The Self-Regard Project

I'm blowdrying my hair for social change.

Remember in August, how people dropping spoons were making me burst into tears? I was stressed and unhappy and sleepless and on edge. It seemed that no matter how hard I tried, life didn't get any less chaotic--generally my response to this kind of situation is to try yet harder. More home-cooked meals? Leave work a little early. Need to get more time at the office? Get up a little earlier. Everyone running late? Drive them all in, skip the shower, throw on some jeans. Mornings a disastrous rush? Get a low-maintenance haircut. Develop a uniform of wash-and-wear jeans and tees. Pynchon has to work two full time jobs at once? Take two (or three) weeks of vacation time to mop up the extra on the home front. Lot of expenses for the house this month? Cut back my own spending .

Trying harder wasn't working. All the sacrifices of my own time and effort and resources weren't making anyone any happier, healthier, more productive, or less stressed, least of all me. So, with Pynchon's very strong encouragement, I pushed back at life. I started what I am calling the 'Self-Regard Project.'

The Self-Regard Project is pretty simple, but its effects have been profound. I found me again, and even if life is still largely a disastrous chaos, I am much more firmly rooted in my own strengths. Here's what I did: I stopped martyring myself, and devoted some of all that energy I was expending trying to smooth everyone else's life into things that were important for me. Currently, the Self-Regard Project is proceeding on three fronts that maybe don't seem to be related, but are: fashion and beauty, exercise, and saying no at work.

Fashion and Beauty:

I got a high-maintenance haircut, a glossy and stylish angled bob that suits my face and my aesthetic. I didn't think it suited my lifestyle: it requires daily washing, daily moussing, daily blow-drying, and just a touch of straight-iron. And do you know what? For eight weeks in a row, I've blow-dried my hair every damn day. It takes 10 minutes, but I walk out of that bathroom feeling attractive and polished. There is a spring in my step. Every day, too, I do my makeup. It takes about five minutes, but that five minutes brightens my eyes, evens out my skin tone, makes me feel well-rested because I look well-rested. In eight weeks of school, also, I've not worn the same outfit twice. Many of the same pieces, yes, but in different combinations. During the day, or in the shower, or at night in bed, I idly run through my wardrobe in my head, combining and recombining pieces. I feel creative. I feel connected to the world. I feel attractive and competent and engaged.

Exercise:

I walk home from work nearly every day. I have had to sort out the child-care pickup/dropoff routine with Pynchon, but he is happy to support me in this. We just have to plan it. I walk with my colleagues, chatting. I walk by myself, listening to podcasts. I take the time to smell the fresh air, watch the leaves fall, splash in puddles in my boots, feel the sun on my face. I go to yoga twice a week. I've moved into the intermediate class and I find that as we are doing more complex poses with more integrity and learning yogic thinking, I am calming down and getting strong all at once. Yoga is in the early evenings, and I leave Pynchon and Munchkin at the dinner table. "Have a good yoga, Mom!" Munchkin hollers, smiling. I'm home to put her to bed, and she hasn't missed me at all.

Saying no at work:

We all work too much, you know? Checking our email at home, bringing the paperwork to the dinner table after the dishes are cleared away, sneaking a couple of hours at the office on the weekends, tackling a pile of grading at 4:30 am, just because. I say no. I won't do it. I need the rest and I deserve it. If I put in a full day at the office, there is absolutely no reason on earth I should be emailing about policy or grades with colleagues or students after supper, on the weekend. And I am getting better at enforcing this boundary.

"Set your foundation with strength and integrity," counsels my yoga teacher. We line up in well-formed mountain pose--push down from all four corners of your feet, hug muscle onto bone, set your shoulders and lift your heart toward the sky--and as she walks around the room pushing down on our shoulders as hard as she can, we don't move. We don't feel it. A strong foundation greatly increases the loads you can bear, and bear more easily than before.

Women, generally, are bearing a lot of loads in their 30s--work, family, life. If I could reduce these loads, I would. I'm still an insomniac, Pynchon still works a lot of overtime, Munchkin still does her best to stay awake in her bed until 11pm so that she is a screechy overtired mess at 7:30am. As it turns out, martying myself doesn't change any of this things. What I can change is me. And I'm marvelling at what a change my sense of self, my life, have undergone simply by committing to blow-dry my hair every day.

The Self-Regard Project has me setting my foundation with strength and integrity. I feel better; I look better; I'm stronger; I smile more.

Do you have a Self-Regard Project?

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Exercise, most of us can agree, is usually an unalloyed Good Thing. Fancy hair and unique outfits and daily makeup might look more like the Beauty Myth, but for me it's about acknowledging that it's okay to take time for myself. That I deserve it. Similarly, there is a strong cultural narrative that proposes that 'flexible' work time gives us more freedom to schedule ourselves, but I've found instead that perpetual connectivity means I never have any time I can fully devote to myself of my family, and so for me a strict 9-5 is much more freeing, and healthy. Your self-regard project might look different.

Last night, an Arrowroot cookie saved my life

Okay it was this morning, and it wasn't, I guess, my life as much as my sanity.

For the past two weeks, our mornings have been a dream. Pynchon and I take turns in the shower; he gets to shave in peace, and I get to blow dry my hair and put on makeup. In the background, you might hear Munchkin singing songs to and about her My Little Ponies, or maybe the thump of her feet as she chases the cat around the house.

What you don't hear is screaming: you don't hear her screaming, you don't hear me yelling, you don't hear Pynchon slamming doors in frustration. You don't hear tantrums, screechy non-compliance, refusals to get out of bed / go pee / get dressed / come downstairs / eat breakfast / put shoes and coat on / leave the house / get in the car. You do hear playing and laughing. You hear songs. You hear reasonable conversations, accomodations and compromises on the theme of "three more minutes of 'bolleyball' and then we will put our shoes on" or "once you make your pee-pee, then I'll read you the book."

Our out of control toddler and our out of control parenting? Is suddenly ... not an issue. We are just enjoying our time together in the mornings now, and when we're late for work, it's because one of us lingered too long over playtime or family breakfast, not willing to walk away to brush our teeth or pack a lunch.

The solution?

Two Arrowroot cookies and a glass of milk.

When we pad into Munchkin's room in the morning, cooing soft greetings just like we always did, we hand her the cookies and milk. She sits on a cushion on her floor, a little groggy, and eats. Drinks. There have been no morning tantrums in the two weeks we've been doing this.

It's a miracle. A miraculous change in our day that no amount of Dr. Google's or Dr. Sears' or Dr. Karp's advice could bring about. It wasn't about discipline or routine or attachment or consequences. It was about blood sugar.

Munchkin, recall, turned three in June. She weighs 42 pounds and her size four pants are now riding up above her ankles. She's a big kid, growing like crazy since the moment she was conceived and I guess she's just really, really hungry. We missed out on this obvious point maybe because she was always throwing tantrums about NOT wanting to eat breakfast, but I think (now) that this was an artifact of desperately low blood-sugar: by the time we asked about breakfast, she was already in a frenzy that didn't feel like hunger, that felt like rage and sadness.

We are agog at the change, at the possibility 60 calories worth of baked flour offers for family harmony, for joy. After preschool, if she suddenly gets unreasonable and moody? Cookie. Saturday morning after two hours of playing picnic with plastic food, angry that the blanket won't fold right? Cookie. It's not that we're bribing her with food. It's that she's hungry. The change in her behaviour is always immediate and remarkable. Probably, the moment of calm and refocusing offered by the 2 minutes of sitting still in the kitchen to munch her snack helps too, but really. Who could have imagined the humble Arrowroot to have such awesome properties?

Not me, that's for sure.

So if your kid is an awful wreck and you've tried everything you know? Try two Arrowroot cookies and a glass of milk. There's probably a hug in it for you--I know there always is for me.

Amazing.

I'm big, and very hungry.

Egregious lapses in road safety!

Every year, I write a back to school post wherein I become wistful or contemplative or hopeful or nostalgic. I think this year, I will instead shake my head in amazement.

I live in a small city, rather than a small town, and so we are more easily able to absorb the influx of students in September than is, say, New Haven (Yale), or Charlottesville (U Virginia), whose populations nearly double when the kids come back. No. It's not that bad, but an extra 30,000 or so people still means ... 30,000 more people on the road during rush hour.

Prepare to shake your heads in amazement at the traffic lunacy, the egregious lapses in road safety, I witnessed en route to school today in the family truckster (Toyota Echo) with Munchkin and Pynchon. Bear in mind that we drove a whole 3.2 kilometres.

1. Not so hip student girl on mountain bike cutting across traffic to mount the sidewalk.
2. Hipster student girl on a cruiser bike, in the bike lane, hooray! But EATING A BAGEL SANDWICH. While zooming down a four lane road.
3. Pedestrian eating a sandwich and carrying an open laptop FROM WHICH HE WAS READING while crossing a four lane road.
4. Women driving a sedan with junk piled so high in the back window we could hardly tell what she was doing, only she was weaving across two lanes, unsure quite of where she wanted to go.
5. Woman driving a RAV-4, zooming up the left turn lane in order to pass us, so that she could make it to the red light before us, and sit there.
6. Rear-end collision involving delivery van and subcompact car.
7. Man OPENING SNAIL MAIL while driving. He had a fistful of envelopes on the steering wheel.
8. Two cops in cars, operating a speed trap on a side road. Officers, it's not the speed, it's the stupidity.

What did YOU see in your travels today?

Baby's First

Baby's first rhetorical question, with hands on hips and brow deeply furrowed: "Do I look happy, Mom? No. I don't. I am very angry with you."

The context was perfect--she was trying to get my attention, and I was resolutely emptying the dishwasher despite her entreaties to play Dora. The tone was perfect--a kind of self-aware broadcast declarative designed to 'hook' the audience.

Is there a page for that in the commemorative album? Is there a tickbox for that on the developmental charts? What kinds of figures of speech ought children acquire competence in, and at what age?

Rhetorical questions. Huh.

I'm always shocked at the sophistication of Munchkin's language, her capacity with metaphor and analogy ("I eat blueberries for my blue eyes, and you can eat apples and have red eyes!), her use of book-style narration, with adverbs ("And the pony said, happily, 'I will help you, Boots!'), and her ability to use language to express strong feelings ("I don't want to cry softly, Mom, I want to cry loudly, because I am very frustrated and not happy! I want to be sad for a little while.")

A lot of her fancy talk comes from books--"my belly is the colour of a sunset!" she tells me, quoting Pinkalicious, or "I was so mad, I was FURIOUS," she cribs from Fancy Nancy. Some of her most-used play speech comes from Dora, or Diego, or the Wonder Pets: "There's an animal in trouble, Mom! Come on! Vamanos!" she implores, as we crawl under the dining room table with a paper clip in hand, to save a plastic dinosaur stuck on a Cheerio.

I kind of like these echoes we hear from her, because it makes me feel we've done the right thing being careful about the media she's exposed to. Her books push her to more syntactically challenging sentence forms, a richer vocabulary in a thematic context appropriate to three year olds--fantastical worlds, maybe, but ones where whimsy and kindess set the tone. Her TV shows are semantically benign: cooperation, sharing, problem solving, talking trains and singing animal that offer her scripts that she needs in order to get along in the world. It is amazing how she soaks it all up, how these texts structure her interactions when the book is shut and the TV is turned off.

By contrast, I see a lot of little kids quoting chapter and verse from Tropic Thunder or Anchorman or The Simpsons, parroting sarcasms they do not understand, and engaging in backtalk, defiance, and many other kinds of verbal and behavioural rudeness. And why not? That's what they see. It really, really bothers me.

Of course, Munchkin picks up a lot of her cues about the world--and her language--from me and Pynchon too. Her first rhetorical question, I blush to own, is one she has heard many times from me. She is a tiny mirror reflecting back our conduct to us, as much as she parrots the television and books she's exposed to. At least once this has come out, in perfect context, as "JESUS FUCKING CHRIST ALREADY!" (part of our family frustration routine) but more often we hear, "Let's get your doudou, Baby Bear, and Mama Bear will tuck you in nice and cosy for your snug!" (part of our family good-night routine).

Isn't it funny, how when our kids use their burgeoning language skills, they express us almost as much as they express themselves?

Rattle and Hum

In the timeless rivalry betwee side-of-fork versus not-quite-softened red pepper contested in the epic battle to Separate a Bite-Sized-piece from the Omelette, red pepper held firm and Pynchon's fork slipped from his grasp, shot up in the air, and landed with a jangling crash back on his plate, an explosion of noise and movement in the middle of supper.

Naturally, I burst into tears.

Pynchon looked at me, a little shocked, but I couldn't quite hear what he was saying as the whooshing blood in my ears, the knocking of my racing heart, and the distracting sharp prickle of primal fear under my arms blocked him out.

My nerves are shot.

The root of the problem is that I'm not sleeping. Again. Whereas I used to fall asleep within minutes, only to wake up in the middle of the night for hours at a time, now I don't even get that first bit of rest. My new trick is to toss and turn for an hour or two, fall alseep, and wake up, heart pounding and mind racing, ten minutes later. I fall asleep somewhat easier if I attempt a midday nap, but still, ten minutes later--boom boom ack--it's all over.

There are other things. For example, massive road reconstruction 50 feet away from my house means that between 7am and 7pm my house is literally shaking. Glasses rattle, fixture hum, windows vibrate noisily in their frames. The plaster cracks. Nothing can stop the noise from intruding either, the whine and drone of many heavy machines rumble forwards, beep backwards, and bang up and down. I'm desperate to leave in the morning.

Munchkin has been waking up at night, not for long, but enough to rip me up from the depths.

And last night, oh last night! The student five houses down had a party that escalated into a raucous 11:30pm march down the middle of the street, tearing up one neighbour's rock garden to throw into another neighbour's driveway, before moving on to demolishing the barricades meant to keep people and cars from plunging into the excavated roadway. They came back and repeated their nonsense at 2pm.

It's amazing to me how even a couple of nights of broken or insufficient sleep can reduce me to hysteria and desperation. I actually wanted to physically harm those morons last night, an itch in my arms that wanted to claw someone's eyes out.

But I'm not talking about a couple of nights of broken sleep--this is becoming an intensifying pattern of persistent insomnia. It's like mental illness, really: I'm a different person, not able to enjoy the things I normally enjoy, not able to concentrate or focus, restless and anxious, depressed of mood and listless. Irritable and weepy. Unable to cope with the normal stresses of life, noisy neighbours or road repairs, say.

I've severly cut my caffeine and alcohol intake, been rigorous with my sleep hygience, practiced yoga, and avoided tv and computer time (glowing screens) too close to bedtime. I do yoga nightly. I take long walks during the day. And yet, still, ten minutes of sleep, a terrified wakeup, and hours of tossing and turning.

Insomnia, Dr. Google tells me, is not itself an illness but a symptom of some other condition--medical pharmaceutical treatments, then, address the distressing but secondary fact of sleeplessness by forcing the body to abandon consciousness with any number of powerful depressants all of which bring as much ill as good, and none of which are to be used any more than very infrequently or for a very short period of time. So the root of the problem is not, after all, that I'm not sleeping. It's something else, something else that manifests as insomnia.

My mother tells me that women in their 30s are the primary sufferers of insomnia. She surmises that having it all and doing it all is at the bottom of it all: it's anxiety and burnout. And truly, I have it all and do it all: demanding career, a beautiful home under constant improvement, a preschooler who has decided to 'marry' me, a husband with his own career and its demands, a drive to be healthy, to do the most for myself and my family. It's overwhelming me, maybe. No, it is overwhelming me, totally. Why else would I wake up in a sweaty panic to find myself worrying, absurdly, that Munchkin doesn't currently like vegetables and is doomed to adult obesity as a result of my failing to sufficiently entice her to eat green things? That three library books are overdue? That I forgot to email a colleague about something completely not pressing? That I forgot to put out our vitamin pills this morning?

Internet, do you suffer from insomnia? Why? And what do you do about it? I am losing this battle, and I am more than a little anxious that bursting into tears over dropped cutlery is more the rule than the exception at my house lately. Advice?