Posts tagged ‘mothertalk’

The Daring Book for Girls


Full-disclosure: I worked with Andrea Buchanan for a couple years at Literary Mama, Miriam Peskowitz wrote the foreword for my book, and I think of them both as friends. I was one of the dozens, if not hundreds, of I hope not-too-annoying-people who sent them suggestions while they were writing The Daring Book for Girls this summer. I’d feed them if they came to San Francisco, and definitely buy them both a drink if we met up somewhere else. I’m a totally biased reviewer.

It seems many of the Daring Book for Girls readers have fallen into this book with a sigh of nostalgia. I didn’t have that reaction. This book is nothing like any books I had as a kid, unfortunately, and lists dozens of activities and facts that are entirely new to me. Peach Pit Rings? I can’t wait till next summer to try this with my sons! And today’s princesses? All –except Princess Anne– new names to me.

The Daring Book for Girls did not make me think nostalgically of my childhood because I’ve done so few of these activities – I counted around a dozen — and two of them (public speaking and salary negotiation) I’ve only done as an adult (I worked as a kid, sure, babysitting and such, but I think people said “I’ll pay you X” and I said, “OK!”) I had a great, fun childhood, don’t get me wrong, and I didn’t spend it sitting in front of the television, but I was not a daring girl. I didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was 19, and I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 20, or maybe 21 (the fact that I can’t remember when I got it tells you what a milestone it was in my life. I was not chomping at the bit to adventure independently).

An adventure for me was walking in the meadow outside my grandparent’s house at night, pretending to be Emily Bronte walking the moors – see, I wasn’t even adventurous enough to pretend to be Catherine; I pretended to be the writer! And so of course I feel kinship with Miriam Peskowitz and Andrea Buchanan, who write, “When we were young and bored, our parents told us, “Go read the dictionary!” We did, and look where it got us. One should never underestimate the pleasure to be found flipping through a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or an old science book.”

Indeed, and such is the pleasure of flipping through this book, full of facts and fun, instructions on games and crafts, social skills (boys! letter writing! Robert’s Rules of order!) and life skills, from Japanese t-shirt folding to changing a tire. I was more of a paper-making, doll outfit-sewing, campfire singing girl than a hideout-building, tree swinging, roller skating kind of girl, but both kinds of girls are reflected here, beautifully. All kinds of girls – and boys – are going to find things to do and learn in this book. It’s a completely inviting, approachable book, from its green and sparkly cover to its lovely line drawings; it’s sized right for curling up and reading in bed, but also sturdy enough to carry along on a girl’s adventures.

I wasn’t a daring girl, and I don’t have any girls in my house, but this book will keep my family good company in the years to come.

MotherTalk Blog Book Tour: The BOB Books



I don’t have a whole lot to write about the BOB books because I haven’t read them.

Let me revise that: my 5 ½ year old son has not permitted me to read them.

Let me back up.

When MotherTalk asked for the mothers of beginning readers to review the BOB books, I signed right up. At the time, I had a very bookish boy who was just taking his first tentative steps into independent reading. He would sit quietly with a book in his lap, mouthing the story to himself, occasionally asking for help with a tricky word like “asked” or “science.” Or he would page through a book in bed, often falling asleep with it still clutched in his hands, the cover tipped down over his face.

But in the interval between the call for reviewers and the books arriving on our doorstep, Ben became a quite confident reader, indeed. He was asking for less help, and moving from familiar books (those we’d read over and over–and over–again) to books he knew less well. When the box from Scholastic arrived, I said, “Hey, Ben, these books are really for you! Can you let me know if you like them? I’m supposed to let other parents and teachers know what kids think about these books.”

I opened up the package for him and started to slide one of the books out of its nice box (we love boxed sets of books, like the Nutshell Library and the Bunny Planet; there’s such pleasure in simply easing the book in and out of its spot). But Ben took the whole box out of my hands, protesting, “Those are my books!” True enough.

So here I am, watching my son go all independent on me. This month, he started kindergarten after two years at a co-op preschool. We spent nearly as much time at that preschool as he did; we knew everything about his day. Now, we drop him off at 8:30, pick him up at 2, and rely on his selective memory to learn anything about his day. He surfs the internet, downloading videos of BART trains on YouTube. And now he’s reading on his own.

He opened the box, pulled out a book, and started to read. Then he started to crack up. Then he started reading to his little brother. Eli started laughing, too.

So let me say this about the BOB books: I love them.

MotherTalk Blog Book Tour: Getting Unstuck without Coming Unglued


On the one hand, I could say–with a great sigh of relief and a handful of salt tossed over my shoulder– that it has never happened to me.

On the other hand, I could say that my eight years in graduate school (and the three years’ office work before that) were a protracted block, a self-imposed detour from the writing I should really have been doing the whole time, an elaborate (and ultimately expensive) procrastinatory ploy.

I’m talking about writer’s block, of course, a subject that I’ve been thinking much more seriously about since reading Susan O’Doherty’s sharp, smart, and sensitive Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman’s Guide to Unblocking Creativity.

Before I go further, I should say that I am not an unbiased reviewer. I first discovered Sue’s work in Andrea Buchanan’s anthology, It’s a Boy; her beautiful essay, “The Velvet Underground,” about her music-loving, costume jewelry-wearing son, Ben, struck a chord with me, the mother of a Ben who used to wear “dress-up hair” to school. I came across Sue’s work next in Jessica Berger Gross’s anthology, About What Was Lost; “The Road Home” details, with agonizing honesty, her journey through multiple miscarriages to motherhood. When my co-editor and I were collecting essays for Mama, PhD, I remembered “The Road Home” and wondered if Sue might have a story to tell for the anthology. Indeed she did, and in working with her to edit her essay and pave the way for its publication, I’ve come to respect her and admire her writing even more.

So when I saw that MotherTalk was enlisting bloggers to review her book, I signed up, looking forward to reading a book I knew I’d enjoy, despite thinking, mistakenly, that it wouldn’t really have much to say to me.

But here’s the thing: my truth, of course, is more complicated than the two versions I offer in the first two paragraphs above. I would never say that graduate school was a waste of time or even a detour from a more satisfying writing life. I did a lot of good writing in graduate school, including a very readable 300 page dissertation. Graduate school, and the courses I took and taught, gave me a great framework for reading and writing that I draw on to this day, and I’m proud to have earned my doctorate.

Still, Sue’s book has made me wonder for the first time whether if I’d skipped grad school and stayed at work in publishing, would I have kept noodling away at the workplace novel I started at my desk? Would I have continued adding sentences between phone calls and correspondence? Is there enough of a writer in me that I would have kept at it, after work, and on lunch hours? Or would something else have come up to interfere with that writing?

Maybe, maybe someday I’ll dig out those fragmented bits of that novel, dust it off, and see if it might still have life in it. In the meantime, though, here I am, seven years post-doc and five years into motherhood, developing a different and very fulfilling writing career. At the moment, I have more ideas than time to write them all out. I can gaze out my window and see writer’s block just hovering out there, past the trees in my neighbor’s yard, but here come Eli and Ben, thundering down the hall giggling, trying unsuccessfully to sneak up on me at my desk, and I race to finish my sentence, jot a few notes to remind myself where I was headed, close the laptop and bounce onto the big bed with them. For now, writer’s block and I are keeping at arm’s length.

So even though I didn’t pick up Sue’s book looking for answers, I’m happy to report that it gave me some anyway. Each chapter in the book is followed by an exercise intended to help you apply the chapter’s lessons to your own creative life and artistic goals. I decided, as a diligent reviewer, to do the exercises, starting in order, and although I haven’t finished (none of them takes more than twenty or thirty minutes, but each warrants a return visit, a reflection a few days later), I’m learning plenty from them already. Some of the exercises are serious (completing the “Girls Should…” sentence with messages you received as a child; identifying your inner critic) and some are a lot of fun (imagining a day without consequences, or imagining your greatest success) but so far I’m already filling pages with memories from my childhood, images I’d forgotten, ideas for future essays: in short, loads of new material. Thanks, Sue!

Like any good teacher, Sue makes her points in this book by telling stories. She’s brave enough to describe the ups and downs of her own creative life, and then sympathetically relates the stories of several of her clients, women at all different stages of their artistic careers, some trying to come to terms with past difficulties, some trying to address current hindrances. And again, although none of these stories is exactly relevant to my own situation right now, each taught me a little bit more about keeping creativity active throughout various different stages of life, whether single or partnered, parenting or childless, younger or older.

When I first started reading this book, I kept thinking of writers I’d give my copy to when I finished writing the review, thinking I’d absorb the lessons and move on. But now I think I’d like to keep it on my shelf after all, and I’ll be giving some copies as gifts.

One Lousy Hour


I wasn’t planning to participate in today’s blog bonanza on discipline. I loved The No-Cry Discipline Solution, but I thought I’d said all I had to say about it, and discipline. Or maybe I just didn’t want to think about discipline anymore. It’s like thinking about global warming, maybe; you know that your thoughtful action will make a difference, but sometimes you just want to pretend things’ll change on their own, without you.

But in fact, I do buy those twisty light bulbs, compost, recycle, and turn out lights when I leave the room. I also spend an inordinate amount of time saying “use your words” or “calm your body down” or “take a deep breath with me” and reminding Ben that his actions, like his brother’s, like mine, have consequences.

Which is why today, less than thirty minutes after we’d arrived at his friend’s house, a half-hour drive from ours, I packed him, kicking and screaming, back into the car, and drove home.

Maybe I should have seen it coming. I’ve been feeling lousy all week, and so haven’t been the most present parent. The boys had been up less than half an hour this morning before they were fighting over a spoon, and although I handled that fine, I didn’t see it as a sign of things to come. I suppose if you took every struggle as a sign of worse to come, you’d just crawl back under the covers. Sometimes it gets worse, but sometimes it gets better, and the uncertainty generally leaves me pretty optimistic.

Meanwhile, the end of preschool last week brought a fun week of vacation this week, but also a dizzying lack of schedule and routine.

Also, his good friend, one he’s known since before he was eating solid food, the one we tried to visit today, moved to another town.

Also, the week’s been hot and sunny– weather I soak up like a chameleon, but which leaves my fog-raised boys a little out of sorts.

So there we were: me, dosed up on advil and pseudo-sudafed, pretending I felt well enough for the excursion, dressed in my pretty new Goodwill sundress and a bangle bracelet Tony’s dad made in the 70s; the boys in shorts and t-shirts, wriggling through my careful application of sunscreen, eager to just get there already.

They sang a song about garbage all the way across the city and over the bridge, but even though it was tuneless and repetitive, they were happy, and I was happy, and I didn’t complain, even when it turned into shrieking.

When we got to our friends’ house (because of course these are my friends, too, the mom a person I treasure for getting me through some comically low points – like ten minutes with 2 toddlers, a crawler and a newborn in one grimy bathroom stall—with incredible good cheer), Ben told Eli he couldn’t play in the basement playroom. We got through that one.

Then Ben and his friend started running back and forth from playroom to living room, bringing out a toy stroller, a batting helmet, toy guitars, setting up for a concert. The halls are crowded with boxes (they just moved in last week), and Eli kept nearly getting knocked over. I asked Ben to keep the toys in the playroom, to open the sliding door into the backyard (“Look, this can be your curtain!”) and make the yard their stage. He started arguing with me about how far backstage (the playroom) needed to be from the stage (the living room), and I tried to have the reasonable conversation about concert hall lay-out, but I’d already lost him. He was shaking and shouting, red-faced, crying, still upset that I’d let Eli in the room at all, flailing his arms and legs the way he does when he wants to hit me.

So I asked him to sit with me a minute and try to talk, but it was too late. I suggested maybe we should set up another game, but he was stuck on the concert idea and couldn’t let it go. And then I pointed out that maybe if he couldn’t listen to my ideas we should leave, but that just made it worse, and then he did kick me, and being hit by a 45-pound 5 year-old hurts pretty badly, but I still didn’t lose my temper, just said I thought it was really time to go.

Eli was watching all this calmly, unsure what to make of it, and Ben’s friend and little sister were looking on in surprise at this uncharacteristic outburst from their friend. Their mom, bless her, strapped Eli in to his carseat and put all my other stuff into the car because I had my hands quite literally full with a kicking and flailing boy who wouldn’t walk out the door. I had to push him into his booster seat and he got a few more good kicks landed while I buckled him, and then he screamed the first 8 miles of the drive home. I know, because I was watching the odometer, willing myself not to cry, because then we’d just get in an accident and that would make one lousy hour last a whole lot longer.

So there it is. I think I did the right thing, but sometimes even doing the right thing doesn’t feel so great.

MotherTalk Blog Book Tour: Writing Motherhood


Very early on the morning of July 4th, 2001, I climbed out of bed and took a pregnancy test. As I waited for the result, I left the stick resting on the edge of the bathroom sink and sat down at my desk to write a few lines on my computer. A few minutes later, I went back and added some more thoughts, trying to absorb the fact that I was pregnant.

That was the start of my mothering journal.

I’d kept journals sporadically in the past: a small, cream- colored book my aunt gave me before a high school month in England; a cloth-bound book I bought before my junior year at Oxford University. But when I didn’t have a discrete period of time to document, I could never keep a journal going. I’d get fed up with myself for using it as a dumping ground for my complaints about adolescent life, or I’d get hung up with worry about someone finding it.

But this time was different. I’d just started a new job, I was pregnant, Tony and I bought a house: my life was changing fast, changing permanently, and I wanted to keep track of my thoughts.

That January, my computer crashed and took my journal with it. I lost teaching notes, syllabi, years’ worth of emails, but it was the journal’s loss that made me cry. It took me a few days to regain perspective (I hadn’t lost the baby, I kept having to remind myself, only the writing about the baby), but when I did, I took myself to a good art supply store and bought a nice journal with lined pages and an elastic strap to keep it closed.

And now I have a neat pile of six on the bottom shelf of my bedside table, with the current one, a pen in the middle holding my place, on the top shelf next to my lip balm, the current New Yorker, and a water glass.

I’ve kept it going.

The problem, though, was that before long the journal was not enough. I’d start something, jot down a funny thing Ben did or make an observation about my new life, and then it would sit there, undeveloped. I didn’t have any compelling reason to develop my thoughts into an essay. And after years of steady writing in graduate school, culminating in a nearly 300-page dissertation, I didn’t really even know how to write an essay about myself. I cast about for a year or so, writing unfinished essays during Ben’s naps, not knowing what to do with them. Eventually I lucked into a writing group and from there landed a position at Literary Mama and, between the gentle pressure of my monthly turn to present at writing group and the inspiration of the essays I edit, I found my way to a regular writing gig, a book, and a new life as a writer.

But it all would have been much simpler if I’d had Lisa Garrigues book, Writing Motherhood, back then.

I confess, I haven’t read any other writing books, so I have nothing to compare this to. Well, that’s not even quite right; I haven’t finished any other writing books. I’ve poked around Bird by Bird (and found it quite useful when I do), read a few lines of Writing Down the Bones, but I’ve always gotten a little impatient with the books, always had a moment when I realized, “Wait… no one’s asking me for snack, no one needs a dry diaper, I should be writing!” and put them down. So one of the things I like most about Garrigues’ book is that she invites you to do just that. It is not a book to read cover to cover (although I did, for this review, and it holds up perfectly well to that sustained attention), but one to pick up and read for twenty minutes when you have an hour free, or five minutes when you have ten: pick it up, find your inspiration, put the book down, and write. Because just as no one learns to parent by reading parenting books, no one learns to write without writing.

I like the bold orange cover of this book, which won’t get lost on my desk; that bright flash will always peek out from under the messy pile of drafts, bills, and Ben’s latest train drawings, and remind me to write. I like her tone, which is encouraging and friendly throughout; she leaves behind any kind of authoritative teacher voice and comes across as a woman you’d happily share a coffee with. Garrigues calls her writing prompts “invitations,” another subtle way that she manages to lighten up the task of setting down to write. And I like that she gives you lots and lots of good stuff to read, because the most important work in becoming a writer, after writing, is, of course, reading. Garrigues gives you her own short essays (on topics ranging from copying other writers, to marriage, to mama playdates); some of the little essays are hardly about writing at all, but about mothering, and then as she comes to the end and crystallizes the feeling that she’s expressed in the essay, she neatly raises a question for your own writing. She provides sample “mother’s pages” (essays written by her students), and she offers loads of great quotations from other writers. She also offers concrete advice on everything from buying a writer’s notebook to setting up a productive workspace. I have both of those things, but I still picked up a couple good ideas from her. She closes the book with an entire section on moving from new writer to a writer seeking connection and publication, with ideas on setting up and maintaining writing groups and taking one’s writing public. And then, in case there weren’t already enough ideas to keep you going in the text of the book, she offers a list of 99 writing starts and a bibliography.

I am keeping this review short because, inspired by Garrigues book, I want to get back to my writing! But I want to leave you with a couple quotations. The first, from Annie Dillard, resonated with me right now as I struggle to clear space in my days to write:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.

And now here’s Garrigues:

This book is, in part, a story of growing up and into a role I claimed for myself.

Is she talking about mothering or writing?! The point, as she claims throughout the book, is that the two are not mutually exclusive but complimentary roles that feed and develop each other. We should take advantage of that fact, and make time to write our lives.

Garrigues teaches writing classes, and those of you in the NY/NJ area should check them out. For anyone looking for on-line writing classes, I highly recommend Susan Ito’s parent lit workshop (which I have taken) and the new poetry workshop led by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza (my editorial assistant in Literary Reflections). Literary Mama will soon be offering monthly writing prompts, with personal feedback from th
e Literary Reflections editorial staff, as well as listings of workshops and other resources for writers. Get writing!

MotherTalk Blog Book Tour: The No-Cry Discipline Solution


When Ben was about a year old and Tony and I were beginning to despair of ever getting an uninterrupted night’s sleep again, we attended a baby sleep seminar (we only had one kid, so we had time for things like this). The seminar, led by the same calm and competent woman who’d taught our birth and nursing classes, ran through the basic information about what disrupts a baby’s sleep (teething; stomach upset; brain development; disturbances in the force…) and various approaches to handling them. She covered Ferber, she covered Weisbluth, and then she mentioned a new book, by Elizabeth Pantley: The No-Cry Sleep Solution. I was sold by the title alone, which set her ideas well apart from the other, more well-known sleep docs. I was not about to put Ben in his crib, shut the door, and leave the room. I didn’t believe that would teach him anything that I wanted him to learn.

So I bought Pantley’s book and read it thoroughly. She advises that you start by making charts of your child’s sleeping and waking patterns, and I still have one of these, of a fairly typical night. I wrote:

Last night Ben slept from 7:15-8:15; 9:20-12:30; 1-2:30; 3-4:15; 4:30-6; 6:30-8:15. Oy.

But after a couple weeks of somewhat demoralizing charting, I began to see some patterns, began to be able to pat him down to sleep again without always nursing him, and slowly, gradually, our nights improved. And neither of us cried about it.

Now, perhaps our nights would have improved without my charts, but Pantley’s book, with its tables and graphs, its supportive advice and its frequent quotations from other parents, helped make me feel like I was not alone, like I was taking steps to improve our situation and, most importantly, like it was going to get better. And it did.

So I was already inclined to like The No-Cry Discipline Solution, and when I saw that MotherTalk wanted reviewers, I signed up because while sleep is no longer an issue (some combination of our experience and Eli’s personality means Eli has always slept more easily than his older brother), discipline certainly is. I don’t know what’s to come, but right now, I can’t imagine two more intense subjects for discipline than a 5 year-old and a 2 year-old. We are Discipline Hungry around here, and I ate Pantley’s book right up.

First of all, lest you get the impression from her title that this book will have you tiptoeing around your kids, afraid to discipline them lest they shatter like so many wineglasses, don’t worry. Pantley’s not looking to provoke tears, but she acknowledges—often– that telling your kids no is going to upset them, and that’s ok. As she puts it, “You want your child to be unhappy about his misbehavior and the consequences it brings. This leads to better self-discipline and will help him to make decisions about how to act.” But I do agree with her that once the crying starts (my child’s or mine!) the opportunity for reasoned conversation, thoughtful reflection, or calm acceptance has been lost. And given how rarely those opportunities come at all, I don’t want to deliberately forestall them. So no-cry, here we go.

The opening section clearly and concisely sets out a foundation for discipline. She dispels myths that can get in the way of parenting well (“Good parents don’t lose their patience”) and promotes attitudes that support it (“Parents who do the right thing 70% of the time should feel proud of the job they are doing.”) She connects how you parent a teenager with how that child’s been parented as a kid, and I love the chart which makes it all look so clear: “Typical Older Child Behavior (leaves dirty dishes/clothes around the house); Preferred Behavior (obvious!); “How to Help Your Young Child Develop Preferred Behavior (as a Toddler, Preschooler, or Young Child).” Now, of course I know (and Pantley acknowledges) that it’s not always a direct route from A to B, but still I find such charts comforting; they suggest that there’s a possibility of success.

This section offered a lot of information I already know. I’m fortunate to parent in the context of a co-operative preschool, and we gather frequently for parent education meetings and more informal gatherings that cover a lot of Pantley’s material. Still, it’s useful to have the information gathered in one place, by a writer with a cheerful and encouraging tone. Sometimes it’s just helpful to pick up a book that tells you: “Keep in mind that [your child] isn’t out to get you, he isn’t trying to anger you, and he doesn’t have a master plan to drive you crazy. He’s just going about life in his blissful little world.” I like all the book’s quotations from parents, too, which offer a community like my preschool community; the remarks remind you that you’re not going it alone. The lovely pictures of kids throughout the book remind you why you make the effort (I’m going to keep flipping to the picture of Tristan, on page 137, when I need a laugh).

The second section, building on the first, offers basic parenting skills and tools. She starts with a list of the various problems that can trigger difficult behavior and offers ways to address them. Again, these are set out in a clear and concise way: Problem (Tiredness, for example), Solutions (make sure your kids gets naps; try not to drag them around on a day’s worth of errands; etc.) She offers a long list of strategies to get you through a tricky transition or diffuse a temper tantrum, from playacting to happy face cards to time outs. Some are silly, some are serious, but since one size doesn’t fit all, it’s great to have loads to choose from. Here, as in the rest of the book, Pantley offers charts, quotations from parents, a “reminder page,” for those of us with short attention spans, with a list of strategies; she’s offering a lot of information and makes it both easy to find and easy to use.

The third section, on anger, is the one I really focused on, because lately this is my biggest issue. I can absorb all kinds of good advice about disciplining my kids, but if I can’t speak to them without losing my temper, then they’re not going to hear it. The trick, for me, has always been that the big stuff doesn’t necessarily make me angry, and an easy day after a good night’s sleep doesn’t always guarantee a day without a flare-up. I can sail pretty calmly through playground meltdowns, grocery store whining, or my five year-old’s recent chant “You don’t know anything about me! You don’t know my feelings!” with a quiet, “I’m sorry you’re feeling like that right now,” but then find myself surprisingly worked up by a bit of toothpaste flying off the toothbrush into my hair. I grab the toothbrush from the out-of-control hand while part of me watches me lose my temper and thinks, “Really? This is the battle you’re fighting today?”

But as Pantley reassures us, this is normal. This happens because we’re doing this hard work — guiding willful people through the day, all day long, often without much support, parenting moving targets, kids whose ideas and needs change without warning–and because we are human, our reactions don’t always fit the perceived crime. What hel
ped me even more is her reminder that adults need reminders and test limits, too. We don’t always obey the known rules; we sometimes, willfully and consciously, “disobey.” Think about it. Why else are there speed limit signs posted every five miles on the highway? So Pantley offers a plan to manage anger, and even more helpfully, ideas on how to identify and reduce the situations that cause anger.

It has worked for me. In the past few days, we’ve endured an unusual series of bedtime meltdowns sparked by my refusing Ben’s last-minute requests for more dinner, dessert, more playtime, more books, etc. I’ve been hit, kicked, and called “Stupid butt-head Caroline” by my usually even-tempered and peaceful five year-old. And tempting though it has been to march him into his room, turn out the light, and slam the door, I’ve instead managed to keep some perspective. Two of his good friends are moving away next month. He is graduating from preschool next week. His little brother is suddenly a very active player in our games and our family plans. We haven’t gotten to the part where he doesn’t melt down at all, but we’re working on that, and in the meantime, I haven’t lost my temper with him since reading Pantley’s book. Tony and I have already spent time talking about adopting some of her ideas, and as soon as I finish this review, he’ll start reading the book.

The final section, “Specific Solutions for Everyday Problems,” offers an alphabetical list of the misbehaviors a parent has to deal with, from babytalk to yelling, and capsule strategies to address them. The section and its epigraph give you a great sense of the overall tone of Pantley’s book:

The list of topics in this section sounds like my three-year-old daughter’s daily to-do list!

It’s a serious book, but it knows humor can help. Here, and with its charts, its clear, non-patronizing tone, its careful repetition, the book simply models the approach it suggests we take with our kids.

This is not the first book about discipline that I’ve read, but I think it may be the last. Pantley isn’t afraid of writing out the obvious, and that turns out to be helpful to read, so I’ll leave you with one more quotation:

Children are childish. Children are inexperienced, naïve, and narcissistic. They have limited knowledge about social rules and expected behavior. Furthermore, they are separate people from us and they have free will.

Someone without kids might read this and think, why bother? But I read this and smile. Indeed, they are separate people, they have free will, and doesn’t that just make the days interesting?!

My Dangerous Boys

MotherTalk bloggers are talking about The Dangerous Book for Boys today; here’s what I’m thinking about danger and boys…

For three years after Ben was born, I thought we lived without a dangerous boy. We baby proofed the house, as recommended, before Ben started to walk, but in retrospect needn’t have bothered; he wasn’t about to attempt the stairs on his own, and he’d run from the kitchen when I opened the oven door. When we walked to the local pumpkin patch and considered the hay ride, three year-old Ben regarded it warily: “Mama, does it go out of the pumpkin patch?” he asked. “Are there buckles [seatbelts]? Is it bumpy? Does it go fast?”

Needless to say, we did not go for a hay ride. For the most part he will sit instead of stand, walk instead of run, cuddle instead of climb. The quintessential Ben moment was when he stood on the couch (an uncharacteristic height for him to achieve) and called out, about to jump, “Watch, Mama! I’m gonna be safe!” This boy who came out hollering after such a short, sharp labor–well, we joke that being born is the only fast thing he’s ever done.

And then Eli arrived. It took him 17 hours to make the trip out of my body, and he was so quiet on his arrival that the doctors and nurses rubbed his feet and hair vigorously as I cradled him in my arms until he squeaked his protest and they let him be. And yet for a while it didn’t seem like he’d be much different than our older cautious boy. He crawled at ten months, walked at sixteen, a similar pace as his brother.

But then he started to run. And climb. And now every day I find myself unpeeling his fingers’ tight hold on the kitchen drawer pulls, where he hangs midway up the bank of drawers, a rock climber with his summit (the cereal, the fresh banana bread, the clean wine glasses) just out of reach. “Where do we climb, Eli?” I ask him. “Pah-pah! [playground]” he laughs, and runs off, until he finds some other chair/table/lamp to climb.

I got this far in my writing when Tony brought the boys home from the park: Ben, looking just as he had when he left the house; Eli, covered in dirt and blood. He’d been running after a ball, tripped over a gopher hole, and gotten a bloody nose. Perhaps that’s my quintessential Eli moment—he throws himself full throttle at the world, and sometimes doesn’t manage a soft landing.

And I love it. I love my cautious guy (who reminds me so much of myself), and I love my adventurer. I want to encourage each boy to be exactly who he is, while continuing to admire the strengths of the other, too. I want each to have the confidence to take risks, the judgment to evaluate which risks are worth taking, and the strength (physical and emotional) to recover from the risks that didn’t quite work out.

Right now the risks are minor and the stakes pretty low – if I gave Eli a match today, after all, he’d more likely get a splinter than a burn. I wonder what the future holds, as my boys move farther away from my protection, as their world broadens. But it looks like one of them will be pointing out the dangers, the other one rushing toward them. My two dangerous boys.

MotherTalk Blog Tour: Healthy Mother, Healthy Child


I started practicing yoga when I was pregnant with my first son, Ben. Until then, yoga had always been on my big life “to-do” list, like learning to play guitar and living in Paris. It wasn’t until the nice lady who was giving me a pregnancy massage told me that the burning pain under my shoulder blade was from my diaphragm (yes, that’s right, it got pushed all the way over there), that I made the time for yoga.

And it helped. It didn’t just help the burning pain, it helped me sleep a little better, and to stress out a little less; it helped me feel more balanced – physically and emotionally—for the rest of the pregnancy.

After Ben was born, I went back to yoga with him. He was kind of a fussy, colicky guy at first, and mom and baby yoga seemed like a great solution: calm baby, calm mama. Well, it didn’t entirely work out that way. I was still a little too unsteady about being a mother to manage tree poses with a baby in the crook of my arm.

Yoga on my own continued to work wonders, however, and I kept at it as much as I could, figuring that a calm mama could better handle a fussy child. When I got pregnant the second time, I practiced yoga all the way through, and was attended through a 17 hour natural childbirth by my yoga teacher/doula.

Now I don’t get to yoga classes very often at all. My family’s schedule seems to shift daily, so right now I need the kind of exercise that I can grab when the opportunity presents itself. I run every other day and aspire to setting aside some time, a place, at home where I can lay out a mat and sink into a nice downward dog every once in a while.

I’m newly motivated to do this by reading Elizabeth Irvine’s Healthy Mother, Healthy Child: Creating Balance in Everyday Life, a book I learned about from Andi and Miriam at MotherTalk. It’s a gorgeous, easy to manage book – you could lay it on the floor next to you as you practice, so that you can see if you’re getting the poses approximately right. Irvine writes with an engaging tone, and peppers her prose with plenty of real-world examples to support her points. “We take on board whatever thoughts we feed ourselves,” she says, pointing out how deflated you can feel, for example, after a well-meaning friend says, “You look tired.” She offers strategies to avoid absorbing everything the world dishes out.

The book’s thus much more than a yoga manual. Irvine believes, as I do, that what we eat and what we think and how we feel are all pretty tightly connected. As she puts it, “You know the saying, ‘you are what you eat.’ Similarly I feel there’s truth to ‘we are what we hold in ourselves.’ We become what we think, read, and watch and whom we spend our time with.” So she offers useful and specific nutrition tips—not just about what to feed yourself and your family (whole grains; juice instead of soda, etc), but how, suggesting ways to get your kids involved in the preparation of meals in order to get them more interested in actually eating what’s on the table, and sitting with you to do so. She’s preaching to the choir with me. Tony and I have insisted on family dinner since Ben was a little bug, and it has its ups and downs, of course (our toddler, Eli, having now rejected both high chair and booster, does a lot of jumping down from his chair and running around the table at dinner), but still, we are convinced, having grown up with nightly family dinners ourselves, that this is a ritual well worth passing on to our own kids.

Now, I have a pretty low tolerance for the kinds of floaty ideas that books like this seem often to offer, and happily Irvine’s writing is as grounded as she’d like us all to be. Still, she does recommend visualization, a technique that always wakes up my inner cynic. Back during my first pregnancy, a friend told me about her childbirth prep class in Berkeley, in which she was instructed to visualize her contractions “hugging and caressing” her baby. We laughed and joked about visualizing the IV full of pain medication (though in fact, between the two of us we’ve now managed 4 drug-free deliveries).

But this book isn’t just about me, of course; remember the title? And look again at the cover photo, that little body folded next to his mama’s. It’s about teaching my children some healthy habits, offering them some tools to get them through the day. And I believe Irvine when she claims that kids are particularly adept at visualization techniques. Most nights after Eli is settled into bed, I crawl in for another cuddle with Ben, who asks me to tickle his belly and tell him the story of the day he was born. Irvine would certainly approve of this sweet ritual, and I’m not looking to drop it anytime soon, but I might suggest adding a little visualization tomorrow night, and see how Ben and I do with it. Irvine offers a couple narrative routes to get you started (“Seeing A Star,” “The Rainbow,” “Soaring with an Eagle”), and I’m sure once you get in the habit, it’s pretty easy to come up with some that work for yourself and your child.

She suggests a variety of other calming strategies, like drawing a mandala (not my style, but I can see Ben, who loves to concentrate on a drawing, getting a lot out of it) or writing acrostic or diamante poems, two ideas I love. All of these various techniques – yoga, breathing, visualizations, balanced nutrition—Irvine argues, can make a difference in helping a child deal with difficulties from eczema (the condition in her son which first led Irvine to alternative therapies) to ADD to a lack of self-confidence and more. They certainly can’t hurt. Also, I appreciate how she cycles back to both her tips and the various issues they might assist with throughout the book, approaching them all from different angles, to reiterate her argument that we are fully interconnected beings.

I began to lose Irvine slightly in the last section of the book, “Home,” which seemed a little less grounded in practical advice and information and a bit more reliant on platitudes (“Each child is a unique gift;” “Children have magical ways about them”). But in the generous spirit of the book, I’ll think of these as mantras, to repeat (perhaps through clenched teeth!) during difficult moments of parenting.

I found the book simple, clear and useful. It reiterated some things I know already and practice, inspired me to try adding a couple more habits to my family life, and taught me a few things I didn’t know. I’m looking forward to adding some of her ideas to our daily routine.

Fearless Friday


Today, in honor of MotherTalk’s Fearless Friday spotlight on Arianna Huffington’s new book, Becoming Fearless, I’m supposed to write about a fearless moment in my life, or a moment when I started becoming fearless.

First, here are some moments I remember feeling fear:
When I was five, and we’d just arrived in Connecticut from Japan and my unfamiliar uncle reached into the car to pick me up;
When I was twenty-two, and a guy with a finger in the pocket of his sweatshirt mugged me;
When I was thirty-five, and I was in an emergency room with my listless, feverish, 9 month-old baby being diagnosed with pneumonia.

Some more typically frightening things — leaving my public school and going to boarding school in 9th grade; moving across country at 22 with no job and no place to live (that one probably scared my parents, but they were remarkably calm!); giving birth — didn’t scare me at all, and I’m trying to work out the pattern, but I think mostly for me (as, I suspect, for many others) the things you choose are less scary than the things that are imposed or inflicted on you.

Just over a year ago, I started a blog. Before that, I’d been afraid of even commenting on a blog, worried, as we often are, of coming across as too stupid, too trivial, too ordinary. Well, maybe I am all of those things some of the time, but I’m also not any of those things enough of the time that I keep putting it out there. And in a direct line from blogging comes my column, and now a book, and a measure of fearlessness. I’ll write to anybody, anywhere, and ask them to talk to me.

So if you’re reading this blog and have never commented, celebrate Fearless Friday with me and drop me line.