At first, I began to regret the idea. As the weeks grew closer to Valentine’s Day and the tree sat pretty much ignored with its lonely two hearts, I got resentful. I really didn’t want another holiday where I did all the thinking, spending and prep work. But it was also clear that celebration wasn’t going to spontaneously erupt either. The girls were also waiting for someone else, i.e. me, to get the ball rolling.

I’d been too busy to clarify to myself how this tree was going to work. It was important to find something between weeks of Christmas-like preparation and a last-minute scramble on February 13.  Several things saved us. A friend and blog reader inspired by the idea of the tree was intrepid enough to send us some homemade valentines (Thanks so much Christine!).  I’m so impressed — I have such a gut-level horror of going to the post office that special people in my life actually receive very little.  But once her lovely things were hanging up, I got myself to a craft store and bought a few inexpensive goodies.

Reminder #1. A little effort can make all the difference.  The tree wasn’t bare any longer and the pleasure from walking by it was gentle and fun. Yesterday, in a spasm of anti-Hallmark enthusiasm, I attempted handmade cards. Reminder #2.  I don’t like what I come up when I don’t have enough time. I’m a crockpot creative — I need to stew. However, the girls did like the results and that’s what matters.

It’s been a nice day. On to St. Patrick’s Day!

This post is part of the February “Coffee Talk”, sponsored by Sandy at firstgenamerican.com. A variety of people will be posting what their tax returns say about them. Check it out!

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Filing our taxes last year marked the end of a long financial saga winding up my mother’s complicated estate. It had taken years to get the last details ironed out, and by then, the general emotional loss has been well tucked in to a corner of my heart. But when we got to deduct those final settlement fees (that lowered our taxes, thank you, thank you!) I felt like the last string had been cut. To put it bluntly, it was the symbolic end of the Mom Safety Net. Even though it had become was as ineffective as a faded blanky, its disappearance made a difference.

This a loaded topic. Some relatives recently has a spat over who bears more financial responsibility when children are adult. Is it the grown kids’ job to step in to aid the older parents, or the older parents job to step in and help the adult kids with the grandchildren? Of course, there are hardnosed practicalities that dictate how these responsibilities are played out, but I’ve learned that outside of specific situations, different families have different core expectations. In my mother’s family, it was that the oldest generation stays financially involved with the younger ones. In my father’s, the grown kids stepped in for the aging parents. And those expectations also differed with sons and daughters.

In my case, with my mother (then divorced from my father), the flow of money flowed in one direction: from her to me. The flow of love, visits, emotional support and short-term physical assistance certainly went two ways, but financially, I just noodled along as a young adult. I worked and lived on very little so I could travel. I made ends meets, paid my purposely-tiny rent, didn’t incur debt, and thought only vaguely about long-term stability because I knew she’d help out if I messed up.

I certainly didn’t get a free ride, but she helped with the fun stuff I couldn’t afford on my own, both relatively  minor —  my first couch — and extremely major — assistance on the downpayment for my first house.

Now I’m now the “top” generation. It’s up to me to make wise decisions for the remainder of my life and for the next generation. And perhaps it’s my obligation to offer my kids the same largesse. Which means I’d better tackle head-on my feelings/fear/inhibitions about money. And I have plenty — of fears, that is.

I wouldn’t say my mom’s flow of money in my direction was unhealthy or disabling — she certainly tried to avoid this. But one way or another, I didn’t tackle the more practical side of life until the last 15 years or so. By that I mean how to pair desires more concretely with paying for them, while also holding down a mortgage, paying tuition, health care, heating bills – all those irritating life realities that bossily nudge themselves to the head of the budget line, often knocking the fun stuff right off the list.

So if the last 15 years were my training ground for grappling with these issues, the tax return was like graduating and being sent out into the world – I’m on my own. Whatever I do or don’t do with the assets on my plate is my responsibility.

I’ve had 10 years to grieve her passing, but this last step has the vertiginous feeling of standing at a cliff’s edge. It’s a whole new level of growing up and I’ve got lots of self-doubt. But one thing being over 50 has taughtme is that while self-doubt certainly gets in the way, it ultimately doesn’t mean anything in terms of what one can achieve.

So feel free to remind me of this at any time, ok?

This is a pretty tangible expression of happiness

As a mom, and as a person, I’ve been needing to improve my tangible level of happiness. Which is something I’m used to thinking about as quite intangible, vaguely based on my state of mind, but quite vulnerable to the outside world.

My inner sense of contentment gets lost more often in recent years. I’ve noticed a certain deadening inside, a gradual loss of enthusiasm as I just push to get through each day. Not that I was ever even close to what a friend of mine calls a “bliss-ninny”. But more often than not, unless I get myself in hand, my inner dialogue can get so worried, put upon, and over-responsible that by day’s end, the results can be ugly.

Our family faces plenty of challenges, but no more than many.  I want to show my kids how to be happy in the face of any circumstance, which is a basic tenet and teaching of every spiritual practice I’ve ever paid attention to. It apparently can be done and people have done it: stayed content and accepting even in the worst possible circumstances.

So is this one

But right now, we are not in extreme circumstances and many, many things are wonderful. So, I’m zeroing in on the strange conundrum of when events that cause barely a ripple in the calm of some people, create cumulative tsunamis in others (read: me).

Some moms and I were recently having one of those comfy, long-ranging discussions about parenting, with all its peaks and valleys. One mom remarked how important she found it to remind herself that it is her job — and only her job — to be happy. And as a corollary, it is very important to teach this to one’s kids. Her right to say this is hard-won and impeccable – she has been through it all and writes a blog on women’s partys.

I’ve always filed this observation under my mental “Of course, but” folder. “Of COURSE I am responsible for my happiness, blah, blah, blah; but if x, y, or z disaster happens – then I can’t POSSIBLY be happy.” The folder just got bigger when I got kids. Qualifying events for happiness-busting have included chronic illness, years of poor sleep, financial difficulties, learning disabilities, tantrums, house remodels, marital differences, putting toddlers into snowsuits…. Hmmm, sounds like many families.

So, I’m just not quite sure how to manage this trick. There’s a difference between just swallowing resentments and gracefully letting things go. It’s hard difference to discern, because they can look and feel the same at the beginning. Simply putting calm and pleasant back into my voice after my husband has irritated me or when a child is throwing a fit over homework merely feels like I’m driving a tractor over myself.

Sadly, within days of our lovely happiness conversation, my friend’s apartment literally went up in flames. She cut short her vacation and went home to find that most of her home was lost. Biggest relief:  the photos of her kids were not touched. Remarkably quickly, she announced the news on Facebook, spun the mess into a positive light and required that the only response to her post be fire jokes to make her laugh. Here’s her blog post on it.

This blew me away – I think it would take me months, or at least weeks to get to where she’d gotten, and it’s entirely possible I would lurk in catastrophe-mode for much longer than that. But I took it to heart – how can I do this and really create emotional health?

Our latest anti-pollution manifesto

Like a good mother lion, I’ve built a thickly-walled world of safety and protection for my small children without necessarily feeling safe and content myself. But now as the kids gain an interest in newspapers and elections and wars and pollution, I’ve got to figure out something with more emotional truth. This requires much more mental discipline – learning and conveying, for example, what is worth being concerned about in our lives and how to let go of what isn’t. That’s a day-to-day minute-to-minute practice, watching my mind, catching myself and moving my inner dialogue through the chatter to contentment.

Which, of course, doesn’t feel very happy. It feels like work. I have enough work. At times, I stamp around inside myself roaring “Where’s my happy place!!” But the effort is worth it. When I do find a happy place, it’s like surfacing from the bottom of a muddy lake into the sun. And it gets a little easier the next time.

I’m being forced to evolve, which I will be grateful for once I get over the fact that I hate it. I don’t like the way I’ve been feeling, and I know what I’m aiming for – the agile, center current of a river that flows around obstacles. Not the lines that smash into boulders. Nor the sides that get stagnant in circling eddies. I don’t do it very well, but I do it better than I did.  My kids are going to need this ability more than I ever will, so I’ve got to keep trying.

Ahhhhh

Seeing her face, I relented and told her to pull out a few favorite ornaments. We’d find a spot for them. Translation: I’ll wait a few days until I’m pretty sure you won’t notice and I’ll put them away.

But I’m learning something about her. She does notice. Things are not forgotten, nor are they forgiven. She stays quiet, but every now and then it comes up again. Resentments about the fast pace of life lie buried in the soft sand at the bottom of her soul. Little landmines.

This highlights my own ulterior motives. After years of chaos, which I haven’t forgotten or forgiven, my war against household chaos seems to have taken a small turn in my favor. There is more order in our house. I feel good. I’m getting a protectively militant about it. They’re old enough to understand. Mommy’s need for order needs to win, hands down. Not finding a lot of inner flexibility on this one.

But then she said, “Why can’t we keep it up, put the Christmas stuff away and put other stuff like Valentine’s stuff up?” I paused. We have a small fake tree because live evergreen gives Rick headaches. I’ve cringed inside about it for the last few years, but in this situation, it is an asset.

We had a good time though and my head is still there. Nice holidays and then a trip east to see my Dad and visit the nation’s capital. I must admit I wasn’t all that psyched about this trip (I only ever want to go to the beach, really), but whole family dynamic got turned down several notches to a much more soothing gentle place. And in honor of that, I’m going to put up some happy photos of the last month, soothing and calming, as I let my writing brain wake more slowly in this new year:

Our part of the world had a beautiful, reasonably timed (5:30 am) view of the total lunar eclipse last month. We watched for a while and then hurtled ourselves, pajama-clad and clutching hot chocolate, into our truck as the moon set out of sight to watch the last little bit before it got too light. Rick caught a lovely shot just above the Jemez mountains.

Bets are off on when the tree will come down…

We saw the big attractions of our nation’s capital, the needle building (Washington Monument) and the ice-cream-cone-with-a-cherry-on-top building (the Capitol). I was reminded that my kids, coming from the southwest, haven’t seen much of that style architecture. Since they acted like ex-cons in a mugshot line-up for most photos I took, here they are, blurs, on a beautiful day in front of the needle building.

This fat guy was sitting in a tree at Mount Vernon and stopped all of us in our tracks. We aren’t birdwatchers, but we don’t see cardinals here in Santa Fe. He just makes me happy to look at him.

Within a day or two of getting home, right out the back door….

Ummm. That has been achieved here and there, usually when someone somewhat professional takes the photos. But I persevere. Something is shining through…

Starting off with total cooperation.

Moving into total abandon.

Sticking with total abandon.

I thought I’d try individual shots.

Nah…

Trying again, bribery involved.

I actually like this one, L looking like some strange Japanese performer. But this is what we went for:

Happy Holidays everyone — I’m going to take a break and start posting again in January, so Happy New Year as well!

L's pretty table

For the first time in years, we hosted several families for Thanksgiving, and I’m one of those people who, if I’m doing two things at once, feel almost like both didn’t happen. Not logistically – I’m just as much a multi-tasker as any other mother and if the kids start squabbling while I’m cooking dinner, it all works: they stop, we eat and I had a lot to do with it.

This is more…something else. Experiences wash off like bad dye. I don’t feel like I’ve kept the peace while actually achieving the nutritious dinner I was aiming for, even if I have pulled off both. In other words, my body and mouth were present and active at those valuable family moments, but something else is chronically absent. Or chronically interfering. With the result being that a lot of potentially nourishing family moments pass me by. And I start feeling lost and anxious. And then more experiences wash away.

I’ve put time into thinking about what this restlessness is about. There are a million potential answers, but no easy one. Not much beyond looking carefully at what it is — these days, it’s feeling like a vulture hunched on a telephone line in my mind, one steely eye on the lookout for other people getting what I didn’t get.

Digging in, with full sun

The vulture hangs around. He’s hard to scare off. So it felt big during Thanksgiving, our cheery house filled with people, when I remembered to look, to really look at our table, our pretty table, made pretty by L’s sense of design with the on-sale flowers I bought when I got tired of spending so much money for our feast.

Then as we started eating, the light hit the wine glasses and sent out glints. The sun started sinking in a halo of clouds outside our glass kitchen doors. A little later, around 4pm, it suddenly got darker as a cloud covered the sun, and it stayed that way. We brought out candles. The kids ate noisily and clamored for dessert. We couldn’t find the bottle-opener. Pies were eviscerated.

Through all that, and later into chess and movies, the light stayed my guide, giving little tugs to the hem of my brain, to look more closely. I took whatever light there was in like breath, like breathing, watching it change; the people and colors changing with it. I managed it for a while. It was just enough. Thanks.

One of the worries hovering in the back of my mind is the small stain of loneliness that spreads when the girls have big-life experiences without me. I’ve gone to almost every ballet performance, show, recital, game or pubic event open to me. It was exciting. This is part of what I’m parenting for, these celebrations marking my children’s life. Even if I’ve been bored – most of these events are things only a mother could love — I’ve wanted to be there for everything, to share what they are doing, seeing, learning. I know part of this is driven by me, but the parenting root of it is that I simply wanted to be there for them, as physically as possible.

If I take that thought to its logical conclusion, then I’d be sitting in small hard chairs running back and for between the third and fifth grades every day so I wouldn’t miss a thing. I’d be sitting in on their play dates, reliving Harry Potter for the 130^th time and trying to laugh at fart jokes.  And I simply can’t. I’m just a prim old lady when it comes to poop, and I’m an impatient b*#^h after say, the tenth time of hearing the same thing again. It reminds me of how much I looked forward to going on swings with my toddlers and realizing, with sadness, that what was needed was much more of mommy pushing swings like a robot than mommy getting to fill in missing holes of her childhood.

But I see now, as in all other things, that nature is handling the growing separation beautifully by the carefully modulated method of overwhelm. My brain is physically not capable of handling what they’re doing. Their interests are growing…their awareness of their interests…their opinions of their interests – all soaring exponentially in every direction. I couldn’t keep up with it if I cloned myself 100 times.

I’m fielding their ideas like a tennis-ball pitching machine has run amok: Why are people camping about banks? Can I have mascara? I’m not doing that because I don’t feel like it! Mom, did you know the Egyptians used to stuff hair up their nose when they died? That food makes me GAG, Mom!

And, dear god, the driving is ramping up this year. Besides our dawn rides, I’ve turned down my first opportunity to pick up my child after a party at 10pm. The part of me that frets about not being there (we’re not even knocking yet at the door of my not being wanted) is way back in line, while my brain open-mouthed with amazement, cogitates make-up and protest movements. Part ADD, part brain freeze, part ruthless, Darwinian choosing of the most important. Whatever – the girls are claiming their own lives, and nature is helping me let them.

We know he’s a young adult because one morning soon after, I heard a crash, sat straight up in bed and saw him standing outside our bedroom door in the grey dawn, looking quite lost, smallish and confused. Bears just are cute, they really are.

As I got out of bed and walked closer to the door for a closer look, he loped down off the deck and into the woods. He’d knocked down the almost empty can that we keep our birdseed in, but hadn’t been happy with it.

We’ve now found appropriate garbage protection plan, which is putting the cans in the now-unused chicken pen (bobcat) and thought we were home free. But one night my husband loaded the garbage in the truck and then realized the dump had closed. He forgot to “secure” the garbage in the truck bed, so we had a difficult second garbage episode the next day (I left it up to him). After that, we’d had no sign of the bear until the other morning when we found birdseed scattered all over our walk from a bag overlooked in our bear-proofing efforts.

It doesn’t look like he ate much. Even so,  we’re taking our time cleaning it up.

Watching our school’s fourth grade play the fifth grade run-waddle around on a sparkling fall day with brooms between their legs in an after-school game of Quidditch. Who knew it was a game? Apparently now there is a real World Cup, but here, Gryffindor battled Slytherin with soft balls and lacrosse sticks through tumbling yellow leaves, tryingnot to poke each other with broom handles.

Standing at a Halloween party, being the mommy coat rack, holding at various times: coats, wet towels, a half-eaten taquito, Harry Potter’s glasses, lollipop wrappers. 

The abandoned summer “fort” I made for the girls this summer under cottonwood trees in the arroyo. Now forgotten and the hammock covered with leaves, I went down to bring in everything for the winter.

Portraying a scarecrow at our school’s Halloween event, begging little fairies and “monster bears” to come protect me from the scary crows that terrified me. I was rewarded with big growls and protective spells.

The thick spider web that appeared in just a few hours in our kitchen, an intense bit of architecture to stake out a warm place for the winter.

B. cracking herself up with the simplicity of “What did the cow say to the chicken? Moo!” “What did the chicken say to the cow? Cluck!”.

How the girls are beginning to notice and claim for themselves, (as opposed to a “mommy-told-me-to-notice” moment), our breathtaking New Mexico sunsets. They’re even grabbing the camera to record some for themselves, calling them “famous painting” sunsets. The lovely gentle-shepherd feeling, that I so often forget to notice, of checking on my girls while they are sleeping, putting my hand near their soft breathing. B is usually huddled inside a pile of quilts, while L has her arms flung either straight out or straight up.

What’s been good in your life this week?