So I went in the living room to work out over lunch, and I found these guys.
They must've been really cold, because they were wearing her sweaters.
I rounded the corner of the path, trailing a tarp of yellow leaves and two tweens, thinking about how this seventy-five degree day was perhaps it, perhaps the last perfect day of autumn.
And I saw this.
I dropped the tarp, and the three of us stared at it without saying anything for a few seconds. We'd been in the woods before, but not this deep. The neighbor asked us to go deeper so the leaves wouldn't blow back in his yard.
It is the perfect tree in every way. It has sturdy, low branches for climbing, hedge apples for decor and obsession and thorns for an element of danger. The girls named it Hedgepoint.
They stayed in the woods for four hours. I'd long since hung up my rake and washed my car and was reading a book when it was finally time to go get them.
When I was growing up, we used to play Narnia in the thicket next to my parents' house. There was a special fallen tree and a lane and a creek with a bridge over it. Every child needs a perfect tree in her life, and now my girl has one. I'm relieved, as the age for properly respecting a tree like Hedgepoint has nearly passed her by.
I'm not sure I'd ever really seen a hedge apple before I moved to Kansas City, but I read these trees were planted to prevent soil erosion after the Great Depression.
Whereas I played Narnia, they played Boxcar Children. It doesn't matter. Doesn't every child pretend to live in the woods without parents at some point?
The most amazing tree ever in the history of the earth.
I came downstairs this morning to find no room at the breakfast table because, well, this.
But who is missing? The Bear in Charge, Ski Bear. Where could he be?
"Mommy, sometimes I feel like I miss something that isn't even there."
Hormones? Anxiety?
"Well, you're getting to the age when you will start having these suckers called 'hormones.' They help you grow your boobs, but they can be a real pain when it comes to emotions coming out of nowhere."
"Hormones make you feel bad?"
"Sometimes. When I was your age, I started to have anxiety."
"What's that?"
"When you feel nervous or really excited or scared for no reason out of nowhere. If you feel those things, tell me, and I'll tell you more about it."
Saying these words gave me a huge download of anxiety, of course. Please, God, don't let her have anxiety disorder. Please give her Beloved's even keel.
It passed, and she didn't mention it again. I don't believe in sweeping emotions under the table, as I feel my emotions with the strength of a hurricane, and I know how great or horrible they can make your life if they're kicking on too high a gear.
Last night, we went to parent-teacher conferences. Her classroom teacher talked about social skills and reading levels and practice those math facts!
Her gifted teacher invited my daughter to attend the conference with us. Her teacher talked about confidence with math and how my daughter needs to work on her confidence so she can take risks in that area. We talked about how scary it can be when you're gifted and just know the answers to some things through absorption, and then you hit on something that doesn't come naturally. She turned bright red.
Her teacher told my daughter she is intuitive and how important that would be in her life, to be able to walk into a room and understand which people were feeling good today and which people weren't. Her teacher complimented her on her ability to sense who needed a boost and provide that boost.
Then her teacher handed us a few articles on parenting the gifted child. I don't know if this sort of literature was available when I was in school or not. I haven't asked my parents yet. I was in one of those programs, and I don't remember anyone ever talking to me about the flip side of just knowing the answers to some things without having to learn them in any sort of thought-out way. I remember being completely unprepared for my first colossal academic failure and questioning my whole existence as a result when it happened -- the side effect of knowing the answers automatically to some things.
I don't want that to happen to the little angel, but seeing her eyes dart around in a way I've never witnessed before and watching her practically climb the chair with anxiety when we talked about timed math tests reminded me of that feeling of panic when the answers don't just pop like they do with spelling or reading comprehension or wherever your gifted wheelhouse is academically.
Her teacher gave us one article I particularly wanted to share, because if you are a gifted person or are parenting a gifted child, it's important to understand the flip side of a brain that works differently than the "normal" people (a word I use extremely loosely). It's called Gifted As Asynchronous Development, and it's by Stephanie S. Tolan. Here's a short excerpt that grabbed me:
Often the products of gifted children's special mental capacities are valued while the traits that come with those capacities are not. For example, winning an essay contest on the dangers of global warming may get a student lots of attention and praise while her intense emotional reaction to the threat technology poses to the planet and its life forms may be considered excessive, overly dramatic, even neurotic. If she tries to act on her beliefs by going on strike to force her family or school to renounce what she considers harmful technology, she may be ridiculed, scolded, or even punished. Writing a winning essay is deemed not only okay, but admirable; being the sort of person she had to be to write it may not be considered okay.
When we focus only on what gifted children can do rather than who they are, we ignore vital aspects of their developing selves and risk stunting their growth and muddying or distorting their sense of themselves and their worth.
That is a hard one, when you're parenting a gifted child. I find myself getting very frustrated with her daydreaming, her inability to break focus when she's creating something. Last night I could not get her to stop making two levels of invites to go trick-or-treating with her -- there was the VIP level for her friends, and then a different, generic "guest invite" level for any of their +1s. For trick-or-treating. All I wanted her to do was go take a shower and go to bed.
It's hard not to push with the math facts to the point that it's uncomfortable, because her classroom teacher told her she tested her in reading up to the level she can go -- but she doesn't really know because that was the top end of the bar. The math facts tears flow instantly, at the mere mention of math facts, because the timed tests are the only things she's ever not just been able to do, and she feels a deep sense of shame because they are not easy for her. I see this shame in her eyes.
From Tolan's article:
Many gifted children are able to develop their gifts and use them productively. But some of these achievers, as adults, live their lives with a nagging discomfort with themselves. They focus, as the people in their childhood environment did, only on what they can do because they are ignorant of (or uncomfortable with) who they are.
It's my job as the parent of a gifted child to do the following things:
- Remind her she is enough just for existing and being a kind person. Achievements will come and go. Some days you're the windshield and some days you're the bug, and that has ultimately got to be okay or your life is going to be too exhausting. No one wins every day.
- Teach her coping skills for when the inevitable failure comes. Deep breathing. Reframing. Humor. Talking to a loving friend or partner. Reading great quotes from smart people who bombed it spectacularly. Exercising. Getting enough sleep.
- Help her understand that her intellectual brain is not her. It's not her spirit, it's not her soul. It's a handy thing to have around, but it is not the sum total of who she is. Her intellect's strengths or failures should not be the ruler by which she judges her existence on this earth.
- Encourage her to use her gifts to get what she wants out of life, but to understand the consequences of success -- successful people have constraints on their time, they have a lot of people depending on them, they have a lot of pressure to perform every day. Just because you're good at something doesn't necessarily mean you will be happy doing it.
- Provide her with the endless creative and intellectual challenges she needs via the Internet, books, games and parental focus. She needs to engage with my husband in me in a way that's different than some kids engage with their parents. She needs us to be parents and set limits and boundaries, but she also needs us to be creative partners participating in her elaborate schemes and internal stories. She needs us to let her stage Macy's-level window displays out of the junk in her room and appreciate her use of the color wheel doing it, and she needs us to listen to her while she worries about all the bad things that could happen to her fish if he lived in the ocean, because she is sincerely concerned with these things and needs to be taken seriously.
- Recognize when she needs to disengage because she's getting too worried about something.
- Encourage her to keep writing down her stories, because writing allows a person to get as dramatic as she needs to be while exploring possibilities in a safe and socially acceptable way.
I'm no psychologist or teacher or social worker. The things I wrote above are my instinctive reactions to her as her mother and as a reader of the literature provided to me by her teacher (there was more, but I'm not going to quote it all). And as a gifted person. It's hard to write that, because when I grew up, it was considered bragging to say you were gifted, even if you were. It shouldn't be -- gifted means your brain works differently sometimes in a way the world values and sometimes in a way it doesn't. It's an end of a spectrum. Every characteristic of a person is on a spectrum. We all fall somewhere.
As an adult, I find this research comforting, because even though my parents never made me feel bad about my extreme emotional reactions to everything from Hurricane Katrina to the death of an author I never met in person to my often-inappropriate desire to fix things for complete strangers, other people did. I've been called too sensitive, dramatic, over-reactive and worse. It alarms people when they see this part of my personality in full force. I know it makes people uncomfortable, and I usually try to hide it in person, the same way I used to sit in class and only allow myself to raise my hand every fifth question so I wouldn't be THAT KID.
I always thought my extreme reactions were wholly attributed to my anxiety disorder, but now I'm wondering if it's just the side effect of my brain grokking some concepts in a different way than the average bear. If that's the case, I can forgive myself the drama and focus on helping my daughter avoid 37 years of wondering why they hell I react to things that most people find puzzling at best and annoying at worst.
My daughter is very smart, that's true, and that's wonderful. But she also tends to walk around with her heart on the outside of her body, and I just want the best of everything for her. Nothing in life is all roses, and neither is being gifted.
When I was a kid, there was a bench in my parents' house that was just long enough for a small child to lie down with her head touching one armrest and her feet touching the other. I loved that bench. I still love it -- my parents gave it to me when I moved out. Sometimes I go upstairs and sit on it and realize how totally uncomfortable it is, but I still love its swoopy wooden details. I don't have the house or the budget for the amount of swoopy wooden details I would buy if I could.
I was moving some things around a few days ago and put a little rectangular pillow on the sturdy, uncomfortable bench in our living room, the one that went so well with the Mission 1902 style of This Old House but not so much with the seventies vibe lingering in Chateau Travolta. I don't think anyone in the family has ever sat on it except to put on or take off shoes, but it holds all of our living room blankets under its seat, so it lives on in the corner of the room.
The day I put the pillow there, my daughter came home from school and saw it and immediately went over to lie down. Her head touched one armrest and her feet touched the other. She looked down, pulled a book out of her backpack and didn't move for the next hour.
Pretty cool.
Speaking of things kids like, you can win a giant cardboard playhouse now through Nov. 1 at Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!
Wow, thank you to everyone for your helpful ideas about getting to sleep. Isn't it funny how something so basic should be so difficult for so many of us to attain?
Ironically, since I wrote this post, she has slept through the night, though she still wakes up really early, in my opinion, for how late she goes to sleep. My husband only sleeps about five hours a night, though, so it's possible her natural needs are lower than those of other kids.
We have a routine, though it's been pushed back a lot these past few weeks as we try to suck the marrow out of summer/early fall while the weather is still good and the light is still here after dinner. Third grade strangely has produced less homework than second grade, though more reading. She gets home from school at 4:30 on the bus and either does her homework or entertains herself in some other manner until I finish work around 6. Then we make dinner. We've been eating outside as much as possible. The last few days she's wanted to play outside with neighborhood friends, climbing trees and swinging. I'm fairly sure climbing trees and swinging are part of what combats global warming, so of course I let her do those things whenever she wants.
I'm not sure if the physical activity has tired her out more or if she's just getting back into the rhythm of life again and thus sleeping better. After she comes in, we have dessert and talk a little, then she showers and then there's about a half-hour of stalling and procrastination, then she climbs in bed and a parent reads to or with her for a half-hour or 45 minutes, then we lie next to her while she falls asleep. When it's me, I count backwards in my head to keep MYSELF awake, because I can fall asleep at the drop of a hat. She also has an air cleaner that makes noise, a lit fish tank with pleasant bubble sounds and a fish light that throws dappled blue light on the ceiling. The kid is practically living in a spa of sleep aids.
I got a sleep aid machine breathing monitor in the mail yesterday for review, but we haven't had a chance to test it out on getting her back to sleep yet. I'll let you know how that goes. It's a great concept. I used it for exactly three seconds last night because I require no help falling alseep.
We did have both the little angel and Ski Bear take an oath on Monday night that they solemnly swore to try to stay in bed and lie quietly instead of coming to get us for at least ten minutes to see if they could fall back asleep on their own. They held their right hands up and repeated after me. Ski Bear is known to break his oaths, but the little angel is usually pretty good.
So, thus far, during the work week she is sleeping okay.
And, since this post was sorta boring, here's a post about The Light Bulb Conundrum of the Easy Bake Oven that I wrote on BlogHer yesterday.
My daughter struggled with sleeping until she finally slept through the night for the first time at about four years old, shortly after we moved into Chateau Travolta. That whole period of zero-sleeping through the night is a giant haze and something I like to avoid thinking about, except to note she was cute and sweet even though she never slept.
Then she turned into this awesome sleeper who could sleep through military helicopters flying over the house and fireworks set off next door and kids opening up their muffler-less cars on our little residential street.
And it was good.
Then, this week: eight-year-old insomnia. WHAT?
Last night I went to bed too late, slept from midnight to three and woke to hear her crying. She explained what she was crying about (nothing big), then I crawled in bed with her, but she was Wide.Awake. Then Petunia wandered in and was all meowy-meowy, then the little angel was REALLY REALLY WIDE AWAKE, and then she tossed and turned until I said, "I'm going to check on you and go back to bed," which means, "I've had it, kid."
I went back to my bed and five minutes later, she was there, too. Then she did fall asleep and started shoving me farther and farther toward Beloved, who may have been suffering from allergies (I wear earplugs, and no, they don't work). Finally, my back felt like it was being stabbed from the bizarre position I was in, so I extricated myself vertically and went into HER bed, leaving her to stick her bony little knees into my husband's back instead. It was about six by then. I finally fell asleep in her bed, and she must've slept in my bed, though I doubt Beloved did.
This morning on the way to school (I had to drive her because I couldn't get my EYEBALLS TO OPEN in time to get everything going to catch the bus), I said, "So what was going on this morning?" And she was all "I don't know. I just couldn't sleep."
RECORD SCRATCH
This can't happen again.
So we talked about relaxing all the different muscle groups. And we talked about counting backwards from 100. And we talked about what works for me, focusing on relaxing the muscle between my ears. And we talked about deep breathing.
And she was all PSHAW.
The bad part is that she woke up at three on Saturday night and couldn't go back to sleep, too.
OH MY GOD WHAT DO I DO?
Does anyone know how to cure insomnia in a kid?
This post was recognized by Five Star Friday. I'm honored.
Today's post was going to be a series of blurry photographs of Miss Elephant and her new outfits. Miss Elephant came from the circus, and her outfits came from the sewing scrap pile. Don't worry, they're still coming, but there's something else I realized I have to write first.
Two events came crashing together this morning, launched by another last night. I tell you this because sometimes I myself wonder how I got the idea to do something. One was the launch of the BlogHer Book Club discussion of Brene Brown's new book, Daring Greatly. The other was a text conversation I had with a friend who's been going through a very extended trough in her life. During the course of our conversation, she wrote, "Sounds like you're doing well from your blog, though. Yay!" And for the most part, I am, and I was glad she was happy for me in the midst of her hard place, which is truly who she is, a very generous and lovely person. I would like to be more generous and lovely, myself, so I appreciate it when I see it in others.
But I felt like such a liar.
We discussed Kansas author Laura Moriarty's book The Chaperone in BlogHer Book Club a while back, and since I realized she teaches at KU and lives in Lawrence just right down the road from me, I decided to check out her backlist. Wow. I totally went fangirl and read them all. Laura Moriarty writes books that are painful to read because they are so fucking real. Last night around midnight I finished The Rest of Her Life, which is a book about the relationship between a mother and her daughter after the daughter accidentally kills a schoolmate by hitting her with her car.
And there are about a million passages in this book that made me gasp and examine myself and freak out. And this was one of them:
"'Oh," Pam said. It was all she said, that one word, but her voice held so much ache and sympathy that it seemed to Leigh her sister might have actually been there at the market and seen Diane Kletchka's misery and insanity for herself. Leigh relayed the entire confrontation, and her sister's face grew more distressed. It was hard to tell who she was feeling sorry for -- Bethany's mother, or Kara, or Gary, or Leigh herself. And that made sense. Leigh knew this even as she was talking, even as she felt a resurgence of fear just describing the scene. There were, after all, no underdogs in the scene, no winners or losers to root for. It was a miserable situation for everyone involved. An objective bystander could only wish they would all get through it." - p. 248
I read that last night, and it lodged somewhere in my mind, a piece of the puzzle sliding into place. And that's why I texted my friend this morning, because there are no underdogs in her story, either. Just a trough and a hard time, and I wanted to let her know I was thinking of her.
This new book of Brene's is all about vulnerability and not being afraid to get in the arena and show people who you really are, even though that can make you look incompetent (you think) or ineffective or sort of vindictive or unfair.
For almost a year now, Beloved's been traveling for work. A lot. Like a several times a week. And I knew with him taking this job it would put new challenges in my road. Most days I handle them well enough. Last night, though, last night, I could feel myself getting sick, and I was standing at the counter getting that dizzy/tingly/oh fuck feeling, and the little angel was asking about dinner and the movie I promised to watch with her, and the trash needed to be taken out, and the cat was protesting for her dinner, and I wasn't quite done with work for the day, and it Felt.Like.Too.Much. As it often does.
I'm not a full-time single mother, but I play one part-time in my life right now. That means my schedule is dictated by my daughter's and husband's, as there is often no one else to watch her or take her where she needs to go. Sometimes that means I can't make plans with friends or answer the phone at certain times of the day. And then I worry I'm hurting the other people in my life by paying them no attention.
Years ago, I would've just blamed this all on my husband, because that's the easy thing to do. I spent much of my early marriage holding him responsible for all manner of things that weren't his fault. And sometimes I find myself tempted to do it now. After all, he's gone while I'm doing the work at home, right? It's not like we're Downton Abbey with staff here. But I know how much he wishes he were here. I know how hard it is for him to be away from us at night, especially when we seem too busy to talk to him, but that's really because everything takes me a million years when I have to do them one at a time, and by the time he calls, we're fried and trying to get to bed. He knows this. I know this.
There are no underdogs here.
So yeah, there has been Miss Elephant this week. And a glorious bike ride on Sunday with my husband and daughter, and she made it nine whole miles and then we went to Cold Stone. But there was also last night, at the counter, with tears running down my face and me emailing my parents to say I WANT MY MOMMY. And then she emailed back with something about making iced tea for my cousin's bridal shower and I was all THAT IS NOT THE RIGHT RESPONSE TO I WANT MY MOMMY. Which she fixed this morning, but in that moment, I just fell apart.
We're all just totally treading water.
But don't we all look nice on our blogs?