Thankful Heart

 There are times when I am very hard on myself as a parent. When you have a dear child who struggles, sometimes intensely, with anxiety of all sorts, it's very easy to second-guess yourself at every turn. My daughter struggles hard every day to come to terms with brokenness and uncertainty, and the older she gets, the more she becomes aware how much life is full of both. I have an internal dialogue that goes something like this "Am I pushing her too hard? Am I not pushing her enough? Is she ever going to reach a place of enough healing on some of these issues that she will be able to make it through this life, which is filled with uncertainty, with more joy and peace than anxiety?" I can have those kinds of thoughts even in the midst of a relatively good day or week, when I realize how far she's come, but they especially whack me on the hard days.

So sometimes I just need to sit back, take a deep, trusting, cleansing breath, and remember what a delightful person she is and how hard she is trying to engage life with courage and creativity.

I love it that my almost twelve year old is coming up with creative ways to spend her summer, even in the face of disappointment over changes to long-standing summer plans. I love that she

• is boldly taking a art class at a local art center, where she's never taken a class before
• has an eighteen book TBR stack in her room
• has begun reading Moby Dick just to see if she can 
• is learning new embroidery stitches
• wants to begin daily drawing times again with me in July
• is looking forward to the celebration of her birthday
• is gardening with me again in the community gardens
• is excited about building a model bridge with her dad (they've been measuring things to make it to scale)
• will be taking workshops later this summer to keep her Irish Dance skills fresh
• is loving our family read-aloud of Lord of the Rings
• thinks it's cool that we're learning about the Lord's Prayer from a book by Kenneth Bailey
• is working on an entry for the county library picture book contest

Thank you, Lord, for all the ways you're growing her to be the young lady you want her to be. Thank you for giving me grace as a parent, and for filling up all the places where I know I lack strength, patience, and skill.

The Slow Learner I Am (And God's Long Patience)

Late last night I found myself feeling discouraged at the end of a long day. And I found myself doing something I don't do very often: visiting the archives of this blog.

I don't know why I don't think to do that more often. I will often wend my way through pages of old journal (the physical journal notebooks I still keep, albeit less often than I used to) to mine them for quotes, snippets of half-finished poems, bits of half-shaped creativity, insights into struggles. And maybe that's the point. My private journal often feels like a work-in-progress (more like me) and something that I can turn to to find ongoing sustenance as I keep journeying on.

My blog, simply because it is a blog, feels somehow tidier and more complete. First of all, it gets broadcast -- it's "out there" -- ostensibly for anyone to read. And it looks so darn organized, with those neat little blogger functions tying up each month in a bow and then each year in a bundle. For the past couple of years, I've even "tagged" my posts, so I can go back and sort them according to category. All in all, it's just a very different way of writing and thinking.

But it's still me, and I'm still and forever a work in progress, which means plenty of ragged and half-finished creative moments. So when I felt a nudge from the Lord last night to go back and look over some posts from the first couple of years, I did.

And I found this, from a post written about 3 1/2 years ago, a piece of a post which I could have almost written again last night. The challenging issues in my daughter's life have changed; the physical season has changed (though not the crazy work schedules and the tiredness); my ongoing struggles to do what I'm called to do haven't. In some ways that's frustrating, in other ways comforting. At least I know these are the edges God has been working on in me for a long time. And I can trust his hands.

"Being patient with myself and loving myself is far harder. Why? I'm not sure. I'm tired right now; I do realize that. Winter is long and cold and icy in our neck of the woods, and D. and I have been working far too many hours and juggling far too many things. We haven't had a really refreshing break in I don't know how long. When I get depleted like this, I am more susceptible to letting myself be shaped by discouragement and untruths. I need to stop doing that, because that kind of behavior hurts me. (Sounds familiar -- sounds like the kinds of things I say to S.!)

So I will try not to listen to the lie that I am a bad parent, and a failure as a mom and a teacher. My daughter is struggling with something that she needs to overcome; I need to find creative ways to be patient enough with myself and with her to help her overcome it. This isn't the first hill we've faced together, and it won't be the last. Grounded in prayer, we're going to keep on climbing."

Of Books, Banana Bread, and Small Bottles

I think I need to be in touch with more mom-writers.

I'm curious to know if any other mom-writers ever feel torn between vocations (that's vocations with an "o" not vacations with an "a" -- I know most moms don't get the latter!) and long for writing time.

My vocation as a mom and teacher is dear to my heart. I wouldn't trade it for anything. I love guiding my daughter, both in heart and head formation. I have days (especially perhaps during snowbound weeks when we both get cranky with cabin-fever) when I may not always do those things as well, patiently and creatively as I should, but it doesn't mean I don't love doing them and recognize them as one of the main calls God has put before me during this season of my life.

But oh, do I miss writing. Not little bits of posts on my blog, or jottings in my journal, or responses to my seminary students' essays, or reviews that earn us necessary pennies...all of which I do realize count as writing, all of which I enjoy and am grateful I get to do. I mean writing...the kind of writing I spent long stretches of adolescent and young adult time doing...short stories, poems and revisions of poems, essays, drafts of novels or scenes from novels or character sketches. The kind of writing it is very hard to squeeze into the cracks of crevices of a life filled with other things I need to do and want to do and yes, have to do. The kind of writing I tell myself, if I were truly dedicated, I would get up two hours earlier a day to do, only I'm often so tired from having to work late the night before, I just can't. Nor would it always be wise, because I need to be cogent and patient that day, not bleary and growly as I tend to be when I don't get enough sleep.

I'm truly not complaining. I know not all of it is because I'm a parent -- lots of folks are much busier parents than I, who only have one child. I know if I had gone on to have another baby back when we had real insurance, or if we'd been in good enough financial shape to adopt, I would likely still be up in the night with a baby or chasing a toddler, and those seasons, in particular (the infant/toddler seasons) are so good but exhausting on very different levels.

Back when the sweet girl was a baby, and I was still in that wonderful though challenging season, I remember reading very wise words from Debra Rienstra, in her lovely book Great With Child. I can't recall the exact wording (nor find the quote right now) but the image has stayed with me now for almost eight years. She talked about the season of intense, active mothering of very small children, and imagined it as a bottle with a very slender neck. There's only so much you can pour at once into a small-necked bottle, she said, and so you have to be very careful what you pour, choosing wisely how to spend your energy. But she also encouraged mothers to remember that not every season of life is a bottle with such a slender neck. Value the precious slender-neck bottle time, and remember that one day, that bottle will widen and you will have more room to pour.

I remember feeling so encouraged by that, both in the hope it held out (my horizons will widen again, and my energy deepen) but in the timely reminder that the time I was in right then was precious and fleeting. It helped me to value that moment, yet look ahead for other moments.

And I think it's a very true image. Except...here's the thing...I'm pretty sure most of life is filled with season upon season of slender-necked bottles. Not in a bad way, but because we choose how to narrow our focus, where to spend our strengths and gifts, and we're finite, we can only do so much at a certain time if we want to do it well.

For me, the season where the bottle expands and I will have time to truly write the things I want to write has just never come. The snippets I've started spill out of notebooks and drawers, but they never seem to get anywhere. And I'm realizing it's partly due to choices I've made, and partly due to where our call as a family has taken us. We are a family involved in mission and ministry. I homeschool. I need to help bring in very necessary income, so I also work -- I teach online courses, I edit, I write, I do whatever I can to help bring in what we need. But somehow I have never found a way (never found the time) to do the kind of writing I most long to do, mostly because it has never been feasible for me to invest that kind of time when there is no guarantee of a concrete return. And given how broke we are (really) that has simply been a wise decision and a necessary one.

So I try to squeeze the time in, here and there, and most of the time that's okay. I see the value in it, and I tell myself to wait because another season is coming, at the same time that I love the season I'm in and value it.

But then I have days when I get frustrated. This is where I think talking to other moms-who-write sometimes helps. The frustrating moments are the ones where I find myself having a wonderful idea for a story, but being almost too afraid to get it to paper because I know I won't have time to really help it unfold, no stretches of writing time when I can just lose myself in the joy of writing, no writing space where I can just shut the door and write. Right now I am almost constantly on call to do other things. But I don't know what I'm afraid of -- that it might take me months? years? to write a story the way I want to write it? Consciously I know that's not a very good excuse, but it seems to stand in my way of starting or moving very far past the start of a project.

And then I have what I call the "odious comparison" days. The days when I see what other writers have accomplished (some moms too, though not all of them). I see their books, or beautifully crafted essays, or brilliant poems, and I look around at the piles of read-aloud books and at mountains of laundry and I think "hmmm...and what I have accomplished this week? Well, I made two loaves of banana bread."

Those are the moments where I have to start laughing. Laughter is better than despair any day. And who knows, in this particular season of life, maybe the making of really good banana bread is just as important as the crafting of a good story.

Lovely Links

Two blessings to my weekend...too lovely not to share.

One is this wonderful blog post by Karen Edmisten. I'm very thankful she "dipped into her archives" to re-post "When They're Older..." a reflection on parenting and "living in the moment" that moved me to tears (even while I grinned wryly at how much I saw myself and our family in it). Every once in a while, I read something that's so moving, so right, so much something I need to hear at this precise moment that I think, "Well, Lord, that was for me, wasn't it?" Of course I know it's not *just* for me! Which is just one reason I decided to share it.

The other is a beautiful ballad that my friend Erin posted on YouTube. It's called Lucy's Lament, and is inspired, as so many of Erin's creations are, by her love for a particular story or character, in this case Lucy Pevensie of Narnia. Erin is a marvelous poet. In fact, I first got to know her (and I'm so thankful I did) after she posted this poem a few years ago on Epinions. I found it so moving that I wrote her an email about it, and the rest, as they say, is history. A handful of years, much correspondence, a couple of re-reading blogs, and two real-life visits later, she and I are still friends -- and I still love this poem. I'm so glad she has now set it to music.

Worth Noting, Worth Quoting

"A bad day of parenting is better than a good day of not parenting."

Tip of the hat to Antique Mommy. Was I ever grateful for this reminder today!

Loose Tooth

I was helping the sweet girl brush her lower teeth tonight when I noticed again that the gap between her left lower front tooth and the tooth next to it seemed wider than usual. That had come to my attention yesterday, but I figured I was tired enough to think I was imagining things. Tonight it really grabbed my attention so I gently poked my finger in her mouth, suddenly alarmed because it looked as though one of her teeth was slightly misplaced, pushing into the tooth next to it.

She's been so incredibly active lately, with a major burst of physical energy and a sudden desire to run and climb all over everything. I wondered, could she maybe have bumped her tooth hard enough to push it closer to the one next to it? But I don't think so. I think my little girl just has a plain old loose tooth. Her first.

Is this early? She's still 2 and 1/2 months from her sixth birthday, and I can't remember when I lost my first tooth, though I think I was probably around six. (I recall it came out when I bit down on a twinkie!)

Ironically, we'd just been talking about loose teeth a couple of days ago. We were reading the second chapter of Betsy-Tacy (yes, we're reading it again...S. doesn't remember it very well from last summer) and a little boy named Tom was described as speaking with a lisp because of a missing tooth. The sweet girl wanted to know what a lisp was, and we had an interesting discussion. Good timing apparently!

But may I confess something? I'm just not feeling quite ready for this. It's not the wiggly little tooth itself, but the milestone aspect of it. She's my one and only kiddo, and it seems like just yesterday she was cutting teeth, and we were proudly counting up how many teeth she had.

I love having an almost six year old, I really do. But tonight (already struggling as I am with some discouragement and sadness over some completely unrelated things) just for a little while, I need to let myself be sad that baby days in our household are truly over.

The Blessing of Children

While blog-hopping the other day, I found this wonderful post from a Catholic homeschooling mother and writer: 40 Reasons to Have Kids. It's a terrific list all in itself, one worth reading over and contemplating and then reading over again as you think about your own reasons you could add to it.

What makes it even more interesting is that it was written in response to another list, titled "40 Reasons Not to Have Kids" which is included at the end of this article. If you think that list sounds like a bad joke or a broad parody...well, it wasn't intended to. It's part of an actual book that apparently has become a bestseller in France. I only recommend reading the latter list 1) after you have read the life-affirming list I posted first, and 2) with an eye toward reflecting on the sadness of our life-denying culture (and finding new ways to pray for people enmeshed in it).

It's truly eye-opening to see the difference in world views: what life and children and love and parenting look like from the perspective of someone who knows and loves God, versus what they look like from the perspective of someone who seems to be mostly thinking about herself. Granted, we all fall into the latter category sometimes (because we're all sinners) but I am totally in agreement with the blogger who believes that children are a gift. In fact, a very great gift. And that they help to move us out of our selfish myopia and into an openness to all that God longs to do in us and shape us into being.

One other comment on this pair of lists: when I read the article about the author of the "No Kids" book, it pointed out that she is, in fact, the mother of two children whom she deeply regrets having. How painful that must be for her children. The journalist interviewing her asked her if she'd given copies of her book to her kids (who are, I believe, aged 10 and 13). And then came my favorite moment from the article:

For the record, she has given copies of her book to both her children. Neither has picked it up, or paid it any attention. "All they want to do is read Harry Potter," she sighs.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I'm so thankful for the resilience of childhood. It's wonderful to realize that her children instinctively turn away from the painful and debilitating view of life that she's espousing and turn toward an amazingly written story that, among other things, provides one of the richest storied pictures you can imagine of maternal sacrificial love, and of sacrificial love at the very heart of reality. In other words, they're "escaping" into a story that's preparing them for an encounter with the Greatest Story. It's pre-evangelism, but shh! don't tell their mother. Don't tickle the sleeping dragon. Just let em' read.

They Will Soar on Wings Like...

When the sweet girl was two and a half or three, I made a set of Bible verse cards for her. Because she wasn't talking much yet, I relied heavily on images to help her learn and become familiar with the verses. On one side of the card I put a picture (either clipart or cut from a magazine or catalog) and on the other side I put the Scripture. When we read them together, I would hold them up with the picture side facing her and the verse facing me, and I would read the verse aloud. Once she was beginning to talk in earnest, she would chime in with the word or words (related to the picture) when I paused in the reading of the verse. For instance, one card had a picture of a sun, and I would read "The Lord is my...." and she would say "Light." I think that might have been the first verse card I made, probably because light was a word she could sign as well as say.

After we used them for quite a while, I put all the cards away in a little box, and just recently we got them out again. We've worked on other Scripture verses in the meantime, especially ones set to music, but I've been delighted to see how well she remembers these first cards and how much she still enjoys reviewing them.

The other day she pulled out a card with a picture of a soaring eagle on it. I held it up and read "...those that trust in the LORD will renew their strength; they will soar on wings like...."

"Birds," she said promptly, looking at the picture. It had been a long time since we'd gone over the verse, after all.

"Well, that's right," I encouraged. "We will soar on wings like birds, a particular kind of bird. This bird is an eagle."

"Eagles," she repeated.

Last night she happened to pull that card out again. Once more I held it up and read "...those that trust in the LORD will renew their strength; they will soar on wings like..."

"Seagulls!" she said promptly.

You know, that image works pretty well too!

A few sweet-girl-isms

Just because I haven't posted any of the wonderfully funny (and sometimes astute) things my daughter has been saying lately...

"Mommy, I'm putting the clo on the bed." (Spoken while she placed one of her teddy bear's shirts on her bed. "Clo" is her unique singular form of the word "clothes.")

"We can't really walk on water like Jesus can. Unless it's frozen. We can walk on ice."

"I'm trying to make myself 6!" (Said while standing on tip-toe and holding her arms up in a ballerina pose over her head. She's just discovered that she has to be six to officially be able to attend the sports camp run by our church. She turns 5 next week.)

"One quarter of ten is two and a half." (Casually mentioned during dinner a few weeks ago. Aftering affirming that was true, her astounded Daddy and I changed raised eyebrow looks and then conferred to find out if either of us had given the little math whiz that information. Neither of us had!)

"When will I get to be one thousand?" she asked me earlier today. "People don't live that long," I replied. "Well, I'll get to be a thousand in heaven!" she rejoined. (Amen! And it may only seem like a day...)

Sweet Talk

True confession. We're turning the corner toward May and we're still eating Valentine candy conversation hearts.

The sweet girl loves those little hearts. So this year we got a big bag of them and we've been doling them out like treasure. After all these months, we're finally nearing the end of the bag, and she's still thoroughly enjoying them. She especially loves "reading" them and asking what the different phrases mean.

Today's said "sweet talk." What was sweet talk? she wanted to know.

"It's when you say something sweet to someone, like 'I love you,'" I explained.

"What are some other sweet talks?" she wondered. And then decided "I hug you," and "I kiss you" definitely qualified.

And then she sweet talked me and gave me a hug and a kiss.

It made an otherwise pretty discouraging day a whole lot brighter.

Classical Music and Funny Riddles

One of the joys of parenting is watching your child develop her own tastes and delights. It's fun to note the kinds of loves she shares with you and the things that she begins to make uniquely her's. The sweet girl's love of chocolate? That's a passion she shares with me, of course! Her enjoyment in measuring things with a ruler or a measuring tape? That comes from Dad. Her utter fascination with penguins? No idea. She just loves penguins, and frankly we've enjoyed heading down that particular "learning trail" with the sweet girl's passion in the lead.

Two of her developing tastes recently are classical music and funny riddles. The love of classical music she comes by very honestly, because we've always played a lot of it around the house. In the first year of her life, in particular, since I was spending more time at home, I tuned in almost everyday to WQED, our wonderful all-classical radio station. But we also listen to a lot of it on CD, and two of her favorite videos of all-time also have classical soundtracks: one is a nature video set to Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," and the other is the original Fantasia.

She really loves all kinds of music (we have pretty eclectic tastes ourselves) so it's been interesting to see lately the kinds of music she's beginning to ask for by name. Not long ago she asked me what kind of music she had especially liked as a baby, and I dug out the "Baby Mozart" and "Baby Bach" CDs, remembering how often we'd played them in the first couple years of her life. These are classical CDs produced by the Baby Einstein folks, and include various short pieces by each composer, usually rendered with gentle instrumentation -- a lot of piano and various bell-like instruments. It had been a while since we'd played one; somehow they'd gotten relegated to the back of the stack. But we listened to them both the other day and it was wonderful, watching her listen (and dance) to these pieces as though she'd never heard them before, although I remember how she heard them dozens of time as an infant/toddler. She started asking questions immediately: what was *that* music called? Why does this one go fast and that one sound slow? And telling me which ones she liked to dance to. We started talking about who wrote this music, and she was fascinated with their names: Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (that one made her giggle!). We also talked about when these composers lived, which helped stretch her burgeoning understanding of time/history.

She began looking at the back of the CD cases and noticed there were a couple of other CDs advertised on the back that we didn't have. She wanted to know what they were called, and I told her one was "Baby Vivaldi" and one was "Baby Beethoven." Vivaldi she recognized from her video, but Beethoven's name fascinated her. "Can we get that?" she asked, and I told her we could check the library. They had it, so now we're in a continual round of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. She loves them all but has informed us quite positively (and many times over) that Mozart is her favorite.

At the same time that she's been realizing her love for this music, she's also been enjoying riddles. She likes popsicles, especially the ones with riddles on the stick. Granted most of the time she doesn't get the riddle until we explain it, and sometimes not even then, but a few of them have really tickled her funny bone: the flying turtle called a "shellicopter" and the bunnies who use "hoppy discs" on their computer are her favorites. Once in a while, we will all come up with riddles together, and it's great to see her trying to come up with humorous double-meanings for words even as she's still learning what a lot of words mean.

Today the classical music love and the funny riddle love came together in a wonderfully delightful way. She and I were talking about what music she'd like to listen to while she rested during nap time, and she asked for Bach. Only in typical sweet-girl fashion, she decided to play with the word and giggled as she said "Beak" instead of "Bach." "Is that the kind of music a bird listens to?" I asked her. "Johann Sebastian Beak?" She giggled, realizing we'd made another riddle. And then as I was tucking her into bed for her quiet time with her bears and a book, she giggled some more and informed me: "Mommy, you know what a sheep likes to listen to? BAA-thoven!"

A Red Letter Day (Literally)

The sweet girl's progress in learning to read has been rolling merrily along. Once in a while I grasp how well she's doing; I suddenly realize she is not only getting more adept at sounding out words, but she's beginning to "sight read" certain words that have appeared over and over again in our lessons (having first learned them phonetically) and she's gaining confidence. She's also becoming more acclimated to all the things we take for granted about reading (because we've been doing it so long, our brains just process these things naturally without us having to stop and think) like reading left to right, pausing at spaces between words, and moving to the beginning of the next line down when she gets to the end of a line. I really appreciate the way the Distar method reinforces all those things visually.

Yesterday we walked to the post office in the late afternoon, so I could mail the last of our taxes (yes, they're all done...hallelujah!). I like to see the tax envelopes postmarked before my eyes at the counter, but I had some other things to mail too, so we stopped at the drop boxes on the way in. S. has always loved these, from the time she was too tiny to reach the slots and I had to pick her up and help her stretch so she could drop the envelopes clutched in her little chubby baby fingers. Now she doesn't even have to stand on tiptoe (when did THAT happen!) and drops the envelopes in oh so casually.

There's a sign in between the slots informing people not to mail certain envelopes or packages that weigh more than 16 oz., etc. Most of the sign is in fairly small lettering, but right in the middle, in fairly good sized bright red capital letters, is the word STOP! I was scrambling through my pockets for the last of my envelopes when suddenly my little girl pipes up with the question, "Mommy, why does that say STOP?"

It took me a few seconds to realize that she'd asked me WHY the sign said what it said, not WHAT did the sign say. In other words, she had read the word, all on her own, without any prompting or encouragement, and silently.

Wow. Maybe this seems small, but to me it really did feel like a red letter event. Never mind that the answer to her actual question was kind of boring (she didn't really care much about how much people's mail weighed) it still gave me the opportunity to practice some casual confidence building. After I answered her question, I said, "you know, you read the word stop. That was good reading!" She looked almost as surprised as I felt, and then came that lovely sweet girl smile.

Flexible Penguins

Well, this Saturday is almost over...and I'm pretty tuckered out, so I'm glad of that. D. had to do some work for the church this morning (a very early meeting, followed by some neighborhood visits) and so we didn't have our usual "whole family all together" Saturday that we usually have. Given the kinds of work we do, especially D's ministry work, those Saturdays aren't always possible, but we try to have them whenever we can.

The sweet girl struggled mightily with her daddy not being home all morning. She's been having a rough time again lately with changes in routine...any changes. Needing to have things a certain way, and doing certain things at certain times -- this has always been a big part of her temperament. It has its gifts as well as its drawbacks; she's always responded well to traditions and liturgy and structure. The challenge comes when she can get obsessive about routine, and overwrought over even small changes. We've been working on it for a long time, and she's much more relaxed and flexible than she used to be, but she has certain seasons where this particular challenge rears its head again. We're in one now.

Which is why I'm exhausted, because for most of the day she was fretting over the fact that we weren't doing "what we usually do" and "when we usually do it." She asked for a reading lesson today, which we don't usually do on Saturdays -- I was surprised by that, but I think she was feeling thrown off by today not feeling like a typical Saturday. So of course I told her we could do the reading lesson, but that we would need to do it in the morning when we had time. She threw an absolute fit because we "USUALLY do it in the AFTERNOON!" and wept copiously over the fact that I said we'd have to do it another time today if she wanted to do it at all.

We had a long talk then...once I could get her to calm down enough to listen to me. We talked again about "flexibility." We've discussed this many times before, but I think she's still getting the hang of the concept. One reason I introduced her to the word a while ago (besides the fact that she needs to learn how to live it sometime) is because I know how fascinated she is with language. Sometimes you can get her to think through important things by first letting her play with the words. Today I got out one of her hard plastic bunnies and a soft rubber band, and we talked about how one was flexible and the other wasn't. We stretched the rubber band and talked about learning to be peaceful and OK with things in our schedule when we sometimes had to do them out of order, or in ways that weren't our favorite ways. Stretching the rubber band made her giggle a little bit through her tears. I asked her if she thought she could try to be flexible, and at first she tearfully told me she couldn't. We didn't seem to be getting anywhere, until she suddenly asked "are penguins flexible?"

She's been pretending to be a penguin off and on for months now; her fascination with these birds seems to know no end (as the continued pile of library books about penguins attests!). I thought about it and said yes, I thought penguins must be flexible because they must bend their legs when they waddle. So she started waddling around the room exclaiming "I'm a flexible penguin!" which made me laugh.

And a few minutes later she came into the kitchen where I was doing dishes and said, in a quiet little voice, "I'd like to do a reading lesson now." I looked at her. "You mean right now? In the morning?" "Yes." And I knew she was trying to be a flexible penguin, bless her little heart.

Having Patience

I write a lot of parenting posts here that celebrate the small, every-day triumphs and breakthroughs and just ordinary wonderments of guiding my wonderful four year old daughter. But in the interest of reporting reality, and because I'm feeling a deep need to emote today, I thought I'd mention at least one case of seeming failure and total frustration.

How do we teach our children when they don't want to be taught? My little girl is struggling right now, struggling to do something that she should have learned to do a long time ago, and she is convinced she cannot do it. I'm talking about potty training. Without going into awful details, I will say that she's not completely untrained, not by a long shot. For the most part, I would say she's been about 80% trained more than a year. We started late due to her speech delay, but once she started, things seemed to be going pretty well, if a little bit slower than I would have liked. In fact, around Christmastime I was realizing with a sense of great joy that she would likely be fully and finally trained by spring because she was doing so incredibly well.

That was then. In the past couple of weeks she has regressed in certain pottying areas. And again, without going into details no one wants to read, I will say that I am completely and utterly depleted from the potty wars. Completely exhausted from hearing my daughter, in tears, telling me -- not "I won't!" (which would be more of a willful problem, and one that I could deal with a bit better) but a despairing "I can't." And realizing that she has really convinced herself on this one.

How do we teach our children when they don't want to be taught? My daughter is bright, capable, and usually a persevering learner. Even when she thinks something is hard: balllet class last semester, a couple of our recent reading lessons (which are going very well, by the way) -- she can usually be encouraged to keep on, and she will keep on. I am very proud of her in that.

I've tried to tell her that: tried to tell her I believe she can do this, that she's capable, that it can be done. I've tried to tell her that what she's doing is not only not big girl behavior, but it's hurting her (because she's been getting terrible rashes, which is excaberating the problem). I've also resorted to some very stupid things: I've totally lost my cool and shouted (especially when she's not following the simplest rules I've laid down this week to try to help her remember to do what she needs to and what she has exhibited hundreds of times that she *can* do); I've cajoled; I've lectured in ways that even I am realizing are not getting through to her; and earlier this afternoon I actually found myself in tears about it in front of her. None of that is helpful.

At this point, I don't know who I am more impatient with: myself? or the sweet girl? Actually, I think if I'm honest I will admit that I far more impatient with myself.

So much of this can get tied into feelings of inadquacy and failure. All those lies we listen to in our heads sometimes about what it means to be a "success" and what it means for our child to be a "success." I realize sometimes I feel more sensitive about this, perhaps, because S. is my only child and because she has always had developmental challenges. She is an odd mixture of way ahead of the curve in certain areas and way behind in certain others, and that's just always been who she is.

I can accept that; in fact, I love her for who she is. I love her so much I want to help her learn and change and grow.

Being patient with myself and loving myself is far harder. Why? I'm not sure. I'm tired right now; I do realize that. Winter is long and cold and icy in our neck of the woods, and D. and I have been working far too many hours and juggling far too many things. We haven't had a really refreshing break in I don't know how long. When I get depleted like this, I am more susceptible to letting myself be shaped by discouragement and untruths. I need to stop doing that, because that kind of behavior hurts me. (Sounds familiar -- sounds like the kinds of things I say to S.!)

So I will try not to listen to the lie that I am a bad parent, and a failure as a mom and a teacher. My daughter is struggling with something that she needs to overcome; I need to find creative ways to be patient enough with myself and with her to help her overcome it. This isn't the first hill we've faced together, and it won't be the last. Grounded in prayer, we're going to keep on climbing.

Charting the Seasons

I had one of those very happy parenting moments earlier today. We'd gone to the Dollar Store to buy Valentine cards for the Sweet Girl to give out to her pre-school classmates next week when they have their party. The Dollar Store was Saturday-crowded and lots of other parents and young children seemed to have the same idea about shopping for Valentines because the aisle with the cards was the most crowded of all. We decided to duck into the aisle next door and try to approach the cards from the other direction, which was fine except that we were assailed immediately by an aisle full of...you guessed it...Easter things.

Later, after making our purchases and getting back into the car, the Sweet Girl began musing in the back seat. "Excuse me, Mommy," she said politely, in her "my-wheels-are-turning-and-I-have-something-important-to-tell-you" voice. "Halloween comes first," she announced, "and then Thanksgiving." Then without missing a beat, she added, "And then comes Advent, and then Christmas." I was inwardly rejoicing over the fact that she'd thought to put Advent on her list, showing that our efforts have paid off and she moves to the rhythm of different and deeper seasons than those defined by retailers. But before I could say anything, her Daddy prompted, "then what comes next?" I assumed she'd say Valentines Day, especially considering where we'd just been, so my heart did a wonderful little flip-flop of joy when she announced, without a moment's hesitation and with great enthusiasm: "Epiphany!"

Once in a while, you get a tiny affirmation that you're doing something right.