Family Portrait

I used to wake up at five a.m. and write my guts out. This morning I woke up at five a.m. and itched to write, so here I am. The cursor is doing that blinking thing and there's an awful lot of white space to fill.

Crap, I'll just jump right in knowing it's not going to be perfect, and I don't have time to make it perfect, because my job and my family take all my time. That and sleeping and reading Game of Thrones and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.

The Kid is five years old now, going on six. He is not laid back. He is high strung. Change is hard for him. He has reddish-brown hair and freckles and bruises all over his legs because he randomly falls down. It's like watching the out takes at the end of the movie, the blooper roll, where the actor is standing there one minute and falls on his back the next, and the crew laughs. The Old Man and I are laughing all the time. The Kid asks insightful questions like, "Who is the boss in this house?" and "When do I get root beer with dinner? Is there a system, or are you just saying no tonight for no reason?"

I gotta say too that I totally deserve how happy he makes me. I really do. He and I go to the movies together and watch The Avengers and Cars 2. I love the movies because all the truths are universal and black and white and there's heroes and villians and no regular people who just screw up because they're human. There's no giving anyone the benefit of the doubt in movies - you might as well just shoot them with a laser and get it over with.

I used to call her The Baby, but she is now two years old. I'll call her Chica I suppose until a better term pops up. Remember from the story two years ago how I looked in her little baby one day old eyes and saw that she totally forgave me for being a messy human who desperately needed someone to give her the benefit of the doubt. Chica is incredible. She is assertive. She is wickedly funny. She is laid back. When I go to work and she is sitting on The Old Man's lap, watching Little Einsteins, she lazily waves goodbye to me with one hand, kind of a ghetto sideways wave and says "Bye Mom," never taking her eyes off Leo. I think, in fact, that she has a crush on Leo, the little red-headed ringleader, from Little Einsteins. She's kind of obsessed. She's also got the reddish-brown hair, but no freckles yet on her olive skin. She has something against shoes and socks. Her favorite outfit is a black t-shirt and a hot pink taffeta skirt fringed in bright yellow. I think she rocks.

The Old Man is still my better half, and I have to say that I absolutely deserve him too. He is patient and gives messy humans the benefit of the doubt as a default of his personality. He's not a morning person but he jumps out of bed to sit with Chica and let her play with his fingernails as she drinks juice from her sippy cup and watches cartoons. He comes home from work Sunday afternoons and sprawls on the living room floor to take a nap and lets The Kid and Chica sit on his back like a sofa. Every once in a while Chica swats at his head to make sure he's really not sleeping. I've given up suggesting he take a nap upstairs because I realized he likes the torture. The Kid has two loose teeth, so The Old Man spent yesterday morning at the bank getting shiny new one dollar coins so we can play tooth fairy the correct way. I was just going to give The Kid some nickels from the change jar. See? My better half.

There's a little pocket of magic where I live, and I'm probably the lynchpin of it all maybe, or maybe I'm just lucky. When I come home from work the first thing I do is take off my underwear because it's constricting, and then change into shorts and a t-shirt, and I get to play dodgeball and have water fights.

All I will say about work is that it's annoying right now and takes up way too much of my time, but one thing about having this particular family is that they force me to remember what is real, and what is just fluff.

Choices

The gifts of a meaningful challenging job and a beautiful messy delightful family mean I make choices every day - but how lucky I am to have these choices.

What really matters to me? What do I want to be remembered for when I die? Yes, family comes first, but my values align with where I work, so work is a part of it. I help connect people to the natural world and wildlife in a way that is not packaged, canned, processed, frozen, televised, spun, disinfected or dissected; and with that connection I believe humans tap into something greater than themselves, to raw, wild life and death and our duty to immerse ourselves in it and protect it at the same time.

My family. There is the *yawn* view that it is our highest duty to raise another human being. The Old Man and I have never talked about values but I guarantee we agree on fundamental concepts:
* our children will be able to think for themselves, to participate in their education, to discover the world so as not only to become functioning adults but to have their choice in how they make their living.
* money and status aren't everything.
* our children will believe unwaveringly in their own self-worth.

There are so many demands on my energy and focus and time, and some demands are bullshit demands, let's be honest.... that it has helped me to define big picture priorities:

1. A majority of my energy goes to my family life.
2. I engage only in pursuits I find personally satisfying.
3. I nurture my mental, physical and spiritual health on a regular basis.

When I feel like dropping a six pack of High Life on The Old Man's chair as a parting gift and escaping to Mexico, or when my head pounds from stress and clanging noise, or when I can't focus because my mind has checked out, those are clues that I'm not paying attention to my top 3 priorities.

One of those things I find personally satisfying is writing... I haven't posted a lot lately, but I hope to correct that in the future.

Thanks for listening, online world. :)

My Favorite Quote Ever - So Far This Week

"A social worker would be fascinated by my in-laws' family dynamics." A friend of mine, gearing up for her visit to her in-laws' house for the Thanksgiving holiday.

It's a well-known fact that holidays are stressful. So many - often unrealistic - expectations are piled on top of the mashed potatoes and turkey and ham bones and pie and cranberries. We want fellowship, time to catch up with family, heartfelt conversations - but instead we get football and work in the kitchen, and if we're lucky, the men do the dishes. If we're not lucky, we spend all day on our feet preparing a meal, serving a meal, and cleaning up after a meal, and somehow the day goes by without any reflection or recognition of each other.

And then there are the veiled comments, the blunt comments, and the outright inflammatory comments, all made with bubbling gravy and the scent of cinnamon apple candles in the background. Knowing what I do about animal behavoir, this makes perfect sense to me.

I did my thesis research on the dynamics of young male wild horses, specifically sub-adult bachelor male groups. There were 3 to 8 horses in each group, and when the groups would meet each other, they would go through an elaborate ritual to establish dominance. This is what all social creatures do when reunited. The hierarchy, the lines of control, must be established.

The horses would stare at each other.

If one bowed or lowered its head, he admitted subservience.

If not, they would approach each other.

One would drop to a knee and bite at the other's hocks. If a horse loses an achilles tendon in the wild, he is dead. This was a very ritualizing form of biting though, and rarely did any horse break the skin or do any real damage.

At any point the horses could lower its head, chomp its teeth, and bow out of the fight, admitting his lower rank in the hierarchy.

There was a lot of circling involved, a lot of staring, and in the end, a lot of giving up and chomping of teeth.

The mares, the females, were much more vicious to each other when establishing an alpha.

I don't really have a rosy ending to this post. Humans should be able to keep the peace better, matriarchs and patriarchs should be able to quash their evolutionary drive for dominance. The human's ritualized fight for dominance - words shaped and formed like weapons, aimed at other human targets at the dinner table - should be civilized. We should be past it.

But we're not.

Family

My parents were visiting yesterday and today, and The Kid has a cold, so my mom offered to take him to Domelandia (I grew up in a geodesic dome...I'll tell you about it sometime) so that we wouldn't have to take sick leave, and because my parents are delighted with The Kid and want to spend as much time with him as possible. Grandpa is a very recent convert to loving The Kid - he wasn't a fan of the baby stage. The Old Man and I are driving down tomorrow.

I did not grow up around my aunts or uncles or grandparents, but The Kid is growing up around his extended family. I don't really have the words to say how important my family is to me, or The Old Man's family is to me, other than that I am so very grateful that The Kid knows his aunts and uncles and grandparents. Not only does he know them, he is comfortable around them and looks forward to seeing them. He high-fived The Old Man and gave me huggins when he left in Grandpa's truck today. He told me he was going to feed the horses which I thought was really brave for a two year old who was recently bitten by a miniature horse on a hobby farm.

I did not have to rush home from work today. The house feels empty and I miss The Kid. Also, I do not miss The Kid and I'm going to dinner with my husband and am grateful for a night I don't have to be a mom. These feelings exist simultaneously.