Author: Jenny

Like a magpie, I've always been drawn to things that have sparkle, from rhinestone-embellished housewares to gold lamé get-ups in second-hand stores or beetles whose metallic armors reflect in the sun. But in my interactions with the world, oh, how I can fixate on the not-sparkly stuff: ill-timed traffic lights, a web page that won't load, the impolite server. Post-pandemic, I took to saying, "Everything's broken, and nothing works." It's not good for the soul, and as a lifelong writer, I've noticed it's also not good for creativity. This blog is about redirecting my attention to what's good in the world -- seeking and finding joy in the same way I notice sparkly objects around me -- and writing about it. There is an old nursery rhyme about magpies, "One for Sorrow," which tells us a solitary magpie symbolizes sorrow, but two magpies symbolize joy. This blog is about looking harder for the good stuff. Here's to finding those second magpies.

motherhood

I Am Not a Search Engine…But I Let My Kids Think I Am (from the Momplex Blog archives)

May 30, 2013February 27, 2023 Jenny4 Comments

Butterflies pee blood. That’s what my kids learned today from the Grow-a-Butterfly Kit I bought for them. Actually, since I’m the one who shouted this information while witnessing blood spraying from a newly emerged butterfly’s lady parts (they’re all girls in my mind), it’s probably more accurate to say they learned it from me.

My children learn most of their erroneous facts about science, nature, history, and the cosmos from me. Turns out I shine only with the basics, like answering whether apples grow on trees or underground like potatoes. Though I absolutely have tried, I cannot explain why we don’t have watermelons growing all over our yard after we’ve spat so many melon seeds there over the years. It’s also proven difficult for me to explain how a photo travels from my smartphone to my computer, and the reasons I never wet the bed. This is because (1) I am not a walking encyclopedia and (2) never seem to realize how full of shit I am until I’m knee deep in what’s come out of my own mouth.

If you have a young child, I hope you’re in the same boat. Because it’s not just misery that loves company; it’s ignorance and ineptitude, too. I don’t want to be the only mom who’s a walking, weekly confirmation of her children’s suspicion that, yes, we really do forget most of what we learn. But, come on, how the hell am I supposed to remember what a scalene triangle is? And why? Oh, wait. I know why: Because some evening, my third-grade daughter is going to flop down next to me at the kitchen table with a geometry worksheet, and ask me to remind her. That’s when I will excuse myself to use the bathroom, sneak a peak at our American Heritage dictionary, and come out acting like I totally knew.

So help me, if you’re able to explain on demand to a child how wind is made, why conifers don’t go bald in the winter, or how worms survive after being chopped with a garden spade, I hate you. It only means you’ve got a better memory than most and/or spend too much time on the Internet. And it’s making the rest of us look bad.

As it turns out, butterflies don’t actually pee blood. Some online almanac tells me it’s meconium. (That’s newborn caca, to the layperson.) Sometime later today, probably while putting the kids to bed, I will issue the retraction of my misinformation from this morning. I will swallow my pride and be honest, confessing I had to look it up on the Internet, slowly but surely handing over my authority to Google, slowly but surely revealing I’m not as brilliant as they used to think I was. That’s okay: My preschooler, who witnessed the caterpillars quadrupling their size, saw them climb to the ceiling of their tent, watched them sealing up as chrysalises, and finally saw them emerge a week later as butterflies — he told me today that it wasn’t that interesting watching them come out, that he’d rather have seen them going in.

I may not know everything, but for now, I’ve still got the kids beat.

Brave New People: Raising Courageous Kids (from the Momplex Blog archives)

May 3, 2013February 27, 2023 Jenny1 Comment

Yesterday, there was an FBI manhunt in our neck of the woods for an on-the-run murder suspect described as “extremely dangerous.” It began near my daughter’s school and gradually progressed toward my son’s. They were both in “hard lockdown” inside their classrooms for a couple of hours. Bus-riders were in lockdown even longer. Hard lockdown, or “code red” as my daughter knows it from the practice drills, means nobody is to go in or out of the school, shades are to be drawn, lights turned off, doors locked, and kids huddled in a pre-designated safe spot in the classroom.

My 4-year-old son goes to a little church preschool and was pretty oblivious to what was going on. My daughter is older, in the third grade, and can’t have the wool pulled over her eyes so easily. She was clearly shaken up by the experience. After being able to sign her out of her classroom, where the kids were indeed sitting in the dark but watching a video and not cowering in tears as my over-active imagination had feared, I asked her what she knew about the situation. Obviously, she knew they were on code red. She explained that she knew that code red could mean there was a bad guy in the school. And she knew–or thought she knew–that this dread scenario for which she’d drilled was basically really happening. That’s because she overheard her teacher telling another adult that a bad guy was nearby.

“Mom?” she asked as I filled out more of the story for her. “Did he kill anyone?” I told her that he was in trouble for a murder case that had occurred in the past, that nobody had been killed today, and that the police would be able to capture him. I watched her eyes scanning outside our car, looking nervously for this bad person.

Later, as she wrapped her lanky limbs around me like a baby chimp and curled in my lap for a hug in a way she never does anymore, my daughter asked, “Mom, did that man kill a grown-up or…well, you know, someone smaller?”

To tell you the truth, I don’t know, but I told her it was a grown-up. What a scary afternoon she had. I spent much of last night thinking about something that’s been weighing on my mind for a couple of months now. I brought it up to my husband just after the Boston Marathon bombing, but it had been brewing in my head since December 14 of last year, the day of the Newtown massacre.

“I’m starting to feel like there’s a strange thing we have to do,” I said to him. “I think we’re supposed to figure out how to raise brave children. I think that might be one of our jobs.”

The thing is, I’m not sure how to do that job. Bravery has never before been something I saw as an essential life skill for me when I was growing up, and certainly not for everyone. Bravery was the domain of soldiers, police officers, and, quite frankly, men in general. But the more bad I see in this world, the more I think it’s a critical life skill for everyone. Our younger generations are growing up every day with this constant onslaught of frightening news from every direction. I think about how we’ve been at one war or another for most of their lives, how terrorism isn’t an overseas thing to them like it was to me when I was a kid, and how, strangely enough, they don’t seem any braver for it. If anything, they seem more calloused.

I don’t want to raise calloused people. I also don’t want to raise people who rely entirely on the decisions and actions of others for their safety. For now, it’s fine, but for when they grow up, they need to be brave. I want to raise kids who can think for themselves in crisis situations, who can respond with confidence and courage, not with deferential resignation. I want to raise them to have mettle that exceeds my own. How do you raise the type of children who, as adults, will go rushing into the mayhem of a bombing aftermath to help the injured? Because the world really needs those people. How do you raise the type of children who don’t retreat from evil but take it on? Because the world really needs those people. In this world, in these days, how do you raise brave people instead of calloused ones? I don’t know yet, but the world is always going to need them, so someone’s got to do it. I’d sure like to try.

motherhood · sons

In Praise of Little Boys (from the Momplex Blog archives)

April 26, 2013February 27, 2023 Jenny4 Comments

When I found out I was having a boy, I cried. My reaction took me by surprise. At the time, I had a healthy, happy 3-year-old daughter at home. I had long been saying, what do I care about the baby’s sex? What a privilege to even be having another child!

So, when tears spilled out on the way home from the doctor’s office, I was ashamed. Self, I said. You are being a jackass. But it didn’t take long for me to deduce the gloom was because I’d secretly wanted another one of my daughter. Not just another daughter, mind you, but another one of my daughter. Basically, with my ultrasound results, I was hit with the realization that that ship had sailed. Not that we conceived by cloning. I was truly being irrational, and I’ll blame it on pregnancy hormones.

But there was more behind those tears, and the real issue rose to the surface over the days that followed. Deep down, I realized I was scared of having a boy. This was based on what I’d seen among my daughter’s peers and my own friends’ offspring. Good kids, but their themes of speech delays, communication issues, attention problems, and truly epic temper tantrums had secretly left me grateful they weren’t mine. Communication with boys seemed so trying, and I wondered how the mothers managed to connect with their sons under such primitive conditions. I assumed it was the adorable cowlicks and miniature tighty-whities.

When my daughter was two, she could pronounce the word sphygmomanometer—and knew what it meant. I loved that I could talk to her almost from the time she could walk, connect with her through conversation. Because I am a blabbedy talker and writer, I put a high value on words, and to me it seemed I’d been given a child teeming with them so that we might easily bond. Which we did.

So, how was it going to be with a son? Based on my limited experience, I anticipated communication would take much longer. The idea of waiting extra years depressed me. Moreover, what did I really know about boys? Not much. I have one sister and no brothers, and I never babysat much. I’m not a dude myself. Looking back now, I see how my poor dad and grandpa bowed to the pressures of our mostly female clan, grew accustomed to our constant chattering, our histrionics, our hair in the tub drains, our TP-swaddled tampons taking up valuable garbage-pail real estate, our choice of tearjerker films over action ones, and our need to talk through every issue until it was talked to death. That was the only world I knew, and it was decidedly deprived of maleness. Tonka trucks and GI Joes were foreign territory. There were no battles of keeping the toilet seat up or down. I knew nothing of Kleenex wads, girly mags, and Selective Service registration. Football was a thing we cheered for, not played.

My son is four now. Though he has indeed exhibited many of the behaviors I used to quietly find so off-putting in other people’s sons, we never had trouble bonding. On the contrary, it’s been easy. I can appreciate the one-track thinking of his masculine mind, the relative slowness of his development when compared with my daughter. I also feel like I’ve had time to savor each of his stages, because they’ve all lasted longer than his sister’s did. I just understand so much better those “boy behaviors” I used to judge. In the end, the challenges have largely been what I imagined they’d be but not at all how I imagined they’d be. True love made quick work of my foolish fears and opened my eyes to the beauty of little boys. They’re quite different than I thought, and they sure don’t fit in any one box.

When my son bends down these days to put on his dorky little cowboy boots, the band of his teensy tighty-whities sticks out of his jeans. Cowlicks pepper his head like miniature mushroom clouds. I just have to smile to look at it all. Those are the small details I would have attached myself to in other people’s sons long ago, a way to dial back my judgments, the odd problem I hadn’t named until I found out I was having a son—my misconception that wee boys were really kind of a pain in the ass. Now that I’ve got a son of my own, I realize they’re not. And it’s not the cowlicks and the undies that help me connect. It’s the person. He’s his own flavor of awesome. And as with my daughter, I wish I could clone him, too.