Humans of Motherhood

In honor of Mother's Day month, we wanted to do something special to acknowledge the collective & individual efforts of mothers around the world to raise good people. Given that we are both huge Humans of New York fans (see here and here), we could think of no better tribute than to take a page from that project--except wordier because we're writers--and present some Humans of Motherhood (HOM).

Because we are. Humans and human. Sometimes we forget to give ourselves--or others--that margin. There really should be a secret handshake, a wink and a fist bump that says "hey, I think you're a great parent, despite your utter conviction some days to the contrary. Despite whatever rotten mistakes your kids make along the way. Despite the shambles of the day around your ankles. Things are going to work out. We're all in this together." (This, by the way, is taken directly from a conversation with Sarah last week.)

Here's to the circle-the-wagons, we're-all-in-this-together club of mothers around the world.

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I first met Khuld Alsayyad in junior high in Logan, Utah. Her family moved there for a few years from Iraq while her father earned his master's degree in Engineering from Utah State University. She moved away and I never heard from her again until the magic of Facebook brought us together again early this year and we've resumed our friendship. Trained as an engineer, Khuld now works as a Field Coordinator for the United Nations World Food Programme in Iraq, where she lives with her family. We were chatting yesterday and I couldn't resist asking her for permission to introduce her to you in our Humans of Motherhood series. 

Tell us about your kids. You have two girls, right?

Masar is 10--she's bright and creative. She is the smile of the house; she is our butterfly. She likes building things, doing things from nothing, from carton boxes. Kade is my older girl. She's 18 and is an angel. She's a smart, quiet person who loves music and speaks English fluently. She's fond of Korean culture--Kpop, movies episodes. I installed a satellite dish so she could see South Korean stations. Now she can talk continuously in Korean at home and can text Korean on her mobile, self taught.

What do you love about being a mom? What are your greatest challenges?

I feel so blessed--I want nothing from life, only to see them happy. They are good, obedient girls and have tolerated my not easy job where I travelled continuously from one place to another. At first I took them with me and they changed schools and friends each year. I was blessed by this job but I knew I had to sacrifice stability; my children and my man have accepted this fact and stood by me, never complained. My mother and father and siblings helped constantly. When my husband went out of the country to get a MSc in Biology, we were three years on our own. My brother came every night at 11 p.m. to sleep on our couch so we wouldn't be alone. (It's customary in our culture to not leave the women alone at night. At first I refused the idea but they said we don't want to let people think you're alone.) I am so grateful to them. They are in every breath. We're very close and now they are with me, step by step, cheering me, advising me, daily calls and visits to know how we are doing. I hope I can be a good parent like my mom and dad.

So your biggest challenge is balancing your family and your profession?

Yes, exactly. I'm also very lucky that my husband is very flexible and supportive. When I got this job, some people refused the idea, "working with foreigners" and this kind of talk. But then they saw that their kids were getting school snacks, widows getting help unemployed and displaced people were getting assistance, emergency operations launched as war fired up. I've been able to be a part of that, "an ambassador of assistance in my country," as our country director tells us. I've been very blessed and lucky with my job.  I cannot deny my man's role in all of this. He might just tell me sit home and be satisfied, I'll  bring home the bread. But instead, when I got promoted to a team leading another province, he encouraged me and said "don't refuse a promotion." He was right. I took it.

You sound like a good team. What is your family life like right now?

I've been busy working in another province, it's about 300 miles from home, giving assistance to displaced people from a province where fighting is taking place and flood affected their area. I'm home now with my kids. Masar is taking final exams now and doing excellent (I'm blessed) and Kade is preparing for her final big exams in June. She is studying continuously from morning til night with lunch and dinner breaks (God help her). She is exhausted but this is normal for good students in this grade in Iraq as exams are extremely difficult and the points she gets determine her future. So I'm praying that all this hard work from her won't go in vain. She's a good obedient smart girl. I took a leave from work to stay with her in this difficult time. She called me and said she needs me near so I'm back home cheering her up til she finishes her exams.

Passing exams is not difficult here but making an A is. You must get a 95% to make pharmacy, 96% medical, 90% engineering. To teach her at this stage at school is not good enough for her to make an A so I've been saving for some time. I sold my gold, which Iraqi women must have, to pay for her teachers. It's the least I can do. I wish there is more.

Isn't she remarkable? Thanks, Khuld, for sharing a bit of your life and heart with us. 

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We're collecting photos and interviews for some more Humans of Motherhood posts. We've got some good candidates and if you have someone you'd like to nominate or hear about, drop us a line!

"How fascinating!"

Or: Jedi mind tricks of raising teens, part 2

Years ago my mom gave me the book How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci by Michael Gelb. A lot of what he had to say about creativity, curiosity, whole-brain thinking and getting comfortable with ambiguity really clicked but one of the clearest take-aways for me was his encouragement to treat any failure or departure from the expected with curiosity. He recommended greeting these experiences (epic or otherwise) with the attitude and phrase "How fascinating!".*

Ten years later G attended a professional conference/retreat where Gelb was the keynote. As part of his presentation Gelb has everyone get up and begin to learn to juggle. G brought home his newly hatched juggling skills and sometimes could be heard muttering, in the middle of a torrential rainstorm of juggling balls, "How fascinating!" We've adopted it as a part-sarcastic, part-sincere (sometimes almost semi-expletive) phrase when things don't go as planned. But the sentiment, especially in matters related to family life, is actually pretty helpful.  Since writing about the Jedi mind tricks of raising teens, I've been on the lookout for other candidates. I think "how fascinating!" may come in handy. 

Think of it as playing curious anthropologist in investigating the native habits, rituals, and behavior of the modern teenager. We're on a quest of curiosity, assigned to gather information and understand this foreign culture. Perpetual socks on the floor? How fascinating! Never turned in the homework for that biology class? How very fascinating! I'll just go file that away in the teen ethnography in my head.

Okay, clearly this doesn't actually address the socks on the floor/missing homework dilemmas. The beauty of this tactic is that it's not about solving but understanding. Sure, it's probably just a rest stop on the way to problem solving but there are moments in this gig when a little detachment--a little scientific objectivity-- is a life saver. 

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*Benjamin Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander use the exact same phrase in a chapter of their wonderful book The Art of Possibility. I'm not sure who captured it first so I'll give them each a shout out here. (But I read it first in Gelb.)

Coming home

At the airport.

My girls have now established a tradition of botched plane rides home from college. I won't bore you with the lengthy list of airline mishaps, but let me just say Maddie arrived home a full day later than her ticket indicated and THIS IS PAR FOR THE COURSE. But we gathered her up from the airport Sunday after church and brought her home for a full day of naps and lemon squares.

I can see that my interaction with my grown kids is becoming a series of arrivals and departures. I'm not so much a part of their everyday lives, but I do get to be there for the special stuff -- the holidays, the big occasions, and the vacations. More than anything, I want my kids to feel special when they are home -- to know that we value having them with us and that we are interested in what they are doing and who they are becoming.

I did a cursory search of the Interwebs to find out what the more experienced parent knows about welcoming adult children home, and there are a number of articles like this:  "7 Great Tips For When Your College Kid Comes Home For The Holidays," which tells you to have lots of good food in the house and give them some space. There are also a number of articles that talk about how to navigate rules and expectations with kids who have had an entire year of relative independence -- like this one. 

Admittedly, I don't have oodles of experience with this adult-kid-at-home phenomenon, but here's what has worked so far.

• Curfew: My college kids seem fairly nocturnal -- staying up into the wee hours of the morning and then either sleeping late or napping during the day. Unfortunately, our home is pretty much in bed by 10:30 on weeknights, and I'm way too uptight to sleep while they are roaming the streets. While home we pretty much keep our college girls to the midnight curfew initially instituted for our high schoolers. If they are planning to be out later, they arrange things ahead of time. They understand that it's as much for my sanity (and sleep) as anything else. (I'll also say here that our kids have been home for such short periods of time, that up to this point the curfew hasn't been much of an issue.)
• Chores: I'm not super proud of this, but we don't require too much in the way of chores on a regular basis. Everyone has a dish day. Everyone does their own laundry and keeps their own things picked up. We all chip in if there is a big job to do. The college kids are definitely scheduled back into the dish rotation. (There may even be some college-educated weed-pulling soon.)
• Lunch: When Jordan was home last summer, she and I had a great time going out to lunch together (just about every day). Often she visited with her friends in the evenings, so this arrangement made everyone happy. Madison asked me last week if we'd be going out to lunch while she was home. Here's the downside: I gained a full five pounds in the six weeks Jordan was home last summer!
• Preparation: I stocked Madison's bathroom with all new supplies -- shampoo, conditioner, lotion, hand soap, razors, tissues . . . and some fluffy towels. I made sure her bed had clean sheets and that her room was tidy. It wasn't a big deal, but I did want her to feel like her space was ready for her (instead of stale and crusty since it had last been used in December). 

I'd love to add to this list. Any seasoned college parents out there? Or what do you remember from your own college days?

Too busy

I have to admit that I'm slowly growing to detest the phrase "I'm so busy."  "Busy" is a relative term, and one I'm realizing it is not necessarily synonymous with success or significance or even high achievement. Busy is a state of mind, and for me . . . in the last year or so I've conscientiously worked to be less busy. The absence of busy-ness doesn't mean idleness. It just means less going on in my head (and sometimes, hopefully, on my calendar). I loved this short article about competence, and how our desire to prove ourselves is making us miserable.

"I have to be honest and and admit that saying 'no' does not come easily to me. It feels far easier to blame my time- and life-management issues on 'The Curse of Competence' than it does to think of this as a situation I have created for myself. As I have reflected on this over the last few days, it has occurred to me that I might be under some other spells. I could be afflicted with 'The Curse of Wanting to be Liked,' 'The Curse of Wanting to Tackle Things That Seem Impossible,' 'The Curse of Finding Everything Interesting,' or even 'The Curse of Thinking I Am Uniquely Qualified to Save the Day.'"

I've been wondering about what "spells" I'm personally afflicted with. Maybe "The Curse of Desiring Perfection," or "The Curse of Pinterest," or "The Curse of Needing to Control Everything (which means delegating nothing)."

What about you? Any spells that are unnecessarily filling up your days?

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This NYT article, "The Busy Trap," is an oldie but a goodie.

"Life begins to divulge a steadier destination"

I inherited a copy of The Letters of EB White at some point. The copy I have is satisfyingly tattered, a book that my parents gave to great-Grandma Brockbank in 1977 (the inscription is on the inside cover) and then later, meandering down through the line, it was given to me.

I'll admit I've harbored a little long-held literary crush on Elwyn Brooks White. It started, of course, with Charlotte's Web and The Trumpet of the Swan. I can’t get enough of his New England wit and quick humor, his ease with sentiment and words. I knew he could write well but his letters provide this open window to his personal relationships and reveal much more of his warm soul and side glancing winks.

On Being* recently posted the following letter that re-sparked and reminded me of my EB White fangirlhood. Mr. White wrote it to his young niece, Judy, in the midst of her uncertainty about her life's path. Who hasn't been there at some point? Who wouldn't love to get a letter like this? 

"I know just how you feel, Judy. Frustration is youth's middle name, and you mustn't worry too much about it. Eventually things clarify themselves and life begins to divulge a steadier destination. In a way, our lives take form through a simple process of elimination. We discard what we don't like, walk away from what seems to inspirit us. My first job was with the United Press, but I knew within half an hour that my heart was not in it and that I would never be any good at gathering straight news under great difficulties and with the clock always running out.

Your majoring in English was no mistake, even though you do not become a critic or a publisher's assistant or a playwright or a novelist. English and English literature are the rock bottom of our lives, no matter what we do, and we should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry. 'To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.' I agree with Mr. Thoreau himself a victim of youthful frustration. You seem to me a girl whose head is on straight and I don't worry about you, whether you are majoring in English or in bingo. Joe, my son majored in English for two years at Cornell, then realized that what he really liked was boats. He transferred to M.I.T., took a degree in Naval Architecture and now owns and operates a boatyard in Brooklin — hauling, storing, and repairing and building boats. Keeps him busy 24 hours of the day, and keeps him outdoors, where he prefers to be.

We've just had three great gales here and are still picking up the pieces and sawing up the fallen trees. Aunt K. is not well, and there isn't much the doctors can do for her, as her trouble is in her arteries.

Thanks for your nice letter — I wish I could write you a better reply, but your question is essentially unanswerable, except by yourself, and you supplied the answer when you said you wanted to live fruitfully and honestly. If you truly want that you will assuredly bear fruit and be an adornment to the orchard whatever it turns out to be.

With love,
Uncle Andy

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*Have you discovered the wonderful radio show/podcasts/blog called On Being with Krista Tippett? The conversations and interviews with interesting people mostly center on belief (it was originally called "Speaking of Faith") and "what does it mean to be human and how do we want to live." It's a gem.

The Braxton-Hicks of launching kids

Yesterday Sam left on a school trip to France. For a month.

Look at that I'm-going-to-France smile! Or is it an I'm-getting-outta-here smile? I'm going to tell myself it's the former.

I know! A month?!  My reaction exactly! It's not the school trip of my own high school experience but apparently, if you are a school in Australia planning to take a group of students all the way to France, you go big or stay home.  At Sam's school most kids take a trip like this at least once in high school. It's a big part of the school's global education focus and we feel really lucky that they value and support these kind of experiences for their students. (And, since the two-week term break is coming up, he'll really miss just 8 days of school overall.) Sam's had his eye on this trip for a long time and has been counting down and preparing for months. The all-over-France itinerary has me alternately super excited for him and wildly jealous. I mean. April in Paris! They write songs about that kind of thing.

Sending him off on this trip has reminded me once again that, ultimately, one of my mama roles is to stand at the doorway and wave goodbye, over and over and over again--handkerchief waving optional. Launching implies a leaving place, a launching pad to push against and leave behind. I am that person, that place. I've had my turn at the launching myself; now I'm the launcher, not the launchee. That's the deal. (See: The Lion King.)

I have been remembering those pesky Braxton Hicks contractions that plagued me in the last part of my pregnancies.  Life has a way of warning us, of designing rehearsals into our systems so that we can gradually prepare ourselves for the real deal.  I've come to think of these adventures and field trips as another set of Braxton Hicks experiences, just preparing me ever-so-slightly for the time when he--they--get on the plane and fly away into a new life. Ever since their births, the leavings just get longer and more distant, more thrilling and bittersweet.  But it's what I signed on for and I have to remind myself that healthy, sprouting, blooming independence is a thing to celebrate, not mourn. Right?

Go, Sam!  Now go bring us back something delicious. And remember to pick up your socks and towels at your host family's house.

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Hey, N&L friends! Thanks for the comments on our first anniversary/giveaway post. As we have probably said before (and will probably say again), comments are one of our love languages.  We've been on cloud nine reading through your comments and feedback. If you haven't already, remember to go and comment on that post by Thursday at 8 p.m. (Texas time) to enter to win our prize package filled with 12 of our favorite things. 

Spring!

Yesterday was my first full day back from Spring Break (topped off by a short trip with Annie). It felt good to put the house in order, make a grocery list, and even run a few errands (normally I detest errand-running). Some of you are still in the throes of winter, so just know that my heart is with you. But here? In Houston? We had a high of 69 -- blue, blue skies and a gentle breeze. In the pool floats a thin layer of yellow pollen. Our red oak grew a whole set of new leaves in the week I was gone. Everything seemed fresh and clean and somehow . . . benevolent. In the favorable light of Spring, I threw back the sun roof, picked up a Sonic drink, and played the music loud. (And yes, I'm sure my kids were embarrassed by my Spring ardor.)

I racked my brain for a way to write SPRING and WIND IN MY HAIR and SUN WARMING MY FACE. But I failed, because I needed to make DINNER, and bake three loaves of banana bread, and get my house cleaned up for a church meeting. 

Also, I'm not Billy Collins. Do you think he has to make dinner?

Spring Fever (from TNYT, April 23, 2011)

Finally, it is time to observe the old ritual
of opening the windows, easily performed
without a shove from any hooded little druids
and no need for a circle of flaming stones.

Yes, the day has arrived to lift the panes
that kept the cold out and the warm in
and gave you a place to stand some days
to watch the snow in its silent descent.

But now a soft, fresh breeze rushes in,
no longer sharpened by the knives of winter
that lately pierced your face
and threatened to shatter your porcelain ears.

A blessing is this new sweet air --
the word zephyr springs to your lips --
that lifts the light curtains
and rejuvenates the room so persuasively

that the oil portrait of your grandfather
appears to be smiling down
from the confines of his heavy frame.
Even the goldfish turns in her round bowl

to face the light from the thrust-open window.
It is spring.
Crocuses break forth. The dogwood trembles.
Persephone touches the earth with her wand.

And there you stand in your blue robe
breathing in the season, filling your lungs
with every bud and blossom,
inhaling every spore and fleck of pollen

until the goldfish leaps into the air
at the sound of your thunderous sneeze.

~Billy Collins