Happy Mothers Day

Mother’s Day has always been a day of gratitude for me – for my own mother, who continues to be a major influence in the person and the mother I’ve become; for my wonderful grandmothers who were (and are) both wise, funny and authentic women in their own way; and, now for my Will and Owen, who have taught me to love life and all its gifts deeply all over again;for Rob, who helps keep me sane, keeps me laughing, and generally makes it possible to survive the whole motherhood thing intact; and for Rob's mother, who taught him to be the kind, caring, loyal person he is today.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you and your families – and especially to my own mom, whose guidelines for living are the subject of this Mother’s Day column I wrote for today’s Ledger-Enquirer.

A footnote: This morning I caught the last half of an interesting radio interview with Karen Armstrong, a former nun turned scholar of world religions and author of "A History of God," among other books. You can listen to it at the Speaking of Faith Web site. She referred to that same simple golden rule (which we teach children but too often forget as adults – and which was a central tenet in my mom’s unofficial guidelines for living) a couple times in the course of the interview. She recounts a story of “Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus who'd been approached by a bunch of pagans who said they would convert to Judaism if Hillel could recite the entire Torah while he stood on one leg. And Hillel stood on one leg and said, ‘Do not do unto others what you would not have done unto you. That is the Torah, the rest is commentary. Go and learn it.’” And she later adds that Jesus himself “teaches a version of Hillel's golden rule, but He says, ‘Do unto others as you would have done unto you.’” Armstrong returns repeatedly to compassion as a core virtue across religions and says at one point “Our future depends on learning to listen.” Compassion, she says “means ‘to feel with.’ Not to feel sorry for, but to say, ‘If I were in his position, maybe I would feel the same.’” So there you are: If a rule is golden enough to reach across religions it must be worth teaching to your children and relearning yourself.

Tall and happy mommy

Today Will and Owen and I enjoyed a Mother’s Day tea together at Wynnton preschool. As we were posing for this photo, Owen took a well-aimed swipe at my cake and sent it tumbling onto the table.

Then I got to open a mother’s day card featuring Will in profile, a nice keepsake that his teachers had to create for him. (Go here for instructions on how to make a Victorian silhouette like this.)
And then came the real prize: this picture of me colored by Will, which I am planning to frame.

Below the picture Will’s description of me was typed: “My mommy is tall and happy.” I loved those adjectives – happy, because it feels so true recently, and tall, because, well, no one’s ever called me that in my 5-foot-3 life.

“Look, I see my brown eyes,” I said as I spotted two faint brown circles in my rainbow of a face.

“Yep,” Will said. “And this is your hair. And here’s your beautiful neck. And here’s your beautiful shirt.”

I was feeling like a very colorful and beautiful mom -- which was nice while it lasted. When I showed my portrait to Rob tonight, he looked skeptically at the descriptive phrase beneath rainbow me and said: “Hmmm. I don’t know about tall and happy. I think it’s more like stumpy and grumpy.”

But we’re not hanging Rob’s portrait of me on the wall.

A little something for the tooth fairy

This morning, Will began talking about how many teeth Owen has, and that apparently got the tooth fairy on his brain. Soon he had a plan for a morning project.

“I’m going to make a sign for the tooth fairy. It will say: ‘This is where Will sleeps. He’s the little kid.’ "

I asked him if he thought the tooth fairy would have any reason to come to our house in the near future (obviously Will’s not quite to tooth-losing age yet). Usually, I told him, the tooth fairy comes to your house when you lose a tooth and often she leaves a little something for you – maybe a couple quarters – in exchange for your tooth.

But Will thought it was about time for the tooth fairy to be on the receiving end of things: “I want to give her the surprise,” he said. “Maybe I could even give her a little present. I could give her a little bit of money so she can buy what she’s going to buy.”

And then, he got to worrying more about whether the tooth fairy might not find him if she did come to our house:

“But I want her to know she needs to go in that room. I’m worried she might wake Owen up when she comes and she doesn’t know where to go so we should leave a sign on my door.”

We could do that, I said.

“Is the tooth fairy a boy or a girl?” Will asked suddenly (this was after using the feminine pronoun to refer to “her” throughout our conversation to this point).

Well, what do you think the tooth fairy would be? I asked, hating to push my female interpretation of things on him just because that’s what I pictured decades ago when I was losing my baby teeth.

“She seems like a girl to me,” Will said.

Then he went back to eating his oatmeal and we never did get around to making the tooth fairy sign.

So if Owen wakes up tonight (and he will), I might have to blame some bumbling toothfairy -- come to claim her surprise money but waking up babies instead.

Just call me granola head

I had a request yesterday for my granola recipe, which is another relic from my mother. She made the stuff throughout my childhood and still eats it today. Back in the fall when I did an interview with Sally Fallon, president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, she suggested that oatmeal (particularly if it's made with oats that have been soaked overnight, which I have yet to bother to do) as a gentler breakfast option for the digestive system. But I’m kind of a granola addict, so I just cut back to every other day and join Will for oatmeal on the off days. (Will, by the way, is addicted to oatmeal – a relic of the long-ago era when he was afraid to poop and I was trying to make sure he had enough fiber in him that he wouldn’t get himself constipated. Now he insists on oatmeal every day).

So now that I’ve whetted your appetite with tales of Will’s potty training, here’s the recipe. It’s perfect for me: not too sweet, but if you’re used to the store-bought stuff you might want more honey.

Mom's granola

8 cups whole oats
1 cup wheat germ
1 cup sesame seeds
1 cup raw sunflower seeds
*1 cup roasted, ground soy beans (roast on cookie sheets in oven; grind in blender)
1/2 cup coconut
1/2 cup honey
*3/4 cup canola oil
1 cup raisins

*(I omit the soy beans now, partly out of laziness, partly because I'm not sure I want to be eating too much soy. And when I heard Canola oil actually wasn't so good for you, I switched to just a half cup of olive oil. I like it fine but there is the faintest hint of olive oil in it -- so vegetable/canola oil's probably a better bet for flavor.)

Mix all dry ingredients (except raisins) in a 13x9 pan. Mix honey and oil in a small bowl then stir it in with the dry ingredients. Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes (rough estimate), checking and stirring every 10 to 15 minutes. After it cools, add the raisins (or any other dried fruit you like).

Will likes to get a spoonful or two thrown in with his oatmeal or Cheerios now and then – but mostly this is a breakfast for mom in our family. (Rob likes it fine for a leisurely morning but most days he thinks it takes too long to chew the stuff down.)

Breakfast for boys

Every morning of my life I have woken up ravenous. I can’t relate to you people who get nauseated by the thought of food upon first waking. The minute I open my eyes, I feel that rumble in my belly, a pinch of dizziness in my head and I am ready to chow down.

I'm too lazy for cooking eggs at the crack of dawn, so usually I grab a quick bowl of homemade granola or join Will for some oatmeal. Now it seems my breakfast habit (and perhaps specifically my cereal-for-breakfast habit) may have landed me two sons, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The study shows a link between high energy intake around the time of conception and the birth of sons.

A similar phenomenon has been seen in deer, horses and cows – all animals which I enjoy comparing myself to, by the way. And the old evolutionary theory behind it all is that if well-nourished females produce more males, those males typically produce more offspring (at least in animal populations where sex-outside-of-marriage is not frowned upon), which theoretically makes for a healthier overall population.

Here are a couple excerpts from this University of Oxford article reviewing the study:

“The study focused on 740 first-time pregnant mothers in the UK, who did not know the sex of their fetus. They were asked to provide records of their eating habits before and during the early stages of pregnancy. They were then split into three groups according to the number of calories consumed per day around the time they conceived. 56 per cent of the women in the group with the highest energy intake at conception had sons, compared with 45 per cent in the lowest group. As well as consuming more calories, women who had sons were more likely to have eaten a higher quantity and wider range of nutrients, including potassium, calcium and vitamins C, E and B12. There was also a strong correlation between women eating breakfast cereals and producing sons…”

“Although sex is genetically determined by fathers, mothers appear able to favour the development of one sex of infant rather than another. The mechanism is not yet understood in mammals, but it is known from IVF research that high levels of glucose encourage the growth and development of male embryos while inhibiting female embryos. In humans, skipping breakfast depresses glucose levels and so may be interpreted by the body as indicating poor environmental conditions and low food availability.”

There was a time long before Owen’s birth when I thought it might be fun to have a boy and a girl. But, if I could do it all again, knowing what I know now about the joy of mothering Will and Owen, I’d say wholeheartedly: Bring on the breakfast!

If any of you have tales of trying to rig the gender of your baby at conception, I would be fascinated to hear them. I know many people go way beyond putting baseball bats under beds. Here's hoping no one starves themselves in their desperate pursuit of a baby girl.

Watching the meltdown

I've been meaning to write a post on this book, which is full of insight about the ways we can live our lives more peacefully by attending to the present moment and learning to recognize the ridiculous games our minds play as we stew about the past or worry about the future or indulge in other ego-obsessions.

But there's no good way to summarize the way reading Eckhart Tolle has impacted me already since I've read the book, which has an admittedly grandiose, self-help-book-style title but nevertheless is full of a simple, profound -- and accessible and applicable -- sort of wisdom. Instead I'll give one example about a passage in the book that happens to deal with how we can be present with children who are in the midst of their own ego-obsessed, power-hungry tantrums or emotional fits. Will is still prone to these (especially when he is tired), although they come much more rarely and a bit more gently than they did in the past.

In the past I had chosen one of two paths for dealing with one of Will’s emotional thunderstorms and sometimes a mixture of both over the course of a given tantrum:I would either a) calmly explain my position several times while Will shouted back at me until I realized the futility of our "exchange" and said I would wait to talk to him until he was feeling ready to talk. Then I would basically ignore him as I cleaned the kitchen or went about my business while he continued his emotional meltdown or b) try comforting Will, keep talking with him, even try restraining him in a tight hug if he got into a hitting or throwing mode.

None of this proved very effective and Will's anger often continued to escalate.

And then Tolle offered me a slightly more effective approach. He talks a lot about the "pain-body" that we -- as children and adults -- carry around with us, individually and collectively. It's a pair of words that's sort of off-putting to my ears, but the basic concept is that we all travel around with an accumulation of suppressed, negative emotion -- and that our pain-bodies feed on and seek out negativity. The pain-bodies in young kids, who are of course egocentric by nature, often trigger tantrums, especially in sensitive children.

Here are some excerpts from Tolle about how to cope as a parent: "When the child is having a pain-body attack, there isn't much you can do except to stay present so that you are not drawn into an emotional reaction. The child's pain body would only feed on it. Pain-bodies can be extremely dramatic: Don't buy into the drama... If the pain-body was triggered by thwarted wanting, don't give in now to it's demands. Otherwise, the child will learn: "The more unhappy I become, the more likely I am to get what I want." This is a recipe for dysfunction in later life. The pain-body will be frustrated by your nonreaction and may briefly act up even more before it subsides...A little while after it has subsided, or perhaps the next day, you can talk to the child about what happened. But don't tell the child about the pain-body. Ask questions instead. For example: What was it that came over you yesterday when you wouldn't stop screaming? Do you remember? What did it feel like? Was it a good feeling? That thing that came over you, does it have a name? .... Do you think it may come back? ... All these questions are designed to awaken the witnessing facutly in the child, which is called presence...The next time the child gets taken over by the pain-body, you can say, "It's come back, hasn't it?" Use whatever words the child used when you talked about it. Direct the child's attention to what it feels like. Let your attitude be one of interest or curiosity rather than one of criticism or condemnation."

And it's this last sentence that has helped me make a nuanced but important change in how I cope with a tantrum. I no longer choose between ignoring and comforting/reasoning. I simply make myself a scientist of Will's meltdown. I observe him and actually feel a deep interest in him and his suffering as I do it. And I notice Will getting uncomfortable under this kind of quiet attention, almost as if by really watching him, I am helping him to watch himself.

He may continue to yell for a minute about whatever it is that's making him mad, but when it seems appropriate I will say quietly, "Are you ready for me to talk yet?" Usually he says no the first time and continues to rant for another minute or less as I observe him quietly again. Then when he seems to be ready I'll ask the question again. "Are you ready for me to talk yet?" And usually he says yes. Then I offer a calm, succinct reason for why I couldn't let him do or have the thing he wanted -- and maybe suggest another thing that he or we might do to move him out of focusing on the current power struggle. And usually he wants a hug and feels ready to move out of his negative space much more quickly than he ever did before. And Will is able to reflect on his tantrums well after the fact and talk about his hopes that these stormy moods will one day lose their hold on him entirely.

I was telling my dad about the shift Will and I have made and he reminded me of an old Zen saying he'd shared with me long ago:

"The best way to control your cow is to give it a wide, spacious pasture." "The second best way to control your cow is to try to control it." "The worst way to control your cow is to ignore it."

My dad was quick to point out that "purposeful parental ignoring" of a tantrum really falls under the second best category of trying to control through ignoring. But I have come to realize that "watching" Will is much more effective than purposefully ignoring him -- even though it might seem like a subtle difference.

You're invited to a bad-boys party

Yesterday we celebrated my mom’s birthday (a day earlier since she was flying home today). Will was a bit disturbed that we didn’t have a theme for Grammy’s birthday. “What kind of animal birthday are you going to have?” he asked her once.

Will has been plotting the theme and the gifts for his next birthday ever since he turned three – although his ideas change of course. Yesterday, he announced “I’m going to have a cake with bad boys and race cars with eyes.”

These are his current obsessions. “Bad boys” is his term for spider man and bat man – superheroes who he’s learned about from friends at pre-school but never seen on television. “Race cars with eyes” is his term for all the anthropomorphized toy vehicles inspired by the movie “Cars,” which I’m pretty sure Will doesn’t even realize is a movie. (For now, I’ve chosen to omit the fact that there are movies with these cars and “bad boys” as protagonists so that he can keep playing with the concepts according to his own imagined script. He doesn’t ask; I don’t mention it.)

And I have from now until late August to figure out how to convince Will that it might be fun to try something other than a “bad boys birthday party.” Although it might be worth it to hear the reactions if those invitations get sent out.

What horrid, inventive or otherwise amusing birthday themes have your kids tried to talk you into?