Life Lately

May is a whole thing. School and school year activities start to wrap up. Summer activities and warm weather begin to creep in. We had dance and dress rehearsals and recitals and baseball practices and games and swim lessons and school and gymnastics. Tomorrow is Nolan’s last day of preschool.

May is survival.

I gave myself permission this month to do only what I needed to get us through. We had seven dance recitals in a span of three days, all with various combinations of kids and costumes and routines. We also had a baseball game crammed in the middle of all that for good measure. We literally haven’t had a weeknight this month without at least one kid activity, and at least half of those nights have been double or even triple-booked. I thought we had a free night this past Monday but then realized Nolan’s t-ball coach had called a practice. June 2nd now looks like the first night since April that’s wide open.

Phew.

Part of me loves this. I love mapping out a schedule. I love writing lists. I don’t even mind all the carpooling of children from point A to point B to point C. One of the biggest losses I felt last year was of the kids’ activities. My kids love activities. Glory be to sitting in a high school auditorium for dance recitals or on the sidelines of a t-ball game, yelling at the four and five-year-olds to remind them where first base is.

The other part of me finds it totally and completely draining. It’s draining to constantly be packing up costumes or uniforms and some semblance of dinner. It’s draining to pick up the kids from school and immediately hit the ground running: dinner at 4:30 because they need to be changed into whatever combo of costumes/uniforms and out the door by 5:15 in two separate cars.

So what I gave myself permission to do this month was to just be mom. I took a big step back from writing. I took a big step back from keeping on top of emails. (Did you know you can delete emails without reading them? I mean, not like important ones, but like random newsletters. It’s possible to actually push past the FOMO and hit the delete button. Magic.) I took a big step back from the feeling I have to produce, to create, to volunteer or work or push to prove my own worth.

In some ways, this felt like walking back 40 years of feminism. Let me be the most housewifey housewife to ever have housewifed. (Though not so much, actually. My hair was nowhere near as coiffed and we relied far too much on Lunchables as a viable dinner option.) In other ways, freeing myself up from the societal pressure to be productive all. the. time. felt like the most feminist thing I could do. It felt like the most radical thing I’d done in a long time.

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Action Item

I’m still working to understand the conflict in Israel and Palestine. The roots are deep, the conflict is decades (if not centuries) old, and the politics of this part of the world are so different from what I’m used to here. I found this episode of Pantsuit Politics and this one and this one of The Daily helpful, though I’ll still admit to often being deeply confused. I’d love any recommendations to help better my understanding of this topic!

Education is great, but it doesn’t help Israeli and Palestinian families in the here and now. The reports of the sheet number of people—the sheer number of children—killed and injured in the latest conflict are horrific. These are people, who by sheer accident of birth had the misfortune to be born into a part of the world embroiled in discord. I found this round-up of aid organizations from CNN helpful and encourage you to donate to one if you’re able.

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Around the Internet

• “What’s happened to America’s working mothers in the last year is not the old story about the tiny subset of women who have the financial choice to work for pay or not. Instead, it’s about what happens when any choices mothers once had disappear.”

• On the fraught-ness that is getting back to “normal.”

• “When millennial women shudder at the prospect of the return of the low-slung jean, we are not being old, or boring, or basic. It’s not about the fucking jeans AS JEANS, and I wish people could actually understand that.”

• Related to the above, this TikTok is a whole sermon in and of itself.

• I had no idea I was so close to celebrity until this past weekend when I found out my friend/neighbor’s brother runs this Instagram account. Little did I know the connection as I died laughing over gems like this.

• The answer to any question that involves the general phrase “do you need more Taylor Swift?” is always YES.

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Eating

• Make these lemon poppyseed muffins. Then eat them all and make them again three days later. Repeat indefinitely. (I don’t use the rose water but make a glaze with just the lemon juice and powdered sugar.)

• If I can give you another sweet thing to eat, it would be Chez Panisse’s blueberry cobbler, which I’m planning to make for Memorial Day. Top with vanilla ice cream. Die happy.

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Fun Things

• Long-live these Cat & Jack quick-dry shorts. The boys love them. They can double as a swimsuit if necessary. I wish they came in about 18 more colors.

• I love wearing slippers but even in the winter they often feel too hot. (How do people wear sherpa-lined slippers? Do my feet just run warm? Do sweaty feet not bother other people? So many questions.) Still, I’d worn my old pair of Mahabis slippers into the ground and asked for their “breathe” version for Mother’s Day. They’re lined with cork and made from a sort of woven mesh. My feet are no longer sweaty. #winning

• Summer and humidity go hand-in-hand here in the Midwest. This humidity shield helps tame my mane on the most humid of days. I don’t really get frizz—my hair is naturally almost strick-straight, with only the smallest amount of wave—but when it’s humid it gets poofy, loses any style I may have had, and adds waves where there shouldn’t be waves. It’s a whole situation. This spray doesn’t work as well on a day where I’m outside for hours at a time, but when I’m in and out of the house or grabbing dinner on a patio it works miracles.

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Beyond being a labor-intensive month, May is also an emotionally exhaustive month. I’m not much of a crier, but May gets me every time. The kids’ birthdays don’t get to me. The first day of school doesn’t get to me. (Because hallelujah they’re back in school!) But their dance recitals? The end of the school year? Nothing marks the passage of time so much for me as seeing their little dance photos all lined up in a row on our refrigerator or comparing the last day of school pictures with the first-day ones. I can’t even think about the fact that one day they will graduate from high school at this time of year. And Caden and Brooklyn will graduate at the same time. Like, who thought that was a good idea?

I spent the rest of my time this month, when I wasn’t labeling dance costumes or driving somewhere (everywhere), as an emotional wreck. And I lean into it hard. I will play every sad song. I can even turn the not-sad ones into something weepy. It’s like my tear ducts make up for malfunctioning the rest of the year all within this one month. 

And that’s the other thing I gave myself permission to do this month: to feel the feelings. To take what little time and space I had to be sad if I needed or read a book if I needed and to take what pauses I could in a month where there were few to take. I gave myself permission to do the things that needed to be done and then to take care of myself, instead of pushing ahead into more, more, more.

I read this from Rachel Cargle yesterday and it’s made me think that maybe…life could be like this all the time? I don’t know. The push to produce, to be productive, to be “on” is ingrained deep within in my bones. But I think it might be possible. It’s something I’m ruminating on.

Goodbye Daniel Tiger

"No. I hate Daniel Tiger,” my six-year-old son mumbled in protest to his twin sister’s screen time selection.

“No you don’t!” I insisted to him in surprise.

“Yes I do,” he muttered back.

I have a soft spot for Daniel Tiger. It’s one of the kid’s shows I not only tolerate but enjoy. I’ve found myself significantly invested in the character’s storylines. I’ve come up with my own theories about the characters. (FYI Katerina Kittycat and Prince Wednesday are totally hooking up in the future.) And, when you can get beyond the unbelievable and compulsive patience of Mom Tiger, you discover there are lessons to be found as a parent, as well. 

There’s also the fact that Daniel Tiger was the first show the twins ever cared to watch consistently, when they were smaller, when I was desperate for just a few moments to myself. 

Caden and Brooklyn were 15 months old when I discovered I was pregnant again. Morning sickness never comes for me, but enormous and all-consuming amounts of fatigue do. Despite almost never using the TV before, I began to force it on them. I tried in vain to get them to watch something—anything—so I could lay on our microfiber couch and pretend to parent.

They weren’t interested. All my “no screentime before two” zeal seemed to have backfired.

Within a few months of expecting our third baby in two years, we were also moving. And my husband worked out-of-state. He didn’t live with us for any stretch longer than four days for four straight months, with our move planted firmly in the middle of that timeline. I needed backup any way I could get it.

I don’t remember how I came across Daniel Tiger, but I do remember realizing the twins were paying attention to it. Their usually active bodies stilled, their eyes glowed. My breath, though not all at one, began to release. First they were taken in by the songs, then drawn into the storyline for minutes at a time. Little by little, their interest grew. This is when they learned to embrace Daniel Tiger, half an episode at a time that fall, while my belly grew with their sibling and I learned to pack up our apartment in twelve-minute spurts.

Read the rest of this piece over on Coffee+Crumbs.

Getting Used to Things We Hadn't Expected

This summer, we learned how to relax.

I’m sleeping past 7:00 most days. It is glorious. I haven’t slept later than 6:30 for most of the past six years. The kids still wake up stupid early but they don’t need me now like they did when they were little and really had to be supervised every single waking hour. The ages of four and six are vastly different from one and three. Sometimes they grab their own bananas or blueberries to kick off breakfast without me. Mostly, they wake up and play together. Pokemon or LEGOs or Barbies or some combination of all three. They play so well together that I’m terrified to announce it here on the internet for fear I’ve now jinxed it all by putting it out into the universe. Like the universe is pricking up its ears now and going, “Oh yeah. Those Williams kids have been good for too long. Let’s throw in some early-morning mischief and screaming.” (Please, no.)

We used to wake up and go somewhere. Anywhere. Lots of wheres. Every day. Every morning. For almost the entirety of the past six and a half years. I was proud of it. “Don’t you just want to stay home?” I’ve been asked. But I didn’t. I really didn’t. And neither did they. They got bored at home. So did I. Sometimes I would try to stay home but by about 10:00 we’d all be going crazy. We’d usually eat breakfast and get ready and pack up and be out of the house by 9:00. If we left at 9:30 it felt like we were running behind. And it was good. They would go to a camp or we’d go to the zoo or a park or the library or meet up with friends or run errands. Every day. We’d come back for lunch and hang out at home in the backyard all afternoon. And that’s been summer (and fall, and winter, and spring) for most of the past six years.

This summer, we don’t do that. Like, ever. Today I tried to get us to leave the house at 9:00 to go to the nature center and we couldn’t, like literally could not, make it into the car until about 9:18. The kids are hardly ever in the car anymore and it seems to create confusion about things that used to be routine, like “Oh, hi. Remember how you need to wear these things called shoes?” and “No, you do not need to bring three stuffed animals, a LEGO minifigure, an assorted variety of plastic crap, and two suckers along on our eight-minute car ride.” We’re also re-learning the use of these things called “seatbelts”.

Most days now, we don’t eat breakfast until 8:00 or so. I cannot stress enough how late this is for us. It’s unprecedented. I roll out of bed and make coffee and butter toast. Still in glasses and an unwashed face and sweatpants I picked up off the floor. Then we clean up and get ready (I’ll save you the many motivational techniques I’ve used in the past six months for the whole “it’s get-ready-for-the-day-time”) and I shove everyone out the door for a bike ride. Though it’s not so forced anymore. They used to whine but now it’s just routine. And after our bike ride we’re just...home. I have a loose morning schedule with things like silent reading and some math or art and iPad time but we’re just...here. At our house.

I thought I would be going crazy by this point, by mid-August, after it felt like we’d already lived through the entirety of summer by the first week of June, but I’m not. I mean, I am. But not as bad as I thought. (Because for real if I stop to think about *everything* too hard, well, then I start to lose my mind.) It’s like this quote I saw recently, though the source of the quote was “unknown” and I’m always skeptical of those. But this one stuck in my head:

“Life is for most of us the continuous process of getting used to things we hadn't expected.”

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I still run our house by routines. My mind and body naturally seem to fall into these patterns, even when I’m not trying to.

We have a morning “school” routine. This is me when I’m trying to create routine. There’s a sign on the wall that’s numbered and color-coded. It starts with our bike ride and ends with iPad time. Though it’s not so strict. We can ditch it if we run into some neighborhood friends playing at the park.

I realized my whole day has been set up with these routines. Not consciously. Though according to a recent EnneaThought for the Day, I “cope with problems by striving to be competent.” Which reminded me of something Nadia Bolz-Weber wrote once, about being in a group where they went around and told each other the worst adjective someone could use to describe them. The people in her story said things like “stupid” and “boring”. I didn’t have to stop and think for a second what mine was. The word that jumped immediately to mind was “incompetent”.

Hence the routines, I guess. Which are illustrated most overtly by that schedule hanging in our dining room but also by the way I have of slipping my headphones on with a podcast at 2:00 every day while the kids have their mid-afternoon dose of screentime. It’s when I go outside to water the plants and check the mail. The way that’s also when I sit and fold laundry or organize the mudroom and clean up the kitchen, a gentle re-entry to the world after I’ve spent the past hour or so working. Or the way I unload the dishwasher every morning, first thing, while getting the kids their breakfast. Just these rhythms set up so I can move about my day, get things done. So I can be competent.

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The routine leads us to our backyard every afternoon around 2:30. We eat a snack on the deck and sometimes I read to them and they peel off, one-by-one as they finish their crackers and applesauce pouches to play on the playset or dig in the sandbox or see how big a splash they can make in the pool.

It’s here that I sit, because though I have a small burst of energy around 2:00, I’m almost always useless by mid-afternoon. 

We’ve learned to rest, the kids and I. Because of the pandemic. Because of these routines. Or maybe in spite of them. They play (mostly) contentedly in the backyard. And while our summers always involve a lot of backyard time, it’s like this year they’ve rediscoverd it. I sit on the deck and read (or *ahem* scroll Instagram). And it sounds idyllic but also I’m interrupted every 2.3 minutes to bring someone a towel or their goggles or their shoes (because there’s always at least one kid refusing to wear shoes). 

We literally have nowhere to be. Except exactly right where we are. And, most days, that feels more freeing than I ever would have expected.

The President of Breakfast

Note: I wrote this post and submitted it a few months ago for the Twin Cities Mom Collective. It’s amazing how much has changed since then. Not only can I assure you that my kids are no longer getting off the bus every day at 4:00 pm (Remember those days? Was it all a dream?), but I am also no longer the President of Breakfast. What had been our normal for many months has, like so many things, been entirely upended in the past three. Also, my kids know what Eggos are now. I don’t know. Here we are. * insert shrug emoji here *

Breakfast used to be my husband’s domain. I don’t like getting up any earlier than I absolutely have to and he enjoys spending time in the morning with the kids, so we settled on this arrangement years ago. But then last fall the school year started and my twins went off to kindergarten, and everything fell apart.

Well, that’s a bit melodramatic. Really what happened is that the school year started and my twins went off to kindergarten and everything fell apart... at 4:00 p.m. each day.

That’s when my twins step off the bus. My youngest wants to play with his siblings who’ve been gone all day. My daughter wants to find a friend to play with because her social bucket apparently needs to be filled, even though she’s just been at school for the past seven hours. Her twin brother needs to go sit in a room with some LEGOs by himself because he’s just been at school for the past seven hours. I want to go through backpacks full of lunch boxes and paperwork and “Mommy look at this!” - all while I also need to start thinking about dinner. Oh, and I am also simultaneously handling three kids clamoring for five different snacks at the same time.

It’s kind of the worst.

Within two weeks of the start of school, I asked my husband to re-arrange his work schedule.

“Is there any way you can start at 7 so you can end at 4?” I asked him one desperate evening. He works from home as a software developer; I knew it was in the realm of possibility. “I can’t be everything to everyone.”

He could. And he did.

But with him now starting at 7:00 a.m. - a full hour earlier - breakfast is now firmly in my domain. I started rising earlier to tackle this task. Instead of using that time to get ready for the day while my husband controls the breakfast chaos downstairs, I wake up earlier to throw myself together so I can take control of it all myself.

I grew up eating toast and cereal and Pop-Tarts and Eggos for breakfast. It was the 90s and this sufficed. Also, my mom isn’t a morning person. I think anything that took 3.42 seconds to unwrap and pop in the toaster was exactly in her weekday morning wheelhouse.

My kids wouldn’t know a Pop-Tart or an Eggo if one popped up in our toaster - those pantry staples from my youth haven’t made it to my own house. But Honey Nut Cheerios and Life cereal are on a regular rotation. Cooking is not my husband’s forte, so cereal became an easy go-to in the morning.

I followed suit after I became the President of Breakfast. Once upon a time, I thought I would be the kind of mom who flipped pancakes and sausages before school and make egg scrambles to fill their bellies with protein. I didn’t factor in the whole I’m-not-a-morning-person part.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

Read the rest over on the Twin Cities Mom Collective.

Week Five

I’ve been writing things down here and there since the coronavirus really started to impact our lives. I’ve shared some of this as snippets on Instagram but if you’re interested in reading more, feel free to read through these lightly-edited words. As this essay says, I’m craving to see what people are thinking/doing/feeling through all of this. Maybe it’s helpful to use my own still, small voice to give some words to what we’re all going through at this moment in time. You can find Week One here , Week Two here, Week Three here, and Week Four here.

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Monday, April 13th
“I've been more aware of the passage of time since Kindergarten began, knowing that at this time next year the twins won’t be in Kindergarten but in first grade, and then second, and so on. Somehow the days of toddlerhood and preschool seemed to shield me a bit more, when our days looked so much the same from one to the next.

I’m acutely aware of their days off of school now, where it feels like we’re just settling back into our normal, three kids snug at home, instead of disrupting what our true, new normal is of packing lunches and backpacks.”

...is a THING I WROTE on December 23rd. Bless my heart.

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I’ve just been assuming, through all of this, that summer is cancelled. I’m assuming they’re not returning to school (though that breaks my heart). I’m assuming there will not be a dance recital (another thing that breaks my heart). I’m assuming there will be no t-ball (again heartbreaking). I’m assuming there will be no PlayNet, zoo camps, Big Chip vacation, or trips to parks and beaches (my heart is gone).

I’ve more or less made my peace with this.

My light at the end of the tunnel is assuming the kids will go back to school in the fall. School even starts really late here this year; since Labor Day isn’t until September 7th, the first day of school is September 8th. It’s about as late as it can possibly be.

My heart is set on this. My dad dared to suggest that the kids wouldn’t even go back to school in the fall and it’s a good thing we’re practicing social distancing or I would have STABBED him. Even though I understand, in the darkest, most remote corners of my brain, that this won’t really be over by then and that NOT returning to school in the fall is an actual possibility, I just cannot even with the idea of it right now.

Though that didn’t stop me from sending Caden and Brooklyn’s teacher an email last week to request they be in the same class again next year. I don’t want to deal with two different first grade teachers for distance learning. Just in case.

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Wednesday, April 15th
Mornings are the hardest. The waking up and the getting up. It’s just the worst.

Back up. Maybe I shouldn’t say mornings are the hardest. It’s the whole getting out of bed part that is.

I’ve never been a morning person. Never, ever, ever. Mornings are only nice in theory. 5:00 am is NOT a nice time. I don’t even think 6:00 am is a nice time. They are dumb times when reasonable people (and children) should still be sleeping.

Still, I used to get up at 6:30. A mere month or so ago when the kids still had things like buses to catch and there were lunches to pack and I had a minivan to drive to places like preschool. There were things to look forward to in the day, or at least in the week.

Forget 6:00 now. Forget even 6:30. Now, even when 7:00 rolls around, I close my eyes against the inevitable like ugh.

The first couple of weeks were different. Then it was like grief. I woke up with anticipation, the sunlight glinting through the blinds, before it would hit me. I would remember, all over again, that this wasn’t just a bad dream. That we couldn’t go anywhere. That coronavirus was a real thing. That the whole world was dealing with this and the kids don’t have school and what bad news would come today?

Now it doesn’t hit me like a revelation each morning. It’s simply reality. Now I wake up and think, “Oh. Here we go again.” And it takes every ounce of strength I have to pull myself out of bed. Even though I just throw on my glasses and some sweatpants and walk downstairs to get coffee. The monotony of our days is it’s own brand of exhausting.

(The coffee helps. So does sunshine.)

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Thursday, April 16th
My moods seem to run in roughly three-day cycles. I usually have a pretty good “this is all fine!” day followed by a day full of “meh” and ending with a “this is awful and terrible and I’m angry and sad and I hate everyone and everything” kind of day.

It’s not always a three-day cycle. I might have one great day followed by three meh days followed by one of pure rage. Meh is more my baseline these days. I rarely have more than one good or truly awful day in a row.

Recognizing the cycle helps. While the good days don’t last, neither do the bad ones.

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Things seem to have leveled off to an extent. Life feels more or less normal now The news cycle has flattened out. A few weeks ago, no matter how often I picked up my phone, I would find new news, new stories, new information. I was getting multiple emails from school each day as they detailed the newest orders from the Governor, here’s when distance learning begins, here’s when you pick up your student(s) materials, here’s your log-in information, here are updated versions of ALL of that.

(And let us never forget the emails from every restaurant and every store and every activity we’ve ever done in the past decade to update us on “here’s how we’re dealing with COVID-19” and/or “let’s stand together in hope” and it got really weird.)

My phone use has flattened off. It’s still higher than pre-COVID-19 levels but not by much. Life certainly doesn’t look how it did “before”, but the new normal has settled in. I KNEW it would, a few weeks ago, I knew theoretically we would all psychologically adjust and yet it seemed impossible at the same time. But, here we are.

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Friday, April 17th
For the record, these are the clothes I’ve been living in:

These pull-on jeans. (Seriously as comfy as leggings but feels like I’m trying.)
These sweatpants.
This bralette. (RIP bras with hooks and adjustable straps.)
These leggings. (Soft and cotton-y. Not squish-you-in supportive.)
This sweatshirt.