My new art project

I had an "oh, duh...." parenting moment a couple weeks ago.

Queen Mab loves to write little notes to people. She'll scribble a little, draw a heart, and announce that it's a letter for Nana, or Daddy, or Auntie Kate (she's started pronouncing the "au" in Auntie like "ah," which is really delightful) So when I discovered while unpacking a bunch of little notepads left over from high school with my maiden name on them (I didn't write many notes back then!) I gave them to her.

Then Valentine's Day happened, and the deluge began.

There were little notes EVERYWHERE. Little hearts, little stars, little scribbles, piled up in the corners of the kitchen and the pantry and getting soggy on the bathroom floor. It was madness. I gathered fistfuls of them to recycle.

One day, though, she asked me if I would draw her a heart.

So I did, and I hung it in the entryway doors so she could see it as soon as she came home from school. She was ecstatic.

She liked it so much, in fact, that a week or so later as she and I spent a pleasant hour drawing together, I made her this.

Of course she loved it too.

But it wasn't until several weeks later that I realized, as I swept up still more little scribbled notes, that if this was how she was trying to communicate her love to us, maybe that's because this is what would make her feel loved. So I scribbled this down one day and stuck it in her lunchbox.

When she came home from school she was practically bouncing. She loved it! She told me how happy she was when her teacher read it to her!
...

Oh, right. She can't read yet (well, not well enough to read Mommy's scribbled notes, anyway).

So I started sending stuff like this instead.

A sauropod having a snack, Mab with her Nana and Papa, a Happy Thursday sunflower, and a tap-dancing Triceratops.

I like to think her behavior has improved since she's been getting these little notes. But even if it's not, it's still worth the effort, because I know she feels loved. Yesterday on the way home from school, she told me how much she liked the picture she'd gotten that day (the sauropod eating an apple) and said, "You're a really good artist, Mommy. I can tell you put a lot of effort into that."

If I hadn't been driving I would have hugged her. It was hilariously adorable to hear her saying back to me the same things I say to her about her artwork.

And Mab isn't the only one who's benefiting from this. It's hard parenting Mab sometimes. I think it's probably harder being Mab, though. The world is an intense place when you have big emotions, limited life experience, and everyone else is twice as big as you (except the toddler, who is the same size and always wants the exact thing you're holding/doing right at that moment). And when I spent a few minutes every day trying to think of what kind of little picture I can draw that will make her smile, I find myself seeing the world from her perspective. And when she's furious and exhausted and screaming and hitting, it's easier to pick her up and go sit someplace quiet with her until she's calm enough to talk to me, rather than scream back. 

I remember reading about an analysis of a bunch of studies on the efficacy of spanking children, which revealed that while spanking didn't actually improve the child's behavior (if anything, it had the opposite effect), it did make the parents think the behavior had improved. When I make these notes for Mab, I feel more connected to her, and that sense of connection helps me parent her more patiently. I lose my temper less, and so even if her behavior is the same, I feel better about it because I'm not losing control over the situation.

Even if her behavior hasn't improved, mine certainly has, and the end result is a happier, more peaceful Mab and Mommy.

The blog post is pretending to be about yoga but is secretly me working out some thoughts for my Kalamazoo paper

On my previous post about the word “awareness,” my friend Kate commented on my Facebook link that “I think in yoga-speak awareness is like mindfulness, not just knowing that something exists but paying attention to that thing, in this case, the sensations that yoga is producing in you, which seems ridiculous at the beginning but gets easier with time.”

Which made concrete (concretized?) something that I had a sense I should be doing but of course didn't really grasp and was not terribly good at. Yoga, once I didn’t have to dedicate all my effort to the plain old “what is this and how do I do it and is this really a good idea?” thinking, has ended up being the place where all my writing thoughts happen. Of course, even after this reminder I still think about writing while doing yoga because I haven’t really had the necessary time to practice yet. Also, I rationalize it by telling myself I’m thinking about writing about my body and yoga, so there’s that.

But pursuing this line of thought also sent me down some other bunny trails. I have a sense that paying attention to how my body feels when I stretch and push it isn’t entirely distinct from paying attention to and loving on the people and places that surround me. After all, paying that kind of attention to my body tends to lead to me loving it ("Oh, what a nice patient body you are! Thanks for trying to cooperate with me when you would rather not! Also, while we’re on the subject, you’ve done an awesome job with the whole carrying-babies, thing, not only on the inside but also in my arms and on my back. That’s hard work! I love you, body. High five."). I recently stumbled across a collection of essays that discusses that in a lot more detail (Yoga and Body Image ed. Melanie Klein and Anna Guest-Jelly, Llewellyn Publications, 2014), because everything I know I read in books. I’m a veritable Twilight Sparkle.

At any rate, my research tends to consider the ways in which our bodies themselves are not entirely distinct from our environment. Some people call that “posthumanism”—the idea that our bodies include/overlap/intersect with our transportation, our technology (David refers to his smartphone as his “brain extension device”) and so on. See Donna Harroway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” for example. But the delightfully controversial Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has argued in Medieval Identity Machines that this was actually a very common perspective for medieval authors as well. 

Take a look at the Zodiac Man, for example (go ahead and check Google Images for examples—I’ll wait. Cohen’s is from Biblioteque Nationale MS lat. 11229 fol. 45r, but there are many others). There’s a human body, but with arrows and lines shooting out of it connecting him to the stars. Medieval medicine (yes, that was a thing—also, they bathed. Let’s not have any of what C.S. Lewis termed chronological snobbery around these parts ;-) ) was very concerned with how the movements of the stars and planets affected the movement of the humors in the body. As Cohen takes readers through his examples in art and literature, medieval bodies reveal themselves as not just organs and skin and bones and muscles, but also stars and planets and continents and weapons and tools and (in the case of knights) horses and armor.

Which makes me wonder. If medieval monks had invented yoga, what would it look like? What if Margery Kempe or Julian of Norwich had been yoginis?

Awareness (and a garden update)

The word "awareness" bothers me. Most basically, it means that you know a thing exists, like having awareness that there may be traffic on the street, hopefully resulting in looking both ways. It's also developed a more nuanced meaning of being deliberately conscious of things like breast cancer and domestic violence and other social issues, though these calls for "awareness" mostly seem to stop with, "Hey! Thing exists!" (like those gimmicky bra color things on Facebook on Breast Cancer Awareness Day, which I loathe). I don't think anyone today isn't aware of the existence of cancer, or violence, or whatever. Calls for mere awareness seem grossly inadequate to the challenge.

So when the directions on a yoga website instructed me (paraphrasing because I don't remember exactly) "with every breath commit to greater awareness," I interpreted it as, "Blah blah blah buzzword blah." What am I supposed to be aware of? And why does it matter? But I tucked the idea that awareness is to be committed to someplace safe where it wouldn't get lost.

Today Glennon of Momastery posted on Facebook, "It's World Autism Awareness Day. To all the little ones with autism: we are not just aware of you, WE LOVE THE BLOODY HECK OUT OF YOU. We are not just aware of you, WE VALUE YOU and THE GIFTS that only YOU, JUST THE WAY YOU ARE, can offer our world."

Yes. Ok. Thank you. When someone tells me to be aware of Thing, I should read that instead as "LOVE THE BLOODY HECK OUT OF" everyone involved.

So I started thinking about the awareness that the skinny-stretchy-bendy yoga lady in the picture online told me to commit to. And I remembered gardening yesterday with Margaret. She was sent home from school on Tuesday with a low-grade fever, and being the responsible parent I am (forgetting that I'm the one who sent her to school when she obviously wasn't feeling like her usual self in the first place) I kept her home for a full 24 hours after her temperature was normal, which meant that on Wednesday, she was feeling fine and I wasn't going to let her spend all day watching Dinosaur Train.

We went outside and planted sunflowers, zucchinis, and a pumpkin.

They went here because no one wants to mow this area and the sooner it gets turned into a garden the better.

We checked on the little sprouts that I posted pictures of a few weeks ago. I'm thinking daffodils.

There were these little purple crocus things that seemed so fragile I couldn't imagine how they would ever survive in our yard, but here they were.

Also these. No idea what they are, but they're intriguing.

Later I took all the minions for an adventure in the field behind our house, sleeveless in the sunshine.

So. Awareness. Small things growing (both children and plants), sun on my back, birds singing (there's one that's been spending a suspicious amount of time in the neighbors' shrub--perhaps a nest?) and an intensely blue sky.

Every day I will commit to loving the heck out of it all. And believing that the heck is being loved out of me, too.