Author Archives: Jennifer Butler Basile

Living, Technology

Incommunicado

Being unavailable, unreachable, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Tomorrow afternoon marks a week we’ll have been in our new home.  Only three people know our new phone number.  Only two bill collectors have found us.  I’ve been on Facebook once and haven’t logged onto WordPress at all – let alone post!

Today as I walked home from retrieving the girls at their new bus stop, I felt that my necessary reentry to the world was coming.  Inevitable.  I can only use the boxes around me as an excuse for so long.  Though I still do not have anything hanging in my closet because I don’t feel I’ve sufficiently de-furballed it (their special cat friend left me many presents).  I still do not have things packed into the bathroom cabinets because I haven’t disinfected them yet.  I still don’t have routines and patterns and familiar places to put things.

But the world does not care.  The world will not let me milk this life-change for all it is worth like the sleepy, hazy period that is life with a newborn.  Eventually I’ll have to answer the phone.  Eventually the beep of a text message will wake me from my reverie.  Eventually I will while away an entire evening checking for updates, statuses, and pictures of cute kids.

And while I’m dead-tired and sick of putting the kids to bed and starting another round of housecleaning, I haven’t missed checking multiple e-mail accounts and social media accounts and staying in constant contact.  I got a lovely snail mail correspondence from a dear friend.  Two wonderful friends of mine brought a ‘housewarming’ lunch.  And legions of family and friends trooped in to help us set up our new home.

Funny how we seemed to survive before we were attached to technology.

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anxiety, Living, parenting

Next Stop: Transition Town

Ironically, the section of the book I’m reading right now is all about transitions.

To ease the transition of moving for our children, I gathered a thematic collection of books to borrow from the library:

  • Fred Rogers’ Moving (classic – right down to the 80s fashion in the photos!)
  • Mo Willems’ City Dog, Country Frog (we are going from city to country – though I didn’t expect the heartbreaking twist!)
  • Our House by Emma and Paul Rogers (inspired my daughter to suggest leaving a time capsule; guess it translated my idea of legacy and different chapters in life)
  • Moving by Michael Rosen (the cat giving his family the cold shoulder b/c of the move didn’t quite get across the positive vibe I was going for, but I guess it shows that even ambivalence can be won over with food!)

As I sifted through the on-line card catalog, I extended my search to books for me.  I think originally I was looking for books on the logistics of moving, tips and tricks.  Maybe.  Who knows?  I’m all over the road lately.  But in any event, I found two titles that sounded interesting.  The first, Moving On by Sarah Ban Breathnach, caught my eye because I’ve had Simple Abundance on my shelf for years.  I figured the universe might be giving me a nudge if I was seeking books on moving and here was one by the woman who first introduced the idea of a gratitude journal to me.  Though I know her other title to be more of a self-help, for some reason I expected a memoir on the rigors and epiphanies of moving.  There are personal anecdotes, but it’s also about finding one’s true home regardless of physicality; being comfortable with one’s space in the world regardless of where she calls home.  The idea of home and making the space within those four walls enjoyable is tackled, but it’s really more about letting go of excess baggage to make room for that enjoyment.

Ha, ha, ha.  So funny as my days are filled with purging and packing.  I am totally in limbo.  This home no longer looks like my own as the boxes begin to outnumber the intentional home décor.  My new home is still occupied by someone else.  So I’m hanging out somewhere in the ‘twain’.  I can’t do any of those exercises she suggests for finding what works about your home because I don’t know which one to focus on!  I know the chaos that surrounds me right now certainly isn’t working.

So I get about halfway through this book and reach the section on transitions.  A major thrust of it is that we actually make these difficult times even harder for ourselves by refusing to let go, go with the new flow of things, honor the past and appreciate the future.  Who, me?  I hate change.  There are some people who have wondered if I want to move.  Yes, of course.  And another scared, change-hating part of me, says, this is so freakin’ hard.  I lay in bed one night and realized I’d have to leave the blades of grass I’d stenciled onto the walls of our first nursery (affectionately known as the grassy knoll).  So between the stress of actually making the move a reality and the mental and emotional preparation, I probably do come across as a little ambivalent at times.

But not because I’m not looking forward to settling in our great new house and setting up shop, exploring the community, meeting people.  It’s just because I’m apparently really good at setting up roadblocks on the way to transition town.

And so this is where another highly appropriate quote from Moving On comes into play.  Ban Breathnach shares the words of Mary McCarthy, who says,

“There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.”

Ha!  If that does not describe me in nearly every aspect of my life, I don’t know what does.  How often have I relearned something I’d already known?  How often have I ignored what needed to be done though the answer was staring me in the face?  Human frailty, I suppose.  That damn weak free will.  We know what’s best and yet take the easier, more convenient, if insanely repetitive and possibly destructive, path.

I know I need to focus on the amazing truths on my doorstep.  A rich life lived in this beautiful little house with many pleasant memories to pack.  A lovely, airy, hope-filled home waiting for us to fill it with sights and sounds and silliness.  I know I can be my authentic self there.  I know this transition will make me stronger and truer.  It’s just a hell of a lot easier to feel it when you’re at the other end of the journey.

 

In a somewhat related vein, the other book I chose to read is a memoir: On Moving: A Writer’s Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again by Louise DeSalvo.  I have yet to read it.  I’ll let you know what epiphanies that unveils ☺

What books have helped you and your children make a successful transition when moving?

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Literacy, Writing

Blank

Words haunt me in my dreams, in my waking hours

They carve themselves in my grey matter

They pull my hands in loops and lines

The click of keys, the satisfying clunk of return

Bits and pieces of phrases and lyrics

Familiar yet fleeting

Disparate yet part of my collective consciousness

Inspiring love, eliciting hate

Droughts or a copious spate

A blank screen, a taunting cursor

Time to sit, reflect, create

A swirling maelstrom in my brain

I cannot settle on a name

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motherhood, parenting

Unfair Labor Practices

I’d like my fifteen-minute break now, the first of two, of course.

Then I’d like to take my lunch break where I will leave the confines of the workplace for a change of scenery.

I’d like to punch out when my eight-hour shift has ended, after tidying my workspace and locking the door on it until morning.

I’d like to collect my paycheck and cash it at the bank, cold, hard, currency in my grimy little hand.

But I don’t get breaks.  I don’t have free time.  I don’t get off work.

Lately I don’t even get to sleep through the night.

If only I had some vacation credits to cash, but my employer doesn’t offer those either.

These three are the toughest little tyrants I’ve ever worked for.

 

[Bad Mommy Disclaimer: this post is tongue-in-cheek, of course.  Most of it anyway]

 

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anxiety, Living, medication, motherhood, postpartum depression

You Can Call Me Peri?

So I crack open this month’s issue of Family Circle, the latest installment from the gift subscription my mother-in-law gave me for Christmas, and see an article on menopause.  Ok, think it’s safe to skip that one.  But oddly compelled to read all printed matter that comes across my radar regardless of whether it pertains to or interests me, I scan the first page.  In speech bubbles strewn about the page are various questions, worries, and anecdotes from peri- and post-menopausal women.  More than half the bubbles could have been direct quotes from me!  And I am not very peri at all!

The article invites me to “read on to find out how to outwit, outplay and outlast the next chapter in your life.”  Thus begins a decade-by-decade breakdown on how to outwit this personified beast that threatens to overtake all women all over the world.  “In [my] 30s,” I can expect my fertility to decline.  Yes, knew that and no, that does not bother me in the least.  I should become my healthiest self as “what [I] do now impacts how early menopause starts, how intense the symptoms are and how they affect my body.”  Right about now, my dander is starting to get up – and it’s not just the lack of the third comma in the lists of three things that is doing it.  I need to “bust stress” as “mini-meltdowns will be happening.”  I should try tai chi or yoga or a “peaceful play list on [my] iPod” to “help alleviate menopausal related anxiety.”

It’s about now that I realize I’m fucked (and, no, I don’t mean the uncomfortable sex that I can look forward to in my 50s).

Either I’ve been perimenopausal since my prenatal visits for my third bambino or it’s gonna get a whole lot worse.  How does one who seems to be suffering from post-partum post-trauma prepare for a whole lot more of the same?

There is a sidebar by my decade entitled, “Get the #1 Test You Need Now.”  Apparently a baseline hormone panel (“an easy blood, saliva or urine test that determines [my] optimal hormone levels”) will assist my doctor in prescribing hormones “specific to [my] ideal range instead of the range of an average woman” when the time comes.  I actually laughed out loud when I read this, eliciting strange looks from my daughters.  My oldest asked what I was laughing at; how would I even begin to explain?  That, when it comes to Mommy, there is no such thing as ‘optimal hormone levels’?  That if the doctor prescribed me hormones based on the ‘range of an average woman’, the cocktail would be akin to a stiff drink of water?

While discussing “the (formerly) ‘silent passage’ is no longer taboo,” many women are still petrified by the thought of it.  Except maybe for my friend – who has such irregular periods, she was almost wishing for it.  But when I mentioned this to my mother-in-law, joking about it, she responded very seriously, “No, she doesn’t want it.”

So where does that leave me?  No, I don’t have hot flashes.  I haven’t gained mysterious pounds regardless of what I do or eat.  But mood swings, irritability, anxiety – all de rigueur already – and I’m only in my first decade, according to this handy little guide.

I’m starting to view women’s susceptibility to hormones as this insidious little secret that was only hinted at as my mother described my body’s cycles to me as I sat on the bathroom floor over two decades ago.  By no means was my mother light on the details; I understood my body’s workings in what, to a twelve year-old, was a revoltingly clear manner.  But I didn’t know how pervasive those pesky little hormones were.

Yes, I knew there’d be a few days of PMS.  Yes, I knew I’d be overly emotional during pregnancy.  Yes, I knew there’d be a few days of baby blues.  Then I noticed extra irritability that seemed to coincide with ovulation.  Then those damn hormones ganged up on me with crazy, heart-wrenching situations in my life to send me into a swirling storm of anxiety and depression.  Thankfully, my head broke water a while ago, but only with medication and therapy.  And I still struggle.

I’d like to say that an awareness helps me prepare for and deal with the effect hormones have on my life – just as the article touts the “18 Things Every Woman Should Know About Menopause.”  To a certain point, it does.  But when you know the beast is coming no matter what – and you can’t run and hide because life won’t allow it – what do you do?  Grin and bear it?  Pray to the gods that in your next life you come back with a penis?  I love yoga, but unless I take my strap and choke the hell out of the beast, it’s not gonna make it go away.  Maybe I can drown it out with the soothing sounds of my peaceful play list while I try to achieve optimal hormone levels.  Maybe instead of ‘silent passage’, it should be ‘silent scream’.

UPDATE May 2014: I spoke too soon on the hot flashes!  My past three menstrual cycles have been ushered in by a week of night sweats.  Good, clammy times!

 

 

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Literacy, Living, parenting, Poetry

Lessons Learned from Shel Silverstein

I am a late convert to the school of Shel Silverstein.  While my peers cut their literary teeth on his silly and sentimental poems, I had never read them.  My mother hit all the other required lending from the library – Dr. Seuss, Sesame Street, Richard Scarry – but I had never cracked the spine of Where the Sidewalk Ends.

Until my first grader came home singing its praises.  Her teacher had read it aloud to her class and she was hooked.  A week or so later when we signed her up for the summer reading program at our local library, she went straight to that book as the first she’d ever check out with her own library card.  Her nose stayed in that book like a bloodhound to a trail – except when she’d call me over to read a particularly silly poem or look at a contorted pen and ink drawing that she found equally funny.  And from there, she guffawed through Runny Babbit, onto A Light in the Attic, and Falling Up.

It blows my mind to be here at the exact moment when my child becomes an obsessive, voracious reader.  I know I’m one, but I can’t even say that I remember exactly when it happened (though it was most likely on my mother’s lap at bedtime).  Where the Sidewalk Ends is her gateway drug.

Harry Potter hit at the outset of my teaching career.  Then and many times since, I’ve heard people disparage its literary quality (which I don’t necessarily agree with), but applaud its ability to get kids hooked on reading.  I am not drawing parallels that bring Mr. Silverstein’s work into question, but having never been privy to the mania surrounding his work myself as a kid, I can’t say I understand it.  But, hey, it has lit that part of my child’s brain that makes her interested in an author, a genre, amassing a body of knowledge – it’s literary gold as far as I’m concerned.

And tonight, I mined for gold even further when I held up two books for she and her sister to choose from for bedtime reading, one of which was The Giving Tree, knowing full well which one they would choose (her sister is also becoming enamored with the idea of Shel Silverstein just by hearing big sis talk about it all the time).  The Giving Tree is actually the only Silverstein book I’m familiar with, having received it as a gift for the girls (no doubt by one of my contemporaries who has fond childhood memories of biting into it) when they were smaller.  I remember reading it in a hormone-induced haze and choking through my words at the end of it.  Man, it got me.

But the simplicity of it got me even more tonight.  And the message that it has for all readers – young and old alike.

I was reading it with a different eye, tuned into the words in light of the poetry my daughter has been reading.  Spread across multiple pages, the beginning is actually an extended stanza.  I could see the line breaks and hear the cadence across the creases.  But then the boy grows older.  And things get more complex.  There is an up-tick in language.  A problem.  Discussion.  Back and forth.  A one-sided decision.  And the tone of the story remains at this elevated level until the boy returns as an old man, weary of the world and its ways, and ready to embrace what he already knew as a young person.

So, tonight, as a thirty-three and seven-eighths year-old woman, I learned a lesson from reading Shel Silverstein; one that I couldn’t possibly have learned had I encountered him for the first time in first grade.  By keeping things simple – our language, our needs, our desires, our interactions with others – life is more enjoyable for everyone.  It is only when we want more, we expect more, we demand more, that things gets muddled and more difficult, especially when we look for those things in inappropriate places.  Being totally appreciative of what we have and honoring those who help us get it is a place to start.  And perhaps we wouldn’t be so very tired at the end of it all if we remembered these things.

Who would’ve thought that I would’ve learned such a profound lesson by reading a bedtime story to my children?  Certainly not I.  So a big shout out to Shel Silverstein tonight, wherever you are – for opening my daughter’s eyes to the wonders of reading and giving me new eyes to see.

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Identity, Living, motherhood

The Alpha and the Omega

There are moments when I catch glimpses of the mother I used to be.  The one I was when I had one baby.  The one I was when I was more frequently in a good mood or less stressed out.  The goofy one who sang silly made-up songs.  The one who danced with a baby on her hip till her legs gave out.  The one who wasn’t so beat down she just tried to get through her day.  The one who could spend time with her children rather than refereeing them.

I see her in the smiles of my children.  The looks of surprise.  The glances at each other and back at me before cracking up.  The silly giggles that roll from their bellies and out through their lips.

I see myself in the mirror and I see a girl child who somehow ended up in charge of three of her own.  A girl who still sees herself as growing and learning.  A girl who still wonders at the dynamics of her own mother/daughter relationship as she builds ones up with her three.

Will they see me for who I am?  A person, who in motherhood and life, often makes it up as she goes along.  Someone who loves them fiercely, but wonders how she loses herself from time to time.  And who opens her eyes from time to time to see the true incarnation of who she’s supposed to be – to them and herself.

Yes, the image will change.  The lines will deepen, the colors fade.  But it should only be a deepening, not a swallowing, a sinking.  The original image is in there somewhere.  A fire in the eye, a shape, a sparkle of laughter.

How do I flow gracefully into the deep while allowing the light bubbles of my past to filter through?  How do I get from the beginning to the end and honor both all the way through?  How do I reconcile the woman and mother I’ve always wanted to be with the being I’ve become?

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anxiety, Living, motherhood, parenting, postpartum depression

This House is My Baby

Three years ago, I was in the midst of the maelstrom known as kitchen renovation while designing my own dream space in utero.  In a house too small for three children and no money to move, we decided to do what we could about the logistics of our life.

We messed them up even more.

We ripped out the kitchen, thinking a more streamlined area would ease prepping and feeding three little mouths.  Streamlined is not a word to describe a kitchen reno or raising three children.

Demo started one month and one week before my due date.  Anal retentive to begin with and unknowingly suffering from a fledging case of postpartum depression, my list-making, obsessive planning, and futile attempts at control began.  I created calendars scheduling every detail.  I pushed my father-in-law to speed things up.  I perpetually pissed off our floor installer for constant e-mail updates.

I wanted that kitchen done before the baby came.  I needed running water to clean bottles and babies.  I needed the nasty mastic under the formerly linoleum floor covered up so any residual dust wouldn’t assault my newborn’s fragile airways.  I needed life in some kind of stasis before all hell broke loose.

How a finished kitchen would have prepared me for what happened in the delivery room and beyond is beyond me.  But I felt that some measure of control over my physical world would provide me some sense of control over everything else.  Well, I may not have known that then, but I can certainly see it now – especially since I’m trying to do it again.

Nearly three years to the day after the first pull of a crowbar in our kitchen, we’ve contracted a purchase and sales agreement on a new house.  Gorgeous kitchen aside, we’ve reached the limits of this house.  With one daughter just starting kindergarten and another young enough to make the switch to a new school hopefully not too traumatic, it seems like the perfect time.  Well, sort of.

With interest rates historically low, causing a backlog in bank closings, and a seller who has a cat with special needs (don’t ask), getting into this new house in time for the first day of school is becoming increasingly difficult.  And I can feel the anxiety ratcheting up as a result.  I can feel that nag mechanism gearing up for e-mail assaults on my realtor, unrealistic expectations from our loan officer, and an overall sense of unrest at the universe’s apparent disregard for my wishes.

Every fiber of my being is screaming – make it happen!  It must happen!  You have to get these kids in that house so they can find a home for their lunch boxes and a place to lay our their clothes for the first day of school, make a dry run to the bus stop, and get a feel for that new place as home before they have to figure out a new school, too.  It’s mommy guilt and good planning and type-A personality all rolled into one.  It’s also unrealistic.  Well, sort of.

If I felt any different, I wouldn’t be myself.  I just don’t roll that way.  And it’s coming from a desire to have the best for my children.

It also feels incredibly familiar.

Since 2004, I’ve been pregnant in two and a half year cycles.  When my youngest passed two years and seven months, I realized that was the oldest I’d ever had a child without expecting the next.  And I held my breath for the next three months.  No child number four, but we still embarked on a tumultuous endeavor: this whole house-buying thing.

This house has become my baby.

Apparently I cannot live through a two and half-year cycle without giving myself something to obsess about until it comes to fruition.  But while I see the parallels between my behavior now and then, at least there’s no such thing as post-house-buying depression – not until the first mortgage payment is due anyway.

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Marriage, motherhood, parenting

No Bubble to Burst

When I explain to my children the evolution that is pregnancy, I do not mention the stork.  I do not talk about babies left in rush baskets on doorsteps.  I explain that they grew inside their mother.  I explain the physiological changes and processes.  But I do it in terms they will understand, which means that the baby grows in a bubble inside the mother’s belly until it’s ready to come out (and yes, we discuss where the baby comes out).

For whatever reason (a recent birthday, a friend’s newborn, another friend’s impending labor), we’ve been discussing these physical wonders a lot lately.  And through the inspiration of an upcoming wedding anniversary, these wonders are helping me reframe the importance of the marriage relationship.

Floating in fluid to cushion it from blows from the outside world and allow the various parts of the body to grow evenly, without restraint; to exercise and strengthen the lungs so they can breathe on their own when out in the world – this is why the fetus is suspended in that bubble.  The symbiotic bond developed in the womb prepares both mother and child for the rigors to come once they become separate entities.

Is this not unlike marriage?  No, one is not born of the other, but for a marriage to be successful, the couple must build that bubble around themselves.  In the world they build for themselves, the couple builds protection from anything the world might throw at them, whatever challenges, insults, hurts it has.  In the shelter of their love, the couple grows as one and as the best distinct individual each can be.  In the safety of their partnership, the couple learns to develop their voice – speaking as a team and to each other about what matters most.  In this bubble, the two halves of this couple develop and strengthen the best parts of themselves and each other so that when they step out into the world, together or alone, they still feel the strength of that foundation.

And floating in that bubble is something only they can experience.  There are some things sacred to just the two people inside; they are meant for no one else.  Nor should they allow anyone to even try to permeate the outside layers.  Just as in parenting, the couple is a united front.  No outside force – or person – should pit them against each other.  And if it’s done right, no one even has the chance to.

I’ve birthed three babies.  I’ve grown each of them in their own personal bubble.  But none of them would be here if it weren’t for the special ‘bubble’ that my husband and I built in love eleven years ago – and no one can burst that.

 

 

 

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