The Christmas Conundrum

Last December I started worrying about whether or not I would tell Quinn the Santa lie. I was able to put off the decision, temporarily, because at just over two years old, she wasn’t really ready anyway. This year she was more cognitively prepared and I was still ethically unprepared. 

With Thanksgiving just past, and Quinn reminding me daily that we had to do something to make the world more beautiful, we entered into the Christmas season. One weekend, earlier this month, we made our world more beautiful by hanging colored lights on a small spruce tree in our front yard. Quinn loved the process and many nights this month she’s gone out on the front porch in her slippers to admire our “beautiful” tree, lighting up our dark little corner of woods. Soon after hanging the outdoor lights, we put some decorations up inside the house, and started a countdown calendar so Quinn could count the days until Christmas. We hung a green ribbon from the railing next to the stairs in the hopes of receiving holiday cards in the mail, and had a great time each day when they did. Eventually, the weekend before Christmas, we hiked out into our woods to find and cut down a tree.

Through it all, I was testing out the Santa Claus idea with her. “Hey Quinn...have you heard anything about this Santa Claus guy?” I was awkward about it, I knew, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t make it feel natural. I’ve always been terrible at lying--I’m incapable of it really. Quinn had heard of Santa from school, but I could tell she didn’t really get the myth, so I thought if I danced around it, I might have still another year to postpone this difficult decision. And yet even in my talk of “postponing” the decision, I felt more and more sure that I would not actually try to convince her that a man in a red suit would come into her house and leave her presents on Christmas Eve. It’s actually kind of creepy, when you think about it in a certain way.

I started preparing Sam for my decision not to lie to Quinn. I think he understood my desire to be truthful with our daughter but, unlike me, he was very concerned about other people’s kids--worried that Quinn would be the kid who would ruin it all for everyone else. I suggested we find a way to talk about “the magic of Christmas” without Santa being expected to actually arrive. But, before I could fully frame the story, I stumbled on a game changer: an article on the New York Times homepage titled, “Santa on the Brain.” I clicked the link, eagerly looking for something to justify my refusal to participate in the Santa lie, but found instead a thought-provoking argument for making the lie as big and fanciful as possible. 

The author, a neuroscientist and mom named Kelly Lambert, explained some brain-development basics:

Although children are born with a full set of 86 billion brain cells, or neurons, the connections between these neurons are relatively sparse during these early years. As their brains develop — as more and more micro-thread extensions form between neurons, and neurochemicals zap across the tiny gaps — children slowly learn about the rules of the physical world, and the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. Eventually, they learn that reindeer can’t fly, that Santa can’t visit every child’s home in one single night and, even if he could make such a trip, there’s no way he could eat all those cookies. Magical beliefs are pruned away as mature neural circuits reflecting real-world contingencies become solidified.

Lambert goes on to explain that even though children outgrow their early fictional beliefs, the presence of those early fictions might provide benefits to them in adulthood:

...The brain appears to retain a mechanism for neural time travel. By this, I don’t simply mean that adults have warm memories of having believed in Santa Claus. [They may also have developed] mental time travel memories, or M.T.T. These [memories] come closer to re-experiencing a remembered event...Neuroimaging evidence indicates that, when certain events are recalled — presumably after being triggered by familiar sights, smells or sounds — emotional brain areas are activated as well as visceral responses. You relive the feelings you experienced in the past.

Reading this forced me to think about my own Christmas memories. When I was little, Christmas was, truly, the most wonderful time of the year. When the Christmas decorations came out, my parents let me hang a string of colored lights around my bedroom doorframe and I would fall asleep happily every night in that soft glow. We left notes for Santa every year, and cookies we’d find mostly gone, save for a few evidential crumbs, by Christmas morning. My sister and I were literally giddy with excitement for days, if not weeks. And, when the day finally arrived, my father would torture us with further ploys to prolong the anticipation. He would have to go to the living room first to confirm that Santa had actually come, while we waited impatiently at the end of the hall, or upstairs. He would have to make the coffee, put Elvis’s Blue Christmas album on the stereo, and light up the tree before we came down. And for the whole long journey, we’d have a camera pointed in our faces, recording the hope and excitement and finally the confirmation, by virtue of the pile of presents wrapped in paper unlike all the others, that Santa had in fact remembered to include us in the Christmas joy.

To this day, in spite of my desire to avoid the excessive consumerism of the holiday, I love listening to Christmas songs, I love signing, addressing and sending Christmas cards, and I love baking Christmas treats and decorating the house or the tree with our small but growing collection of Christmas ornaments with stories. I still get excited. And I still remember, every year, the time I woke up in the middle of the night and was certain I saw a reindeer leg pumping air outside my second story bedroom window.

My reluctance to tell Quinn the lie, I realized, was not a desire to deny her these Christmas joys, but rather a desire to help her avoid the disappointment of finding out that Santa isn’t actually real. That’s why I’ve been trying to imagine a way to preserve the Christmas spirit, without the lie. But when I reached the conclusion of the neuroscience article, I started to realize the necessity of the fiction. The author herself realized, “For every year I layered another set of Christmas memories into [my girls’] brains, the easier it would be for them to relive those feelings.”  And so, if Quinn is to be able to call up that magic in the future, if she is to have an opportunity to relive the joy in her adulthood around the holidays, it seems I have to lie to her right now. I want Quinn’s experiences of magic to be real, and tangible, rather than just conceptual...rather than just lore.

And so, when Quinn told me one night recently, “I hope Santa will bring me a new baby doll for Christmas,” even though I had already bought her presents, and even though I hate baby dolls, I went out and got her a new one. And when I absentmindedly let her play with the roll of wrapping paper that was going to be just for the Santa presents, I went out and spent another $7 dollars on a different roll, so the Santa presents would stand out as unique and exotic under the tree. On Christmas Eve, I asked Quinn if she wanted to leave Santa some of the peppermint brownies we’d made for friends and family, so he could have a snack if he stopped at our house, and I even wrote a note for her, based on what she wanted to write: “Dear Santa, Cookies are for you.” After that, she signed her own Q.

She went to bed without complaint, understanding that Santa doesn’t stop if you’re still awake. Sam and I stayed up late prepping appetizers and dinner for Christmas day, and wrapping presents, and we were woken up early the next morning by our three year old who was eager to see if Santa had come. She was hard to contain upstairs while I went downstairs to get things ready, and she graciously arrived with a look of surprise when she saw the small pile of Santa presents set aside from the rest. 

It didn’t all go exactly as planned. When I showed Quinn the crumbs left on the plate, certain she would be excited that Santa had eaten and enjoyed the treat she left for him, she burst into tears and stormed away. I followed her to ask what was the matter. “I wanted those!” she screamed, and she continued crying for at least five minutes. Seems we still have some work to do on just how this whole Santa thing works. In the meantime, it was a good start, and it felt okay, for now, to tell this white Christmas lie.

As for me, I worked hard to do my Christmas part. I got the granddaughter to Massachusetts to see her Nonna and Poppa, Aunt Amy, Uncle Scott and her boy cousins, and I got her home in time to host her Grandma and Grandpa, Uncle Josh and Aunt Geraldine and cousin Olivier, as well as her Aunt Becs and cousins Tyrus and Cameron just back from California. Everyone had presents under the tree and was hopefully well fed through the holiday. I made cranberry orange scones for breakfast (reminiscent of my grandmother’s cranberry bread she used to make for me), and Louise's egg and sausage casserole. We had bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with blue cheese in the afternoon with shrimp cocktail and champagne, and a smoked ham for dinner with sautéed green beans and a rosemary potato galette. Everyone seemed content: reading books, playing with toys, video-chatting with the one missing Jackson sibling and her family in Spain.

By Christmas evening, as the last of the presents were opened, I was exhausted and felt a cold coming on, as well as a bit of anti-climax. That’s when I was forced to assess what Christmas means to me now. It’s not the presents that matter, but the anticipation of it all and the rituals. I love receiving Christmas cards in the mail from friends and family all around. 

And I love that students come back home to Vermont and want to see us. Since we said goodbye to the family on the 27th, we’ve been welcoming a rotating series of former students - now friends, to hear their latest stories. I love the surprise phone call from an old friend far away. That’s what’s wonderful to me now about Christmastime: people remembering other people, making time to say hello. That and my memories of childhood Christmases with my family. Not remembered magic, but magic re-experienced.

The day after Christmas I put the leftover hambone in a stock pot on the stove. I’d never bought a ham before, and hadn’t had a spiral sliced ham in many years--since we used to celebrate Easter at my grandmother’s. Every year, after Easter, my grandmother made split pea soup and it was one of the things I most loved. I’d never made split pea soup with ham before. It simmered on the stove for hours, and when I finally tasted a spoonful, the sweet smokiness transported me back to her dining room, on a day when we would have tea, just the two of us. I’m convinced the time travel is real. Magic, done right, can be relived. 

For me, 2013 has been a magical year and I'm grateful for every minute of it.

Here’s hoping 2014 is a magical year for everyone. 

Happy Holidays.

Weathering It

On a recent Saturday evening, we had come home a bit late from a splurge dinner out with friends to celebrate our sixth anniversary. My November funk had persisted and, after weeks of going through these work and family motions feeling disconnected from Sam, I had a hard time shaking my literal and psychological fatigue. “Are we even in love any more?” I asked. “Yes,” he replied, “We are. That’s what gets us through the times when we feel like we’re not in love.” Sam will go long periods of time without saying anything at all, but when he's down to the wire to avoid disaster, he usually says just the right thing. I went to bed willing to put a seemingly "inevitable" divorce off for at least a bit longer.

When I woke up the next morning, on our actual anniversary, the world and the house were still dark. My thoughts were too, but less so. I tried to clear the sleep from my head as I approached the stairs to take Quinn down to the kitchen for her glass of warm syrupy milk and my coffee. We were feeling our way from step to step, and long before I reached the island light switch, the smell of the storm ahead reached my nose. I put Quinn next to the tree post and told her to stay there while I tread carefully around the first floor, turning on lights as I followed my nose to the smell: a literal shit storm was about to begin and it started with a cold pile in the middle of the living room rug.

This is the third November in a row that’s found me feeling depressed; by now I recognize it as a pattern, and patterns are meant to be analyzed. So why, in this month that marks my birthday and my wedding anniversary and my favorite of all holidays, Thanksgiving, why now would I feel so persistently sad? Add to this the fact that in November I am largely relieved of my teaching duties as kids ship off to points west for ski training, and it all seems so illogical. As I scrambled around in my pre-coffee haze, trying to clean up the mound of fecal matter, a few answers started to come to mind.

First is that without the structure of school, Sam and I often flounder. I especially need the sense of purpose that my job provides, and without it unproductive days and hours pass and I feel dissatisfied, at best, if not completely unhappy. I love my job and I love to work. So, while I expect to enjoy the bit of extra time “off,” I haven’t yet managed to find a rhythm for myself in that undefined time. But, this is a fixable problem…

What I do end up doing in that available time is scheduling all the things that are hard to otherwise fit in: doctor’s appointments, tire changes, etc. And this brings me to the second challenge of November. In recent years, my doctor’s appointments haven’t been as uneventful as they used to be, nor nearly as uneventful as I’d like them to be. This month, still trying to solve some early skin cancer spots on my face, I had to do a 14 day topical chemo-therapy treatment. My face looked like a pepperoni pizza and my vanity was equally inflamed. What my still-not-annual physical turned up, ironically, is that my vitamin D level is insufficient, explaining my low energy and moodiness. (And here I was thinking it was just the result of being a Scorpio!?) My skin is telling me too much sun, and my blood is telling me not enough! Fortunately, this is fixable too…

Finally, November brings Vermont fully into the throes of hunting season. While I appreciate the notion of truly fresh meat, and the New England self-sufficiency that informs the hunting tradition, I hate knowing that each day there are beautiful wild animals being hauled from these acres of woods in the backs of pickup trucks. On our little horseshoe road, we rarely see anyone pass by most of the year; in hunting season there is a steady stream of slow driving, broad scanning hunters. I hear gunshots from inside the house. And, worst of all, our dogs manage to find gut piles and bones left behind in the woods. And when they find them, they eat them. And when they eat them, they regurgitate them and then eat them again.

I put the dogs’ orange vests on that morning and sent them outdoors into the predawn dark while I resentfully cleaned the rug. Some time later, when I had forgiven Moses for his dastardly deposit in our living room (Boone would have barked to go out), I heard them return to the front porch and went to let them back in. Boone almost made it past me into the house when I spotted the green-brown sludge on his shoulder. While I don’t know what he rolled in, I know I didn’t want it inside so I sent them back out. When Sam eventually woke up, I told him about the shit storm that was well underway. He was determined to have his coffee before going out to scrub Boone in the cold. That was until I spotted Boone eating something over by my vegetable garden. Sam must have seen Moses throw up there because when I drew his attention to it, he panicked. “No! Boone! No!” He grabbed his jacket and ran out the door. Quinn and I opened the upstairs window to peer out just in time to watch Boone throw up some sort of fully intact organ. By the time Sam finally cleaned Boone and came back inside, it was Moses’ turn. Without even getting up from his bed, he threw up a green slime that was so pungent, I ran to the window to gag.

Some hours later, when rugs and floors and orange vests and dogs and their beds were all cleaned, I felt my November funk fully dissolve as Sam and I gave in to laughter and hugged in the kitchen, commenting on the very unromantic nature of our sixth anniversary. I never tire of these metaphors: life is a shit storm sometimes, and you’re lucky if you have someone to weather it with. I felt a new appreciation for my partner that morning, thanks to those ridiculous dogs. 

And in the nearly two weeks since, as I’ve studied this recent November pattern, I’ve been reminded of some important facts, about my life and my relationship with Sam. 

Sam’s mom and dad sent us a card for our anniversary, one that in a supreme irony pictured a dog sleeping between two people in a bed. What they wrote inside brought me back to one thing that’s especially good in our relationship:

In these recent three years, we’ve been forced to be constantly connected to each other in a way that isn’t quite natural for us. We haven’t been able to truly function independently in a long time, save for a couple of brief outings each of us has had in the past year or so. And that’s the thing: we need more of those, in order to more fully appreciate our time together, and continue "forging forth in all of the essentials." Acknowledging this might help us feel a renewed commitment to the vows we each wrote six years ago. Looking back on them now, I’m as surprised as I was on our wedding day, by how they are almost exactly the same, even though we wrote them separately and unveiled them to each other only just before our ceremony:

For me, Sam wrote this: “I promise to keep alive our desire to explore the world--from what is in our backyard to what is overseas--and to keep seeking out adventure and experience, whether it is traveling to new places or building a house or starting a family...I promise to give you the space to walk away when you need to be alone, to be your own person for a moment...I promise to love you and support you unconditionally, in good times and bad…”

And for Sam, I wrote this: “I promise to honor you each day as best as I can, by being near you when you need me, and by letting you go when you need that of me. I promise to be a partner who encourages your dreams, one who supports your personal adventures and who gladly participates in those you want to share. I promise to love you unconditionally, in good times and bad…”

In spite of my tendency to see life in absolutes--as in: because we are not, in this specific moment, enjoying one another’s company, we must, absolutely, be destined for divorce--Sam and I have not really had any truly bad times. I forget, sometimes, that there can be a third or fourth or fifth category, other than good or bad. The weeks spanning October and early November, for example, seem to fall somewhere outside of both good and bad. And, as Quinn would say, "that's just the way it is!"

Fortunately there is Thanksgiving to help me put things back into perspective and take stock of all the things I’m truly thankful for. This year, among many things, I’m especially grateful for this guy:

And the warm house he built me, and the beautiful sunrises he made sure I could see each morning.

And I’m grateful for this kid, my hero, who woke up on the day before my birthday and, before saying anything else, told me: “Mom! You need to show up for your family. You need to show up for your life. And you need to ‘make the world more beautiful.’” *

I’m not kidding, or exaggerating, or writing fiction...she actually said that. And she’s right. So that’s what I’m trying to do right now...trying to show up and appreciate all there is to appreciate: my family, all of them, on both sides, and those dear friends who are family too, my "voluntary kin," and the adventures that have made me who I am, and those I have yet to experience, and this beautiful chunk of Vermont woods that is my church. 

I’m thankful for all of it, and you: thank you for reading my stories. Happy Thanksgiving.






*If you haven't already, you should read Miss Rumphius too, a wonderful book given to us by wonderful people: Roni & Matt & Megan and Ben Luck. It's made an important impression on Quinn, and us. 

The In-Between

We’re just coming off a nearly seven week stretch of continuous work days. Some of my “work” is just participation in school-related events, and some of those events are really wonderful occasions: the engagement of two former students (one a young woman who backpacked on the Long Trail with me for almost three weeks, and the other a young man who lived with us when we were dorm parents for a group of kids), the celebration for another former student who is beginning medical school, the annual fall musical, the boys’ soccer team playing in the state championship game. It’s all good stuff, and I love what I do, but when I add to this the actual work, whole months can go by without me stopping to notice, without getting any exercise, without any dinners with Sam that aren’t pressured by reading or grading that needs to get done. A whole seven weeks of Quinn have passed in a relative blur.

When so much time passes like that, I start to get run down, worried that I’m missing important things or wasting precious days. And then, when I’m out of practice being mindful, or I’m out of any potential routine of eating well and exercising, I worry that I’ll be so far gone from healthy that I won’t be able to ever get it back. I sit down to write and don’t have anything to say. I look in the mirror and don’t have anything to say. I stop sleeping.

But in the nearly two months since I last sat down to write, some wonderful things have happened. I went to my twentieth college reunion with my three best friends. We had a tiny little hotel room for two nights, with two tiny beds for the four of us, and we were happy and without complaint. When everyone arrived, we fell immediately into old patterns. Each set of former roommates gravitated automatically to sharing a bed. We laughed for hours, told and listened to stories, retraced some of our old steps: running a morning 5k together, climbing to the top of the fire escape that looks out over the lake, sitting at the bar, four in a row, at the brewery where we used to always go. I still live near our old stomping grounds, but for some reason I never go to the old places we went. College was a pretty magical time; it’s just not the same without them. 

Still, none of us would go back if we could. Life is too sweet right now, with all of us still living in the happy here and now--no divorces so far, no cancers yet, no teenage crises or traumas to endure. It’s all just stories of trying to keep it all afloat, stories of funny moments and the shared insanities of the little people in our lives. For now, it’s all just a looking forward to more brightness still to come.

Quinn has been wearing her coon skin cap a lot these days; often with Mardi Gras beads.

And there was a lot of brightness with Quinn in this past month and a half too. We've made continued progress treating each other kindly and dealing with the meltdowns--hers and our own. One tired morning, after barely getting out the door, Quinn called to us from her car seat. When she points, she uses her middle finger. She wagged that middle finger at us from the back seat and lectured us all the way to school: "Mom! Dad! I do not like those angry faces. I want you to work on making happy choices today, okay? I am so serious about this. Happy choices! OKAY?" By the time we arrived at her school, she insisted we needed to hug each other and make up, even though we had never been fighting. We're just spreading the love around it seems, around and around and..."Mom! That will make Dad so happy right now, okay? Go ahead...give him a hug." 

Quinn is also starting to take ownership of some "chores" around the house these days, like plugging in all the white lights when we come home to a dark house, setting the placemats and napkins on the table for dinner, crumpling paper to start a fire in the wood stove. She's in a "big girl" bed, with the front finally off of her crib, and she's quite proud of that. She went to see Shrek the musical with me at school, which she loved and still talks about, and she went trick-or-treating for the first time on Halloween (just to one house, my friend Meg's across from Quinn's school). Quinn chose her own Halloween costume of course--she wanted to be a butterfly--and she made suggestions for ours too: she thought I should be a "scary tiger mom," which I thought was ironic, and she wanted Sam to be "a scary princess," which I thought was, well, hilarious.

Quinn and Ansley were Meg's first trick or treaters in her new house.

This is the slightly more put together outfit Quinn wore for her school Halloween Party.

These are the things I need to remember when the malaise of early November starts to set in. After the leaves have fallen, and the cold has settled, and the clocks have been turned back to add more darkness, I have to carry the bright spots with me as I enter the nebulous transition to winter. It is undefined time, a place I’m not good at being, and if I'm not careful I can lose track of myself in these grey days.

Driving home from a friend’s the other night, after a much needed break, a gigantic owl dipped down in front of my windshield and glided in front of me over the dark dirt road. I hadn’t seen one in a long time. At four o’clock this morning, I woke suddenly to the yip and howl of a coyote in my back woods. I haven’t been able to write anything in weeks, but peering out into darkness, the coyote in one ear, Quinn’s sleeping breath nearby in the other, I wanted to open my computer right then. Finally, I thought, I feel awake.

At six o’clock I came downstairs to let the dogs out and was happily surprised to be greeted by winter--three fresh inches of beautiful white snow. I watched the first spot of light begin to grow on the clouds over the ridge. Quinn padded quietly down the stairs. 

“Hi, Mama.” 
“Good morning, sweet pea.”
“Wanna know how many times I love you?”
“I do.”
“I love you like crazy…”

The syntax is whacky, but that’s the beauty of it, of course. 

“Mom? Wanna look at the mountain with me?”
“I do.”
“What colors do you like best?”

All of them, thanks to you Quinn; I like all of them.

Quinn Turns Three

You know what they say, third time’s a charm. For Quinn’s third birthday, unlike her first or her second, I did not freak out over anything, not even once. I didn’t have any disastrous paint episodes, no videography meltdowns, no frantic baking or gift buying. 

What I did do was manage to avoid, for one more year, hosting a party of little people and instead invited our adult friends to come to dinner so it would at least feel festive. I spent the morning on the back of a tandem bicycle with my friend Mary, not even worrying about cleaning the house or frosting the cupcakes, and then I bought a bunch of steaks and some balloons and that was about it. 

Quinn was still excited that it was her birthday--it was the first one she’s really had any awareness of. When I picked her up at school on Friday, the day before her Saturday birthday, she waved and yelled out her window to anyone who would listen, “Goodbye! Goodbye! It’s going to be my birthday! And my friend Jerry is coming! And Rebecca! And Baby Henry! And Corey and Kellam are coming too! And we’re gonna have cupcakes! And a dance party! Goodbye!”

I was excited too, of course, but determined not to be so neurotic this time. I only bought her a few presents: two new books (Make Way for Ducklings and one called You Are My I Love You that is so beautiful it made me cry in the toy store), a package of undies, a headlamp--just because, and an awesome backpack with an owl on it and a mini-carabiner on the zipper. 

The presents I bought for Quinn on her first and second birthdays have seen practically no use in the time since; she wasn’t really ready for either of them--rather they were gifts I was eager for her to have. This year I bought her a present I knew she would love. And she did love it, but in a wonderfully surprising way. I bought her a backpack because by turning three she would be moved up from “pebble” status into the “rocks” room at her school, and I thought it would help her mark that transition--no longer me carrying her bag for her, but her carrying her things all by herself as she is now wont to do. When she opened it, she squealed with joy, “A backpack! For camping! Now we can go camping!” The funny thing is I hadn’t even thought of that, and yet that’s what I have been wanting to do since her first birthday when I bought her a sleeping bag.

For some reason I didn’t feel any of the anxiousness of previous birthdays; I just wanted to have a fun evening. And we did. Even though I purposefully did not tell our friends that it was Quinn’s birthday when I invited them to dinner, they are the kind of friends who knew anyway and still showed up with presents and tons of birthday party energy. Jerry and Rebecca came with Baby Henry, as Quinn knew they would, all of them so happy and healthy and vibrant that it felt like a party as soon as they arrived. And Corey and Kellam came too which was exciting in ways I’m not sure I’m supposed to talk about so I won’t. And Quinn greeted all of them from the front porch as they pulled in the driveway. 

The evening was a swirling unscripted celebration: Corey brought some chips, about five bags of them for some reason, and we munched and talked and some of us drank some wine, and we tried to get caught up on each other’s news and at the same time tried to keep the dogs away from the baby, and Quinn away from the cupcakes, and there was some gift giving and picture taking and story telling and commiserating and some more wine and eventually some candle lighting and singing. 

And before the birthday girl went to bed, all the adults around her, our dear and wonderful friends, joined her for the dance party she had been imagining. We turned on some tunes and danced in our tiny living room all together. 

Quinn danced and laughed and got picked up and put down and she jumped on the couch a thousand times with her helium balloons and then eventually, on the verge of collapse, she actually went to bed. 

Rebecca sent me an email the next day: “Never knew I could have so much fun at a 3 year old birthday party!” I replied with some suggestion that the wine had probably helped, but what I really wanted to say was that I never knew I would be so lucky as to have friends like these who would come and be so loving and kind to my kid, and make her feel so special on her birthday. Quinn was totally at ease with everyone, and she had the time of her life. She’s still talking about it. And I’m still wondering how to communicate my gratitude to my friends, and for my daughter, and for the abundance of love I feel in this life.

Happy Birthday Quinn. I love you.

To Spank or Not to Spank

When Sam and I were getting ready to build our house, people were constantly telling us how stressful it would be. We were engaged at the time, planning to get married in the middle of the building process and a number of people went so far as to say that building a house with a partner caused their marriages to end. I had only one person, one lone person, tell me that building her house with her husband was fun. And I’m grateful to that person still because she gave me hope that it was possible.

Approaching Quinn’s third birthday was a similar experience. Everyone, leading up to it, made a point to tell us that “the terrible twos aren’t that bad...it’s three that’s the worst!” The horror stories about toddlers at age three are ominous, to say the least--enough to make you hate the year, before you even get there. This is how self-fulfilling prophecies work. You imagine dreading the phase and so you do. 

Or, you don’t. I’m working to tune out the doom and gloom.

I will confess that it’s not been entirely easy. Quinn is tenacious, intense, even prone to fits of violence. One night, determined not to take the bath that she so obviously needed, she grabbed a mason jar from the edge of the tub and threw it at my head. Fortunately, it missed my head. Unfortunately it did not miss the porcelain toilet; it shattered all over the bathroom. I was so stunned I didn’t immediately react; I just gasped and turned my head to look at her. What I saw next was the scariest part: Quinn was initially surprised too, but when she saw me turn to look at her, she quickly composed herself and looked me directly in the eye. Her gaze was threatening, her eyebrows bent, her message clear: “Don’t push me, Mom; I’m not taking a bath.”

The past month or two has brought increasingly frequent meltdowns, increasingly furious outbursts, and increasingly angry reactions from both me and Sam. Quinn has spent a lot of time in “time-out.” And when she’s in time-out, I can tell you, she is not thinking about what she’s done wrong, she’s thinking about ways to kill us. She pounds on the walls and she screams.

But let me back up a bit. The other thing I’ve been struggling with in the past few months, in addition to my raging toddler, is an increasing feeling of pressure from other people about how to handle her. In fact, some of that pressure goes way back to when Quinn was probably about a year old and she was doing something my dad thought was inappropriate. He looked at her, with wide disbelieving eyes, and then at me...back to her, back to me. “When are you going to spank her!?” he demanded. The idea seemed laughable to me at the time; I definitely wasn’t going to spank her at that age and I wasn’t even sure I ever would. Hitting her seemed absurd.

I’ve had other questions about my parenting choices since, some direct and some just implied. There were a number of challenging moments this summer, in front of family or friends, when Quinn would misbehave, demand attention, refuse to go to bed, or slap me across the face in front of a room full of people. In each of those moments I was simultaneously trying to figure out how to deal with Quinn’s embarrassing behavior and how to also manage the observers’ expectations and in some way explain or justify my choices. What people often don’t understand is that the kid behaves worse because they are there, and I parent differently because they are there. Instead of making a scene, or getting really angry, I found myself trying to smooth things over calmly and positively, so as not to disrupt the mood any more than we already had. But sometimes, I found, people expect you to lose it--they want you to blow a gasket because that’s how they did things, or how things were done to them. In their opinions or experiences, that’s the way you have to react in order to maintain control and raise an obedient, well-mannered kid.

By the end of this summer, as Quinn kept doing things that frustrated us, I started to wonder if all of those people were right. I started experimenting when no one was around to witness my angry-parent reactions: I stopped tolerating any misbehavior, I got mad quickly, I put her in time-out often...I even, recently, tried slapping her hand when she hit me, so the sting of it would send a message. And the other day, after allowing this pattern to repeat for a while, I slapped her on the face. “How do you like it?” I asked her. “I don’t like that,” she blurted out through shocked tears. “Then don’t do it to me...” But as my sentence trailed off, so did my conviction. I realized why I had never reprimanded  her in these ways when people were around: because I felt absurd and ashamed.

I always imagined that I would be the tough cop with my kid. I’m a stickler for right and wrong, I don’t put up with b.s. from anyone, and there have been plenty of times I’ve yelled at people. But I don’t like yelling at Quinn. Here’s why: three short years ago she came into this world weighing only seven pounds, with her skinny little chicken legs, and every day since I’ve watched her set her sights on doing new things and apply her persistence to accomplishing them. At this time last year she was just starting to be verbal. By now she can have sustained conversations with people on the phone. She has memorized every single word of a handful of beloved books. I can tell her something once and she’ll remember it and apply it repeatedly with ease. “May I please be excused?” she’ll ask after a meal. “Thank you for making me my dinner, Mom,” she’ll say as she climbs down from her chair with a big, proud smile. 

And when Quinn screws up, or hurts your feelings, she knows it and she manages to process through her anger much more quickly than some adults I know. When she’s given the time and space to do so, Quinn almost always makes a point to apologize. At three she still lashes out when she is feeling emotions that need an outlet, but she is also beginning to develop a sense of how other people are feeling too. And while the time between a strike and an apology might seem long to some observers, the fact that one inevitably follows the other is something that I admire. Frankly, she behaves better than a lot of adults I’ve dealt with in life, but because she is a toddler, there are a lot of people who think she should be kept constantly in line.

I can tell you for certain that if someone threw me in a time-out and then immediately got in my face and demanded that I calm down, “use my nice voice,” and apologize for something I felt justified in having done, I would lose my f’ing mind. And that’s the key for me right now: I can empathize with her. I don’t respond well to belligerent displays of authority, so why would she? I have to find a way that feels more natural and, as I do, I’m confident it will work better than what we’ve been trying lately. I won’t speak for Sam; he and I have always had a really different style as teachers, and we’ve both found what feels right and natural with our students, with generally positive results for each of us. I know he’s going through these parenting questions right now too, and I suspect he feels a bit envious of the dads of old who simply left the day-to-day parenting to the moms; he’s not so lucky--everything in our house is shared, including the parenting books that are starting to pile up.

When we left Quinn’s three-year check up with her pediatrician today, we both felt a bit deflated. Quinn behaved as I suspected she would: she did not want to be examined and she did not fall for the nurse or doctor’s coy attempts to trick her into “playing a game” or taking a bribe. She wanted to do her own thing and, when Sam tried to hold her still on his lap, and the doctor leaned into her personal space with her instruments, Quinn wriggled one arm free and slapped her right on the face. I was disappointed and apologetic, but not entirely surprised. Sam was mortified. 

I had really been looking forward to the appointment--to hearing what the doctor thought about Quinn’s progress, to being able to brag about the fact that Quinn gave up her pacifier herself, and that she was the one who decided she wanted to stop wearing diapers, and that since then, she’s been wearing “unnies” almost all the time. Instead we got bogged down in talking about the challenges of dealing with her behavior. The pediatrician said, in a tone that implied she thought we had long-since figured this out, that “Quinn is obviously a spirited child,” and it was clear that spirited was a euphemism.  And it is, I looked it up: spirited is the nice word for “high needs.”

So that’s what we left with today: a label. That and the business card of a family counselor who specializes in “spirited” children.

I know I’m at a turning point because while I was disappointed with her behavior today, I wasn’t mad. I'm done being mad at her all the time. Instead I feel newly determined to help her find ways to channel all of her passionate emotions in life, to keep finding ways to grow beyond the bounds of anyone’s labels, and to evolve into a civilized but still authentic version of herself.

Five minutes after we drove away from the doctor’s office, with no prompting from us, Quinn said, “Next time, I’d like to say ‘I’m sorry’ to Dr. Parker.” 

I think three is pretty incredible.

Summer 2013

Quinn sat between us last night, on the front row couch at our local movie theater. She had on a yellow tshirt, striped leggins, polka dotted socks and her sneakers, a tall bag of popcorn in her lap. For longer than I imagined she would, she sat captivated by her first movie on the big screen. I watched her watch it, and couldn’t help but smile at all the possibilities that keep opening up.

Our whole summer has been like this--a happy arrival into the warm light at the end of the tunnel. Many of the things we feared would happen when we had a kid, happened--we had less freedom, we lost a lot of sleep, we had fewer adventures. But through it all we’ve kept thinking, someday...Someday we’ll be able to move around more. Someday we’ll travel with her. Someday she’ll enjoy doing things we like to do...

This summer we accomplished a lot. We got her in a canoe without her screaming to get out. We took her rock climbing with some friends (the little people snacked while the four adults took turns belaying and climbing). We had some good long walks, went berry picking, went to swimming holes and had some picnics. And we even got her in a plane and flew across the country.

In June, as we were getting our school year wrapped up, we were putting finishing touches on our summer plans--the perfect blend of family and solo adventures. The first of which was the big adventure: a trip to Wyoming to see our friends, Scott and Julie, and their daughter Eloise who is just a bit older than Quinn. Scott and Sam have been friends since they were about five years old. Julie and I were like old friends the first time we met; it’s not often I can be my unedited self right from the start. With Julie I could.

Getting to them involved an early morning flight out of Boston to Denver. A subway within the Denver airport to get from one terminal to the next. A bus ride from the airport to the rental car agency. Then a seven or eight hour drive to Wolf, Wyoming. All but the long drive would be new experiences for Quinn. I was worried and nervous a few days leading up to it. I was worried about getting Quinn and all of our stuff through the airport under time constraints. I was worried about missing the flight because toddler pace is so excruciatingly slow. I was worried we’d be those people on the airplane with the screaming toddler. I was also worried that by the time we got to our rental car we’d be so exhausted we wouldn’t make it to Wyoming. 

But Quinn wasn’t worried; she was excited. She was excited to use her new ladybug suitcase on wheels. She was excited to see Nonna & Poppa who live near the airport. She was excited to go on an airplane, even though she had no idea what that meant. And she was really excited to meet “The Eloise.” 

The travel day was almost effortless. Quinn was so engaged in everything going on that she was easy to deal with and fun to watch. The only minor snafu came when the flight attendant told her she had to put her seatbelt on so the plane could take off. She’s not particularly fond of being told what to do and, up to that point, we had managed to disguise most of our commands well enough that she just went along with them. But when the flight attendant leaned in and told her what to do, Quinn started screaming, as I knew she eventually would. “I wanna get off!” 

My reaction was to succumb to the inevitable humiliation and slouch back defeated in my seat. “Here we go,” I thought. Sam’s reaction was to lean down to her eye level and start talking in a very soft, high pitched voice, very very quickly. “Quinn! It’s okay! Don’t worry! It’s okay! We just have to put on our seatbelts...It’s just so you’ll be safe. Please put on your seatbelt! No, no, no, don’t cry, it’s okay. Really. It’s okay. Listen...” 

The truth is I have no idea what he said to her. I just remember thinking, “Oh my god, he’s totally panicking.” I became less concerned with Quinn than Sam. I wanted him to calm down, slow down, and stop the insane chatter. But before long, Quinn stopped screaming and just started staring at him. I’ve been calling it The Filibuster ever since: he just kept talking, as fast as he could, without a break, until she wore down and gave in. She was mesmerized, I was laughing, and Sam was winning. 

After that, we read Peter Rabbit about a thousand times and she gave me “haircuts” by rubbing my hair around in all the wrong directions. I looked like a wreck when we landed, but I was feeling pretty good.

And in the week that followed, I felt better and better. Within moments of our arrival, Eloise was taking Quinn in to see her bedroom and her toys. Scott and Julie were cooking the first of many incredible dinners. And we were settling in to our vacation on 12,000 acres of beautiful Wyoming grassland. We felt really spoiled.

We spent our days planning and executing all kinds of two-family adventures: truck rides out over the grassy hills to find good swimming holes, trips into town over 25 miles of dirt road for coffee and cupcakes, group hikes, picnics, some fishing for the dads, some more hiking and polo watching for the moms, lots of chicken feeding and kiddie pool time and cupcake baking and family meals, and daily vigils by the picture window watching early evening thunderstorms rolling in from the Bighorn Mountains.

Because Julie is even more organized than I am, she had both families settled into the same routine almost immediately--I loved it! And I especially loved the evening routine: One parent would accompany each kid to her respective end of the house for the bathing, toothbrushing, book reading, back rubbing and negotiating. One parent would help with dishes and general clean up. One parent would put the chickens to bed and water the garden. After all creatures great and small were tended to, four parents would meet in the kitchen to pour another cocktail and commiserate in hushed voices. It was so good for our spirits to be with friends who are almost exactly where we are in life...fighting the same battles, sharing the same joys. It bolstered us. Standing in the backyard, on the Fourth of July, the four of us watched fireworks on the wide horizon in two different towns. It was a good metaphor: when you’re in the fireworks, your own are all you can see. It’s nice to step back and see you’re not alone.

Admittedly, Scott and Julie’s fireworks seem a bit more mild than ours. Eloise is literally the nicest toddler ever...she shared everything with Quinn and, when Quinn swatted her away, or gave her a dirty look, or refused to share any of her few things, Eloise just offered Quinn more things. They were challenged by each other, regularly, but I think they loved each other too. Two months later Quinn is still talking about Eloise and we are still savoring the magic of those Wyoming days.

A few weeks after our return to Vermont, Sam and Quinn dropped me off at the ferry dock to cross Lake Champlain and meet up with Char on the other side so we could embark on another canoe trip, this year closer to home. The Nine Carries Route in the Adirondacks was a good concept, but somehow, preoccupied with whether or not we’d be up for the long portages (up to 1.6 miles), and whether we’d be able to pack light enough that we could carry our packs and the canoe at the same time, we failed to notice the ratio of portaging distance to paddling distance. This “paddling” trip was a lot like backpacking with a canoe. 

We camped in some of the darkest, dankest mosquito-nest campsites I’ve ever seen. And, on one occasion, when Char made a slight misstep off a slippery log with the canoe up over her head, she sunk to her crotch in mud, with both legs. I’d show you a picture but I can’t because I was laughing too hard and scrambling too much to take one. I’m not sure she’ll ever forgive me for failing to document that feat. What was also a feat was the fact that on the 20th anniversary of losing my mother, a date I worried about for weeks, if not months in advance, instead of being totally depressed, I spent the time cracking up. When you find yourself hiking up and over miles and miles of shitty trails, with a heavy pack and an essentially useless canoe, swatting bugs and sweating your ass off, there’s really nothing else you can do.  

Next year we’re planning a river trip.

Sam and Quinn came to pick me up at Char’s camp and, from there, we drove down for our summer visit with the Jacksons in the Poconos. This year the Madrid clan was home, and the California clan was there, and the local cousins came too for an afternoon picnic and birthday party for Jesse. It was a short visit with a lot of family news to cover, so we didn’t truly feel like we had enough time. With loved ones, I suppose, it is always that way. 

The next adventure was Sam’s. It finally worked out that he could get away for a real trip. With two other guys, he traveled north into Quebec to find and run some new rivers. There was map work to do, and a language barrier, and the water they were looking for was remote. I knew he was having a good time when I heard his message on the answering machine one day: “Hi, Ker! I’m just calling to let you know we made it off the river today, and now we’re headed into the wilderness a bit. I won’t have cell service; we’re not sure what’s up there. I’ll call when I make it back out.” The excitement in his voice was unmistakable; it’s good for him, I thought as I listened, to get back in touch with his adventurous self...it’s also good we have life insurance.

He came home happy, but I wouldn’t say satisfied. For Sam, scratching the boating itch is like scratching poison ivy...it just makes you want to scratch more.

And that’s okay, really, because we both feel like we’ve finally arrived to that place where the future we imagined for ourselves is possible. The place we’ve been working to get to for years and years. Even before Quinn came along, we were always working toward something. Toward a house, and gardens and land with a view. Toward a time when there might be a little money in the wallet so we could afford to leave the driveway. And we imagined having a happy, adventurous kid who would want to come with us. 

When we went climbing that morning earlier this summer, after I got lowered down from my climb, Quinn showed up next to me and whispered, “Great job, Mom.” And when we were riding the bus from the rental car agency back to the airport after our Wyoming vacation, Sam and I looked down at her between us and realized she had one arm around each of us. And last night, when I was saying goodnight, she hugged me and said, “I had a lot of fun with you at the movies tonight, Mom. Thank you for taking me. I love you.” And the same again today before her nap, "Thank you for taking me raspberry picking, Mom. I had a lot of fun."

It’s taken a long time and a lot of work, but the work has been good, and we’re proud of the results, and every day Quinn is our reward. We are really grateful.