Jolene was the sprout of every girl who had ever hurt my feelings, reincarnated as a preschooler.
Yet my daughter was inexplicably devoted.
Ever hopeful, she would greet her wee frien-emy warmly.
Jolene would shriek and hide under the table. She would ignore–then punish cruelly if my child played with anyone else.
When confronted, Jolene would blame her actions on her delicate emotional state. “I’m really missing my mom today,” she would say, copping a sad face. “That’s why I’m making bad choices.”
But she would look me in the eye in a way that tipped her tiny hand.
In honor of the upcoming holiday, I wanted to take a moment to think about gratitude.
If that sentence gave you the heebie jeebies, join the club. For some unknown reason, I have a deep-seated repulsion for Chicken Soup-y type aphorisms and daily meditations.
Perhaps it is accentuated by the cliché art and bad fonts which typically accompany such things.
Don’t get me wrong. I love sunsets. In fact, I would be thrilled to be present for the moment depicted above. But what’s great about the setting sun over the lake is definitely not the cloying overscript on a two-dimensional reproduction.
Moreover, just because I won’t hang that poster doesn’t mean I have a beef with fostering gratitude. On the contrary! Gratitude is essential. I’m working on this often, striving to be a better person, and I certainly don’t want my kids to grow up to be selfish brutes. So…presenting…
A brief discussion of gratitude in a sans serif style.
Semi-recent articles in the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, the Atlantic Monthly, and Family Circle once again outline that teaching gratitude to your kids is important. Do it.
Why? Fostering gratitude doesn’t just make more tolerable people; it makes happier people. Jeffrey Froh (PsyD) did a study with middle schoolers. He asked one group to list up to five things for which they were grateful everyday for two weeks. Another group listed hassles, and the last group filled out surveys. The first group showed a marked jump in optimism and overall well-being that extended for a while, even after the study was completed. Those students also had a more positive attitude about school in general. Feeling grateful boosts happiness, gives people better perspective in life, and improves relationships at home, school, and work.
To sum up what I’ve learned…most experts recommend:
Model gratitude. Big surprise. Thank your kids. Thank your significant other. Thank friends, cashiers, relatives, teachers, baristas, maybe even the DMV clerk. After all, it must be a sucky job.
Give positive reinforcement. Even just “hey, thanks for noticing.” or “I appreciate your comment,” can help the set a pattern of behavior.
Give them less. Have kids work toward something they want, do chores, earn money. Let them know the value of an item. I could buy you those shoes, but then we can’t order pizza tonight. Lost a backpack? Help earn a new one. Talk about how work hours translate into garbage pick up, electricity, gasoline, vacation. Read aloud Farmer Boy, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. In addition to being a humorous and vivid story, it discusses hard work, chores, about wasting nothing. There is also a great discussion about the value of a silver dollar that Almanzo would like to spend at the fair. Another book recommendation: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter. If that doesn’t make you appreciate having heat and food on the table, I don’t know what will. Amazing.
Volunteer as a family. We’ve started very small. We collect our change and bring it to CoinStar periodically, which allows us to select a charity and send it electronically. What could be simpler? It teaches them that even pennies and nickels can add up to something significant. We’ve also baked cookies and given them out to homeless people, sold cupcakes to raise money for charities, and currently we foster kittens for the SPCA.
Coach when appropriate. I often have my kids make their own purchases, even when they are using my money. I remind them to say thank you (before or after the transaction, not during. I try to avoid barking at them while they are mid-transaction) and ask them to leave a tip when appropriate. They need little nudges along the way. “I was disappointed that you didn’t seem more grateful after I helped you with your homework. I could have been doing other things.” Reminding them of opportunities to be aware and thankful is not cheating.
Structure a moment of gratitude into the day. Practice, practice, practice! Gratitude is a muscle that needs exercising. Examining life for the positive helps lay new pathways in the brain, creating a positive mindset. That explains why Jeffrey Froh’s experiment had such an impact. This is big! I grew up saying grace at the table, so it feels natural to ask my kids, “What are you thankful about today?” when we sit down to eat dinner. I answer the question, too.
I highly recommend Shawn Achor’s TED talk on Happiness. Don’t be put off by its title: “The Happy Secret to Better Work.” It actually includes the happy secret to better life. There are amazing nuggets tucked in amongst some amusing anecdotes. Among them: “90% of your longterm happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world.” In other words, by your MINDSET. Further study has shown that increasing positivity increases creativity, energy, and intelligence, because the dopamine released not only makes us feel happiness, it turns on the learning centers of our brains.
In the last two minutes of his talk, he outlines five quick and easy ways to increase happiness–based on research and not hopeful speculation. Guess what comes in at number one? Write down three new gratitudes each day for 21 days in a row. That is why I now have a gratitude journal, though I can’t call it that, of course. The phrase “Gratitude Journal” makes me gag a little. I have a crass name which I can’t repeat here, but which makes me laugh every time I take it out. I figure that makes me happier, too.
Sasha, we called her, not knowing it was usually the name of a Russian man.
Now the name has broadened for me. There are poets and Presidential daughters and even a pop star alter ego who bear the name. But as a child, the only Sasha in my world was our very bad dog.
My teenaged sister had endlessly begged for her, and sworn to train and care for her every need. Big surprise: I only recall seeing her once or twice with an empty milk carton and the ‘pooper scooper’ in hand.
Sasha was (of course) adorable as an incontinent mutt puppy. Puppies are charming. As she grew, however–unfettered by discipline and authority–she hardened my heart toward nearly every drooling crotch sniffer I would meet for the next couple of decades.
Sasha scratched our back door until the bottom right corner was worn thin, and flapped loudly with every paw nudge: her own relentless doorbell.
And if the door opened for any reason, that dog shot out like Usain Bolt after a case of Red Bull. The next 30 minutes were spent trying to find in which neighbor’s yard she was digging or defecating.
Since my sister was busy dating boys my mother disapproved of, I was often saddled with the job of dog walking. Sasha had a choke collar and what seemed at the time to be a twenty-pound chain. I would occasionally wrap it around my hand in an attempt to maintain grip on the wild beast, forgetting that this was the quickest way to crush my hand into a temporarily useless hunk of flesh. Sasha would lurch from the house, dragging me past a couple of houses before leaving me behind to nurse my fingers and hope she turned up shortly.
She had many other talents:
Stealing fresh-baked items from the dining room table. Sometimes whole cakes. Especially during parties, while people were distracted.
Vomiting.
Eating vomit.
Repeating cycle.
Bad breath.
Finding porcupines.
Lying in motor oil.
Eating frogs.
Getting unsightly mats in her fur from rolling in trash and dirt.
Hearing scissors open from 100 yards away–even when sleeping.
Due to the combined result of the last two, she once had a soup can lid stuck to her belly for a couple of weeks.
I have heard worse. I have heard of a dog that–during a time out in the garage–broke the car window and chewed through the dashboard to get to half a Power Bar in the glove compartment. Shenanigans like that are way out of Sasha’s league. To be honest, she did have some sweet moments now and then, and her shortcomings were the fault of her owners. Sasha was a part of my childhood and a member of our family, and it was a sad day when she succumbed to liver failure.
Just like on the previous fourteen days, I have been flailing around for a writing idea again today. As an added incentive, I told myself I couldn’t eat lunch until I post, which means I am getting ridiculously hungry and increasingly desperate.
So I have turned to a list of suggested writing prompts for assistance. Here’s sampling:
“Do you enjoy growing old or do you fight against it?”
No. I do not want to write about that. Does anyone? Perhaps yogis or saints.
Next up, “If you could permanently get rid of one worry, which one would it be?” You know what? Cataloguing and weighing each worry–starting with growing old, of course–has set off a mild anxiety attack. Thanks a lot, people.
Though it didn’t spawn ideas, this one did cheer me out of my funk: “You’re a Nigerian prince with millions in the bank but you can’t access it without an American co-signer. To your surprise and disappointment, nobody will help you transfer the money.”
Most promising at first read: “What is the one appliance that you can’t live without?” Easy: the toaster. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything to add to that besides the fact that toast is the most fabulous, most perfect food in the universe, unless you have run out of butter, and then…why bother?
Sadly, in the midst of my search, guess what appeared on the right side of my screen?
Dang. This felt personal.
Hm. Must be time to put this post out of its misery. Kudos to you for slogging through it. Any suggestions for getting unstuck are indeed welcome.
My brother-in-law is a very ambitious and successful guy. I asked him once, “how do you juggle everything?” And he told me, “Sometimes, when I’m hurrying from one thing to another, I pull over, turn off the car engine for two minutes, and breathe.”
His comment didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time. It wasn’t delivered in a “here’s what you must do to be amazing like me” manner. It was just honest and straightforward. And effective. Dubious? Try it yourself.
Today I would like to take a moment to mull over a few other comments that seemed very small at the time, and grew to be important tenets along the way.
“Don’t discount this young man just because he’s nice to you.” I was indeed surprised to hear a comment like that from my mother. Smart lady, though. I married the guy.
“Be more Beret.” This sounds like a no-brainer. People say things like “be yourself” and “be true to yourself” all the time. But somehow, throwing my name in there made all the difference to me. I thought, “I am Beret, how can I be more Beret?” I started small, of course. I started reading books that I like, instead of the ones I should read. I started saying no to things. I started saying yes to things. I started making time for things that make me happy. I started singing along with catchy songs even though they might be insipid. Who cares?
“You don’t have to love being a mother, you just have to love your children.” This was news to me. If I ever write a book about parenting, this is the quote I will use on the dedications page.
Lastly, when I started teaching, I didn’t go through the traditional credentialing route. I hadn’t taken any education courses in college, so I had a boatload of theory crammed into six or eight weeks one summer, and then I was thrown to the wolves. Terrified nearly to paralysis, I asked a seasoned teacher for a few wise words before my first day. “Always have an extra piece of chalk in your pocket,” he said.
When I tell that story to people they roll their eyes. “Nobody has chalkboards anymore,” they say. But while I am grateful for discussions of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Krashen’s Input Hypothesis,that teacher’s advice still rings in my ears. For me, it meant that no matter how great a challenge I was facing, how insurmountable and overwhelming it might seem, I could break it down into tiny, doable tasks. Likewise, despite the fact that the knowledge and skills we need as teachers/parents/humans are hopelessly infinite, we can start by learning one thing and building upon it.
I will now imagine that rather than staying up late yet again to finish tomorrow’s lecture and a writing project due at midnight, I am instead looking at the light at the end of the tunnel. Or sleeping peacefully.
Someone mentioned to me today, “soon we’ll need to be gearing up for the holidays.”
And I thought, when did we gear down?
Life is flying at such a frantic pace this fall that I honestly don’t believe I can squeeze anything more out of the days. The idea that soon we’ll be juggling what we have plus a boatload more is not particularly appealing.
Kinney. Not pictured: the other half of the hopelessly incontinent duo–Sleater.
It was a crappity day for everyone under my roof.
I counted four meltdowns in our house today, and one of them was mine. I was sending memorial flowers from my family today when I remembered I could not put my Dad’s name on the card–I’ve been a little raw ever since. Though he died in May, I am still trying to wrap my head around the new reality. Evidently grief is neither a smooth nor predictable process.
I also spent 4 1/2 hours driving today–mostly carpool and after school activities–and was consequently unable to finish two crucial projects that are due tomorrow afternoon at the very latest. I am hosed.
Meanwhile, Miss 11 failed a math test, which she had to bring home for me to sign. She has a major project due tomorrow–still unfinished–and a test to study for. Miss 9’s after school activities kept her busy until we arrived home at 6 pm. At that point, she was too tired to approach her long division and decimals without a flood of tears and a complete cranial shutdown.
Luckily, at about 6:15, the spouse got home with a new crop of therapy fuzzballs. We’ve been fostering kittens on and off all fall, which is pretty great unless they have diarrhea or persistent confusion about the litter box. Constantly scrubbing everything with bleach and enzymatic cleaner is less gratifying than petting and snuggling and playing. This batch seems pretty well adjusted, however.
While I cooked dinner, I sentenced the girls to mandatory kitten time, and after dinner, I made myself go down there as well.
I’d write more, but I could use a little more purring.
Artwork by Mel Bochner; photograph by Julien Foulatier.
Many hours of my life are spent trapped in a moving vehicle crammed with middle school girls. In the clear minority, I have had to relinquish radio control and speaking rights in exchange for survival.
More than once, I’ve thought about that scene from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles where Steve Martin says: “When you’re telling your little stories, here’s a good idea: Have a point! It makes it so much more interesting for the listener.”
For some unknown reason–perhaps I was too exhausted to say no–I recently found myself chaperoning 400 sixth graders on their field trip to the Academy of Sciences. Now, I do love the Academy, but you can imagine how much inane commentary filtered through the scientific learning experience.
The trip also involved walking long distances with hoards of whiny youth and taking public transport without losing anyone. Imagine the expressions of the other folks riding the bus when they saw a group of 75 12-year-olds poised to board. Priceless. I’m sorry I didn’t snap a photo of that scene.
In fact, the only photo I took was of some poor stuffed creature who symbolized for me the gangly-awkwardness of this particular age of kids.
I mean, he’s getting some leaves, but he looks ridiculous.
I began to pretend I was an anthropologist, studying an unknown community of slightly shorter, hormonally challenged humans. When possible, I surreptitiously typed notes on my phone to review later. I only wish I’d taken more. A sampling:
“We had very, very different ideas about what toast is. It all has to do with the multiplicative inverse.”
“My feet hurt. I should have worn a wheelchair.”
“Everyone knows unicorns poop strawberry cheesecake.” Well, I do now.
My approach made the whole experience bearable.
As a special bonus, chaperoning “allowed” me to drive two extra carpool loads last week. Though I can’t take notes while driving, bringing a ton of snacks does cut down on the chatter somewhat. That will have to suffice until I can get a decent recording device set up.
Bad Parenting 101 