Kitchen or the Egg

A friend of mine shared recently, “I know, as a grown up, that we can’t always get what we want, (thanks Mick), but for a 5yo, this is a heartbreaking reality.”

As grown-ups, we know that you can’t always get what you want. But how can we best support our children when this becomes a new awareness for them?

I am finding myself focusing more on personally connecting with the need/desire being expressed by my child instead of maintaining more neutral, matter-of-fact objective territory.

When my five-year old and I run into scenarios like that, I’m trying to *be* with where he is. It’s still feels new for me and takes a lot of effort for me to remember to approach things this way, but I’m trying to help the shift from squelching my child’s wants and needs to supporting them.

When he says he wants to buy something he sees and it’s an impossible purchase at that moment, it still matters to me that he wants it. I mention how excited he sounds, then kind of “dream” together — if it were a baseball mitt, maybe I’d throw in how that baseball mitt could
catch home runs, how soft it is, how the leather smells, how cool it is to stick our fingers in the finger slots, and how it would be cool to buy 10, or 20, or 100, or a million of them and how cool it would look to see a million people catching a million baseballs! And let’s write down “baseball mitt” on our Vision Board at home (writing it down on paper or in my check register or anywhere, in the meantime). “And check out how much bigger this mitt is over here!” kinds of comparisons. And make our way through the store, including my own fantasizing around a golf club or exploring/trying out/discussing whatever interesting things we pass along the way.

I’m finding that writing my son’s “wishlist” on our Vision Board, along with my own dreams and those of the rest of the family, helps give it “legs” and he appreciates just feeling *heard.* Then when we run across the thing again, it’s more of a reference, “You wrote that one down, right Mom?” and it helps us to focus on the fun and cool aspect of the thing instead of just the need-to-have-it-and-need-to-have-it-now energy.

I’m also talking more openly and casually about my purchases when we’re together, mostly groceries: the things I did buy and why (“I can’t decide between this one and this one…let’s look at the price….”,) the purchases I made with coupons, the things I bought on sale, and the ones that “got away” that I’m disappointed to skip this time but really excited about the stuff we *are* making with the things we *do* have. I’m not trying to do this in a condescending
this-was-all-pre-determined way. I’m just trying to vocalize more of what’s going on in my head *while* I’m doing it. Anyway, he seems to like this stuff.

My son loves playing Club Penguin (clubpenguin.com) and it has been an amazing experience in so many ways. It’s a community of penguins, and you personalize your penguin character and the igloo. You need penguin coins to do this, which you “earn” playing video games embedded within Club Penguin. You always know how many you have, and you can “shop” from the catalog or do various things with your money.

My son has played loads of games to “save up” for various igloo accessories, completely conscious of having enough yet, or not, in a way that’s really clear to him. It’s so much less abstract for him now, having enough money for something, or not. Or having enough for
something cheaper instead, or saving coins to get the more expensive thing.

I’m convinced these things are part of what led him to sell these scarves he’s been making and selling lately. All *totally* his idea and all his own work, he could not BE more proud to have created a way to earn, and spend, his very own money.

To me, the key (for us) is to be honest with my own feelings and ideas, feeling free to express them from my heart as opposed to telling my son something that *sounds* disappointed but fake, in order to make a lesson out of it. Something I’ve done and I’m happily growing out of.

Sometimes the *bigness* of my son’s feelings can feel threatening to me, something I want to make stop because I feel uncomfortable. I’m getting better about recognizing that, too, looking beyond the thing that triggers something in *me* and being able to celebrate his openness and willingness to share that emotion with me.

I’ve done Pilates about once or twice a week for 5 years now, and I can honestly say it’s one of the most awesome parts of my life. The “Aha!” moments I experience there are profound, and the ripple effect into other areas of my life is powerful.

I felt led to go to Pilates after suffering severe back pain from carrying my infant son. I’d previously taken a mat class at the YMCA but didn’t like it and never felt the same bliss everyone else in my group was raving about. So coming to this local studio was a chance to try again, this time with the machines. I was hooked after the first session and have continued ever since.

In addition to strengthening my back muscles, it has helped to prepare me through my second pregnancy, it has relieved stress during challenging times, it has led to new friendships with people I’ve shared classes with, and I marvel at the clever ways my body tries to avoid the deep muscle work as I try to maintain being present with a given exercise. My teacher once told me, “It’s not intuitive to go to the area where the muscles are weakest.” The other muscles are constantly trying to cover, to compensate for these weaker areas. It occurs to me how often I must do this misguided “helping” in my life, if I’m doing it here in Pilates.

As I go deeper, it is just really hard. No way around it. I don’t want to do more repetitions of this same tender, challenging area. I want to leave, I want to go home, I want the session to end, I hate this. And then we finish that series, and I feel amazing. Not just finishing class, but finishing a given sequence in class. It feels unbelievable. Like a new awakening within myself.

With years of experience with this style of exercise, I am surprised to find how much more I am needing instruction and coaching. I’m finding pockets of complacency in my positions and efforts, and the attentive cues and corrections from my teacher helps me to re-engage. I’m also appreciating instructions for more advanced modifications of a familiar exercise, or a more detailed description for a certain movement.

My teacher’s invitations last week to “have a conversation with my body” about my feet being in parallel position without turning my knees in, or “feel this one in your hip flexors, not your thighs” helping me to refocus the work where it belonged instead of the larger muscle group taking it over, all centering and returning my power to me, going inward, seeing what’s going on in my own body. It also keeps things interesting, there’s always something to release and something to contract.

One interesting shift in my thinking happened a couple of weeks ago. My teacher, like all Pilates teachers, is constantly reminding us to lower our shoulders. It’s easy to hunch them up when we lift our arms up and it happens all the time. I’ve always mentally beaten myself up about this common tendency. “How long have you been in Pilates? How many times have you done this exercise? Why can’t you remember to get those shoulders down?” No one else is saying this, mind you, just me. But last week, she mentioned something about releasing our shoulders to engage our back muscles. What?? Huh?? I had no idea there was actually a *reason* for doing this. I just assumed there’s a right way and a wrong way to do a given exercise, and that lifting my shoulders was a perennial breach of correct positioning.

I love the idea of moving *toward* something instead of just focusing on *not* doing something else. It brought in for me the idea of micromovements, honoring a process that takes place in very small steps. Every step counts, doesn’t matter how big or “useless” it is. There’s no judgment in engaging my back muscles. I do that at the level I am able. But raising my shoulders? It’s like taking a test and receiving a big fat red X from the teacher. That one small cue was cathartic. It helped me to see how much I criticize myself during the class. Which again, helped me to question how much I do that in the rest of my life in brief, insidious ways, whether to myself, or to my family.

If it’s true that “what we tend to, grows,” then I am enjoying this shift from “failure” focus to celebrating the awakenings.

In homeschooling, we’re living and learning all the time. There isn’t a point in the day where we say, “Alright, that’s enough learning.” We try to live our lives to the joy-fullest each day, follow Declan’s questions, Quinn’s interests, without an arbitrary “on” or “off” switch determining when that begins and ends.

I’m seeing my own habits starting to shift as I witness the seamless flow in my kids’ daily lives. I have a habit of trying to compartmentalize my life. And how that can be an escape route from getting things done if it’s not the “right” time to work on something.

I’ve got mountains of projects, including clean unfolded laundry, waiting for just the right “time in the schedule” to be put away. It feels too daunting to chip away at five or ten minutes at a time, as I’m able to go back and forth to it. My “preference” would be to just get it done all at once – to spend hours folding it, putting it away, reorganizing the kids’ drawers with the cold-weather garb, sorting through the outgrown items, etc. But really? Do I really want to spend hours doing a specific chore? No.

Then why do I resist getting things done a few minutes here or there? Does it seem like a wasted effort? Not working hard enough? It will just get “undone” anyway so why bother?

Really, it’s like a leap of faith approaching things in this way.