The Way From Here

Ma-Jean's Magic Jar

     It was my idea of a great rummage sale.  I skipped the tables with crowds around them and headed for the empty corners where creative possibilities lay disguised as junk.  I found old transistor radios and alarm clocks for the kids to take apart, horn rim glasses and a scatty wig for the dress up box, a tin of colored thread on wooden spools, and best of all, a large cardboard box of ancient Coleman parts (valves, screens, springs and brass coils) just waiting for the uninhibited to reinvent the lantern.
     On my way to the cashier, I cast one last glance over the toy table when an old peanut butter jar caught my eye.  Curious, I pulled it out from between the piles of games and books and read the label:  "Ma-Jean's Magic Jar (For times when the kids say there is nothing to do but watch TV".)  Inside were orange slips of paper.  I unscrewed the lid and pulled one out.  "Make a house!  Use chairs, couch cushions, blankets."  I added the jar to my pile of treasures. 
     Later that night I read the rest of the slips.  "Have a picnic on the front porch," "Pretend you fell down and bumped your head and broke your leg, Grandma can be the doctor," " Have a parade with records."  The slips went on to suggest that making jello, writing letters and turning seven sommersaults were all a lot more fun than watching TV. 
     Try some Ma-Jean Magic.  Sit down with your children and fill the jar together.  Ask them what they consider fun.  Add your own ideas.  Some of our favorite things to do are as simple as reading a book together or making pancakes in the middle of the day. 
    The shared pool of suggestions makes this project a success.  They are not vague orders from an adult like "Go outside and play," but instead offer immediate and tangible alternatives a child helped think of himself. 
     Ma-Jean's Magic works for me too.  Sometimes I need a piece of paper to remind me how important it is to sprawl on a bed with my children to read Where the Wild Things Are.   Besides, you never know where you will find magic.  It may even be at a rummage sale. 

Pride Time

    “You’re gone too much,” Nick, our eighteen–year-old, said one Sunday afternoon.  I studied him thoughtfully.  He’d grown ten fast years past the name Nicky into a lanky young man filled with strong ideas.  Ideas that leaned hard on the fierce side of things these days:  politics, girls, rowing, the price of gas, the length of his sideburns.
    “I mean I don’t miss you or anything.  It’s just that it seems you are never around.”
    He looked at me defensively and shrugged. My husband Greg and I had just returned from a weekend of working at the family ranch.  Nick had declared he was too busy to go with us.  He had rowing practice, a paper to write, and a marine science test to study for.  Besides, he wanted nothing more than to sleep IN on Saturday and NOT, no thank-you, deliver calves or lift rocks that had surfaced in the spring thaw.   Nope.  Not Nick Blakey.  He had bigger fish to fry, like renting Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and playing pool with friends.
        We were all busy for that matter.  Even though three out of our four children were at college or on their own, and it was just Nick left at home, time seemed to hold us on a perpetually short leash.  It had been a spring of travel and speeches that ran late into the night for me.  Earnest, even passionate, speeches urging parents to slow down and allow more unstructured time with their families. Often by the time I caught the ferry home it would be after 11:00 and Nick was in bed.  Family dinners had gotten shoved aside and staged.  Nick had to eat the moment he stepped in the door from rowing.  Greg didn’t arrive from work until later, and I ate with Greg or Nick or whenever my appetite and mood dictated.
        “Don’t look at me that way.  You don’t have to worry.  It’s just that when you talk about going to the movies together this week, or going out to breakfast tomorrow, it feels like you are trying too hard or something,” he continued.
        Nick rested his chin on his arms and gazed up at me.  Where did the time go?  I wondered.  How did this handsome young man land on my kitchen chair?  I sat down and sighed.  Navigating the final stages of adolescence into adulthood is difficult, and in a few short months, my time with the family, or lack of it, would be as insignificant to Nick as a pile of clouds on the horizon.  I knew this with all my mother’s heart.  I thought of the one thing I could do, that I always do when confronted with the paradoxes of parenting:  I told a story.
        “Nick, once when you kids were young, we went to Woodland Park Zoo.  We moved slow for once, and stopped at every single place and animal that interested you guys. Ben loved the bats, we stopped at the monkeys for Jenna, and you and Daniel wanted to look at every lizard and amphibian and bring them home.  Remember that?  Then we wandered over to the lions.  A signboard describing something called ‘pride time’ caught my eye.   Pride time is the invisible, seemingly irrelevant acts of social unity within a group of lions. They groom one another, they sprawl and nap.  The kittens might bat the dozing females’ flicking tails and then rassle each other with pouncing energy.  The lions rub heads, play, and sleep some more--in a pile, shoulder to shoulder, head to tail.  They lick each other, paw, and yawn and stretch and roll in the dust.  From the outside it seems that nothing important is going on except a whole lot of laziness, but researchers discovered a correlation in the amount of hours spent on pride time and the health of the pride itself.  The more time spent relaxing, the more strength and vitality in the pride.
        I felt a big BINGO go off in my head, Nick.  I translated it into human terms and thought how some of the most fulfilling times in our family were when we moved slow and scratched backs and read books.  It wasn’t necessarily the big times or the adventures that made us feel loved, it was more in the tiny acts of eye contact and physical affection.
I think what I am hearing you say, is maybe not that I am gone too much, but that we are not doing enough of the little things these days—walking Juno, family dinners, saying good night, scratching backs.  We always seem in a rush and hurry.  I think the bottom line is we don’t have enough pride time.”
        In the silence that followed I thought heck, I had sounded pretty darn good—competent, sure of myself, wise even. I would love to tell you that Nick leaped from his chair and hugged me hard, and said  all would be solved with a foot rub and a nap.   Instead he pondered for a moment and nodded, maybe a little impatient with this long and windy explanation of why he felt bad.
        “Yeah, I think that could be it,” he said.  “You haven’t made a good dinner for a long time.”
        Nick’s world in a nutshell, reduced to food. We pushed our chairs from the table and embraced awkwardly.
        “Well, I don’t have any homework tonight and I’m going to catch a movie with my friends.”
       “What?!”  I’ve just spent the last fifteen minutes talking about pride time and slowing down and you’re taking off?”
        Nick grinned and placed his hands on my shoulders.  When had he gotten so tall?
        “I’ll come in afterwards to say good night and I’ll bring that weird head-scratcher thing in.”
         Nick grabbed the car keys, opened the back door and ran up the steps two at a time.  Greg lay on the couch reading the New York Times.  “Let’s do the crossword puzzle, Nanc” he called out.   I smelled the rosemary chicken roasting in the oven for dinner.  Above it all, I heard our man-boy Nick whistling his way to the car.

Ping Pong and Hot Tamales

          The relationship I have with each of our four children began the moment I held that fragrant newborn in my arms.  It was unasked for and immediate, complete with everything we would need for the journey ahead.  Through the years, communication, playfulness, respect, and a sense of belonging, were at the core of our ties, they were the things we valued and developed.  They were also the very things I often forgot when we landed in the changeable territory of adolescence.     
     There are a thousand ways to raise happy and healthy children. I have seen strict parents and lenient parents do it. I have watched intact families, single parents, rich and poor manage to instill a sense of purpose and meaning in their children. There is no grand formula, no one set of criteria for success save one: There is a sense of relationship between parent and child. However misguided, lopsided, or messy the connection may be, if there is a relationship, there is hope, there is forgiveness, there is a certain resiliency that absorbs the lurches of mistakes and failure.  In many ways, it is unimportant how you cobble a relationship together, as long as there are corridors and alleys of connection.       
     I needed that sense of relationship about a hundred times a day raising our kids through their teen years. There were times when most forms of communication were issued in the command tense over unfinished business or mysterious outings---“Finish your homework, empty the garbage, Where are you going?  Who are you with? When will you be home?”      In the end what helped save life from becoming an unrelenting yammer-fest were hot tamales candies and ping-pong. I am not kidding.  I was a little desperate. It started one autumn afternoon when our son came home from middle school flat and monosyllabic for the fourth week straight, I pulled out a gigantic box of the red-hot candies and shook them enticingly.  “Want one?” I asked.  “Sure,” he said.  “Well, you have to beat me at ping pong then.  Winner gets 10.”  He looked at me scornfully.  “Just give me some,” he said.  “Forget it, you have to earn them,” and I cha-cha-cha-ed downstairs shaking the box like a mariachi hoping he would follow. 
     He did.  We played.  We talked.  We even laughed, because truth be told, he is a whole lot better at ping pong than I am, and he coached me with a muscular voice on how to play more competitively.  I often leaned on ping-pong and hot tamales with the others as they moved through their detach-and-grow-distant moods. The game became a conduit for communication without eye contact, for sharing the silly and the profound on a level playing field.  The command tense swung around to the kids telling me I wasn’t quite good enough and here’s how to do it better.  “I learn better if you don’t yell!”  I caught myself saying one eye-opening evening.     
     As the ball landed back and forth, idle exchanges sometimes led to topics more difficult to breach when we were eye to eye or confined to chairs.  There were gaps and pauses before replying, sideways lunges and rich conversational detours.  The game was a metaphor in many ways for the things that were going right in our relationship: having fun loomed larger than who won, the world wouldn’t end if we changed the rules, and a shared laugh bridged the worst day.     
     Margaret Mead once defined the ideal human culture as one where there is a place for every human gift. Whether the human culture is at work or home or the community, the meaningful use of our gifts can hold people together in fundamental ways.   Don’t wait for the right time to connect with your child.  That day has arrived.  It is right now.  As deadlines are being met, laundry folded, and as another workday draws to a close.  Sometimes the most important thing we can do is drop everything for red-hot candies and a game of ping-pong.

Mom-n-Me Breakfasts

      It isn't always easy being part of a big family.  There is always someone older or younger than you, more needy, louder, bigger, or faster.  Sometimes your voice is lost in the crazy swelling orchestra of brothers and sisters stretching up and out.  There are dentist appointments, baseball games, and school carnivals.  Sometimes it seems there is never enough to go around.  Not enough time or energy.  Not enough listening.        
     In this big family of ours we have a strategy for stretching that precious listening time.  On Thursday mornings before school I rouse one of our four children and we go to breakfast at a local diner on the island where we live.      It is a school day.  We have routines ahead of us, but what makes the day special is life set aside for a few hours.  We eat an extravagant breakfast and I listen to each child, one Thursday at a time, with undivided attention.  I say little about table manners (although it is tempting), and I don't take advantage of the warm feeling between us to discuss the friction or issues I may have with a child.  I simply listen.      
     One Thursday morning at the diner I watched our thirteen-year-old son jitter his knees and roll his neck to some weird inner music.  He dropped silverware on the floor, speculated how to make earrings out of empty Tabasco jars, and wiggled a loose tooth over and over.  Ben ordered soda pop instead of orange juice and a huge ham and cheese omelet that he tried to cram into his mouth in three bites.       I didn't say a word.  I couldn't decide if I should laugh or scream SIT STILL!  But then something happened:  the ghost of Norman Rockwell whispered in my ear asking me to look at this live wire half-grown boy as if he weren't mine.  As if he were the subject for a magazine cover.   I saw a lovable knucklehead with big feet.  The image made me smile.      
     “MOM!! A HUGE WEASEL!”  Ben yelled around a half a piece of toast stuffed in his mouth. 
     I wiped the smatter of his toast crumbs from my face and looked through the window onto the street where he was pointing.  A river otter.  It was a wild and sleek otter strolling down Main Street at seven thirty in the morning.  There were eight of us eating at the restaurant that morning and we all rose from our chairs as if from pews in a church and walked outside with the cook.   We watched this wondrous spectacle on an ordinary morning until the otter disappeared down a ravine that led to the harbor.        
     We returned to our breakfast, but nothing was the same.  Ben had led ten pairs of adult eyes to a river otter on Main Street.  We were too busy reading the newspaper, drinking our coffee, or thinking of ways to put a lid on a boy's goofy energy to notice the miracle right before us.  Blink! and it was gone.  As fast as a thirteen-year-old boy would be grown and gone.      
     Thursday mornings at the diner live long past a few hours for us.  It is body and soul time.  Beginning with a good cup of coffee with endless refills for me.  This is necessary if your daughter wants to talk about friend problems.  Sip listen.  Sip listen.  She can indulge in a cup of hot chocolate herself.  Feel better and decide that one good friend is worth three flighty ones.  She orders a hot and tender waffle with real maple syrup and orange juice (sensible girl).  I have my usual, the Morning Saute.  It is a deliciously vigorous mix of sautéed spinach, mushrooms, green onions and tomatoes over two poached eggs on toast. We look at the clock and linger over our hot drinks until it is time to drive to school.       Ten-year-old Nick orders bacon and eggs every time.  Nicky feels he is too old to play with the box of Mr. Potato Head pieces available for restless kids, but he will watch other children play with confused longing (I'm big.  I'm little.  I'm Nick.  I'm Nicky).  Our Thursday mornings together are gloriously simple.  He's TEN.  He loves eggs over easy and Mom and Dad.  Mind and body are perfectly synchronized before the surrender of common sense and stability to preadolescent hormones (Nick has two other brothers smack in the middle of that dangerous territory; I silently beg him to play with Mr. Potato Head).      
     The gourmand of the tribe is Daniel.  He is an accomplished cook in his own right with an adventuresome palate.  Daniel most often orders the morning special---this morning an egg scramble with mushrooms, jack cheese and basil.  He chooses the biscuit and douses it heavily with butter and jam. The muffins are flavored with seasonal berries and not too sweet.  Daniel approves.  We study for a test on Africa between the hot chocolate and the eggs.  "What is the capital of Liberia?" I ask him.  "Hmmmmm. . . " Daniel muses,  "Liberate men roving--Liberia, Monrovia!"  That's my mnemonic boy.
     Our island diner may not be in your neighborhood, but most likely there is a warm and intimate place washed in the good smells of something baking near you.  Patronize it.  The neutral territory of a cafe is a safe place for uncovering all the interesting, sad, unique thoughts of a child that can spiral past us at home.  My parenting downshifts, I am able to feel tenderness for a moment.  Maybe realize that all this growing up before me is fast.  Fleeting.  Thursday morning is a chance to savor my daughter, my sons, before the mind fades away to another load of laundry, another meal made.  On Thursday mornings my eyes are opened to the miracles in each child.

The Dishes Can Wait

    During my baby years, the years our four children were between the ages of newborn and five, I divided the world into 'permanent' and 'impermanent' things. The daily mountain of laundry, washing dishes, grocery shoppping, all fell into the 'impermanent' side of life. These things seemed necessary but dull. Anybody could do them, and they would be done today, tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that. Impermanent, as I saw it, would not change the world or leave a trace of my performance.      
     Permanents, on the other hand, left an impression in the slippery slide of my life. Reading a book, writing in my journal, making something: a sweater, an arrangement of flowers, a slingshot, meant I was alive underneath the fatigue.
     The division between the two moved with the day. Sometimes an impermanent became a permanent, like inventing a new shrimp salad or hanging clothes on a line in summer with the sun on my back. "Permanent!" I would say in my head, relieved that ideas still evolved, that the capacity to pause and feel a moment of light was intact.
     Permanents made a difference. They contributed to a private knowledge and lay like seeds inside, wordless and waiting. During my baby years I tried to do one permanent thing a day against the tide of impermanent. I looked for projects to do with the children. Not with the urgency of a parent intent upon stimulating creativity in her offspring, but with the awareness I was on my secret search for permanents.
     I found science experiments involving eggs and fire, and messy art from shaving cream. We made a scarecrow for the garden and a frog cage from cake pans. We grew alert for ideas, and found them in the most unexpected places. The children and I did these projects with a loose informality and followed our instincts over instructions. I still washed the clothes and cleared the table, but the experiments and projects gave me the chance to learn like a child: joyously, instinctively, with curiosity. The attention to permanents was meant for the unfolding of my creativity during difficult years, but the process embraced us all, making our lives dense with possibilities, the small possibilities that uncover the big ones.
                                                                  * * * * *
     The following projects are two of our favorites. Their beauty lies in their immeasurable results. There is no specific 'pattern' to strive for. Each piece is completely different from the piece before, and all participants are on equal footing. Your children are able to create beautiful papers beside you without the 'help' that is often nothing more than interference to them. Take your time and move slow. Whether you have a houseful of babies or your children are grown, investing in creativity, noticing the small enduring moments in life, does make a difference. The dishes can wait.

                                                       

   GARDEN PAPER

     This lovely, rough textured paper varies in color with the plants used. Experiment with different colored tissue, or try pressing dried grasses, sequins, or seeds into the paper before it dries.

What you will need:
1 cup garden snippets such as grass, flowers, leaves, berries, or soft vegetables like tomato or          zucchini.
1 cup finely shredded paper: tissue, toilet paper, or napkins work best
blender
water
newspapers
screen cut into a 12 inch square (small rolls of screen are available at your hardware store)
wax paper
rolling pin

     After collecting the garden snippets, tear or cut into small pieces and place them along with the shredded paper into a blender. Fill the container two thirds with water, and blend the mixture on medium speed until it is the texture of mush. This step breaks down the fibers of the plants with the tissue to make a pulp, or slurry as it is known in the paper making trade. Pour the pulp into a colander over the sink and drain off the excess water. You are now ready to roll the slurry into a paper. Set the piece of screen on a thick pad of newspapers, and place the drained mixture onto the screen. Cover with a sheet of wax paper and roll the slurry out, changing the newspapers as they get soggy, until the pad is fairly dry on the last roll. Lift the screen from the newspaper pad and dry the garden paper in an airy place. Check the paper after a few hours and lift the edges a little. This will make it easier to remove the paper from the screen later. When it is fully dry your family may want to use their papers for a poem, a picture, or save it for the pure pleasure of creating.

                                                         MARBLEIZED PAPER

     Words cannot do justice to this magical project. I have made marbleized paper with my children, my friends, and in a classroom of 26 six year olds and each time we lift the paper for the first peek, there is a surge of wonder at the astonishingly beautiful patterns. The process is simple, the technique easy enough for even small children, but most importantly, to create with your child and marvel together at something new is a rare opportunity to pause in our busy lives and live a resonant moment of discovery.

What you will need:
cookie sheet
aluminum foil
oil based paint
typing paper
turpentine (not the pure gum spirit turpentine)
aprons or old shirts to wear
newspapers

     Work in a well ventilated area. Turpentine vapors can be strong. Prepare the paint by thinning it with the turpentine to the consistency of milk. We use small jars with lids for this, to store the unused paint for later use (I guarantee you will be asked to do this project over!)
     Cover the work area with newspapers, and line the cookie sheet with foil. Fill the cookie sheet half way with water, and have your child dribble drops of the thinned paint onto the water with a small paint brush. The paint may seem to disperse to nothingness on the water's surface at first, but keep adding the drops of paint until it begins to glob. Swirl the paint around with a pencil or popsicle stick for the marbleized effect, then gently lay a piece of typing paper upon the surface of water. Lift the paper and lay on a newspaper to dry. Explain to your child that the reason for the marbled look on the paper is because oil and water don't mix. The oil based paint is lighter than water and rests on the water's surface. The typing paper acts as a blotter to absorb the swirled paint, and captures the beautiful patterns.