Maybe I will finally meet my 2nd Vice President. It would be nice. Up til now I think she is not really a person. But my friend who has had a history with this person would correct me for sure. But I will see what that deal is in about 10 minutes.
I didnt sleep last night for whatever reason. Dreaming wacky dreams again. Dreamt that some kids were spray painting the houses on my block with orange spray paint so I had to wait all night for the cops to come. Hence no sleeping I guess. I need a dream analysis. I may find I am nuts after all
~Writing now after my PTA meeting which ran 'til 11:30 p.m.! Wow. But I am actually pretty pumped about this coming year. Everyone on my Executive Board had pretty strong personalities and a lot of great ideas. Maybe we will finally have an active productive MS PTA, which was my ultimate goal upon agreeing to this job. I hope after two years we have a lot of great stuff in place. I am confident now that we will.
My VP who I thought was going to be a pitbull, turns out to be more like a beagle! I was ready to lay it on with her, but I don't think I will need to. Although I need to get more insider info from my above mentioned friend.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Below I am inserting something a friend emailed me. Its an article a Newsday columnist wrote which really hit home with me. It sums up pretty much where I am at...
By Anna Quindlen, Newsweek Columnist and Author
All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief.
I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two
taller than I, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books as
I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their
opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I
choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to
keep their doors closed more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the
bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by
themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber
ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible
except through the unreliable haze of the past.
Everything in all the books I once poured over is finished for me now.
Penelope Leach, T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry
and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, all grown
obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are
battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages
dust would rise like memories. What those books taught me, finally, and what
the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations --what they taught me, was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all.
Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then
becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an
endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive
reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout.
One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2.
When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on
his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last
arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden
infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is
terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself.
Eventually the research will follow.
I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful
books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of
infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil
for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat
little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he
developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he
went to China . Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine - &
walk, too.
Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes
were made. They have all been enshrined in the, "Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame." The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not
theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for
preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her
geography test, and I responded," What did you get wrong?" (She insisted I
include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through
speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all
insisted I include that.)
But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while
doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear
now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one
picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow
of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could
remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and
how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a
hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had
treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.
Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and
what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday
they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they
simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways
that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was
often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how
it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the
world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity.
That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to
learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the
experts were.
...........crying yet? I was.
No comments:
Post a Comment