Tag: parenting

4 Jan 21 – But I’m Still Right About Other Stuff

I don’t want to seem braggadocios, but I’m pretty good at Guess Who. We play a lot of it over here. I mean, A. Lot.

Tonight, the 9yo and I were playing a round. I was the mustachioed Jake. If it’s been a minute, peep the image below. That’s Jake in the front row center. Shock of white hair, eager gleam in his eyes. Jake’s a paragon of happy-go-lucky. Look at that chin.

But, where is Emily going?

So, the 9yo asks, “Does your person have milk on his face?”

I reply in that tone parents get to use when their kids are charmingly naive, “You mean a mustache, buddy?” Gotta love the “buddy,” right?

He examines the faces before him. “No,” he says.

“I’m pretty sure you mean ‘mustache’,” I repeat. He’s been known to dig his heals in from time to time, so I decide to let it sit for a while. He’ll come around.

“No,” he says, “It’s not a mustache. It’s like milk right here.” He rubs the bottom of his chin.

Looking at my pal Jake and his stunning display of illustrated facial follicles. Poor kid’s confused.

“That’s just called a mustache,” I say, beginning to wonder why he’s having such a hard time with this. Also, why does he think a mustache is on the chin? Do I need to plan a teachable moment around facial hair? “Do you mean a milk mustache?” Placement would still be wrong, but I understand how he could forget the word.

Honestly, though, at this point I’ve used the word mustache at least three of four times. I’m wondering why he’s not picking it up.

9yo let’s out a sigh I swear had a whisper of “okay, boomer” in it. He removes his own playing card from his board, places it face down on the table and turns his board around.

Not pictured, my dignity.

In what I now realize was an enormous act of self control, he says, “Like this. It looks like milk on his chin.”

But his Jake didn’t look like my Jake because his Jake was Jon. That layabout hippie can shave a mustache, but can’t be bothered to shave his milk chin.

2 Jan 21 – The Long Road

The kids and I, after appropriate and vigilant isolation, went home to Illinois for Christmas. My moms have also been isolating. My sister and brother-in-law have also been isolating. This meant we got to be a big old isolated pod.

I hadn’t appreciated how cut off I’ve been from my family this year. I knew it in a logical way, but had been cordoning off grieving that separation. It lived in a box underneath all of the other detritus that took up 2020.

Here’s the thing, it’s also meant almost the entirety of my first year of parenting was spent without the physical presence of my family. Thinking back now of all the questions in my home study interview that invoked my family as my support network, it seems impossible to have made it through.

Honestly, there were moments of figuring out who we are as a family this year that also had me wondering if we would.

In those interviews, my caseworker asked me, “What do you think could change as a result of placement of children?” My answer, “Everything could change. It won’t all change, but I need to be ready to deal with anything changing.”

If I’d only known.

These two weeks, though. Watching the kids really respond to our larger family as THEIR family. Seeing them with their baby cousin, who has never known a version of our family without them. Watching them hug and receive hugs freely. Again, I appreciated logically that this would all happen – eventually. Emotionally, though, I held back hope that we’d see it this Christmas.

I’m a bit worried I might be holding back hope on a more global scale. Not all hope, mind you. More like, I’m keeping a bit of it back in situations where I’d normally be Head Optimist in Charge.

A former student posted yesterday on Facebook that a former therapist of his advised sitting and making a list of the things he’d accomplished within a year. A tool for regaining perspective. The idea has been knocking around in my brain since reading it. After 900+ miles of driving today, I don’t have it in me right now, but it feels like a good step in the pathway to claiming back more hope.

1 Jan 21 – The Year Ahead

I’ve been silent here. I’ve been silent a lot places this last year. Everyone has, right?

So, when I thought about whether I wanted to commit to a post a day here again in the way I have in years past, I was hesitant. Then, I recognized that hesitancy as a need to commit. To be sure, the pandemic has meant silence in a lot of places I’m used to using my voice.

Parenting, though, has been the bigger silencer. My mom has asked me a few times if I’m journaling. It’s the tool she’s used as a parent to help her check in and see how she feels. At the beginning, I didn’t quite understand it. Now, more than a year in, I understand how single dad-ing can mean I get to the end of the day and find I’m carrying the feelings of an 11 and 9 yo, but might not know what I’m feeling, thinking, doing.

And, thus, I’m here, typing, again. Committing to finding out where my voice is and how it sounds as an educator and single parent.

I’m doing it here because I’m thirsty for conversation, community, and gut checks. Inspired by the near-constant uncertainty of parenting, I’m more doubtful than before that anyone’s on the other side. It’s all new territory.

Let’s go.