My Mind on KonMari and KonMari on My Mind

I recently learned about Marie Kondo and her method of decluttering. KonMari boils down to the philosophy that every single thing you own should be enriching your life and, if you own something that isn’t enriching your life, it is actively detracting from your life.

Marie Kondo named her method KonMari which I’ve been fitting into every other sentence for weeks now. My husband thought “konmari” was a Japanese word for “get rid of it!” so every day he comes home and asks me what I “konmaried” that day. Now, every time he gets rid of something (for instance: terrible terry-cloth green pants he’s had since he lived in Orchard Park, New York twenty years ago) he yells “KONMARI!” In what he imagines is a Samurai voice when he throws it in the donate pile.

Naturally, I also yell it that way now. It does add a whole element of celebration to getting rid of crap.

And my house stays so clean most of the time now that one of my kids (the laziest one) asked why we even have to clean at all. “I mean, since you bought that book at Costco everything stays clean anyway.”

Of course, I still think floors need to get swept and dishes need to be washed but I was informed that I shouldn’t have had any kids at all if I didn’t want to take care of them. Touche! If 14 years old isn’t the cut off date of doing everything for your child, really, what is?

The Best Weight-Loss Tip of Ever

I have this idea that, because I weighed less ten years ago than I do now, I’m much too fat. No civilization before us has ever had this particular idea but that doesn’t stop me from caring about what people if this particular civilization think if me. (Although YOU should not. You’re much smarter than the rest of us. Yes. You. Right there.)

Since I’m normal and eat more during times of stress, bounty, or celebration, I go through periods of being very perfect in my diet and periods of ‘feck it.” You know how that works……..you have a very challenging child with special needs whom you love more than life but who drives you to tears regularly but whom you also feel the need to defend from the rest of the world so at the end of the day you go off your diet because you’re a good person who deserves some pleasure? Sure you do. And as you all know, this is a ‘feck it’ trial.

Right now I’m in a period of ‘feck it.” but I did ask a friend who was successful in losing a significant amount of weight (don’t know how you guys do it. I’m still pretty certain you’re all some kind of supernatural creatures with inhuman constitutions) for her advice on what I could do to lose weight. Since my tendency is to do great during the first part of the day before all the noise of other humans starts getting under my skin and then drink wine and eat popcorn at the end of the day (those things go together) as a way for rewarding myself for surviving life, my friend suggested I find a non-food way to reward myself at the end of every day.

She recommended a bubble bath.

That seemed like a great idea, so here I sit in the bubble bath I truly deserve WITH my glass of wine beside me. I can juuuuuuust reach it from here. I’d be surprised if I lost any weight from this method, but you know what?

Feck it.

The Importance of Being Thank You

If I ever tell my kids the story of The Princess and the Pea, in my version the princess wouldn’t be a whining, complainy bee-yotch. She would say, “Thank you for your gracious hospitality. I had a lovely stay.”

Unless the Queen was actually pretty rude and unpleasant. Then the princess would say, “Thank you for putting up with my irritating presence. I understand how trying being a good hostess can be, especially for people with such wonderfully inflexible personalities as yours,” because maybe she’s a passive-aggressive princess. I don’t know her life.

A Thing That Happened

I remember a Calvin & Hobbes comic in which Calvin is home sick from school and watching a soap opera. After watching a very smoochy scene Calvin says, “Sometimes I think I learn more when I don’t go to school”. This has always stuck in my head because 1) I am a good rememberer and things are always sticking in my head and 2) Isn’t this the truth? School is a very nice place to learn square roots and how to write a thesis statement, but all the most important lessons of my life were gotten elsewhere.

After beginning The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place this week with my boys, we discovered last night that (spoiler) the children involved are actually feral. Seemed like a neat-o story and this morning I was telling my boys that there really is such a thing as children raised by wolves. As things do with me, the topic got out of hand. I interneted “feral children” and got more than I bargained for. This is actually a lot like the time I was explaining how amazing a human fetus is and I searched for “fetus” in Google images, expecting to find something like the photos in the book The Miracle of Life. Instead I found some of the most horrifying images I’ve ever seen in my life and I can’t believe any human thought, “Hey, I’ll put this on the internet” and I’m so glad I at least had the sense to shield the screen from my son before I entered the search.

So that was bad.

This was not quite as bad, although I did learn that there are two sorts of feral children. One sort was rescued from abandonment and death by some miraculous altruism on the part of an animal group, and the other sort is the kind of child who actually had parents but was so horribly neglected that they were socialized by animals instead of humans.

In one case–a girl essentially raised by neighborhood dogs–the girl actually had parents who were described as “alcoholic and neglectful” in the article.

Now, this strikes me as actually sullying the good name of alcoholics because I am certain that many, many alcoholic parents exist who still care about their children and manage to socialize them and care for their basic needs. I mean, the word “alcoholic” does get thrown about with ease these days, but still: the word can’t possibly be synonymous with “abusive parent” can it? Certainly it happens, but non-alcoholic parents can also be abusive……..and you have to be some special kind of evil to do such a poor job of caring for your child that literal wolves, chimpanzees, dogs, vervet monkeys, goats (?!), gazelles, and even birds make better parents to a goddam human child than you do.

I managed to keep the worst details from my boys so that they still have the childhood notion of Mowgli and all that, but to a certain extent, they now do understand a sorry truth about mankind.

Although the PR for nature in general gets a win, I think. And that is a thing that happened today.

 

Because Princesses Are So Realistic

So I guess Disney has a new princess character coming out.

Her name is Sofia the First, or some such business. Some Hispanic advocacy groups have a problem with this because she isn’t obviously Latina in appearance, even though these same groups acknowledge that Disney has a solid history of culturally inclusive characterizations.

Disney points out that the new princess comes from a totally made up, cartoon place. Zing! I’m thinking they kind of win the argument with that one. Supposedly the character is imagined by her creators to have parents from different cultures: Scandinavian and Latin. They say this type of blended influence (both genetically and culturally) is a realistic representation of much of America (however they phrased it) and this is screamingly obvious to anyone with half a brain and no agenda.

Being of Scandinavian descent myself, with pale skin and very pale blue eyes, I’ve run into a kind of situation since adopting a baby girl of Hispanic descent. For the first time I realized: hey! All the dolls are blonde! All of them! All the dolls of ever, anywhere! (Shout out to Grannie for finding a Cabbage Patch doll that looks a lot more like my daughter. *hart*)

Having instituted a ban on Dora the Explorer, only because she yells everything she says, I quickly realized Dora was a major opportunity for my daughter to see a model of Hispanic background. And now I have to listen to Dora shout her little brown head off every day, which I hate. But the bebe loves it and I think the inclusion of Dora in our lives is important.

As important as it is that my daughter understand all the different ways to look and be a wonderful human being, isn’t the idea of a culturally blended family preferable to a piecemeal society: every Disney princess perfectly categorized into some group or another? Divided and looking out for as much representation as possible in some misguided pursuit of, well, supremacy? I know that’s a loaded word and all, but why else be so gravely concerned about a cartoon princess not being brown enough?

All things considered, I care very little about Disney OR princesses, but this has become a topic I rather care about. You want a post-racial society? Then let cultural blending become the new normal.

Poor Synthetic Humanoid Object, Casualty Kinetics

Guess I’d better sand him off before the bebe accidentally eats any of the paint she scrapes off.

Pens, Paperwork, and Psychotic Breaks

I didn’t have any pictures for this article, so here is the wire telephone I made one time (with a GI Joe for scale).

It’s no secret that a major percentage of adulthood is paperwork. I mean, there’s that final year of high school when it seems very important to many of the adults at the school that your entire class take the ASVAB. And it seems at the time that a significant part of this process is just finding out if you can fill out the header properly. Somehow it takes the first 25 minutes to get your name, the date, your student number, and the name of your high school in the proper order. Because if you get that wrong, they can never trust your answers to the question: “According to graphic 6. A., if cog A is rotated in a clockwise direction, in which direction will cog C rotate?”

I know it’s been, like, some years since then, but I have never forgotten that question. It is a real and unexaggerated example of how elementary that test is. My counselors actually made me take Math Analysis so I could answer THAT question.

Anyhoodle. So I don’t mind paperwork on principle. In fact, I do crossword puzzles for leisure. I don’t mind filling in small boxes in scrupulously legible print. Give me a good pen and I am a happy clam.

Tonight I had a huge stack of forms from my son’s school to fill out so I got my shoebox of good pens and a glass of wine and began.

You know what? I wish I was taking the ASVAB. I remember on that test they asked us to properly differentiate between a wrench and a screwdriver. No joke. But, you see, that is a DEFINITE TASK  with a DEFINITE ANSWER. Nothing is to be implied or inferred. It’s all very literal. That’s why I kicked butt on the ASVAB and the Air Force wouldn’t stop calling me.

That is the last time I was good at answering a question. I’m too literal. Now, for some unimaginable reason I regularly cause major misunderstandings when I have to fill out paperwork. I apparently caused a huge miscommunication when my son’s soccer team application asked for “Your email address”. I gave my son’s ZooBuh! email and not my own. When my husband found that out he looked at me like I’m insane, but he doesn’t even know HOW LONG I stared at that stupid application thinking: Are they asking for my email? That would imply that this is my application. Clearly, this is not my application. This is my son’s application, so when they say “your” they must mean him, right? Why would they assume that all fifth graders have email? But why else would they say “Your”?

Not kidding around, this stuff stresses me out.

Tonight I began filling out page one of, like, a million, by writing my name. Our address. Our home phone number. Easy stuff. Then it asks for “Highest Grade Completed”.

What, like a number? They need a number? What number? A Bachelor’s Degree is high school plus four. Assuming you got your degree in four years. Assuming the year of graduate classes doesn’t count. Honestly, should that be a 16th grade or a 17th grade? And nobody says either of those things, so that can’t be right at all!

I wrote “Bachelor’s Degree” and hoped they didn’t think I was trying to rebel against their sysem of calculation.

Next question: “Mother’s full name.” Okay. It’s a repeat, but okay. “Father’s full name.”All set. “Mother lives in child’s home?” Yes. “Father lives in child’s home?” Yes. “Child lives with (check one) Both parents? Mother only? Father only?”

Seriously?

I check “Both parents.”

“Names of adults child lives with.”

WHAT GAME ARE YOU PEOPLE PLAYING? I  ALREADY TOLD YOU BOTH THOSE THINGS.

But they aren’t kidding with this. Further on they need to know what anesthetic I had when I was in delivery. I want to say it was something like “Demarol” but I’m not totally sure how it’s spelled. I wrote “Demoral” and then I realized that says “de-moral” and I thought, “Well, that doesn’t look good at all,” but I had already written it down and if I scratch it out it will look tacky.

I’m sweating heavily. I don’t want the people judging my kid and thinking his mom is an idiot who can’t spell the names of pharmaceuticals and doesn’t know what 17th grade is.

They give a list of diseases. I’m supposed to write in the dates of the ones he has had. This leads to a long process of asking myself, “wait, how old was his brother that year? I’m pretty sure he was still in diapers. So, no older than two, but he could have been one.” Then they ask me to “describe” the illness.

Hey, these guys  do know they just wrote down all the names of the illnesses, right? When they printed “pneumonia” with a space to put a date next to it, they KNEW WHAT THE WORD “PNEUMONIA” MEANS, RIGHT?!

Describe it? He was coughing. He had a fever. IS THERE THAT MUCH ELSE TO IT?

This was all I could face of paperwork for the night. I can’t possibly imagine what they could ask me next because there is no limit to the personal questions they will ask and no limit to the idiocy they will employ to ask it. If they ask for pregnancy complications do I have to –yet again–explain the faulty position of my placenta? Do they really NEED to know about the placenta? Furthermore, whose placenta even was it? Was it mine? I grew it and it tore away from my uterus and I almost bled to death. But I guess we technically shared the uterus so maybe Placenta Previa applies as a medical condition my child suffered from, but I’m far from sure and I would like to know if anyone else finds these questions easy. THESE ARE HARD QUESTIONS.

Can I go back in time and just take the ASVAB and have people think I’m smart? Because when I bumble around the regular world I feel like I do not belong here. At all.

Just Not Pink

When we had the opportunity to adopt our daughter last year, it was in no way a planned situation. Instead of having months of preparation like parents would normally have, we had ten days. This was barely enough time to get the essentials from IKEA; we certainly couldn’t whip up an actually nursery, decorated thoughtfully, such as I attempted with our boys.

Then we ended up moving to a new house a couple of months ago. For the first time I can give the bebe a proper bedroom.

However, in all the time since I daydreamed of having a daughter to decorate for, I seem to have changed my mind about how to approach decorating for a girl. I don’t understand why a girl baby would want something fundamentally different from a boy baby. I’m not saying there’s no natural difference between men and women; but isn’t a baby a baby? Is a newborn going to appreciate cowboys more than princesses? Why?

Furthermore, many people are beginning to suspect that our generation is doing something wrong with pushing the princess bit on girls. The past few generations have already become increasingly entitled and selfish. Now we have this pink princess trend up the wazoo and some of these little girls are spoiled in the worst sense of the word: ruined. Ruined almost beyond hope of having any normal adult life with real responsibilities, the expectation of having expensive beauty treatments on a regular basis, and no ability to consider the needs of others as equally important as their own desires.

Obviously, not everybody who calls their daughter “princess” and buys her a Cinderella dress for dress up is creating a monster. Not at all! But I still can’t stomach the idea of bathing my daughter in a constant sea of pink until the day she graduates high school.

But I did NOT want the gender-neutral thing going on (usually yellow and green, Winnie the Pooh, jungle animals) in some kind of defiance of anything that could be construed as feminine. Here’s what I started with:

Homemade origami mobile.

 

Origami paper in a kit my boys got for Christmas and weren’t using: free.

Blue yarn remnants from my constantly o’erflowing yarn basket: free.

Branches from the poplar in the backyard: so free. All I had to do was go out there in my nightgown and jump around until I caught the branches I wanted. I’m sure I did not look crazy at all.

Anyway, I extended the look over to the curtain rods:

Here’s how it looks together:

The room is still pretty spare at this point, but there’s time to add more–ideally without going overboard. How much stimulation does a human really need?

I have the beginnings of a rag rug, continuing in the theme of generalized multi-color.

It’s god-awfully ugly, but I’m hoping that will add to the charm.

However, I quickly learned that both quilting and rug-making are not for me. I do not understand how anyone can have the patience for this stuff! There’s a definite possibility that this rug end and the quilt squares I’ve cut out will simply languish in the back of a closet until I throw them out in a few years.

At any rate, I have at least succeeded in not cramming pink ruffles down my daughter’s throat before she even has enough teeth to chew them up first.

 

Thanks For the A-1 Parenting Advice, Slick

It is a truth (kind of) universally acknowledged (okay, only psychology textbooks acknowledge it) that every individual walks around looking at other folks’ lives assuming he, himself, could be managing that life much better.

Aren’t the solutions to other people’s problems so simple?

One of the most obvious arenas for this mindset is the realm of parenting. Most people assume they are good parents. I was at a party one time and this guy’s kid came downstairs and the dude said, “If you do not get back upstairs right now, I will punch you in the face,” and his kid flew back upstairs as though The very Devil was on his trail. And that dad probably thinks he’s a good parent.

And who am I to say he isn’t? Clearly, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve read about eleventy million different parenting books, seen therapists, had innumerable parent/teacher/principal conferences, and I still wake up every goddam day dreading whatever choice I will have to make first.

As most of you know, my oldest child has Asperger’s Syndrome. I have struggled with that diagnosis and what it means, but when you get down to how I’ve dealt with it: I got pregnant at 21, was shotgun wed (how much of a choice I had is, in reality, quite debatable) and then, right out of the gate, had huge challenges. We had broken collarbones from the delivery, we had an unusual tongue situation that rendered my child almost completely unable to drink for his first four months (no, seriously.) and then we had what I only knew were ‘difficulties’ until I heard the words “Asperger’s Syndrome” for the first time in my life, from my son’s first grade teacher.

We thought knowing what was wrong would help us deal with it, but that’s a laugh. Yet we did not give up. The boy is crazy smart. This HAD to be a workable situation. So I read everything I could. I read all the books. I don’t just mean, “yeah, I’ve read all them books” I mean that I must have read every book ever written, in fact, every book in all of reality, in this dimension and others.

As a culmination of my studies, I am here to tell you what appears to be the number one piece parenting advice in existence. Are you ready for it? It’s heavy stuff. See, what you should be doing is…….

Try something different.

Try something different?

Are you f***ing kidding me?

WHAT DO YOU THINK I HAVE BEEN DOING?

Honest to god, that is the worst advice any human could give any other human in any situation. What do you think would happen if you walked into, like, a cancer research lab and told all the scientists, “Hey, ya know, I was thinking……what y’all have been doing just hasn’t fixed anything. Have you ever tried–and I’m just throwing this out here–have you tried doing something different?”

What do you think the scientists have been doing staring into all those microscopes and test-tubes and crap for all these years? Do you think they’re mixing blue with yellow over and over and over again, wailing, “Aw, crap, it’s green again! What are we doing wrong, you guys?!”

One of my son’s therapists (a guy with no children, I noticed) suggested a parenting maneuver that is, for veterans, one of the most elementary, intuitive techniques. It was so not-new territory. But this guy thought he was giving me the Rosetta Stone or something and when I informed him, “that tactic has no effect on my child,” he acted like I was this terrible mom who stubbornly refuses to try. He snarkily responded, “Well, if you don’t want anything to change……”

Yeah, a**hole. I don’t WANT anything to change. THAT’S why I’m here.

I’m just opposed to doing the same thing over and over with no new result. (Please don’t start talking about insanity, anybody. We’ve all heard that cliche.)

So about two years ago, when my son was struggling with fourth grade despite all the medications, behavior modification attempts, teacher seminars, and whatever else benevolent spirits could muster, I was crying to my husband one evening yet again.

Now, of course coming home to the same person crying over the same thing every day must be quite trying. But let’s just be honest and point out that it was me who had the shorter end of the stick. So I think I deserved a little bit more than a usual blank stare day after day followed with one final outburst consisting of him throwing up his hands and yelling, “Why don’t you try something different?”

Then we had one of those moments when both parties knows a gauntlet has been thrown down and now only vigorous back-pedaling can stop an all-out duel. But if you know my husband, you know that he wouldn’t be caught dead back-pedaling. It’s not his nture. He defends to the very death. So after a long pause, I choked out……

Me: Something different?

Him: Yeah. Just…..not something you’ve already tried.

*More of tense pause*

Me: I understand the DEFINITION OF THE WORDS. I USED TO BE A HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH TEACHER BEFORE I GAVE IT UP TO TAKE CARE OF OUR SPECIAL NEEDS CHILD.

Him: You know what I mean.

Me: DO I? DO I? If you mean I should ransack my brain to come up with yet a new program of behavior to try to coax some civility from him, I promise you, I’m all tapped out.

Him: (knowing there is nothing that would possibly be a smart thing to say)……

Me: You….You didn’t have some idea, did you?

Him: ……

Me: You’ve thought of something?

Him: No…….I just mean….

Me: That it’s my job to think of the something different? That’s what you mean, isn’t it?

 

So that went on for a while and did not end well. For the record, he never did come up with any “idea” other than the “idea” of “try something different”.

After six years of desperately working with my son to perform reasonably in school, I have realized two major things. 1) Public school is just not the right situation, and 2) Medication reliably does nothing but kill my son’s appetite so badly that I start crying every time I see the poor child without his shirt on.

Since I’m pretty much working solo most days and without a net, here, I made two executive decisions. 1) No more medication, and 2) Homeschool.

Do I have trepidation about these new situations? God, yes. I’d be crazy if I didn’t. However, I AM TRYING. I AM DOING SOMETHING DIFFERENT. Wouldn’t you think somebody–anybody–would have something encouraging to say about it? They could say, “Hey! You’re taking my awesome advice! That’s so great! It’s amazing that you’re trying something different!” They could say, “You’re such a devoted mom to make this sacrifice.” They could say, “It can’t possibly be worse than the last six years.” If they were feeling extremely magnanimous they could say something like, “You’re a good mom. A bad mom wouldn’t bother.”

It seems like the people who ought to typically be saying anything at all encouraging could come up with maybe one benign remark for me, instead of echoes of my own doubts and invalidations of my choices and criticisms of my “complaints”.

But who has? Who has had one loving word for me in any of this difficult path? Where is all my due accolade for taking all that super useful expert advice about trying something different?

Pouring my heart out to the internet is kind of a dead give-away, isn’t it?

 

 

No Good Result

This morning my mother-in-law (and super duper friend. Hey girl! Holla!) posted this picture on my Facebook wall.

See, my mother-in-law KNEW that I would be very concerned with all of this. I’m famous for screwing up sewing jobs. My attempts are horrendous. I’ve been about to work on a cover for a beanbag chair for my daughter and I just knew that I could use all this advice.

In fact, when I showed this ad to my boys–who think sexism is just about the funniest, most absurd thing ever. I guess because its so alien to them?–they had the idea to scientifically test the theory that being beautiful and having a spotless house helps you sew better. They suggested I make one attempt as I normally would and a second attempt following the advice of the ad. We could compare the results. I thought it would be a great science project to do with them. They took all the pictures and helped choose the appropriate wardrobe.

Trial 1:

You see, in this one I have uncombed hair, no make-up, and my husband’s old high school pole-vaulting t-shirt. I thought that I was comfortably attired for a few hours of a tricky sewing project, but I did not realize that the lack of lipstick and “French chalk” (seriously? WTF?) would render my pathetic womanly fingers incapable. I was so deeply worried that my husband would come home early and give me “what for” because of my shameful appearance that I had a hard time concentrating. Even simply cutting out the pattern pieces was a disaster. I ended up with this jumbled, unusable mess.

For trial 2 my boys and I went to the closet to figure out what would be the perfect “clean dress” for the project to be most scientific.

This one is from a roaring 20’s party I went to a couple years ago. The boys deemed it too dour. I tried again.

This is an awesome red velvet dress that I’ve had since I was seventeen. I NEVER get to wear it; it still has the dry-cleaner’s tag on it. But then one of the boys came up with a fantastic idea:

This is my wedding dress. Talk about clean–it’s only been worn once. All of us agreed that if anything was going to get me a “good result”, this certainly should. After about ninety minutes of hot rollers, and wearing about thirteen times as much make-up as I did on my actual wedding day, this was an acceptable result. Because lipstick was specifically mentioned, I just went for it. (You can really see the Tyra Banks influence, here. I popped out my shoulder like she’s always telling the girls to do, and I could NOT look more bored. That’s professional, right?)

But one son pointed out that no jewelry inhibits the full effect. And then the other boy remembered my blue Muppet-wool coat that he thinks is very fancy……..and we ended up with this.

See? Even better. Because it’s not like I can rely on my lifetime of experience and skill to get a good sewing result. You have to pile on the fanciness.

We felt that this outfit struck all the right chords. And so, feeling very good about my looks, I went about the house making sure that beds we made and the dishes were done. I put a pot of marinara sauce on to simmer in anticipation of dinnertime–it wouldn’t do to have my husband coming home to no dinner, would it? Even though the train of the dress is short, I did have to kind of sashay around the house. While sashaying isn’t a very efficient way to travel, I felt even better about my self-image. It could only lead to an even better result.

I will admit that some part of my brain began to distract itself with worry about one of the neighbors popping in and seeing me dressed in a bridal gown, wool coat, and cowboy hat, I brushed those worries off. Anxious fantasies of concerned neighbors calling for a paddy wagon can only distract us from our goal. Ultimately, my bean-bag chair, complete with French seams (I still have no idea what French chalk is) was ready for use.

A good result!

Science has spoken, my friends. Science has spoken.

 

Note: Because the absurdity of this whole exercise is so extreme, I want everyone to know that I don’t go around looking like I do in any of these pictures. I look like a normal person who wears just a little make-up, ponytails, and tank-tops in ninety degree weather.

See? Normal. I swear it.

And also, no matter how much I always want to, my husband and I have an agreement that I will not put pictures of my kids on the internet. Except for Facebook, which, as everyone knows, is veritably devoted to privacy. (Or not.) But I promise you that my kids are very cute.