Author Archives: Jennifer Butler Basile

Children, motherhood, parenting

Oh, My Aching Head

We call them Old Wives’ Tales, but there must be some truth to them.  For, why would such a tale transmit through the generations, from place to place, person to person?

One particular teacher, a seasoned veteran, and I used to compare notes on our students’ behavior in relation to the phase of the moon.  In other words, a full moon meant crazy kids.

I extended that prediction to rainy days as well.  A drop in the barometric pressure caused children’s brains to ooze our their ears.

Which is about what is happening to my just-returned-from-school children right now.

Oh, my aching Old Wife’s head.

Found this image on hemiplegicmigrainehope.wordpress.com - thought the info on this site was ironically appropriate for all adults involved.

Found this image on hemiplegicmigrainehope.wordpress.com – thought the info on this site was ironically appropriate for all adults involved.

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Identity, Living, Mental Health, Mental Illness

Quirking

Marking the distance yet to cover when your arrival time has elapsed. How close can I get?
Noting how many more steps yet to complete a recipe before your spouse returns. How far can I get?
Washing clothes and putting them back in drawers before it’s been a week since you first took them out. How anal retentive can I get?

Perhaps we all have such markers, paces we put ourselves through – though we might never know because not many would admit them. For fear of – sounding crazy? Mental? OCD?

I actually asked my therapist once if I was OCD. She said there are such things as OCD tendencies or even an OCD personality without an actual OCD diagnosis. One way to tell, she said, if whether such routines disrupt our way of life. If they stop us from all the other bits of living we could be getting to because they take up too much time – or if we cannot even begin living if we don’t first complete them.

So I may not have full blown OCD, but I have my quirks.

Not being fully free of a dinner party until the platters, teacups, tablecloths are all clean and back in their original homes.
Reading library books in the order they were taken out of the library.
Impelled to leave pieces of projects out, where they will taunt me, until I’ve completed them.

My mind works in weird ways. Segmented. Compartmentalized. Whatever part of it that is responsible for my control freak tendencies has trained me to believe that physical limits lead to overarching control. What a quirky rule of thumb. And I fall for it mind, heart, and fingers.

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Children, Education, parenting

Fly on a Sticky Wicket

A second grader, hands still so small they remind you of the baby they grew out of not so long ago, eager to please, eyes full of wonder and mirth, proud to show her parent some of her schoolwork, excited because the parent is here, in her classroom. It is a special day, out of the ordinary. As she moves to retrieve her journal from its crate, a classmate in the front row sneers under his breath, “What do you think this is? A second open house?”

The parent in this scenario is me. The second grader is my daughter. The classmate in the front row is – rude? A bully? Jealous? The teacher in me found it hard not to reprimand this rude comment. The mother in me found it hard not to put this punk in his place. But because my daughter thankfully didn’t seem to hear it, because it wasn’t my place, and because it wasn’t my charge of children (ie my classroom) – I stepped back to assess the situation.

All teachers know that nearly all off-base comments are based on some insecurity hidden deep within the offending student. In the heat of a disruptive moment in one’s own classroom, it’s hard to remember or appreciate this, but as a parent privy to only this one comment and able to scoot back out the door I’d only just peeked into, it was easy to presuppose why this student may have made such a snarky comment.

As jazzed as my daughter was at my visit, there was a vacuum of other parents who couldn’t be in the room right then. Perhaps this young man was upset that his parent(s) couldn’t be there. Perhaps his parents have jobs that prevent a midday visit. Perhaps he’s angry or sad that his parents would never think to come into his classroom. Perhaps the obvious joy and pride in my daughter’s eyes reflecting in mine is something he can’t bear to see because this is the only time he will.

Perhaps it is unfair for me to make such presuppositions.

After many years of seeing students in action, however, I know that those students who you would least like to embrace are exactly the ones who need it most.

Not an easy task when they make hurtful comments, strike out at those around them, and have no other framework of operating to follow. There is no easy answer. Remember, I didn’t say anything . . .

But while there may be a reason for it, such behavior cannot be condoned. Had my child heard this hurtful comment, her joy would’ve been squashed as well. Her fragile nature, which I’d come into the classroom to build up, would’ve been diminished.

How do we support such children without discouraging others around them?

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Living, Poetry

Jury Duty

Oh, bastion of jurisprudence
pain in my posterior

I should be honored at the chance
to view the inner working of our judicial system,
to enact fair and honest adherence to our laws

But your summons strikes annoyance in my heart,
dread at undoing my schedule
and fitting into yours.

At your beck and call,
subject to your every whim –
I don’t see the justice in that.

lady-liberty-scales-of-justice-h-1000-630x432

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Weekend Write-Off, Writing

What Say You?

Duotrope or Writer’s Market?

When searching for markets for your writing pieces, which of these listings do you prefer?  Is one more user-friendly or  has offered you resources where you’ve found more success?

I have more experience with Writer’s Market, but Duotrope has come highly recommended as well.

Currently, I am searching for markets for literary short fiction/flash fiction.

 

Please share your thoughts/ideas!

Happy Weekend Write-off!

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Children, Humor, parenting

The Changing of the Clothes

In just ten easy steps, you, too, can get your children’s drawers ready for fall and winter!

1.  Save every possible stitch of hand-me-down clothing you can get your hands on, even items your previous child may have loathed or ones they loved so much they near extinction.

2.  Wait until the switch is absolutely essential.  That month or so of sweatshirt mornings/shorts afternoons – way too early.  You must relish those last-minute mornings of fishing the one clean pair of long pants out of a random laundry basket.  Searching out hooded sweatshirts shoved into the sandy bottom of your forlorn beach bag – priceless.

3.  Reassess the situation when your children have shivered onto the bus for six consecutive school days.  Ensure that the sixth day follows a weekend.  See if it wasn’t just an acclimation period.  Grudgingly drag one bin up from the basement and pull from that during this waiting period.  If needed, you may also pull one stretched out kitchen garbage bag into your child’s room.  The clothes in this bag, however, may not be of any use to you as they were the ones that might not fit next season, but were so stinking cute you couldn’t bear to part with them.  Now is the time.

4.  After three days and nights of your children plying you to change out their drawers and your frantic scrambling to find clothes that fit them, but still sending them off looking like three of Fagin’s minions, start pulling your youngest’s summer shirts out of the baskets in her closet.  Make a pile of outgrown clothes to donate, a pile of ones that might not fit next season, but are so stinking cute you can’t bear to part with them, and a pile of those that certainly won’t fit next season but could work under a sweater right now.

5.  Leave these three piles on the floor of her bedroom for a day and a half.  Be sure to yell at your other children for knocking over and mixing up the piles.

6.  Open the one bin you’ve dragged up from the basement and put the shirts from it into the baskets in the closet you just cleared out.

7.  Repeat step 4 1/2, 5, and 6 for pants, sweatshirts, pjs, and bathing suits (the spot of which will now be filled by sweaters).

8.  Shove the rest of the clothes which you do not have room for – but are in perfectly good shape and kids are so messy you could always use an extra pair – into any nook, cranny, or hole you can find in their closet.

9.  Take the one bin you’ve managed to empty and bring it into your oldest’s daughter’s room.  Put her outsized clothes into it, where they will stay for the 2.5 years it will take for your next child to grow into them.

10.  Put all the newly filled bins back into the basement where they would sit collecting cobwebs for three months – except that in two weeks you’ll have to move them all about to get the one on the bottom into which you must place three more items you found lingering at the bottom of the hamper two weeks too late.

from operationwife.com

from operationwife.com

And that’s all there is to a smooth wardrobe transition from one season to another!  Easy Peasy!

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Poetry

Where do hummingbirds go in winter?

A day of nothing,

that’s what I need to jazz me.

To recharge and kick start the engine.

But there’s always the danger of a day of do-nothing

leading to lethargy,

sad, morose thoughts.

Of not enough energy to do anything productive,

but enough guilt to keep away any enjoyment.

 

Where do hummingbirds go in winter?

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Faith, Living

A Magic Number

 

I think I was brainwashed as a child.  Ha ha, weren’t we all?  But I’ve been meditating on the concept of three lately.  For some reason, it’s cycled back through my subconscious – and this song came up.

A man and a woman had a little baby,

yes they did,

they had three in the family –

that’s a magic number.

Those lines cycled around my subconscious on an endless loop growing up.  It was always those lines.

Apparently I didn’t absorb the other math concepts in the song, because instead of 1+1=3, I decided to go for three kids rather than three total family members.

But three always did have a special connotation for me.  As an only child, it was always three of us in my family and what a nice little tight-knit crew we were.  I was assigned the number 3 jersey when I played CYO basketball for several years.  And speaking of spiritual organizations, there is, of course the ultimate – the Holy Trinity.

Revisiting this song in the context of today’s antiseptic if tolerant culture, I was super-surprised that the lyrics alluded to the mystical trinity.  Whoa.

There is a reason comparable concepts cycle through the universe’s subconscious.  There’s that, and the super catchy ditty that gets stuck in one’s head like an ear worm.  But all kidding and brainwashing aside, there is a magic to the way things grab onto us and won’t let go.  My man and I could have had a little baby and stopped, but I wouldn’t see the sparkle in each of their magical little eyes.

A few years ago for Christmas, I chose a card that said peace, joy, and love to accompany a photo of our three girls.  Each of my girls has one of these characteristics at her essence.  There is no measure to that number.

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Writing

Rogue Pitch

I’ve reentered the world of Writer’s Market,

that world where dreams dash against the rocks of phrases like, no unsolicited manuscripts, no unagented material.

A maze where magical words lose their luster amidst the dark shadows of procedure and proximity.

Where you wonder if you’ll ever come out the other side and almost wish you’d never gone in,

wish you’d stayed in that bright, open space where not necessarily certainty, but at least possibility, bloomed in big clouds above your head and in your heart.

Now my writing consists of queries and quandries, of spin and specious matter.

If only I could stay in that imaginary world of my own making

and not try to sell it in the real one.

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