“Did they know you wanted to play with them?” I asked.

“Yes! I told them I wanted to play together.”

“And what did they say?”

“Nothing…they ignored me the whole time…even after they saw
me leave and start crying.”

Needless to say, our hearts sank when we heard this story,
and doubly so because Fred really wears his heart on his sleeve. This is a child
who, at 5, stayed up late at night to tailor each holiday card to his
classmates, writing different messages and choosing a different color ink
depending on what he knew to be the child’s favorite color. Just the other day, he
found out through Jack the name of the kid who had stolen his Pokemon cards recently. When I asked if he’d
confronted the culprit, Fred’s response was, “I don’t know yet if Jack was
supposed to know. So I don’t want to do anything until I find out, because I
don’t want to get Jack in trouble.”

Max and I know this is the stuff of children’s lives, and
that at different points along the way most children will play both victim and
victimizer until they learn to be more self-aware, compassionate and assertive. For all
the times I have been the dedicated friend, I shamefully admit that I, too, had
played the part of the cold rejecting friend.

I had not developed good friendship skills until – yes – my 30s.
It took me three decades to learn how to be a friend, how to balance my own
needs with the needs of others, how to handle the more intense and honest
feelings that naturally arise when intimacy is reached, how to brush off the older, accummulated feelings of rejection that stayed a part of me even into adulthood.

I am grateful that my dearest friendships have survived
those trials. Getting smarter and happier translated into having similar-minded people in my own life. By the time Fred came along, I could present a better model of a friend to him. Max and I have an open door policy when it comes to Fred’s friends, and we rank socializing right up there with studying hard in school.

But the pleasant times of friendships are the easy part; can
we do as well teaching Fred how to navigate his relationships when he is
confronted with rejection and conflict, especially when the idea of our baby being
hurt threatens to blur all rational thinking? I had to consciously hold myself
back from coming down hard on Fred’s friends when we were discussing this at
the dinner table. It was so easy for me to blame the parents, too tempting to tell Fred to find other friends who could better appreciate
him. “Well, why don’t you tell them how you feel?”, I did finally manage to say, choosing the high road over the emotional and over-protective one and, perhaps, the more painful ones that I’ve already walked in the past.

Fred listened to us attentively while alternating feelings
of hurt and indignation. Yes, the kids were mean. Yeah, Jack might be “smart at
math but he’s not smart at human nature!” And yes, Fred certainly has many
other friends besides these two.

“But,” he said, “I haven’t given up.”

Of course. You don’t give up when you love
your friends…nor should I, on these children who are just trying to figure relationships out for the first time. Maybe this little guy doesn’t need too much coaching from us after all.

Have you already had to deal with your children’s friendship troubles? Any advice? How have you grown as a friend?

I am a bit of a hermit blogger, so I am always flattered when someone invites me over to her blog. Today, I am guest posting at the lovely Jessica’s Mommyhood NEXT RIGHT while she is tending to her beautiful little girl and brand new baby. While you’re over there, please hang out a bit and check out her heartfelt and honest writings about motherhood.

The story is involved and I’ll keep it short: the accident was caused by the teacher; I casually brought the accident to the teacher’s attention in a private conversation and in a “no biggie but FYI” kind of way; the teacher became belligerent and defensive, denying the whole incident; the accident reflected larger classroom management
incompetence; we believed in our son; we spoke up; our complaint was not the
first.

Speaking to the head of the program was one of the
most empowering things I have done as a parent. We were fortunate in that we
were listened to and fully supported. When we first spoke with the director, we
were immediately offered the choice to switch Fred into another class. Fred is
very adaptable, and took the changes in the coming few weeks in stride.
However, he was curious: “Why am I switching teachers?” “Where do I go
tomorrow?” “Where did Ms. ___ go? Is she coming back?”

I somehow managed to evade his questions by
responding vaguely, something I could get away with perhaps because the issue
involved someone he had not been that happy with anyway. I was vague because,
regardless of his or our feelings toward the teacher, I believed that I should
not reveal the negative side of the important adults in his life.

But ultimately it would not be up to me. During a
car ride with Jet’s best friend Jack and his mother, I overheard the two boys
talking about the “incident.” Jack’s mother asked me what was going on, and I
told her the whole story. I’d lowered my voice when I told her how the teacher
vehemently denied everything, and that is when Fred’s 7 year-old voice pierced through
our whispering like a bomb: “She is a BIG FAT LIAR! She did it and EVERYONE
knows it! EVERYONE heard me crying! She is a STUPID LIAR!” My throat tightened
and we stopped talking. Initially it was my dismay that he had heard me, as well
as a knee-jerk reaction to hearing him speak disrespectfully of a teacher. But
soon I realized I was reacting to something else. While I had never doubted
Fred’s version of the story, his raw fury simply made the truth all that much
clearer to me.

“Well, she is not there anymore,” was all I decided to
say, to let him know that he had been heard, that he had been vindicated.

Throughout this incident I’ve tried to walk a fine
line between maintaining respect for this teacher and letting Fred know that we’d
gone to bat for him. But how do you tell a child you’ve beaten the bad guy
while maintaining his illusion that there is no bad guy? Central to this
experience is the lesson that we want to teach Fred about self-respect: no
one – no child and certainly no adult – should lie to you. And if you feel
something wrong has been done, you need to speak up. Good people
will listen. Good people will support you. Things will work out, and if they
don’t, at least you will know that you have done all you could.

At the same time, how real does the world need to be
for a 7 year old? What does it do to his concept of trust if he knows that the
most important adults in his life can behave so badly?

I’m just beginning to look for answers. At the very least, I want Fred to know that for
every bad adult that’s out there, he’s got an army of good ones on his side.

There had been clues along the way.

The prolonged hugging in the morning, before Fred left for school. ”I love you too much,” he said, as he rested his cheek against my belly. I responded in kind and wrapped my arms loosely around him. He repeated himself one more time, “I love you too much,” before he finally let go to head for the car. But midway he stopped and ran back to hug me again. ”Okay, go, go!” I said.  ”Get in the car.”

Yesterday, when he seemed to overreact when his afternoon playmate had to go home for dinner. “WHY does he have to go?” Fred had shouted in tears. “HOW do you know he is eating dinner NOW?” Max and I had already started arguing in the next room by that time. I later realized that Fred was dreading to let go of his friend, afraid to be left alone in the house while his parents were fighting.

Where there is love, there is conflict. Where there is intimacy, there is hurt. We fight because we feel and because we care. As the saying goes, the opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. As long as we engage in conflict, we are showing that we care enough to engage.

I know this. At least, after 10 years of marriage, I know this. I know that lack of sleep or misunderstandings can trigger some of our meltdowns. I know that within 24 hours things will blow over. I know that, despite the hostility we feel at those moments, our love cannot be so easily destroyed.

But at 7, Fred doesn’t know this.

I remember the first time I heard my parents fight. I was in bed, and all I could remember hearing were my father’s shouting and my mother’s muffled crying. At the crack of dawn, I woke up to study my mother’s face and body, making sure she was still breathing and that she would soon wake up. I had believed, then, that you could die from someone’s yelling.

I was 7, the same age Fred is now.

The night after, while Fred and I were reading at bedtime, we came across the word “courage” in his story book. I asked Fred if he knew what the word meant. He asked, “Is that like me not crying last night?”

I realized we had not talked about the fight. I told him to feel okay about telling Mommy and Daddy how our fights make him feel. I told him that sometimes as adults we forget; we are so emotional and we forget how our anger impacts our children. Fred, who had been stoic this whole time, suddenly started blinking back tears until they overpowered him. I realized, then, how much he has grown, how much of a complete person he has become, and how vigilant we have to be now in his presence.

Long before I became a mother I had a goal to spare my future children the stress of a war zone at home.

A number of things have defined the person I became, but none more than the experience of witnessing and living with my parents’ fighting. The feelings of powerlessness had led to depression, the fears to anxiety, the anger to a sometimes overly strong need for independence from any man. But how easy it has become to prioritize getting all our emotions out over making a serious effort to consider the impact on our children. More than once I found myself saying something to Fred that echoed too painfully what my mother used to say to me, something that used to give me zero comfort: “Your father is not angry at you; he is angry at me. This has nothing to do with you.”

A fight between Mommy and Daddy is the cracking fault line in a child’s world. Our fighting has everything to do with them.

After a day of not speaking, I finally reached out to Max when I saw the notes in Fred’s school folder. Fred had been acting out that day. He did not listen to his teachers. He was angry. They made him write a letter of apology to be signed by us. Without explanation, we both knew the cause of his behavior and what we needed to do to restore normalcy to Fred’s – and our - life. Like a powerful glue, it was our child that put us back together again. Our children have everything to do with us.

How do you handle your marital conflicts when it comes to your children? Are you able to fight behind closed doors? How do your children react to conflict?

I’ve been struggling with my writing all year. Topics became harder and harder to come up with, and I worried that I was writing without feeling. I would look at some of my posts and grimace at the writing quality. I was going downhill, I thought, and in my mind I decided it would be better to pause than to keep churning out bad material.

Motherhood, marriage, identity and all these other issues I had loved thinking and writing about were still important to me, and yet I found myself coming up dry. Have I moved on, I wondered? When I started this blog almost two years ago, I did so with an inexplicable urge. Life was probably no less busy then than it is now, but I had enough drive to make writing (and blogging) a priority. For the first time in my life I had the courage to let my voice out and so I did week after week, publicly – intimately - writing about things I had not even told my family or close friends. My voice was a volcanic eruption. Then gradually this spring that drive lost its urgency. I felt at peace, even when I was  not writing. Had I healed? Had I gotten so much out of my system that I no longer needed to talk? Words became less of a focus for me this year. For some reason I can’t explain, I even stopped reading this summer. Life was busy – I was a “single” mom for a while with Max in Japan and Fred’s martial arts activities intensifying – and I began living life rather than only thinking about it. And by this I am not saying that writers don’t live – only that I don’t. I’ve tended to write during periods of my life when I needed to heal, and I’ve written much less during times when I felt good.

And then recently I heard from a friend, “I miss your blog.” I read Alexandra’s poignant post about bloggers who disappear (and she’d mentioned my blog). The lovely Jessica at Mommyhood: Next Right even e-mailed me to say she’d missed my writing. I was honestly shocked. I had not realized that it might make a difference to someone to read what I have to say. It feels embarrassing to be this self-depracating at my age, but as someone who still has a hard time calling herself a writer without quotation marks, I’d say that my self-esteem as a writer is probably right at the high school level. But why not, right? There are so many writers – both professional and amateur – whose voices I would desperately miss if they were to stop. Whether it’s because they share experiences that make me feel less alone or stories that take me somewhere I could never experience, I am so grateful to be touched by them. And like finding a good hairdresser, I make sure I hold on to those writers that really make an impact on me. I don’t mean to be presumptious enough to say that I play that big of a role in a reader’s life, but I need to remind myself that part of the reason I like to write or blog is to make an impact; I am not only doing it for self-healing.

So I’m trying to ease back again. I will likely continue to struggle with time – time to write, time to read and comment on blogs, and I doubt that my writer’s block has completely lifted. But I miss the sharing and the interacting, and I miss the process of reflecting on an experience. Hopefully this time I will find a new voice – a voice that stays present even in the absence of healing, a voice that reflects the growth I’ve accomplished in the last couple of years. I hope that you can still be there for me.

And then I saw an article on my Twitter feed about the “Lawn Mower Parent” – a parent who attemps to “mow down any obstacle in their children’s path.” (courtesy of Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, “Spare the Spanking, Spoil the Report Card?,” The Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2010). This time the term struck a nerve.

In fact, I remember beginning my parenting journey with this goal (one of many): to spare my son the trauma,  the unpleasantness, the hurts, etc. that I had gone through as a child. Don’t we all have that as a parenting goal? What parent says, “I want my child to get bullied. I want my child to get his feelings hurt. I hope my child has an uphill battle to fight in school.” ? Our greatest joy is seeing our children happy.

I’m sometimes amazed at how vastly different Fred’s childhood is from mine. Due to particular circumstances in my family then, I had lived in alot of fear, and tension was the norm rather than the exception. Everything except academics had felt like an uphill struggle. Very little had felt smooth back then, and my parents were too busy or did not  know enough to help. So I stumbled along myself. I figured out how to get into one of the top high schools in our state. I wrestled with friendships and relationships. I figured out my own career path, found a good man to marry, became a mother. I’ve struggled with alot of mistakes over my life time, wasted years, depression, and self-doubt, but now, at 40+, I am confident in my ability to rely on myself and to take care of others.  

Do I want that for Fred? Would I want him to go through even a third of what I had gone through? No doubt those early struggles on my own helped me develop some of the strengths that I have now. But I see my strengths in a small tub mixed in with alot of anxiety and insecurities that would not have been there had an adult played a bigger role helping me get through those obstacles.

I do get the whole argument about the Lawn Mower Parent. Like all these short-cut parenting labels, they’re meant to generalize and stereotype the most extreme parent. The Lawn Mower Parent is the one who doesn’t want his child to ever not get what he wants. She’s the one who doesn’t ever want her child to cry. While I want to protect my child from trauma (if I possibly can), I do know that kids have to experience frustration, struggle, hurt, fear, injustice, and disappointment in order to develop maturity, confidence and coping skills. And believe me, I have more than once wondered, Is Fred’s life too easy? Is he too happy? Has he not had enough bad things happen to him? And then I see the absurdity in this line of thinking, in the kind of self-questioning that these parenting labels induce.

The truth is, try as I might, life has its own way of throwing potholes in my son’s life path, and I am guessing that much of the time there will be little that I can do to shield him from suffering from them. I want so much for Fred to live a happy and stable life, but already he knows what it’s like to be falsely accused by a teacher and principal, to be cheated by friends, to lose, to doubt his abilities to perform, to fear the anger of people he loves. To think that I have the ability to smooth or clear all of this for him is to overestimate my power as a human being.

Screw all the parenting labels. I’m going to love my son the only way I know how, and be confident that he is going to turn out a good – and happy - person.

I’m back, after a longish but unintended hiatus.

I’ve missed writing and connecting with all of you. Unfortunately, I just had nothing to write about. Or I thought I had nothing worthy to write about, nothing that would make your trek over here worthwhile.

My last two posts were about the Japan earthquake. I wrote them because I felt I needed to. But I wasn’t happy with the posts because I couldn’t translate my emotions to words. How is it that I could write about something so clearly devastating to me (I was nauseated for several days) without feeling? I had put up a wall, a dam, between my writing and my feelings. It was at that point that I decided to stay quiet behind my writer’s block.

But many of you commented on my last post and I even heard from some new visitors. Your words and support meant so much to me, enough to keep me from quitting my blog altogether.

Looking back, I realized that in my absence I was trying to find ways to cope. Reading, hearing and thinking about the earthquake were literally making me sick. Somehow my body responded by one day choosing to live more externally. In other words, I began spending less and less time inside my head. I turned off the t.v. I tried staying away from my computer as much as possible. I began avoiding words. I stopped writing and reading.

Instead, I began doing, something that is sort of out of character for me.

For Fred’s spring break we made a 3-day getaway to a hot springs town. We rented a beautiful cabin near the Appalachian Mountains and enjoyed our own private tub of hot mineral water. Cabin fever and a crazy marital spat aside, I had a wonderful time and returned home with softer muscles and radiant skin (you have to try a hot springs dip!).

I’ve also been spending alot of time outdoors, exercising. 3 miles of walking a day. Push ups, lunges, etc. The intoxication of the sun and the endorphins released from moving my body feed my desire to do more.

I’ve scheduled three fun dates with a good girlfriend of mine (she doesn’t have children and is still enjoying the carefree life) that I don’t see nearly enough of. WHEN was the last time I really went out with a girlfriend, doing girlfriend stuff??

Max, Fred and I have also channeled our anxious energies into doing something creative and productive for Japan. We’ve been folding origami and making origami cards as both symbolic and practical gestures (for fundraising). The idea of doing something so intricate used to give me headaches, but now that I’ve tried it, I realize how soothing and meditative origami can be.

And I’ve felt so good! I am at peace. I am happy. My body has softened. Yes, this small island on the other side of the world – my second home country – is reeling. But I needed to move on. In searching for ways to cope I’ve stumbled upon and incorporated ways to add more peace and joy into my life.

And a week or so ago I really began to feel that I miss…words. Stories and updates from friends, my own reaching out to others.

I admire the many bloggers who can continue to write consistently no matter what enters their daily lives. I am hoping that I can better combine the internal and the external, and am looking forward to filling this space more regularly from now on.

How do you cope when your inner world feels overwhelming? Do you also go through periods of hibernation? If you’re a blogger, how do you maintain your motivation to write and stay public?

K. was in a meeting at work when the quake struck. She dove under the conference table watching wall hangings and bookshelves topple over around her. Crying and clutching the hand of a fellow co-worker, in her mind she really believed that this would be it, and the only thing she could think about was the fact that she was not with her 6 year-old daughter and husband. But she did make it out of the quake alive, and the next thing she did, as soon as she was allowed to go out, was to get to her daughter at school. “I NEEDED to have her in my arms,” she wrote. Wanting to fly to her daughter, she was forced instead to drive along the split open roads at snail pace.

Our other friend S. was working in Tokyo when the quake hit, and even on Japan’s rapid transit system he was a good 2 or so hours away from home. They had stopped all commuter trains that day and night though, so he walked home to get his 2 year-old daughter from her daycare. “I finally got there at 2 in the morning,” he wrote. He had walked 11 hours. (His wife was stranded in Tokyo.) 

Before this incident, they were my peers, friends with whom we have shared office space, beers, DVDs, the same sense of humor, the same rantings about marriage and parenthood. Sharing our stories and experiences was like playing handball; we threw things back and forth and we understood one another because we have each been there in the other’s shoes.

Until now. But I don’t mean that in any negative way. I have simply always imagined heroic acts of courage to be more distant, heroes to be people I read about, not email or have coffee with.

We were the same. Could we be the same, still?

If Max, Fred and I had not left Japan in 2008, we would have been in that earthquake. Despite myself, I have played out the various possible scenarios  in my head. 2:46 p.m. Fred would be about to finish up at school, and I would be, I am guessing, getting ready to pick him up. Max would be either working from home or meeting with a client in Tokyo (50 minutes away by train). Or it could be the other way around; I could be the one in Tokyo. Either way, there is a chance we would all be separated. Could I muster the physical, mental and emotional strength to suppress my own fears in order to protect my child when disaster strikes? Could I walk 11 hours, without food, without drink, for my child?

I want to believe that I can. That we are not all that different, that the heroism I have seen in my friends and in so many people in Japan and around the world is mettle that we have in all of us. Until I am tested, though, I stand in awe of all those who have survived tragedy and who are coping with struggles that we can only try to imagine.

Has tragedy ever hit close to home for you or have you overcome tragedy yourself? Do you ever think “what if”?

The irony is, well, ironic, seeing how his 7th birthday falls on an even more devastating day. I pay attention to odd coincidences and I don’t know if I am stretching things here, but the earthquake in Japan struck 9 minutes to the day that Fred was born.

News images of the earthquake in Japan fill our t.v. screen and my Facebook page is flooded by personal accounts of friends in Japan who’ve either walked up to 4 hours to get home (due to stoppage of the commuter trains) and/or who’ve hid under tables watching walls and shelves collapse around them. My 75 year-old mother-in-law was home alone when the quake hit and my 13 year-old stepson never made it home the night of the quake. 

But, everyone that we know, as far as we know, is alive and safe.

I am reminded of the helplessness I felt when 9-11 took place. I was in Japan at the time, and now, like then, I feel far and somehow out of reach of being able to really share this sense of powerlessness and heartache that I still cannot fully articulate.

When friends ask, “So how was it?” I give two pat answers: I ate too much and it was glorious to be away from my computer. Being on a ship where internet access cost in the neighborhood of $1 per minute, I stayed away easily. What surprised me is that I realized I did not miss the technology. I loved having an excuse not to crouch in front of a computer. I loved that my cell phone read “No service.” I used to get extremely antsy if I couldn’t get my fingers on a keyboard, but this time I couldn’t get enough of feeling disconnected from society. 

Since I’ve been back I’ve been having a recurring dream: each time I was in a bedroom within an enormous and crowded space. I couldn’t identify where I was, but it felt like a combination airport-cruise ship-shopping mall. In my dreams I would be going about my personal business while crowds of people were streaming in and out. Does this signal a blurring of lines between my private self and the public?

When I think about my waking life, I realize how much of it I live sitting in my rather dark, ground-floor home office. I usually log on at a quarter to 8 in the morning, and try to get work out of the way first. If I’m done early, I would then go on to do a number of other things while never changing position let alone leaving my desk: check our finances; pay bills; arrange for household repairs and any other problems/issues; make any necessary appointments (dental, accounting, etc.); check in to my on-line writing class; shop; read the news; read blogs; check Facebook and comment on Facebook; research potential business ideas, relevant parenting/educational/health topics, recipes, vacations, retirement plans; read and respond to emails; etc. The reasons I would lift my butt off my chair are limited: to get something to eat; to shower; to use the toilet; to pick Fred up from school. When Max says, “Hey, you want to go to the post office with me?” I typically leap at the chance.

But this is also a confession I feel sheepish about making, because not only does technology mean work (which seems to carry an inherent right to gripe), it also means relationships. I now do a significant portion of my socializing on line through Facebook, blogs, and email. Does my serious discomfort of sitting in one position 9 hours a day and staring at a rectangular screen mean that I don’t want to be with my friends? Over the last few months I have been utterly slow about responding to emails or keeping up with blogs. “I’m so sorry for responding so late…” has become my new salutation. I hate it, but I don’t know how to explain to friends that my worsening communication is not personal.

Our local Border’s is having a store closing sale. That leaves our town with one last bookstore. I’m  sure I had my hand in contributing to the bankruptcy of Border’s, as time and again I would compare prices and choose to purchase my books through Amazon. And I never thought I’d say this, but I think I actually wouldn’t mind walking to a mailbox somewhere and depositing my bills there. I think there are trees along the way I could look at. And letters! Remember those days when you actually peeked out the window to see when the mailman was coming to bring a letter from a far-away friend? Credit card applications and local coupons. That’s all the postal worker brings anymore. And maybe one day s/he will be gone too.