Create.

Parenting is the biggest creative challenge I've encountered yet.  The writing challenge, the choreography challenge, those are far less intense and seemingly endless, and in many ways, less real.  Though I do love them, let's not forget that.

When I feel like I've found a parenting solution it directly impacts a human being, my son.  I also love finding something close to a solution for a line of words.  But I never really know if that's a solution or just something better than what I did yesterday.  If you get down to it, that's the same thing, really, it's all just looking for something better than the day before.  Yup.  Can I get Hudson to not throw a tantrum right now... can I get him to eat his dinner... can we play something other than wheel-spinning and actually keep his attention...

I can't wait until he gets a bit bigger when we can really start doing arts and crafts.  When we can really start drawing, and making sculptures, and making sand castles... It's going to be great, and that will definitely satisfy my need to keep creative even when I can't sit down to write any thoughts for hours or days or weeks at a time.

I'm reading Imagine by Jonah Lehrer, our faculty summer reading, and it's doing a great job of helping me realize how many ways I don't stretch my creativity and my brain power.  I had very much the same sensation when I read Poemcrazy a few years ago, though they are actually quite positive sensations because I come away determined to do more, and also satisfied with the knowledge that I can in fact cultivate creative thinking in myself and those around me.  Travel, go to coffee shops, talk to more neighbors, allow myself to be under the influence (within reason) and get out into the arts world to be exposed to other people's creativity.  These are all important lessons I'm getting.

Mostly, I'm learning to take advantage of time even better.  To take a day and a half to write a blog post is okay if that means I am actually using every five-minute piece available to me, and if it means that on the whole I'm writing more.  I'm learning to observe more closely and narrate not just to Hudson what's going on in the world around us, but to myself.  I think it's all connected.  Hopefully all this will help me stay creative as a parent as the years go on...

What I learn from a two-year-old

It has been a long stretch without a post to this blog, mostly due to my own freak-out and needing to step back and look at life from new angles and re-settle things in my mind a bit, re-organized.  But contemplating, playing, planning, discussing, oh, and going to lots of therapy sessions, have been a really good way to spend the past few months. 
The biggest takeaway from this Spring has been that having a two-year old seems to run my life, but it doesn't have to be that way.  I commented to a colleague recently who has a 3rd-grader that there is no "sweet spot" of actually making all this career-art-mother balance.  It is just hard.  He commented back, "unless it's all a sweet spot and you just have to look at it differently."  He paused, and I tilted my head in that "well, maybe so..." kind of way.  "But we both know that's bullshit", he said.  Yup. He went on to explain that he remembers having a toddler and the stress level was entirely different.  He can actually sit down with his kid to read books in the evenings, and can go outside to play sports with him, and I keep that in the back of my mind....

My two-year-old is teaching me patience.  Both the patience needed to find out why he's throwing a tantrum and to stick with him through it, and the patience needed to understand that he will someday be a 3rd-grader.  He is teaching me that he can do things by himself -- like read his duck book, play with his musical toys, and play in the bath, and I can ABSOLUTELY take little moments in his playtime to read a poem or look through my own writing.  The rest is all about scheduling - even personal time has to be scheduled when you're a working, creative mamma, or even if you're a creative, stay-at-home dad like my husband.  We've gotten lazy.

Our plan is to actually schedule babysitting time well in advance so that  we have date nights set up regularly.  I have just started a summer session of adult ballet that I'll take one or two nights a week.  In the summer, when I'll be home with the kiddo I'll take him to a drop-in daycare once or twice a week so I can sit in a coffee shop and do some writing.  When next school year starts, little H will be registered in the NSCC co-op preschool program and while Ben will sometimes have to be involved as a member, he will get some sessions off to do his own thing.

Meanwhile, we watch our little guy learn new words every day, switching between his Spanish and English vocabulary, we watch him get excited about a new book, we cuddle and tickle and tackle and spin umbrellas in the rain.  And of course, also, we try to get him to eat dinner without the house becoming a war zone.  We try to get him distracted from a toy whose batteries have run out.  We try to get him to sleep in his toddler bed for the whole night.  And we stay patient. And I will continue to use this blog as my process, and my place to share what I experience and what I learn.

Love Stories

My two greatest loves

I am perhaps influenced by how many articles I'm reading recently devoted to love, or perhaps I have been doing the thinking on my own. I can't tell anymore.  But wherever it comes from, I am finding myself compelled to reflect on my relationships and my happiness and to share this joy.  I have been reading about the physiological importance of kissing and holding hands as part of healthy marriages, of the importance of touch for a baby's and child's learning, and about the importance of emotional stability for one's own success.

I usually hate Valentine's Day and the commercialism behind it but I am getting a little behind the idea of the holiday this year just as a way to encourage some meditation on the good things in life and a way to jump start the positivity I want to bring into my everyday life.  Enough of this stress that holds me in its clenched fist.  Right??

I've been wanting to tell the story of how Ben and I met, and I'll try to keep it brief.  This is one of my meditations on love.
Ben and I met in Melinda Hedgecorth's flamenco class in Seattle in March 2004.  I was taking her dance classes after not dancing for seven or eight months, and Ben was accompanying them on guitar after not doing classes for quite a while.  I don't know if it was love at first sight, but pretty close.  I knew we'd connect, if not fall in love.  It was easy, and genuine, to talk to him before and after class and it felt like we were really becoming friends.  When he actually asked me for my number, in May, and asked me to see Eric and Encarna with him at the Capitol Club, I had to ask my friends at work the next day if they thought it was really a date.  Duh.

Since I already had plans to move to Wisconsin and live with my sister starting about a month later, I called Ben as soon as I figured out it was a date, to re-schedule our get-together for sooner.  How about tomorrow?  Yes.  By the time we did go to the Capitol Club a week later, I was in love and we had been spending every day together.

I left for Wisconsin four weeks later with the plan that Ben would come visit over the summer and see if he could get his own apartment and job.  I was sleeping in my sister's den, and we were looking for a new place to move ourselves.  The visit was a success and sure enough Ben came to Wisconsin around September and moved in to an apartment about ten blocks from our new place.  It was only a matter of months before we realized we were just wasting rent money having him live down the road, so he moved in to my bedroom with me and shared the apartment with my sister and her dog and cat.

We had a rough year in Wisconsin, but we were falling in love, totally self-obsessed.  We got engaged on our one-year anniversary after dinner at the restaurant where I was busing tables, and it was a totally planned engagement.  We had been talking about it, Ben spilled the beans that he'd bought me a ring, and frankly, I told my sister as soon as I got to Wisconsin that I'd be marrying him some day.  She didn't believe me at first.

We left for Spain a year after landing in Wisconsin, and I started grad school at NYU in Madrid that September.  Ben taught some English and took guitar lessons.  I'm so glad we were there for a year, and I sometimes wish we'd stayed longer but at the time we had several reasons for wanting to come back.  We planned a Seattle wedding at the Japanese Garden, with help from Ben's mom while we were abroad, and I bought my wedding dress with my mom in Boston on a trip to the States for some job interviews.  We took the marriage both very seriously and not at all seriously.  I think we were dedicated to the process of reflecting on our relationship and preparing for a new life, but I also think we knew that marriage in itself meant little to us and that we could decide to be un-married at any point it felt logical.  We did not connect the "marriage" to our deep love as directly as many do.

So the following summer, we moved back to the States, got married in Seattle, and then settled in Pennsylvania for my teaching job and it was perhaps the most intense summer of our lives, but it was also very real.  I felt like a grownup.  Slowly the domestic life expanded... a cat... a dog... planning the pregnancy... and not once did it end up feeling like a "sell-out" or the lame version of growing up that we all fear in our youth.  I think we stayed true to our passions and to our ideals pretty well.

We've moved back to Seattle, full circle, arriving the same summer our marriage filled five years.  We have had our fights over the years and we've pissed each other off but we also accept each other and love each other profoundly and we encourage each other and we find tiny ways to celebrate love and give thanks.  We are constantly trying to balance intimacy with space, passion with obligation, career with family, like anyone.  We will always be working at it.  We are starting out, yet again.  We are helping each other through the transition and we have each taken turns holding the other tear-streaked face on our shoulder.  Hopefully this has been one of our last major moves, and we can truly settle, and continue to travel and experience the world from a great home base.

If I didn't have Ben I don't know what I'd do.  I don't know how I'd keep my sanity in all this (job, baby, art).  Ben is a dedicated partner and open communicator. He's a wonderful dad, and I don't even think he knows how talented he is in this.  He is a dedicated stay-at-home dad and even though winters are hard, he pushes through and brings love and creativity to Hudson's expanding life.  And for my part, I am definitely still in love.

Wear 'em Out: yet another venue for Hudson's obsession with wheels

I went to the Northgate Community Center yesterday with Hudson since I have the week off for Thanksgiving, and we piad the $3 for the Wear 'em Out "open gym" for toddlers they have set up.  They put out a bunch of push-cars, rocking horse toys, climbing toys and a couple of bouncy houses and some big rubber balls.  I went early so it was still pretty quiet, but it got crowded and crazy.  I was surprised at how many parents just sat on the bleachers and let their toddlers run around by themselves.  There were several that also were down on the ground playing, and helping to negotiate toddler battles over the cars.

Hudson pushed, rode, and flipped over cars to play with their wheels, and every now and then I was able to pick him up and introduce him to some other toys.  Then he would go back to the cars.  When other kids would come up to him, he just stared and a couple times even shook his head when I asked if he wanted to say hi.  He's definitely shy around other kids.  But the other day, in the coffee shop, a little girl a couple years older than him was giving him toys to play with and he actually smiled at her.  That was awesome.

So it's pretty clear the obsession with wheels is not just a passing thing, it is lasting from the sitting stage to the standing to the walking to running to talking phase, (he's got a few words and sounds under his belt!) and I can only imagine where it will go from here.  I wish I had time to relate all the details of Hudson's growing and changing, but I've been sitting in this coffee shop grading final exams and catching up on my communication all morning -- the whole point of having Thanksgiving break is that I get to be with Hudson and share all these experiences like Wear 'em Out that I don't usually do.  He's probably been awake for a while now so I should get home and get playing.