my kids with me so I kept impressing on them that whatever else we did, I had to get that done.  They kept interrupting and finally, in exasperation, I asked them:  "WHAT is the main job this weekend?"  Penny (age 7) said "Paint your room".  But Sar (age 6) said no.  "Our main job is to love each other," he said.

God I love my kids.

Once uponce a time (sic), There was a battleship in the sky.  The battleship crashed on the volcano.  There was hot lava all around.  The people got out of the battleship.  They fell but they didn’t fall on the lava.  They fell on a big rock.  A big bird flashed down from the sky.  Saved all the people.  Nighty-night.  The 1566 got out of bed.  He sneaked through nighttime to see if the hot lava was still there.  He went back home.

The end.

By Elessar James Beverly, age 5

March 1, 2008

Enrolled the kids in school today at the Seattle Public School district building.  They're starting next week.  We have a tour scheduled for Monday and they'll start on Tuesday.  I hope it will be a good thing, but I feel as if I've enrolled them into a meat grinder.

Everyone says "Oh I know they'll like it -- especially Penny."   And they probably will.  We'll see.  It's pretty much a 3 R's kind of school:  lots of solid reading, writing and arithmetic.  But it'll be a big adjustment for all of us.

When I was enrolling them at the district building I ran into Trina Willard, who was enrolling her oldest into middle school (and whose music you can hear here).  I adore her and it's been years since I've seen her.  She sat with us for a bit and walked us out and swung the kids around in circles on the grass.  Her presence felt like a good omen.

Another weird sleeping night.  I fell asleep when I put the kids to bed -- it's hard not to when I cuddle Sar down and he holds my hand between both of his little hands and goes to sleep.  Tucking him in is the one truly peaceful time of day with him.  He's been big on the testing behaviors lately.  Like, for the last three years.  But it seems to be escalating and he's very angry with me though he's not conscious of it or can't articulate it.  I love him and Penny more than I love anybody in the whole world. But I don't know what to do next & am often at a loss with him.  I feel more sure of myself with Penny.  She talks feeling language and she's very in touch with why she wants what she wants in any given moment.  Sar has been taught feeling language but I don't think I've ever heard him say "I'm angry" instead of "you're stupid". 
Vero suggested that I stop focusing on curbing his behaviors (that doesn't work) and start focusing on talking to him about his values and asking him to question himself about why he does certain things.  she has a lot of wisdom and this works with her kids.  I don't know if it really will work with Sar, but I started that tonight.  It was new enough that it kept distracting him from his next tactic, but he avoided answering any questions or talking to me directly.  (His answer to any question is "poop".)  He *did* pull Lord of the Rings down and ask me to read to him.  He loves LotR.  And here's a confession:  I've never made it through the first book of the trilogy.  Kevin started reading LotR to Sar & Penny because Kevin loves Tolkien and Elessar is named from the books (Aragorn's second name, given at the end of the third novel).  Tonight I read almost a chapter about the Burrow Downs.  It was enthralling & both kids hung on every word for almost an hour. 
So.  I went to tuck them in, and fell asleep at 9:30 with them and work up at 3:00 and came downstairs.  A sane person would have just turned off all the lights and gone to bed.  I'm grabbing the opportunity to write in my LJ and play games on Facebook and to rev up my iPod.  Ah, the simple life.  It would be so good for me to unplug and I would have the DTs if I had to do it cold turkey.  I *am* getting rid of my cell phone this week.  I'm going to miss it terribly.  But it's a start.

Sar is finally asleep tonight after hours of jumping around, hurtling himself into furniture and at the floor, provoking his sister as much as possible and peppering me with lots and lots of questions, most of them revolving around sizes, ages, numbers.  Andre the Giant features in many of the questions:  how big was he?  was he healthy?  did he have kids?  was he older than anyone when he died (because in Sar's mind older=taller).  If Grandma Crabtree is almost a hundred, is she big?  Do people die when they're a hundred?  Was Andre the Giant a hundred? He had a lot of questions about dinosaurs today too--which ones ate which other ones and do they walk backwards and what kind of teeth did they have and did they eat humans and would they eat Andre the Giant or would he be bigger than the dinosaurs?  He constantly has numbers about the clock:  how many minutes is it past my bedtime?  How many minutes have you been here?  How many minutes past my bedtime will it be when you leave?  Is 9:00 the middle of the night? Do grownups go to sleep at 9:00?  What time did Andre the Giant go to sleep?  And then, because his father is in Hawaii right now:  do they have a restaurant in Hawaii?  Is Hawaii a volcano?  Is it lots of volcanoes or just one volcano? Why did Dad go to Hawaii? Does he know where to get food in Hawaii?  Where is he sleeping?  Can I go to Hawaii?  When is Dad coming back from Hawaii?  How many hours is that?  How many minutes is the night?

And those are the questions I remember.  Trust me, it's the tip of the iceberg.  He's figuring out a lot of stuff right now.

"Anyways, when it's Christmas, it's everybody's birthday."

We're back home now after a solid hour of trick-or-treating...that's the most my kids have ever done, and the first time we've really trick-or-treated outside of the community. Sar went as The Mystery Machine from Scooby Doo, and Penny was a cat princess, or a princess cat, depending on who was asking. Penny said, as we approached the second house, "Sometimes I get so happy, tears come out on my face." And she was. And Sar said to me, "I am so excited." Towards the end, we ran into James and Miriam & Benjamin, so we went down 17th with them. It was good being out, seeing our neighbors. We live in a very multicultural neighborhood...when I was a kid, I was a white kid trick-or-treating in a white neighborhood. But our neighborhood has Americans originally from Somalia, Eritrea, Viet Nam, Korea, Mexico, Southern California, here in Washington, New Hampshire, etc, etc, etc. And on Halloween, everyone roves around together in clusters of 8 or 9 or 10, and it's a good opportunity to actually talk to some of the older kids I'm always trying not to hit with the car.

One sour note. When I got home I told Kevin I was doing NaNoWriMo again and he said, "I'm sorry" the way you say "I'm sorry" when someone's dribbled cranberry juice on their white carpet. He thinks it's funny, and it is kind of, but it just brings back all the ways in which he has conveyed subtle disapproval of my writing. Chalk it up to another reason I'm glad we're getting a divorce.

More good stuff:
I have a lot of friends who are Wiccan in the community, and I had Penny and Sar say "Blessed Samhain" instead of "trick-or-treat" to one of them. She loved it. When we got home, we ran into Maria (also Wiccan) and I prompted Penny to tell her what they said. Penny said, "Blessed Salad".
Sar has just sorted all his candy into three piles by shape: rectangle, square, and circle. Penny just added something to his circle pile and he said thank you to her. It's so nice when they get along.

The first day of fall quarter is always a huge shock after the quiet of summer.  An extra 30,000 commuters are all of a sudden competing on buses and highways.  People wander all over our building looking lost.  Everyone is self-consciously dressed in something that looks put-together, even it's a casual kind of put-together.  But it's good energy too.  Hope and surprises and reunions with people who've been gone for months.  Cookies and brownies and coffee-on-tap in the office.  New majors coming in.  Old majors dropping by to fill out a form.  This is my second year with the department, but my third school year, so I know a lot of names.  I feel part of things, and happy.  I ran around a lot today and didn't focus very well on my work. But I was much more focused on my work *place* than I have been for months.  I love fall quarter.  It's busy and optimistic and not nearly as stressful as spring quarter. 

( more about the day...tra la la la la... )

Fell asleep in Kevin's bed last night with the kids.  (Kevin wasn't here, so it was ok).  We didn't mean to, just all crashed there and didn't wake up until he got home at 10:30 from his "How to Be a Farmer" workshop.  He carried the kids to bed and I dragged my butt downstairs to my own bed and crashed until 8 this morning when I woke up surrounded again by kids.  So I slept for a total of ten hours or so last night.

Today was the annual retreat at Duwamish & we had a post-settlement rehash & appreciation ceremony.  I think it's the first time in a year or so that I've felt this much a part of the community because I've been one of the three people on the legal team representing the LLC, so we haven't been able to be part of the Homeowners' business meetings or work structure.  They gave us each bouquets of flowers, but I think we all acknowledge that there's a huge lot of work ahead of us in rebuilding community after all the damage of the last two years.  I'm not sure where I'm going to be in the long run.  Kevin and Maria talked to a real estate agent about land around Bellingham this weekend, so either UBC or Western might ultimately be a good choice for me.  Don't know if we'll be able to sell this year, or next, or when, but it looks more possible now that we may get our equity out of the house.  Kevin's taking a day off this week to work on the divorce paperwork, so that's going to move ahead too.  He's ready finally.

So:  this morning brought all *that* up, and then I had the afternoon free for a few hours during which I (drum roll please)...slept.  Yup.  That was pretty much it.  The kids were Kevin's responsibility today and he had hired Jenelle to look after them.  She's 13, so I stuck around and we bought pizza and watched Land Before Time IX.  And because Jenelle was here, I got to spend more time in my room, cleaning, organizing, re-stringing a couple of bead necklaces, etc.  All in all, a pretty satisfying day.  And I'm thinking now that I might....(yawn)...sleep.  Seems to be theme of the day.

I just made toast for Penny and Elessar. P needs to take the butter and
jam out of the fridge herself. If I've already taken the butter out
(which I had this morning) she has to put it back in the fridge so she
can take it out herself. This is what she calls "helping".




Had a great night last night with K and the kids. K came home from work
pretty early and took us to the beach at Alki. We laid around and
played in the sand and the kids chased the water as it advanced and
receded. Elessar got knocked over by a wave and panicked, but K let him
save himself (E was maybe two or three feet from K). K and I talked
about it later. K wanted E to have the experience of knowing he could
get himself out of a bad situation. Also, he didn't want to get his
shoes wet.




I sculpted a...well, a vulva, actually, on the beach. It wasn't
conscious so much as it was tactile. I was just digging around in the
sand and patting it down, and tunneling underneath, and gradually,
there it was in front of me. I liked it. Seemed to fit the sound of the
water and my internal mood.

First conversation this morning:
P: It's Sunday! Time to get up!
Me: Hunh?
P: It's Sunday! Time. to. get. up.
Me: How do you know it's Sunday?
P(spreading her hands as if it were so obvious): The sun is up.
( More Domestic Yawnings )