Thoughtful and thought-provoking conversation continues in the comments of the patience post. There are two main strands of discussion: one focuses on parenting style, and the other on educational philosophy. Of course, those two topics are completely intertwined—not just in the comments, but in life.
I’m seeing a lot of incoming links to that post, and I wanted to direction your attention toward some of them. Willa’s reflection upon patience vs. acedia is a powerful read: “Is it possible that every morning God says, ‘Do it again!’ to the sun?” An excerpt:
I think the “bad kind of patience” that Melissa discussed relates a bit to acedia, or at least it does for me. Too often, I “serve my time” and endure what ought to be a delight. Thereby I lose the privilege of drawing closer to what I am intended to be. Thereby I close myself into a little box, limiting myself to finding delight in what I naturally have a preference for. Doctor’s offices are one thing, but when I am bored and restless spending time with my little ones, or impatient about having to deal with the 100th quarrel or need in a day, that is something else. Like Melissa, I should know better than to take these joys as a given. If Aidan taught me nothing else, I should have learned that these very repetitions are privileges of the greatest magnitude.
JoVE shares her thoughts on children and housework. Amy has some specific questions about dealing with the daily challenges of parenting; she also ponders, movingly, how “seeing beauty in every face” means looking for it in her own face, too.
I was going to reflect upon these and other incoming links, but my rugrats have awakened and there are bouncy balls whizzing past my head in every direction. Rose is comparing the bounce and arc of balls made of different substances. (In my experience, “child” outbounces them all.)
This morning Beanie came bouncing into my room and informed me that she had just won a game she was playing with Rose. The agreed-upon-beforehand prize? “A cuddle with you, Mommy, uninterrupted by the other player.”
Rose elaborated: “We wanted to think of a prize that everyone would like.” (This moment, the moment of announcing the contest results, was not the prize moment. Beanie seems to be planning to redeem her winnings later this weekend.)
The conversation about patience, peace, and parenting continues to unfold in the comments of Monday’s post. I haven’t had a chance to chime in yet today because of Good Friday, but I hope to catch up tomorrow. I so appreciate the thoughtful responses you are contributing. I had no idea this post would strike such a chord. Thanks for sharing your struggles and your insights. I think a lot of busy mothers and fathers get into authoritarian habits without examining where they’ve come from or whether they are really good for the kids. (This page has some great advice about how to change those habits, especially Pam Sarooshian’s post near the bottom.) It’s good that we’re thinking about this, talking about it, being frank.
My web host informed me there’s going to be a server change this weekend, so it’s possible (but not definite) that things will be out of whack here for the next few days. It’s a busy family weekend for many of us anyway. But rest assured that I’ll be continuing to ponder the questions and thoughts you’ve posted, and I’ll be back in the regular groove on Monday. Unless I’m busy being Beanie’s prize.
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, budget, California, current events, cuts, parks, state
Meaty discussion in the comments.
Jane told me all about the crocheting of hyperbolic planes, including a giant coral reef model being crocheted by mathematicians and crafty folk around the world.
Rose wondered about last names like Peterson, and we talked about traditions where the last name is father’s-name-son or -daughter. Jane remembered seeing a bunch of -sson and -dottir names in the credits of Lazy Town, which is produced in Iceland. (Sportacus is blonde—who knew?)
(Sportacus is maybe my third favorite TV character, after Sawyer on LOST and in the top spot, Bobby Goran on Criminal Intent. JimandPam are fourth.)
(Oh shoot! I forgot Greg House!)
(Bobby is still at the top.)
Jane told me about genetically modified goats that give milk with filaments like spider silk in it. This gives me the creeps. But spider silk is cool.
All the talk of spiderwebs made Jane think of crocheting some of her stretchy plastic beading wire into a weblike mesh. This, too, was cool.
Rilla put on pants all by herself. Her father’s heart cracked another notch.
My nasturtium seeds are up!
I’ve been thinking through some things in emails (and offline) lately, and I wanted to bring some of those thoughts here. It has to do with patience, a good kind and a bad kind, and their relationship to happiness and learning, especially unschooling.
My children think I’m a pretty swell mom, but they know all too well that I have my faults. If you asked them, they would say (if they weren’t too loyal to rat on me) that my greatest fault is impatience. They’d be right, at least as far as my relationship with the kids is concerned. Impatience comes from frustration, (or does it lead to frustration?), and I think we all know that what spills over from an impatient person’s frustration is scolding, or nagging, or sharp words. Impatience is what you feel when people aren’t doing what you want them to do: it’s a frustrated desire for control.
When Jane was two years old, in the hospital fighting leukemia, people used to constantly compliment me for my patience. Other parents, nurses, doctors—I heard it from many people and it always puzzled me. I didn’t feel ‘patient,’ not in any virtuous sense. What I felt was a keen awareness that my days with this child might possibly be numbered, and I didn’t want to lose a single one of them to a bad mood. I wanted to savor every moment with my baby girl, in case I didn’t have many moments left to savor. So I gladly, gratefully, spent hours playing playdough with her, or giving her i.v. pole rides in the hallways, or holding her while she slept. You don’t need ‘patience’ to live through moments like that.
And through the years, I’ve held on to that sense of ‘savor this moment because it is precious’ with my kids. But I cannot deny that as the years passed, and as more children joined the party, impatience elbowed its way into my heart, my words, my actions. I can almost pinpoint the moment I changed, or at least the moment impatience boiled over into sharpness. Rose was three years old, and Beanie was a baby; we were at a lake beach near our home in Virginia, and I got stuck. Stuck trying to leave the beach, with an unhappy, sandy Bean crying on my hip and a bag slipping off my shoulder, and an intractible Rose straining to pull away from me, her heels digging into the wet sand, wavelets lapping at our ankles. We needed to leave. Jane was already halfway to the parking lot (and too young to be there alone). I couldn’t put the baby down without getting her wet (again), and I was out of diapers. Rose refused to budge. I felt helpless, completely held hostage by a stubborn toddler. I had to scoop her up under one arm like a football and carry her, screaming and squirming, back to the car.
I say “had to,” but I’m sure I had other options. It didn’t seem like it at the time. We were there with friends—the dad friend would, in later years, recall that episode with glee, the day he “saw Lissa lose it.” Why I didn’t holler to him to stop grinning and pick up Rose, I don’t remember. I am quite certain that either of the mom friends who were present would have been happy to help. They probably offered to, but what I remember about the moment is that sense of helplessness and frustration.
Moms of small children can run into that feeling often. What it is, really, is a feeling of being out of control. Loss of control is scary. I dealt with it well when the loss of control was due to illness, something out of any human being’s power to alter. But ah, it’s when a person, or people, especially small people who are “supposed” to obey their mama, are flouting my attempts to control—that‘s when impatience comes in.
People who try to control other people often find themselves feeling impatient, or worse. The reason mothers (to single out one kind of person) scold or fuss or nag or criticize their children is because they are trying to bring a situation back under control—that is, to make things go the way the mom wants them to go.
When I had three or four children each wanting to go a different direction, that’s when I got impatient. That’s when I became a mom who scolds. That’s when I stopped savoring every moment, only selected moments.
That’s when I started to wonder what had happened to the patient mommy I used to be. I used to be so patient—I would think that all the time, forgetting that in the days when people remarked upon my patience, I hadn’t felt like patience came into the equation at all.
I think when we talk about patience in terms of a quality we don’t feel like we possess (“I used to be so patient”), we are talking about a kind of patience that isn’t really a virtue at all. That kind of patience is about enduring the present moment until a better one comes along. It’s a gritting-one’s-teeth-and-getting-through-it state of mind.
It’s how many of us endured countless hours of our lives in school. The kids who didn’t patiently endure were the ones labeled troublemakers. Patient endurance is how most people get through hours in line at the DMV, or (to poke my own self here) the interminable waits in doctor’s offices. There is no moment-savoring going on in that kind of patience. In fact, often ‘being patient’ really just means ‘being quiet and not making a fuss’ while resentment or irritation is churning underneath.
I think the reason people tend to be less patient with their children is because they can in fact exert some external control over the children—as opposed to the doctors who keep us waiting, or the complicated beaucratic systems directing the flow of traffic at the DMV.
But “exerting control” by nagging, scolding, lecturing, ordering in a drill-sergeant’s bark—these are actions that, sooner or later, will do harm to a relationship. Nobody likes being nagged, scolded, or lectured ‘for their own good.’ I sure don’t like it, I know that much. It’s a complete violation of the Golden Rule, isn’t it? Treating children the way we’d like to be treated if we were in their shoes means finding other ways of dealing with those out-of-control moments.
I think for me, the shift back toward a better way began when I drove the kids from Virginia to California by myself. Rilla was six months old, Wonderboy three. Scott had already started his job out here, and he would have flown back to drive with us but I talked him out of it. If he came along, we’d be on the clock; he could only take so much time off work. If I drove alone, we could amble, stopping as often and as long as the kids needed to—which turned out to be very, very often. I had to abandon myself to the flow of the trip: letting go of the desire to control every move we made. We wound up having a wonderful time, the six of us, and I think a big part of the reason is because that 2700-mile journey was about taking each moment as it came. They were moments worth savoring, and savor them I did.
Not that there weren’t some bumps in the road. There were (are) still five children, not all of them always wanting the same thing. But I found that being mindful of the difference between ‘taking care of’ and ‘controlling’ (or trying to control), and being determined to appreciate the present moment, not just try to to ‘get through’ it—those attitudes eliminate impatience. Really. And then the bumps in the road become part of the grand adventure, challenges to be tackled, puzzles to be solved. It’s so much more satisfying to be creative and fun than to be frustrated and stern.
There is another kind of patience, a good kind. It’s the quality that allows a mother with ten places to put every minute to sit in the driveway drawing chalk figures for her toddler, or blow bubbles until the whole bottle is gone, or take half an hour to walk down the block, admiring every dandelion and ant that catches her little one’s eye. It’s the patience that plays a game of Monopoly with an eight-year-old until every last dollar is in someone’s pile, the kind that listens with interest to a detailed recounting of the latest phone-book-sized Teen Titans collection. That kind of patience isn’t about enduring the present moment until a better one comes along. It’s about enjoying the present moment for exactly what it is, with gusto and gratitude.
There’s “patience in suffering,” too, of course, and while perhaps that kind isn’t about enjoying the present (painful or sorrowful) moment, it too involves a willingness to accept the present moment for what it is. People who are patient in suffering tend to be people overflowing with gratitude for all the other things in their lives besides suffering. This is a very great virtue, and I think it grows out of the peaceful sense of appreciation for what is, now, as opposed to a longing for something different, something better: it’s the good kind of patience all grown up.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about all this in conjunction with unschooling, which is a whole way of living that embraces the present moment, rejoices in what is good about it. Unschooling says: this day, this encounter, this connection of ideas, this moment between us—this is very, very good. Unschooling begins with a dismissal of the kind of experiences that a child must “patiently endure” in order to be “educated,” but it is more than that, more than a rejection of one way of being. Unschoolers see everything in the whole wide world as interesting, connected, something they can learn about. (Scroll halfway down at the link and you’ll see why I linked that page in particular, though the whole site speaks to the point.) Instead of patiently (or impatiently) enduring the long wait at the DMV, an unschooler might look around, notice things, think about them, wonder how and why. Why are all the people sitting in the back two rows in this waiting area, but are scattered among all the rows in that bank of seats over there? What kinds of jobs do the people waiting in line have, and was it hard for them to get time off to spend a weekday morning here? When did the old cameras get dumped in favor of digital cameras? Why are the walls a glaring white instead of something soft and soothing like in doctors’ offices? What is the ratio of DMV employees to customers? Is customer the right word for a person in line at the DMV?
Of course I’m not saying that unschoolers are the only people who approach life this way. Harvard professor John Stilgoe, the author of that book I’m still reading: he gets it. He sees what’s interesting in power lines and telephone poles and manhole covers. He has made these things interesting to me. Reading that book is making visible—even beautiful—all sorts of things that were ugly or invisible to me before. The other day I looked out my windshield sideways down a street and saw, for the first time in my life, how the rows of of drooping wires made a spiderweb against the sky: lacy, delicate, lovely.
It reminded me of Philip Isaacson’s book Round Buildings, Square Buildings, Buildings that Wiggle like a Fish, which showed me ways of looking at buildings that made every building interesting to me, made me see the artistry and story of the Brooklyn Bridge, the white clapboard church, the green glass skyscraper.
I’ll never forget reading, in college, Betty Edwards’s Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and how one of her students said that after taking Betty’s drawing class and working on portraits, every face she looked at seemed beautiful to her. The drawing lessons taught her to really look at people, and when she did, she saw beauty everywhere.
I know I’m going all over the place here, but in my mind these things are all connected: this way of really looking, really seeing, noticing what is interesting and important and even beautiful about things many people whisk by without noticing. And what I can do for my children is refuse to fill up their lives with things they must patiently endure until a better moment comes. I can savor the moments as they happen, and give them the time and space to find what’s interesting and beautiful in every face the world shows them.
As I was writing that last sentence, Beanie appeared in front of me with a big smile and a present: a bracelet made of safety pins linked together, each pin shining with green and blue beads. “It’s for you, Mommy,” she breathed, so proud and excited. “Jane showed me how.” How patiently (the good kind of patience) she must have worked to slide all those beads in place.
I never noticed before what a work of art a safety pin is!
A Bonny Glen reader wrote me with a whole bunch of really good questions. Actually, I’ve had several emails come in recently with suggestions for topics or questions to answer. I’ll be tackling some of those in the days and weeks to come. But this is a lazy Saturday morning so I’m starting with the easy one.
Can I ask how you pronounce Lissa? It is like the second half of Melissa or the name Lisa?
Like the second half of Melissa. If you want the whole scoop on my name, it goes like this. Melissa Wiley is, as you know, my pen name. But the Melissa part is real. My middle name is Anne-with-an-e and that e was always very important to me as a child, so that when I first read Anne of Green Gables at age eleven, I loved her instantly and devotedly from the moment she made the big deal about having her name spelled correctly even in people’s minds.
When I got married, I kept Anne as my middle name instead of making my maiden name my new middle name as many women do. But I love my maiden name, Brannon, too.
When I was growing up, my family had two names for me. (They still do.) Well, three names if you count Melissa, which was only used when I was in trouble, usually in company with Anne. My official first name with the family has always been Missy. I am still Missy to my parents and sisters (Merry and Molly) and cousins and some of my high-school friends. And that’s fine; Missy is a comfy and friendly name, I think.
But at home, growing up, I was always Lissa too. Casually, unofficially, in a “Lissa, dinner’s ready!” kind of way. My parents would introduce me as Missy (and that’s how I signed my papers in school, and what teachers called me), but when they were just speaking offhandedly, affectionately, they usually said Lissa. So I loved that name too.
And by the end of senior year, I was tired, for a while, of being ‘little Missy.’ (I have always been the shrimpiest one in the class.) I kept meeting people with dogs named Missy. (I actually had a dog named Missy myself, when I was a baby. She was named Missy before my parents got her, and she was older than I was. They changed her name to Sissy. She was a dear little doggie.) Missy felt like a little girl’s name, and some of my drama club friends had picked up on Lissa from hearing my parents say it, so when I went to college I just introduced myself as Lissa, not Missy. And it stuck. I met Scott in college, so that’s the name he’s always known me by.
But actually he almost never calls me Lissa. He calls me L, and so do his brothers. If I call any of my brothers-in-law on the phone, or my sister-in-law Theresa, I say, “Hi, it’s L.” If you’ve known me online long enough to remember my old “tisell@earthlink.net” address, you might know that “tisell” meant ’tis L.
One thing about “Lissa” is that lots of people mis-hear it as “Lisa,” so in recent years I have introduced myself more and more as just Melissa. But it really throws me when people call me that in person. I jump, because that’s still the “teacher is mad at me” name.
Another high-school friend nicknamed me “Misery” as a joke. And it became the stuff of high-school legend one day when that friend offered me a ride home from school, and I was walking with another friend who was kind of an endearingly arrogant guy, and he assumed the invitation extended to him, and the car-driving friend informed him that no it did not. And he said, “Aw, come on, you know Misery loves company!”
She gave him a ride. 🙂
It’s true, too; I do love company.
I get a lot of letters addressed to Mrs. Wiley. Once, at a conference where I was a speaker, the organizers gave Scott a nametag too: “Scott Wiley.” That made us laugh and laugh. Sometimes if he forgets to do something and I ask him about it, he says, “Go ask Mr. Wiley.”
Most of my friends’ children call me Mrs. Peterson. I am still young enough, at age 39 and coming up on 14 years of marriage, that it feels funny to be called that. In Virginia most kids called me “Miss Lissa,” and Scott was “Mister Scott,” which cracked me up and generated a lot of Star Trek jokes on my part. Alice‘s kids call me Lissa and mine call her Alice.
Here in San Diego, people startle when they hear that my husband’s name is Scott Peterson. That name will forever be linked to the wife-and-baby murderer, here and in lots of other places. But my Scott Peterson’s name was in print long before that guy started making headlines. There’s a Scott Peterson who writes books about Rwanda, too, and one who works in film production at Warner Brothers. If you see his name in movie credits, that’s not my guy. (Although his name does come up on a computer screen in the Batcave in the first Batman animated movie, and that’s a reference to my Scott.) If it’s in a comic book, that’s my beloved Mr. Wiley.
Wiley was the first name of my great-great-great-great- I-can’t-remember-if-it’s-four-or-five-greats-grandfather, Wiley Tyler, who died in a Confederate prison camp. He was an Alabaman himself, and there’s a big story there, but I’m saving it for a novel. When HarperCollins, at the insistence of the Laura Ingalls Wilder estate, asked me to choose a pen name beginning with W so booksellers wouldn’t be so confused about where to shelve my Little House books (Roger MacBride’s Rose books gave them fits—shelve them with Laura’s books because they’re sequels? or shelve them under M for MacBride?), I chose Wiley in honor of my fine old ancestor, so that my pen name would be a family name too.
Although I quite liked Alice’s suggestion at the time that I choose “Willard” as an homage to Betsy’s sweetheart, Joe Willard, from the Betsy-Tacy books.
I once published a poem (and won a literary award for it) under my maiden name, Melissa Brannon. I’ve published lots of things under my married name, Melissa Peterson. Scott and I collaborated on a beginning reader science book about ants once, and we used our middle names as a psuedonym: Anne James.
There you go, more than you ever wanted to know about my name. My names. All of ’em.
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The Journey North gang was here today, and we had a blast. This project gets more fun week after week. All the lines on our photoperiod graph are close to converging at the 12-hour mark now, and we are starting to have guesses about the latitude of some of the mystery cities.
With the equinox fast approaching—and falling during Holy Week, when we’re taking a week off from meeting—I wanted to tell the kids today about the Egg Experiment so they could try it during our break. You know, it’s the thing about how on the spring and fall equinoxes, you’re supposed to be able to stand an egg on its end. I got out an egg for us to experiment with…
…and they took turns giving it a try, and I told them all about how the egg will only balance on its end on the equinox, not any other time of the y—
Um.