Category Archives: Guest Post

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya tomorrow

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Tomorrow marks a new start in many ways. I did what I said I would do. I found a new job with a better schedule, closer to home and with responsibilities that make sense to my resume. I gave notice at my old terrible job on Wednesday of this last week and because it is one of those places where you really aren’t of any use once you publicly make it known that you don’t want to be there any more, my last day was Wednesday as well.

I had a four day weekend. It was lovely because the sun was out and Portland has finally been putting on its June clothes but also because there was an end behind me, a new start ahead. This new job could be another version of terrible. I don’t know yet. But for now, it is a hopeful opportunity to have a more content life both in terms of career and in the ways that work affects everything else, in the rest of my life as well. For the most part I can barely contain my elation at the prospect of this new job, at the reality of leaving my old job, at having four consecutive days off. But there is also a bit of anxiety in this transition. Maybe it’s a sign of getting older that my hope is not unadulterated the way it would have been when I was just starting out. Now I know bad jobs and layoffs and have the added reality of kids who need health insurance and vacation plans looming in the near summer.

But through this transition, I am working on a couple of things. I’m working on being more content, finding the parts of my life to live in and allowing everything else to just fill in, or roll off or fall away. I’m also working on being more grateful. I know this blog has not really been a mouthpiece for raising our kids in a community or family of faith, and for the most part I’m not living as if this is a priority anyways, but it would be untrue to say that I don’t feel connected to a bigger story, that I don’t have a sense that we are being cared for in some way. Because two weeks ago I got to a class I was teaching early and as I waited for the students to show up, I looked out the window to the parking lot and prayed for change. I took on that old unused trope of another time and I sent out a pointed supplication, that my situation would change, that things would get more hopeful, that I would have a sense of what it was that I should do with my life. And now, those things have gotten underway. So I am grateful that things sometimes happen when you want them to. I don’t know that this new job is the answer to all of my occupational questions. But it is a change; it is better; I give thanks.

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Guest Post: The human jungle gym

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Today we have a guest post from Writendad who writes a great blog called Filets to Fishsticks. After reading the post below head over there and read some more and make sure you click on Gallery to view the beautiful pictures he takes as well.

I pick Him up all the time. To carry Him without having to wait. To remove Him from an area. To tickle Him incessantly and then round it off with a raspberry from hell. That’s the real reason. To torment Him when the only defense He has is to flail about in the air and squeal with tortured delight. But the other morning I took a beating. It’s far from the first time He’s attempted to scale Me, but this was the first time I really felt it.

And when I say scale, I mean it. Like an awkward mountain goat on a piece of playground equipment. Everything is fair game if it will get Him to the top, and it all begins when He grabs My belt with His toes. As soon as those wicked little things find their niche, it’s over. Anything waist up from that point on becomes fair game. And I do mean anything. Hair, ears, cheeks, shirt collar. It’s slow torture. And this last time, when He decided that sticking a toe in My belly button could provide some extra umph, gave ‘torture’ some new depth.

I couldn’t decide whether My body wanted to pee, shut down, or collapse in pain. And He couldn’t decide where to step next. Well, I didn’t give Him that option. The adrenaline flowing at full speed to My belly button, in an attempt to keep Me from passing out, somehow enabled Me to peel Him and His vicious toes from My scarred body. It was over. He laughed and went about His play. I stood, beaten, mauled, and conquered.

Yet I have learned nothing.

Just today I picked Him up again, right after work. All 40 some pounds of six year old glory. I couldn’t help it, though. He may be six, but He’s as holdable today as He was 4 years ago. Plus, He spared Me this time around. I could see in His eyes that He was aware of His power, but He spared Me, and for that My belly button is grateful.

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Dear Phil & Ted

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I picture the two of you very vividly as hippy parent inventor extraordinaires: well tanned and with lovely accents (you are Australian after all), athletically thin (you make jogging strollers) and bearing the characteristic idiosyncrasies of both the modern progressive parent and the self made business men that you are (this part I’m just conjecturing). And with this image in my mind–a sort of boyscout meets crocodile dundee meets metrosexual dad of three with a Subaru forrester and a compost pile sort of image–I write you this letter of appreciation believing that it means something to you to hear it.

I love your strollers. I mean really. I really love your strollers.

I fancy myself a progressive parent in my own right, but more of the garage sale-ing, taking mass transit, carrying a canvas tote everywhere I go kind of progressive (see here-less money than your typical granola mom) so your stroller, with its hefty price tag and slightly yuppy looking exterior would normally not appeal to me. But here’s the thing, the whole design of the double stroller that converts so simply for varying children in different stages and does so with such minimal bulk is really just so very brilliant. So brilliant in fact that when I first saw one of your strollers on a clandestined day at a Borders in Beaverton, I chased the man down who was pushing it and bombarded him with questions as he hastily tried to find his wife and make his escape. I actually followed him through the store marveling at the apple green stroller with his two toddler aged sons riding comfortably double decker as their father swiveled and maneuvered between narrow bookshelves and dawdling customers. I dropped my books on a table near the door, waved my husband down and followed this man with the stroller out the front door to continue my interview.

The very next day, I went to the store of his direction and found the vary same Phil&Ted’s stroller parked just inside the front door. A week later, after much rationalizing and some financial fanangling, we took our own green apple stroller home. As it would happen, we found the last stroller of a certain shipment from your lovely company that had been specially priced so that the double kit came free. It seemed like a good omen.

Ever since, I have pushed my stroller proudly to all manner of events, through airports and MAX stations, festivals and carnivals, on dirt and on grass and on pavement. And it has been worth every penny we paid for it and more. I live in a lovely city where it rains unforgivably often and when we bought your stroller, I was a newcomer and knew very few people. It would have been very easy for me to stay home with my newborn and two-year-old sons and mournfully look out the drizzly windows. But with the initial motivation of making sure I got my money’s worth and then for the continued joy of being outside and finding the trails and playgrounds in an ever-broadening radius from our house, we used it all the time. Now looking back on two years in this rainy city, we have you to thank for ever having gotten out to see it at all.

I realize this sounds like hyperbole. And to some extent I know it is hyperbole. We would live quite effectively with a less lovely stroller and in fact would probably continue to breathe without a stroller at all. But my point is, your design is useful to my life. I walk more often: to buy groceries for dinner, to send a birthday present, to get coffee and then play at the park. And if walking more isn’t progressive, than I don’t know what is.

Thank you for the ingenious design of your double jogging stroller. I believe I am a better mom for its convenience and comfort.

Very best,

Kate Rohl

PS. While I appreciate the stroller’s jogging capacity, I should disclaim that I have not yet utilized it for actual jogging.

PPS: Your company might want to think seriously about issuing me some sort of commission structure as I am easily persuaded into conversations with perfect strangers about the brilliance of your strollers and then a subsequent demonstration of its function. I have also introduced the stroller to entirely new markets visiting friends in both Indiana and Arizona where you, Phil&Ted are not nearly as well represented as you are here in cutting edge Portland.

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Guest Post: Life of a stay at home dad

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I asked a friend and fellow stay at home dad to write a guest post for me because I admire him as a dad and as a writer. John Beeler is the father of two girls: Cosette (Cosi), and Winnipeg (Winni) and has another baby joining the family any day. He lives in Indianapolis in the house directly behind our and John and I spent many an afternoon pushing our strollers through the neighborhood and discussing the deeper meanings of The Wire and childhood development. Enjoy the longer but beautiful post below:

Primo and Cosi 4 years ago

It is 9:09am and we are driving down Fall Creek Parkway. It’s rush hour. To most everyone else the time is only important because they are nine minutes late to work. But to me, 9:09am is a different kind of important: all three of us dressed, fed, and on the road. This is a major achievement.

Our windows are wide open and the sharp spring air is sprinting through the car. Coldplay’s “Lovers in Japan” is blaring from our speakers, its third repetition officially making it an anthem for the day (“Lovers, keep on the road you’re on”). In the back seat are my two girls. Cosi, my nearly-four-year-old, is facing east. Her eyes are closed with intensity and I think I know what she’s doing: she is seeing but not seeing. The bright morning sun is running with us and the trees from Fall Creek are casting a strobe effect into the car and then through her closed eyelids. Light and dark at the same time. I remember this from being a kid.
Winni, my younger one, is looking west out her window, her eyes following one car, then the next, then the next, then the next…. They are both unusually quiet.  (“Sometimes even the right is wrong…”) In the quiet space between the song and the wind I wonder if Cosi is experiencing a memory; the first thing she’ll remember without the help of me or photographs or stories.
We are moving at nine miles over the speed limit to what is supposedly a massive seasonal sale at Macy’s. The girls need spring clothes. The day is golden, it feels ripe and plump with possibility. Everything is right, right now.

****

It is 2:40pm. I am sitting on the naughty chair. My eyes are full of tears, my cheeks flush. Cosi’s are, too; at various points in the past 45 minutes we’ve both misbehaved, we both know it, and we are both paying the price. She is sitting in my lap, quivering and heaving. What we did doesn’t matter anymore. We are just here, on the chair.

She turns around quickly, tears streaking little highways down her face, and, with all the honesty and sincerity that only a three year old can muster, she tells me between deep breaths, “Daddy. -breath- You can go. I -breath- will stay. I have forgiven -breath- you.”

My tears burst tenfold and my hands go to my eyes to hide my shame. Where does she find these words? I wish I could say they come from me.

****

It is 10:38am and we are driving northwest on Michigan Road, a few miles from downtown. We dropped Momma off at work and delivered chocolate chip cookies to Grandmum. Alexi Murdoch’s “All My Days” is on the stereo this time, and the sun is again keeping pace. We three are quiet in the car, the girls are again staring out their respective windows. (“I’ve been tryin’ to find, what’s been in my mind.”) If you took a snapshot you’d think it’s a perfect morning.

It is not. I feel like a great, historical failure in the history of parenting. Name a way in which the morning could have collapsed into chaos and it has. Thoughts are running through my head as fast as I am trying to drive. I am thinking: I believe that women can really do this job better than I can. I am thinking: women are far more biologically in tune with their children than I will ever be. I am thinking: They are more compassionate and graceful than I. I am thinking: I am not cut for this. Me? I can carry eight grocery bags and a two year old in the other arm. That is my special power.

Not only am I aware of the myriad levels of inherent sexism in my statements, I want to curl up in them and disappear forever, like a morose Big Lebowski scene.

I am headed somewhere other than home because home is a dumping ground of laundry and dirty plates and unswept floors. I imagine a legion of mice sprawling from the basement and feasting like mouse royalty. I can see the mildew greedily spreading across smelly kitchen towels like a time lapse Discovery Channel video. I do not have dinner planned. I do not know what we will eat for lunch. I have snapped like a shark at my children all morning. I pretended when I kissed my wife. I spent the early morning shitting on the toilet while reading blogs by homemakers like myself, but unlike myself are able accomplish so much in so little time. I resent them all. Fuck arts and fuck crafts. Fuck playgroups and parks. Fuck life lessons. Fuck the fucking incomprehensible phonics of the English alphabet and our obligation to teach it to our children before the age of four.
I am ready to Work. To be the Distant One, the One who has an excuse to leave the house early (and picks up a latte on the way out). To be the one who works into the evening with good reason and for the  betterment of the family. The one who makes appearances and cameos. The one for whom the studio audience claps for upon entrance. (“Many a night I found myself with no friends standing near.”) I covet the concentration of time that absence affords. As the bright sun burns the morning into our car, I seethe deep into my front seat with jealousy, thinking about all these things, over and over.

We are not far from the bustle of Michigan Road but then, by just turning a corner, we are in a strange place in the middle of the city, a section of the city with affluence seemingly protecting it like a castle wall from a barbarian encroachment of stoplights and traffic and strip malls. It is hilly and trees and fields are everywhere. There is a small farm up ahead, just over the rise. “Look! Horses, Daddy!”

****

It is 3:14pm. The three of us are sitting on the sidewalk, our backs leaning against the brick storefront of Joe’s Cycles. Heat is simmering from the pavement and melting ice cream is freefalling from our chins. Good ice cream, too, made at the creamery just outside the city, free-range cocoa, grass-fed vanilla beans and so forth. It tastes significant and hearty. Even though this stuff is by no means cheap, my girls charmed Joe into doubling (tripling?) the scoop size. “Chalk-oo, too, please, Chalk-oo, too, please!”
We’re quiet, a celestial event with a four and a two-year-old. But there is plenty of sound to go around: a parade of passing cars, the occasional laughter spilling out of Joe’s shop, and the soft splatting of ice cream hitting the sidewalk.

If I imagined a perfect scene as a stay-at-home dad before I became one, this is it. As I elbow my way in for another bite of ice cream, I feel like I have given my two kids a gift today, and not just the ice cream that was priced like a gift. The ice cream was just the delivery method for something else. The pavement. The cars. The hot sun. The jokes bouncing off walls inside the bike shop. The dandelions peeking out from the cracked bricks. The smiles from passersby. The ant carrying a crumb across the sidewalk. My gift to my children is to have accidentally carried us into these rare collaborative moments as bestowed by the world. Beauty in the mundane, shit like that.

And good ice cream.

****

It is 8:21pm and the sun is barely holding on. The neighborhood birds are pecking at the ground for one last easy meal before they find their nest again and sleep.

The days pass like cards flipping in the air from a deck fallen from my hand. A third child is on the way and I am sleeping less because I am worrying more. I need to find a preschool for my first. My second spent two weeks tied to a bed in intensive pediatric care one year ago, and lately has been looking up at me with those same deepset eyes murmuring, “Huhrt, Daddy, huhrt.” I am scrambling to find myself, to find my family’s self, even to just be.

I am digging in our garden outside. Everything makes sense out here. Plant this, water here, and, from the black, green appears. The dog across the alley is barking at someone searching for metal in our trash. I stand and he scurries to the neighbor’s bin.
When he’s gone, I hear my daughter crying through the windows of our house. I bend down to the soft ground and dig deeper.

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On the paradox of wishing time away

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Looking back on the posts I have contributed thus far to this blog,they are all negative. I seem to be doing a lot of complaining; I seem to be an unhappy sort of person. It’s not true really. For the most part, our life in community with James at home is going swimmingly. We are all in our best role and the really important things are good, really good actually. So why is it that I always sound so damn whiney? I blame my job. I promise though, next week I will come up with something really positive, like-sunshine and roses and smiling isn’t-the-world-lovely kind of optimism. You won’t know what hit you. In the mean time, here’s one more dooms-ville post to add to my record. Because I wasn’t quite feeling up for optimism yet. It’s coming though. Soon. Really.

I do a job I do not enjoy. I have bad hours, an uninteresting commute out of the city to the suburbs, tasks that I am not challenged by and metrics I am not achieving. Because of these things, I am constantly wishing time off the clock, willing lunchtime to come sooner and living for the end of the day when I run out the door, peel out of the parking lot and weave in and out of traffic home, to my boys, who I am working for. But this wishing time away of course makes me feel like I am living for the 3 or 4 hours when I am away from my job and these hours end up going by much more quickly than any other in the day. So time is going by, slowly by day and quickly by night. And all of a sudden, in the four months since I started this job, my little boy who was still a toddler is talking in full sentences and his older brother is already shrugging off my snuggling and these lovely, innocent months are slipping through my fingers.

It is difficult to switch gears: to get through the day and linger through the evening, to resent the daylight hours in my cubicle and cherish the bedtime routine, to function through tasks and then engage with full emotional depth. For the most part, I’m not good at the separation. I end up blurring the lines and coming home with a practical agenda and feeling impatient, discontent, frustrated. And because I realize this as it is happening, as I watch one of the boys react to my rigidity or feel James’ retreat from my negativity, I immediately regret my attitude and further resent the job that brings me to this place, the job that steals from the time I have by fostering ennui for most of my waking hours. I’m sure I am not alone in this feeling. In fact I’m sure that even working parents who like their jobs struggle with switching gears from day to night. But the difference must be that I don’t feel like I accomplish much during the day, I don’t spend the time away from my kids for any productive, world changing work, or even work I gain pleasure from or contribute talent towards. I am just making money. Which is important, I know. But sometimes I can’t remember why it’s important enough to be spending this much time away from my boys.

I don’t know what to do. The easy answer is to quit my job, find something else that I enjoy more, that has better hours that is closer to home. For now, there aren’t any good options for those kinds of jobs. And for this time, however long it lasts I need to get better at being content and appreciating what I have, maybe even trying harder to be successful in my job. I’m sure at some not too distant time in the future I will look back on this as a blip of time in between much better times. I just don’t know what to do while I wait. Because I don’t think I can wish time away much longer; I’ll have lost too much of the good stuff.

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Finding quality, when you can’t do quantity

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I’ve been working a lot lately at both my full time job and at various part time jobs on the weekends, which makes the time I get to spend with the boys all the more valuable. I like this about being the working person because I wasn’t always very good about being intentional with time when we had so much of it. They still have the ability to frustrate me and demand more energy than I have but because the quality time has to be less, I try to make it more concentrated and this makes for some really great time spent.

Like this morning when Segundo took his sweet time having breakfast so that the other two had already headed off to the basement for dinosaur train leaving the two of us dawdling over our bran flakes and chatting over coffee (flakes for him, coffee for me). I feel like I appreciate this time more than I did when I was home with him all the time. The stay at home parent gets moments by quantity so we working parents have to get them by quality. I’m trying to remember this when I’m whooshing in and out of the house on my way to and from; to focus and spend time when given the chance and make sure I’m listening to the boys and responding over breakfast or running errands, while giving them a bath or rocking in a chair before bed.

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Thank you ESPN; thank you very much

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Any of you that know my husband James might note in the first points of any description of him that he loves sports, I mean really loves sports. He would rather be watching an NBA basketball game than doing pretty much anything else in the world. And all other sports rank only slightly lower on his list of priorities. Give him a remote, he can find a sporting event. Leave him at home with the boys and our cable-less TV, he will stream the most interesting game available online. Give him a ball he will kick it. And give him an unknown person, he will find their unique sports passion so that he can talk to them about it- seriously.

And since the NBA playoffs are upon us (really the height of the height of his favorite thing), all conversations lead to some excited description of an elaborate play at the end of the game or a player’s comments to some obscure journalist or a backwoods obsessive blogger’s theory about the weaknesses of the triangle offense or the LA Times’ most recent editorial about Kobe or…you get the idea. He is single minded.

For those of you who do not know my husband James particularly well, he is an excellent conversationalist. He finds not only your sports loyalties but your other passions as well. He can talk about urban development, tonka trucks or literary analysis of the modern American novel with equal candor and knowledge. He will find the subject that uniquely provides an overlap of interest.

Not so during the NBA playoffs. Or maybe its just me. Maybe he just feels the need to be polite to other people and talk about other things than the most important thing of all time, the Lakers playoff run. And so he comes home and just must talk to me about the burning questions of matchups and defensive strategy. Maybe he spends all of the alloted time and energy he has for other subjects at work. But around here, we are like a one man NBA TV-all basketball, all the time. And here is where my grievance with ESPN and really all sports media comes in. There are a number of bloggers and sports writers and pundits and hosts who love sports as much as James. They live sports. They know all the stats and subtleties of players and plays, they call coaches by their first names and refer to the playoffs of ’88 or the obscure off season scrimmage between D-league rookies. They make podcasts with their other fanatic fan friends to talk about all sporting subjects. And in their broadcasted sports obsession, it validates James’ personal sports obsession-he has camaraderie in this shared knowledge and passion. There are others who care as much as he does.

But there is a difference between James and them, a key, important difference. They get paid to know everything there is to know about sports. James does not. And when James knows as much as the people whose whole full time job is to know these things, well, it makes me wonder. Maybe James loves sports more than they do because he doesn’t have to. Maybe these sports professionals with their intern researchers and their whole weekday schedule make it tough on us middle-american housewives whose husbands must read and know all that is offered. Maybe someone would pay James to spend his whole day loving sports. Maybe it’s just May and the Lakers are in the playoffs.

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Meeting defiance at the door

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For the working parent, male or female, there is always the need to come up to speed very quickly when you walk in the door. While I am at work, the boys have been disciplined, rewarded, educated and just generally experienced life while I am away. It is necessary for me to take stock as soon as I get home and calibrate accordingly. I think my husband and I communicate well and try to establish common parenting goals so that we can both interact with the boys and know that while we have different styles, the same general system offers the background whoever is doing the parenting. But lately, especially with our oldest I’ve noticed a kind of defiance that seems especially reserved for me. Like the same request out of my mouth elicits an entirely different reaction than when it comes from my husband. I struggle with this not only because a defiant three-year-old can make even the sanest of us want to throw our own tantrum but also because it seems like it implies that my kid senses that I have less power over him. I know parenting is not or should not be all about the power struggle but there is some sense that I need to be able to say no and have my kids listen. And when I am away from home for almost 10 hours a day maybe we both know, my son and I, that I have less room to command, that I can’t demand obedience for those autonomous moments in the evening because I don’t have the explanation of the entirety of the day. I know this is a phase and I can objectively see that our son is three and in the midst of testing his boundaries, seeing how we react, gauging how far he can go in any one direction. But on a visceral level, it makes me feel like a terrible parent who resorts to yelling and threatening punishments that I won’t be able to follow through on because I am on my way out the door.  And because I have so little time with my boys bookending our days, I regret any part of it spent sending one of them to time out or taking away privileges. I need a better plan for maintaining control without being the constant bad guy. Any ideas from all you working parents or any perspective from you at home parents?

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Not impressed

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Stay at home dads are still enough of a minority going against the conventional role of woman as caregiver that the scaffolding is not yet in place to support them. The language of marketing campaigns, the changing tables in public restrooms and the judgmental looks of kind-hearted grandmothers all continue to paint the picture of mother as nurturing parent and father as competitive provider. Assumptions like these are more than unhelpful for families like ours; the existing network for parenting is overwhelmingly generalized to be unsupportive to the male caregiver. I see this and know that if I were staying home, I would need look no further than the end of the block to find a sympathetic mom with young kids hanging on her legs and graham cracker crumbs squished into her car floor mats. For my husband, this sympathetic community is being found but at much greater effort, much more thoughtful intentionality and greatest of all through the modern marvel that is the internet. He is able to connect with other men in this very forum, through this blog as well as other web based communities participating in a myriad of pod-casts, discussion forums, reviews and radio shows. I admire his resilience and commitment to find like minded men and supportive women who he can gain a sort of momentum with, join a movement and feel supported by the waves of strength in numbers.

It is not easy to be successful and relate to the world when your ability is questioned, your decision misunderstood and the expectation of your gender tied up in role that doesn’t fit you.

It’s interesting to me though how similar this language is to the language of inequality millions of women have used as employers in a workforce designed to support the success of men. Women working today certainly are offered far more support and opportunity than in decades past. But a recent study came out again proving that even when maternity leaves, various types of work more popular by gender and all other conceivable variables were taken into account, women still make on average 70 cents to every dollar their male counterparts make. As a working woman facing the future with hopes for career growth, occupational fulfillment and financial compensation, it’s hard not to worry that I will not be taken seriously or that my skill-set might be overlooked because of my gender. And there is an added dimension for woman who work with young children at home: there is either a sense of guilt at being away for so many hours in a day or judgment that they are somehow less maternal than the staying home mothers, a feeling that is not particularly translatable to the male working parent. So the woman who works is trying to succeed at a job where the network is not designed for her success and simultaneously deal with the parental expectation tied to being female.

That is to say, It is not easy to be successful and relate to the world when your ability is questioned, your decision misunderstood and the expectation of your gender tied up in a role that doesn’t fit you.

So I guess the point is to say that a modern family making decisions based on personality not gender and looking for ways to sustain their family that look very different from their parents’ and grandparents’ way of doing things will face a difficult road. I think we have found this road particularly satisfying to travel. But my point is also that you involved dads and stay at home dads have it much better than you think. You may not have changing tables and commercials designed for your lifestyle, but I won’t be giving to your cause of horrible oppression and inequality any day soon. It is tough to make a decision that looks different to convention. But it is also early on in the movement. Who knows, maybe in ten years millions of men will be staying at home with their kids and the actively nurturing dad will be the stereotype. And maybe by then women will be earning the same salary as a man. But it will have been a lot longer in coming for the working woman.

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Another’s perspective

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Starting tomorrow morning I am going to be having a reoccurring guest post on Mondays from a very distinguished guest; my wife. She will be giving the working moms perspective to this whole stay at home dad thing and either addressing something that I wrote about during the week or bringing a topic of her own. I call her Beautiful but you can call her Kate. enjoy.

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