Every now and then I go through periods of time where I’m discontent, incredibly hyper, and I start to drive myself a little more insane. I love my life and family but let’s admit it — Suburbia can become a tad monotonous. For someone who thought she’d go prematurely gray from herculean efforts to  save the whole darn world, or who at least seriously thought of a career reporting on the human condition around the globe, being married with two dogs, a fenced-in backyard in a sea of McMansions and obsessing about my child’s education isn’t quite how I pictured grown-up life. My last hold out is a death-grip refusal to get a minivan, even if it would be more practical.

Lately I’ve been fantasizing about jumping out of planes over a jungle, backpacking through China with my 5-year-old or volunteering in a refuge camp for a year. Sure I could make one or all of these little fantasies a reality, but I won’t. I’ve come to appreciate the security and stability my husband and I have created; the ebb and flow of daily life and apparently I’m too much of a chicken anyway. Still though, the seed for discontent lives inside my mind and seems to bloom at least once a year.

Thankfully my husband is also a discontent soul…full of wanderlust and a knack for dreaming. He’s not threatened when I start to let my mind wander or talk about needing an adrenalin rush. He gets it. He feels it too and rather than question my commitment to the life we’ve built, he makes suggestions or plays along until my mind and heart settle again and my state of hyperactivity subsides.

Just the other night while I was bouncing off the kitchen walls and he was trying to focus on creating an amazing chicken curry I said, “Kim, I’m going nuts. I need to do something crazy.”

He looked up from the steam of coconut milk and garlic with a naughty grin lifting the corners of his lips. “Oh really,” he said. “I thought you were planning a skydiving adventure with friends but if that’s not going to work out, I have an idea.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked. “Do tell!”

“I think you should take a lover.”

“That’s a fantastic idea. You won’t mind?”

“Not at all. Just make sure it’s a woman and you bring her home to share!”

Um, yea, he apparently has been dreaming a bit too.

I just started reading, for the third or fourth time, Deborah Tannen’s book, That’s Not What I Meant. How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships. Communication fascinates me and the first time I read Tannen’s book it was assigned as part of a college sociology class. I remember feeling captivated, enlightened and nodding my head in affirmation through each passage and chapter.

Every time I’ve read the book I’ve taken away something different, something relevant to whatever is going on in my professional or personal life at the time. Monday I started reading it again for two reasons…I have a new client who’s conversational style is much different than my own and I want to build the relationship. Second, I find myself struggling with a new awareness in my marriage.

You already know there’s a significant age difference between my husband and I. Other people most likely have given our 27-year number gap more thought than I have over the 14+ years we’ve been together, but recently I’ve begun to contemplate, to become aware in ways I never anticipated. I want to talk about how I feel and what I think, after all…I’m a woman and therefore hard-wired to make sense of my world through conversation. It’s a difficult conversation to have with friends, with my husband, with myself.

I think most of us first become aware of people we love aging with our parents. We expect parents to go through certain life stages and different realities long before we do. We anticipate our parents will require different circumstances, care and understanding while we’re still young enough to provide certain comforts. We don’t learn in the natural course of events to anticipate those same changes in our spouse long before we’re experiencing them ourselves.

I remember when Kim and I first got together, he clearly explained numerous times that, “Tricia, one day I’ll be an old man and you’ll still be a fairly young woman. It’s not fair for me to ask that of you.” Of course I reassured him and said it was my choice to make, it was my future too and that I understood what I was signing up for. He believed me. I believed me. I was 23.

Given the opportunity again today, even with the growing awareness I have of how different our realities will eventually become, I’d make the decision all over again to stay with him. I don’t have any sense of regret or remorse, and I certainly have no intention or desire to bail so let’s put that on the table just in case you’re wondering where I’m headed with this conversation. What I do need is to find a new kind of peace with this growing sense of mortality and the small age-related changes I’m observing that with time will become more pronounced.

Finding that peace is where my struggle begins, and it’s where differences in conversational style become acute and cumbersome. Broaching the subject with my husband is delicate. Regardless of the words I use, he HEARS what he told me all those years ago… that one day he’d be aging while I was still young, and he feels guilty for having anticipated it, yet still moving forward with the relationship. That guilt creates a filter through which my words need grease and meaning becomes much more subjective than I intend. When he responds, I’m also filtering his words through that previous conversation and the guilt I have for even bringing this up since after all…we discussed this before we committed to each other. What right do I have to bring this up now. And I know he can’t help but wonder if I say it out loud, does that mean I’m going to abandon him simply because he’s experiencing things he has no control over…he’s progressing through life just as he should and what right do I have to acknowledge the observations? It makes everyone uncomfortable.

Yet here I am…a woman…hard wired to make sense of my world through conversation.

Perhaps the longer a couple is together the more filters we construct, the more webs of unintended consequences we create where every carelessly strung together sentence carries a whisper of some previous conversation, a  call-to-action in our brain to read between non-existent lines. As my husband and I figure out how to talk through a new awareness, I’m quite sure I have to think twice about how my words are delivered and how they’re heard. The phrases I choose and their delivery will hurt or caress when my intent is simply to communicate my truth.

What about you dear friends. Have you recently had a difficult conversation, broached a challenging topic and found you needed to think twice about how preconceptions or internal dialogue is interfering with how your words are heard?

This place feels like the arms of an old friend you haven’t seen in far too long, but whose embrace erases all the bubbles in time and you’re exactly where you left off. I miss it here in the land of blog and I’m ready to shout from the rooftop, dance my fingers across my keyboard and check back in with all my blog friends to see what y’all have been up to the last few months.

I look forward to catching up.

XOXO

Eventually the pull to meander through multiple ideas, stories and the issues I care about will bring me back to this space, but for now I’m simply not enjoying the clicking and hopping required to be a participatory community member. I want to spend time unplugged, listening to my child giggle, and more time quietly rummaging through my mind to more fully develop the writing projects that don’t belong here.

à la prochaine,

XOXO

Tricia

He will continue to thrive and we’ll all learn to accept this milestone with grace and eagerness and remember to savor as many moments as possible; time simply slips thorough our fingers. It’s that passage of time that I was having the hardest time accepting, not the idea that my wonderful son is starting a new stage of his life adventure. Today I feel more at peace with his growth and the role I play. I still want to stop the clock, but I’m making peace with the reality that I can’t. However quickly that clock ticks and chimes, I want to help him become the very best person he can be, and to fulfill every ounce of potential he has.

We started calling Friday “Funday” because at Aaron’s school Friday afternoons are reserved for activities that are thought of as traditionally more fun. Of course I’d argue that a good book is the most fun, but hey…what do I know?

To carry the “funday’ theme forward, several months ago we started letting Aaron eat dinner in the family room. With the TV on. I know, I know, just string me up by my ears.

I’m one of those crazy obsessive people who does not allow my child to eat food anywhere except at the kitchen counter or the kitchen table, and there’s NO TV allowed during meals. I grew up participating in nightly family dinners and have incredibly fond memories of those times together. Dinner was often the only chance we had to all sit down together, have an uninterrupted conversation, touch base on what was going on in each other’s lives and explore each other’s thoughts on a variety of things.

My dad worked from 6:00 in the morning until at least 7:30 at night…SEVEN days a week. Sitting down together for dinner was incredibly important for our relationship and I’m certain I learned some of the most valuable life-lessons and values, things that still echo in my mind, from talking with my dad over mom’s shepherd pie, and I’m sure it’s not a surprise that I’ve carried the family dinner tradition into my adult life. It’s just not an option here at Chez Sanders…except on Fridays.

I actually can’t take the blame credit for initiating this little ritual. I was out of town and my husband let Aaron eat dinner in the family room on a Friday night. Our little son was so over-the-moon excited to have what he considers a huge privilege, we decided to make it a weekly routine.  Each Friday as we start making dinner, Aaron gets out a little tray and arranges a placement, napkin, silverware, dishes and even his very own little pepper shaker, and he does it all with great precision and pride. It’s fun to watch and I think this is a tradition we’ll keep. I just can’t resist those great big smiles he gives when we say it’s “Friday Funday!”

What about you? Do you have any family dinner time traditions you love?

I’m also guest posting today over at Life and Times of a WickedStepMom. Head over and say hello if you have a chance.

What is your altruistic dream? Would you feed the poor? Save the planet? Reform education? Cure cancer? Stop domestic abuse? End genocide in Africa? If there was one thing you could do and have a positive impact, and you didn’t have to worry about your current limitations related to family or career or…whatever keeps us stagnating, what would you want to accomplish? Just imagine the sky’s the limit…

When I wrote last night about not being ready for Aaron to start Kindergarten I was raw, peeled and agonizingly raw. Today I’m searching for a spin on my perspective and I think I’ve opened a new well of insight that was closed to me last night.

Of course I am mourning the passage of time and all the ways it ravages every cliché and clock and heart beat, but I have to remind myself that I spent many, many years wondering if I’d ever hear someone call me Mommy. I fought and plodded and determined my way to motherhood, and for every click of time that passes and breaks my heart, I have to remember how blessed I am to have this opportunity to mother…how determined I am that this one shot I have at parenting will count in as many ways as possible, and I can’t do that if I stop time and forget that my responsibility is to help Aaron find himself…to grow and mature and to become what ever, who ever,  he is meant to become with all the values and character I hope he continues to develop. It’s a journey and I have to pinch myself some days to simply remember his presence in my life isn’t a dream. He’s a reality, my reality. He’s in this world because of a tremendous amount of love and the only way to honor his existence is to honor his growth. If I fall off the wagon again, please remind me.

This is my issue, my hang up, not my child’s. He’s ready. He’s looking forward to reuniting with his friends, to days and days of manipulating Montessori materials until his little mind is exhausted, but me…tonight I want to hold on tight and never let go. Tonight I want to wrap myself in the iridescent bubble of memory and let it strangle the sands of time, to stop the clock, to comfort this mother’s heart and let me believe that life doesn’t have to stop and count my heart beats. Please. Is anybody listening? If I beg and throw my soul at the base of an hour glass, can we slow this down? Can I have those lost moments back? Please. Will you put the baby back into my arms and allow me to drift away on the scent of chubby thighs and baby soap? Please. Can you stop my heart from aching for all that I know I’ve missed; for all that I don’t want to miss, for every moment, every tiny drop of sand that passed through my fingers without notice? Please. Can you help me not to feel selfish, to wish him luck, to encourage his independence, to relish each step he takes away from me. Please. Can you teach me how to love this transition, to embrace his new-found abandonment of baby and his rocketing into childhood…into kindergarten, into becoming more and more his own person. Please. Can you help me?

Aaron is a chatter box. He loves to talk and talk and talk and talk, even when he’s in the bathroom. Although I don’t have a penis, I imagine aiming one is a lot like driving a car. You need to keep your eyes on the road or inevitably your steering wheel will follow your gaze. I’m constantly telling Aaron, “No talking while you’re peeing.” It doesn’t matter. We’ve tried all the tricks … Cheerios as targets, requiring he help clean up his own mess, praising, explaining, talking, threatening…none of it works. Multiple times a day, we know we’re going to spend time cleaning on our hands and knees.

Friday morning Aaron was in the bathroom and while I was waiting outside the door, he was trying to talk to me. Repeating my mommy mantra, no talking while you’re peeing, I peeked in and saw his head was turned away from the toilet. His eyes were certainly not on the road and he apparently had no awareness that his steering wheel was turned left on what should have been a straight away. Urine was streaming down the back of the porcelain goal. Frustrated, I started to yell, which of course scared him. He lost all control and before I could blink there was now a geyser-type eruption covering two walls, the toilet, the floor and the roll of paper. My response made an even bigger mess than what otherwise would have been.

I’m not immune to flares of temper, that’s for sure. It’s unusual for me to yell at my child but it happens and when it does I see an immediate change in his behavior. He gets quiet, clingy, and his eyes stop shinning. I suppose I could find value in the fact that when I yell he normally responds with an immediate capitulation and tows the line to meet whatever request I’m dolling out, but I don’t find any long term value in his compliance. Although I’m guilty, I don’t think yelling and screaming at our children is acceptable. As a parent, I should strive to walk with a higher sense of self control.

When I yell at Aaron and his eyes immediately lose their luminosity, he becomes hyper aware of my mood and his surroundings. All of a sudden he takes on this over-the-top need to please. He’ll offer to perform all sorts of random acts of helpfulness, he’ll seek me for extra hugs and affirmations, and he’ll tell me a hundred times in a 20 minute time span that he loves me. I feel horrible with the adoration because I know it’s not the natural state of affairs; it’s him reacting to a hurt I’ve inflicted and although the bruise isn’t visible to the naked eye, it’s certainly visible to this mommy’s heart.

I wonder how many invisible bruises it takes before the change that takes place inside a child’s mind each time he or she is the subject of a screaming parent becomes more than a 20 minute capitulation and instead lasts a lifetime. I don’t want to find out.