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Last week was an unending whirl of activity - some fun and some stressful. I had four evenings in a row of fun activities and social gatherings and a three day week of work that included some not so fun situations to handle (I'm a peace lover and the idea of "confronting" anyone is possibly worse than the idea of sitting down to eat a steak but sometimes you just have to eat steak. With friends, of course). I woke up Saturday wondering where I had been all week, feeling like absolutely bushed. I spent much of the day on the couch. It was TGIC (Thank God it's cartoon day)!
Saturday is cartoon day in our house, which means that there are very, very few limits on how much television the kids can watch. If Asher knows that the next day is cartoon day, he has been known to get up at 4 to start watching cartoons, and we put it off until about 6 (but only if he goes BACK TO BED). Cartoons then play for hours on end. It's a great time for us parents - time to sleep, get a few things done around the house without interruption, spend time laying on the couch with the kids, have a cup of coffee together.
Unfortunately, television has a backlash effect on my kids. While they are so eerily sedate while watching, once the television goes off, the world seems more than normally difficult to handle. There are more tears, tantrums and less smiles and laughing. My theory is that while watching TV, life is very simple and pleasurable and once it goes off, my kids have to suddenly deal with the real world - pleasurable without a doubt but requiring more effort (like using actual words) and handling of a whole mess of emotions.
When I was little, my parents had a book called, "The Plug in Drug," which was about television. I never read it, but I clearly remember the cover and thinking about what the title meant. Watching my kids, I can see how television has a drug-like effect not only while they are watching but once it's off. They go through withdrawals.
Television has a place in my life and my kids (Asher is a HUGE fan of cartoons). I'm not always so happy about this and with little prodding could fall into a big "Kill Your Television" advocate. I still try to keep the tube off more often than not even as on a day like Saturday (with a day of rain), I took full advantage of cartoon day.
During my first fall in Santa Fe during college, a few friends and I drove up the road to the Santa Fe Ski Basin to check out the changing aspens. We had hit the peak of the leaf change, parked the car and walked into a grove of yellow aspen trees. Such a place is unbelievable - surrounded by leaves on the trees and spread all over the forest floor, that seem illuminated from within by a yellow light and that make a gentle, rustling noise in the wind as the leaves touch each other. Holding up all the yellowness are bright, white tree trunks, slashed with lines of black. Breathtaking.
Colorado is also home to aspen groves, which grow in a kind of family unit with many trees sharing a single root system. The last two years, I have been able to drive and see aspens at their peak again. A few weekends ago, on Michael and my trip up to Tabernash, we took a hike with friends and ended up in a few aspen groves. Walking off the trail, I walked into the middle of a grove and let the yellow light, the leaf rustle fall all around me. I breathed deeply.
Michael looked at me and asked, "Are you having a moment?"
"Yes," I answered. Indeed I was.
There was a time some year and a half ago where I felt like trees - among other things - were God's message of strength to me, messages to keep going and to continue hoping. What a joy to have messages of beauty now in these trees I love.
The day after I had Asher, hormones arush and crazy, I realized the profound love of a mother and wept for, as my postpartum mind put it, "all the babies without mommies." I thought of orphans all over the world who were born into a world without a mother's love, without a mother's touch, without a mother's voice (do they feel so lost, I wondered, not hearing the voice they "knew" in the womb?). My head was in a rather pitiful place.
To this day, stories of adoptions as well as a baby passing away can easily make me cry. Yesterday, for instance, I cried at church when the pastor talked about visiting his adopted daughters grave (she passed away at 6 weeks due to trisomy 13), cried while reading a story in Wondertime about an adolescent, blind girl adopted from China and cried - oh, yes, still more - while reading "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle" and the loss of Edgar's par
ents' baby (note that we had two days of overcast skies and rain in Colorado, highly unusual, and apparently not so good for my sense of happiness).
It is no surprise then, that on the happy occasion of our nephew's official adoption by his step dad that on entering the judges chambers and seeing a bookcase full of families adopting children from around the world that I teared up, and I teared up as the judge signed the final form making our nephew's adoption final. Such joy in seeing children happily united with a family - with a mommy and/or daddy. Such joy in seeing our nephew's dad officially recognized as his dad.
Explaining why we were going to see Jaden on the day of his adoption to Asher was interesting. I really didn't want to get into the biology of babies - yet how to explain that Jaden's stepdad was "becoming" his dad! When I told Asher something to this effect, he replied, "But Tio is already his dad." Wise words indeed. Sensing the joy of the moment, after Jaden received a certificate from the judge and an uncirculated quarter, Asher turned to Jaden with a big smile and hugged him. How did he know?
I woke up this morning with a small depression hangover from Sunday. The sun was just coming up - thank God! - as I drove to work, and I tried to work on being thankful for what I do have. Apparantly, practicing thankfulness can increase our happiness by something like 25% (whatever that means!). I looked in my rear view mirror and saw the blond heads of my two kids, and I felt thankful for them, for their place in my lives and for the unending joy I find in their lives. There is something unendingly mysterious - in the emotions and the journey - of parenthood.
Last week was an unending whirl of activity - some fun and some stressful. I had four evenings in a row of fun activities and social gatherings and a three day week of work that included some not so fun situations to handle (I'm a peace lover and the idea of "confronting" anyone is possibly worse than the idea of sitting down to eat a steak but sometimes you just have to eat steak. With friends, of course). I woke up Saturday wondering where I had been all week, feeling like absolutely bushed. I spent much of the day on the couch. It was TGIC (Thank God it's cartoon day)!
