the squibix family blog

Two days ago we went to our local town pool and Harvey mentioned that he'd like to take swim lessons. Okay, it's not like he ASKED for swim lessons, it's like the seventeenth time I asked him if he wanted swim lessons he shrugged and said, "okay." Either way, it was like a rocket shot me over the moon. For a year I've been asking Harvey to consent to various age-appropriate group activities - baseball, soccer, even ballet though his grandfather would take away his trust fund. Thus far the mention of such things has made him curl up into a ball like an armadillo. (That's the right animal? They curl up like that, right?) Harvey HATES being told what to do by other adults. He barely makes it through kid's church every week, and that's only because I'm in the room, and only because I'm absolutely forcing him to do it. So when he consented to swim lessons I breathed a year-long sign of relief. I said to myself, "This is it! Four years old will be different!"

Then this morning I said we would go to the pool to sign up for the lessons and Harvey fell apart on the kitchen floor. Now swim lessons are the scariest thing on the planet earth. And his mother is an evil dictator for suggesting them. I said we could talk about it later. Let's just go swimming and discuss this another time. He cried harder and stamped his feet and insisted he was not. going. anywhere. ever.

I was disappointed, and not only disappointed but MAD. Because I had been so proud of him on Saturday for agreeing to swim lessons, so proud of his newfound bravery and hopeful for the future. So when he returned to his normal behavior, I was mad at him for getting my hopes up and then dashing them. As if he was doing it just to fuck with me.

But the psychologist-written-book on helping children with anxiety says not to shame them for for their feelings. So instead of saying what I wanted to say I said "Harvey, I'm upset and mad and I need to take a few minutes away from you to calm down."

This mama-time-out approach works for some people who write parenting articles, apparently. But this morning it didn't. This morning it appeared that children having an anxiety attack about separation anxiety because they are afraid of separating from their parents? They do not like to be left alone.

"I want to beeeeee with yooooooooooou!" Harvey screamed from downstairs.

And when I was standing at the top of the stairs, wondering whether I would run down and scream at him, or punish him, or force him to put on his bathing suit RIGHT THAT MOMENT, I realized I was disgusted with my child. Absolutely disgusted. I was absolutely filled with righteous indignation. Because here was this kid manifesting all these disgusting SINS! Like LAZINESS! He's not only lazy because he won't try anything new; he's lazy because he won't even get up off the kitchen floor to come find me! Plus he's getting FAT! And he's cowing to FEAR! He is so completely run by fear that he won't try something he knows he wants to do because something about it suddenly scared him.

And this disgusts me more than anything else in the world, because loud and shrieking on the kitchen floor are MY SINS, the ones I've been trying to hide from the world for twenty years. It's me who is lazy and fat and fearful. My poor genetic duplicate is bawling because he's too afraid to do anything, and I'm thinking, "Yeah. I know what you mean."

I would not be disgusted if they were different sins. I would have compassion for PRIDE, or JEALOUSY, heck I'd have so much compassion I probably wouldn't notice them at all. But LAZINESS and FEAR? And maybe he's a little FAT? That's me if you strip away all my pretense of good qualities. If I stop for one moment cleaning and making and accomplishing and working out? The world would see that I am a lazy, fearful, (filthy?) child.

That should make it easier to love Harvey and for some reason it doesn't.

The people at church on my prayer team would say that I need to forgive myself, my current self and the child-like self inside of me who's been shamed for fatness and laziness and anxiety. And I'm totally in agreement with that advice if I was giving it to SOMEONE ELSE who I was praying for. But for me? Have compassion on myself? No way! Being disgusted with myself is pretty much my M.O. Disgust is my primary motivator. It's how I get like 90% of my chores done.

But for Harvey's sake I'll try to take a baby step. I'll offer him some grace. I may still force him into swim lessons, but I'm not going to talk about it any more this month.

Jesus said (you know what's coming here church goers and I'm sorry for being obvious) Jesus said that unless you become like a little child you can't enter into the kingdom of heaven. I always thought he meant you had to be like innocent and maybe even a little bit needy. Those things lead you to God, obviously. But what if he meant: unless you become like ACTUAL CHILDREN? Unless you're an irrational, impulsive, unfinished jerk, you can't begin to see what God is offering you? Maybe? Because I'm those things though I hate to admit it.

We went to our local pool and sprinkler park for several hours on Saturday. There is a sandy beach, a dock, a sprinkler park, and a playground. (There's also a concession stand which I am pretending does not exist.) After four hours of playing it still took tremendous effort to get the boys to leave at half past dinner time. And only then because I promised we could go back on Monday.

This is basically my plan for the rest of the summer.

And then I thought: But this is what the blog is for! Recording adorable moments with a date stamp so that years later I can look back and say "Oh how precious the children were! Why weren't you just absolutely orgasming over every single minute of it?" And then I will judge my former self, because I have no compassion for past iterations of me. "What a terrible mother I was, not to slather them with kisses at every single moment," I will say. "It went by too fast!"

Hey Leah of the future: enjoying all your luscious and complete sleep cycles? Bite me!

Here are some cute things my kids said this week:

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Me: "Harvey, do you want to move these magnetic letters downstairs to the refrigerator so we can spell more words?"

Harvey: "Yeah, let's do that but not now. Let's do that the next day. Life is never ending!"

(I don't know where he heard this 'life is never ending' thing, probably something I said when I was complaining about the chores.)

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Me: "Oh, sounds like Zion is waking up."

Harvey (climbing up the stairs): "I'm coming sweetie! I'm coming baby!"

Zion (shouting from the bed): "Noooo! Me todder!"

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Zion is sitting in the middle of an empty living room whining for something we can not figure out.

Zion: "goosey hemet"

Me: "Goosey Helmet?"

Zion: "uuh." (this means yes.)

Me: "Harvey, do you know what he's saying?"

Harvey: "He's saying goosey helmet."

Me: "That's what I thought he was saying, but that doesn't mean anything."

Zion (more insistantly): "goosie hemet. goosie hemet nock down."

Me: ????

Zion: "My Petuh? My Deedees?"

Me: "Oh! The city of Jerusalem? The city of Jerusalem got knocked down?"

Zion: "uuh."

Me: "And you want me to rebuild it with blocks? So you can play with your Peter and your Jesus?"

Zion: "uuh. Tempoo nock down."

Me: "Oh. Why didn't you say that in the first place!"

We had read our picture book of the Nicene creed that morning, and it seems as if Harvey is doing some processing about baptism.

"You follow Jesus even though you're not baptized?" I repeat to him. He nods. I don't want to tell him that actually he WAS baptized, because Zion wasn't, and I don't want either of them to feel left out among their peer group now that we go to a church which practices on adult baptism.

"You can be baptized if you want to, Harvey," I say. "Once you decide to follow Jesus."

"But we DO follow Jesus," he says.

Well yes, corporately, as a family that's true. But in our modern protestant theology there's an individual choice that's important too. I say:

"Well, to be baptized you have to realize that you need Jesus, and you have to decide to follow him for your whole life." Suddenly I feel anxious, like I'm forgetting some part of the formula. How do I lead someone through a salvation, again? What if I'm tested on it on Sunday?

"Everybody needs Jesus," he says.

"True" I say. Nobody can argue with that. But there's this issue of sin that I remember is important.

"Why do you need Jesus?" I ask.

Harvey looks at me with his spotless face. "Because he takes care of me!" he says.

This is Harvey my budding saint who the other day screamed from the bathroom, "Mama! It's amazing! God healed Zion's Poison Ivy!" Because the red spot on Zion's arm had disappeared miraculously after a seven day waiting period. And I don't want to say, Well, Zion's body healed the poison ivy. Because isn't it miraculous that God made our bodies so ready to heal themselves? Who am I to say that God heals instantly but the bodies he created heal in seven days? Maybe Harvey's faith is better than mine. Maybe I shouldn't bother him with sin.

But I try.

"He does take care of you, Harvey." I say. "And also he takes away your sins. If you do something bad that separates you from God, Jesus takes the sin away from you. That's an important part of baptism..."

But Harvey is not listening anymore. He has gotten up and gone back to his play, which is putting small pieces of paper into the bedside lamp to see if they'll catch on fire. This is what he was doing, apparently, while I was sewing his birthday present.

And I think, never mind the sins. Thank You Jesus for taking care of him.

I guess you could say he's zealous about learning.

A few weeks ago we read the scene from Little House when Ma gets a sprained ankle. Harvey asked where the ankle bone is, and I acted all learner-lead-lesson-maker about it, showing him some pictures on the ipad and pointing out where he could feel the bones on his own body. Well, he just ate that up, and asked me about other bones he could feel. I went to get my bone book from college, but when that proved to be in the attic I gave up for the day and I took a bone book out of the library instead (way easier than getting a ladder). The first layout in the library book was bones of the ribcage, and Harvey suddenly became fascinated with the rib cage, asking to see pictures of crocodiles ribcages and monkey ribcages. Why do we have a rib cage? he asked. To keep our lungs safe, obviously, and then I took out a library book on respiration (though in the end, all Harvey really got was that we breath in and our lungs get bigger). Still, I was feeling pretty chuffed with myself, like this homeschool stuff just writes itself.

Then we had a week of terrible days. I was feeling sick; the kids just wanted to bug each other. Zion started saying NO! and hitting his brother. It was raining. If the kids were teaching themselves anything it was how to piss off mom.

Harvey had a string hanging off of his sock and he wanted me to cut it off for him, but when I brought a scissors he insisted that HE wanted to do it, and so I gave him the scissors and he cut a hole in his sock, and then he cried that there was a hole in his sock. I said he could get another pair from upstairs and he screamed, "No! YOU get it!" I said if he wanted to be a big boy and solve his own problems he could walk upstairs and get a new sock, but if he wanted to be a baby then babies don't play with scissors and I'm putting the scissors away until he's 5. He screamed that he wanted me to get a new sock AND he wants to play with scissors and I reiterated his options, a little peevishly because even though I said I wasn't mad that he accidentally cut his sock I was a little mad because it was a brand new sock. He lay in the floor in an angry crying mess and Zion crawled onto my lap and I forget exactly why but he started hitting me.

I shut my eyes and drew in a deep breath. "I'm going to be quiet now," I said, "and breath in and out slowly until I get not angry." I inhaled to a count of five. I exhaled to a count of ten. For several seconds it was miraculously quiet in the house.

Then Harvey piped up. "Mama!" he exclaimed, "When you do that your ribcage gets bigger!"