I remember the day this happened. I was on my way home and found myself in the most baffling traffic jam that I’ve ever experienced. At every turn there was no way out. I took the slow moving surface streets and eventually made my way to my destination. I was lucky, others were stranded, completely immobilized, for hours and hours.

What I found most fascinating about this was how so many people were affected by one person’s actions. It seemed to me such a poignant lesson that was largely ignored. Sure, the guy who did this was in the midst of a significant personal crisis. Sure, had I been one of the people sitting on the bridge for hours on end while he sat at the edge, my interpretation of his actions may have been a little different. And yet I could not help but think, what better way to realize your place in the world than to bring all traffic in a major metropolitan area to a complete standstill? It brings to mind the big lesson of this classic, put in real life terms of course.

I realize that my interpretation of these events is only possible based on my distal vantage point. That up close and personal, lessons are not nearly as simple to divine. But that one of the many benefits of living in community with others, isn’t it? We get to learn from each other. We get to take events and create stories around them. And the story itself can have a positive influence on our future choices and how we see the world.

Here’s my main takeaway: We are interconnected. One person’s crisis is every person’s crisis. With our interdependence as a base for understanding it follows that just as we can help each other, so can we cause each other major distress. It seems to be that our best hope lies in listening to each other in ways that facilitate collaboration. Together we can make progress much faster than apart. Indeed, together we make progress in spite of our invented sense of independence. So why not just stop pretending that we are in this alone?

Celebrating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is an annual favorite of mine. Every year, the day approaches and I wonder what I will do to remember my first and enduring hero. And sadly, the actual day arrives with an empty calendar. I think that this mostly has to do with the circumstances of my life, a too long list of to do’s on account of my never-ending ambitions, and the sad fact that amongst the people I know, I am probably the only one who would like to do something communal to celebrate Dr. King. And so every year I end up alone, thinking about him. Given all sorts of events of recent, on this particular occasion of remembering Dr. King, I am thinking about the reality of loss, the endurance of spirit, and the tides of the material world that bind us into habits of being. All this has to do with the machinations of our all powerful minds. We are putty in the hands of our minds’ dictates, and I find that unrelenting truth fascinating. As I look at the world that we inhabit, the cruelties that we inflict first upon ourselves and then upon others, I am amazed at how our minds are what drive us to do these things.

I have a few new projects in the hopper (remember the never-ending to do list?), that are lurking behind the words that I write here today. But I want to keep this post short and sweet: just one in a vast collection of homages to an American great who above all else, always stood up for the best of ourselves. The reason that Dr. King has remained, and I do believe that he will always be, my number one hero is because he spoke essential truths. At so many points in my life I am looking for proof of a point: where goodness and righteousness are my ultimate goals. And I find him. He was always speaking to the essential good. And I cannot think of a better definition of a hero.

It is not only on his honorary birthday that I remember Dr. King, but many many days out of a given year, he is on my mind. I would dare say that I think of him nearly every day. Not that I’m keeping track, so I can’t be sure about that. But he is big in my life and now I realize that perhaps I’m making a pitch for more people to call on their memories of Dr. King with increasing frequency. And this is not to discount the heroic acts that each of us makes regularly, but to make a point about Dr. King. One man, who had an amazing charisma, who made many many many excellent points, who put himself at the front of the line pushing against the ugliness of us all, and who died very early in his life. The ugliness pushed back, he got a break from a never-ending list of deeds to do, and the rest of us got a hero for all time. The injustice is sick. The sadness of loss, infinite. But so are his words, and what he stood for. Love above all else.

It seems to me that we are often looking for the neat summary. When I am not thinking of Dr. King’s wise words, I’m thinking of his place in the world, the service that he provided us. And so, that’s my story. This year. Next year it may be different, based on who I meet and what words we share. But always, Dr. King will remain a hero to me.

I’ve got a pet theory. (I’ve got a lot of those actually.) But this one keeps coming up in my thoughts. And this space is where I get those thoughts out of my head and into the world, with the hope that they will do more good out there than they do floating around in my head making me neurotic.

The Center of the Universe Theory: there is a developmentally appropriate period of time in the life span of every human being during which they are most appropriately self described as the “center of the universe.” During this period, if the people caring for this person, understand the theory and behave in accordance with it, the human will develop a deep seated sense of well-being which will serve as a foundation for a happy, healthy, life. I am pretty sure that this period of time is the first couple years of life. And then it is over, at which point the person begins to look outward to the world, to develop all the wonderful social qualities that we hope for in a well-adjusted person.

When somebody with a chronological age higher than two or so years demonstrates a high degree of self-absorption then it is possible that somehow, the people caring for that person did not give them the unconditional deference appropriate for his / her age in those early years of life. And so, this person is now on an perpetual hunt to find that sort of treatment, often at the annoyance of other people. (It is also possible that the person has some other sort of mental condition determining his / her behavior – social theories are such slippery fish).

To me this means that in my days with my 18-month old son, I try to keep him happy. This is usually quite easy to do. Which sort of proves my point. If this assertion that I am making were beyond what is possible to execute than it would not me much of a theory. Sure, some amount of arranging of our family life does have to occur, but it is not anything that a competent adult cannot handle. And it is for a relatively short period of time in the scheme of how many years we will all live together as a family.

Over the years I’ve picked up tidbits of information that have all fed this theory. One of the main themes of these tidbits was that the very earliest years of life were very important. We are in danger of missing this information if we hamper the instinct of mothers, because by design mothers are the people who are primed to receive this important message and act on it. I’m speaking here of breastfeeding, mostly. Because if a mom nurses her baby, all sorts of automatic reactions click into place in her body. But at a broader level, this has to do with caring. Those who have been well-cared for pass that care onto others. Those who have not been well-cared for must find ways to care for themselves lest they always be starved for real caring and, in turn, unintentionally pass on neglect.

As I have alluded to in many posts, this has been a challenging year for me and for our family. I blame this on our career choices, namely that my husband and I are both in business for ourselves. As I think about our choices and consider the alternative of being employees, it is now an impossibility for either of us. We are each too far into the world of independence and de-institutionalization to accept the requisite boundaries of such a work environment. We are not so far along that we have achieved a desirable degree of stability, which is precisely the main source of my frustration. But we are far enough along that we cannot turn back.

And so, forward we go. With as much care for our son, ourselves, and each other, as we can possibly muster. (And yes, I am afraid that that is the order of caring in our home these days). And here, in turn, are the three ideas that support our action, at least in my mind: the center of the universe theory; if you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything; and the old saying that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Time will tell how our bets pay off.

…do we turn away from darkness and toward the light?

The past year has been full of dark times for me and people in my life. And it seems the same for many who I don’t know. But then, there are always dark times for somebody somewhere, yes? What is in question is not the darkness itself, but how we choose to respond to it.

There have been many singular moments in this past year when I considered the question, have I hit bottom yet? Though I was usually somewhat out of my head in such moments of quandary, I would often marvel at the question. On the one hand it seemed strange to me that I would have wanted to have sunk to the lowest of my lows. And then I would realize that I was likely posing the question under the assumption that if I had indeed hit bottom, I’d surely begin my ascent sometime soon.

We have just narrowly missed another apocalypse, suffered a national tragedy (at least one that I’m aware of, that is), and right here in our little slice of the globe, mother nature celebrated the winter solstice with the sort of weather that made us want to retreat indoors and abandon our outdoor plans for celebration. These three things came together last night for me as I thought about how I could mark this natural turning point.

A thought on the apocalypse that a friend shared with me: perhaps it is simply the end of the world as we know it. In the wake of the violent events in Connecticut last week, I think that we are past due for a collective adjustment to our social values. So I like the idea of some new reality. I’m thinking of the sort of reality where we are careful to let absolutely NO ONE slip through a single crack.

Clearly this recent event has sparked all sorts of thought and discussion. I read one blog post that got me thinking. Here are my thoughts, in short format:

We humans are capable of really awful things in the same way that we are capable of really amazing wonderful things.

When these things happen, we have a wide variety of responses.

I am (always) interested in a response that is simultaneously grounded in deep thought and is forward looking. I am looking to make improvements where ever possible and it seems that in order to do that, the real problem must be addressed.

Violence is widespread on this planet of ours. How we respond to the violence depends on how we feel about the victims. Race matters. Cultural and geographical proximity matter.

To me there is always one common denominator in these questions: humans causing harm or death to other humans. And yet, I feel rather alone in this emphasis. People want to talk about details, they don’t seem to want to address the basic question: how do we let this sort of thing happen. Ever?

I believe that we have the power to stop violence. I believe that when we value life, we will do that. I believe that when we value life above all else we will make choices that are different from the kind of ones that lead to tragic events anywhere.

Humans causing harm to other humans where ever it occurs is a result of negligence on all our parts.

(Which brought to mind a quotation that I see while driving around these parts, and a discovery of a cool blog. I usually feel a pang of remorse when I consider these words because I feel that I ought to be doing more: “To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it” – Martin Luther King, Jr.)

And now, at least in this moment, I feel that I have an answer to those pangs that I’ve so often experienced as I realize what little thing can we each do to shift our collective reality. I think kindness is the key. Kindness in all ways, toward all people, even in moments of distress or upset. Kindness is always the best option. But before kindness, we must try to really see each other, to bear witness to the sufferings and successes of our fellow humans. And in order to do this for others, we must first do it for ourselves.

This is the sort of thing that we can each begin immediately. And when we lapse, we can resume at any point in time. It can be that simple, I believe. Our real power is far more subtle than political speeches or even the most violent act.

(Which brought to mind another of my favorite quotations: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that” – Martin Luther King Jr.)

And so we have made the turn. Definitely in material terms, perhaps in spiritual terms as well. Welcome light. Welcome love. Welcome hope.

There is a little something that we people commonly do that makes me cringe. And it dawned on me that I should share the alternative to that cringe-worthy behavior here. I read about this in Elizabeth Noble’s book back when I was pregnant and now that I’m nearly 1.5 years into the testing of the theory she presents, I’m fairly confident about it.

The idea is to support a baby from his/her pelvis from birth thereby giving baby a sense of our upright response to gravity. This applies to holding, picking up, and passing babies. Consequently, I never pick my boy up from his arms or shoulders. I do occasionally lift him by his ribs, but I mostly squat down and lift him from his pelvis.

So far, I’ve noted two benefits to this. It would seem that offering a baby / toddler such support gives them an opportunity to build a body awareness that begins near their center of gravity. This is important because an awareness of this physical center logically leads to greater control over that area which is relevant since the center is a powerful leverage point in our human bodies. In the first years of life we are engaged in many exercises of control over our bodies. Most relevant here, I believe, are sitting up and walking, but of course all these things are so interrelated that it is impossible to truly compartmentalize. Since we sit on the bones of our pelvis (at least babies do at first, before our socially acceptable and physically abominable habits mess that up, but that is another topic for another day) it makes sense to give babies support from that place. After all that is essentially what sitting is, supporting our pelvis from the bottom. Likewise in walking, we learn to walk from the feet up so it follows that support from the bottom up is most in keeping with the learning process. In contrast, offering a child support from the arms to walk is both distracting to their process and potentially harmful to their shoulder joints. How would you like it if somebody was constantly pulling your arms over your head while you were going about your business? This brings up an ancillary point to my original one which is that I avoid leading my kid by his hands. If we walk hand in hand, which we do a lot of these days, I’m very careful to walk at his slower pace and not pull at him. In that small, but I do believe significant way, we are equals in each journey that we take together.

Now that I’ve seen a fair number of people interact with my son, I realize that I’m in the minority with my approach to the physical support to babies. And this is why I feel it is so important to make the point, somewhere. Anywhere. To put the thought out there with the hope that over time more people will come to understand some of the fundamental aspects of our physical bodies, and the best ways to honor those essential elements to our human experience.

That’s what my mom always said when I was a kid. Patience is also a challenge, at least for me. I find myself exercising my patience everyday. Which I suppose is a good thing, although when I’m in the middle of a patience-based workout, I am not so happy about it.

This morning, like just about every morning (save perhaps twenty), I had the benefit of exercising my patience first thing after getting out of bed. First a little background, I am a quick waker, and therefore a quick out of bedder. Which is fortunate given our son’s penchant for wriggling out of bed and running into the kitchen to cook immediately upon opening his eyes. (It’s important to keep up with him just in case one of the baby-proofed elements is out of place.) My husband is the exact opposite of me in this aspect. It’s only been about five months since he started getting up within an hour of the baby and I regularly. Before that, he’d roll of of the bed anywhere between 11 and 2 left to his own devices. For a long time, I found this very frustrating because I’d end up waiting at least 5 hours before our day together started.

Now back to today, I only had to wait about 25 minutes for papa to join us. Which goes by in the blink of an eye. And yet, my nerves are a bit frayed these days and to be honest I had some rather urgent business to conduct in one room of the house and I didn’t want to leave the baby with the breakfast cooking on the stove (he’s very determined to cook!). So I had an opportunity to practice my patience. When I went to put my toast in the toaster oven, I found our cat’s dinner from last night. Poor kitty went to bed without his dinner thanks to papa’s forgetting.

It was then that I told myself that if our dear cat can be patient, than so can I.

This is my battle cry that echos loud and clear two times a year. I tell everyone who will listen, and yet the sad truth is that I don’t talk to too many people. But now I’ve got this little blog. True, I have no idea if anybody has visited this space (save my husband and a few friends who have probably already heard my plea), but there is a chance that someday others will, so I’m laying the groundwork for my campaign to end Daylight Savings Time forever.

I realize that some people like DST. Some part of it, that is. For example, a friend realized that she could use it to her advantage with her two-year old’s new morning routine. What with fall-back, getting to school is so much easier and consequently mom has a much better time getting into the Pilates studio for a work out at the beginning of her day. That’s great, to be sure. The next logical question in my mind is what happens with spring-forward? Uhhhhh. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

DST is a pipe dream as far as I’m concerned. First we invent the construct of time and then we figure that we can manipulate it to suit us. Which I suppose is logical in some sense since it’s all made up anyway. But our natural rhythms are not made up. And our constructs mess with them. I know this purely at a gut instinct level because the health nut in me has always taken sleep very seriously. For me, the triad of good health comprises sleep, diet, and exercise. For those who are not so fundamentally opposed to messing with nature, typing daylight “savings time accident statistics” into the search field on google may be a useful exercise. Out of the long list of results, I picked this one first. See?! DST is a bad idea! And yet, the article doesn’t even touch that notion. Rather it concludes with the proposal that employers alter work schedules to accommodate DST. Why not just eliminate DST? Which leads me to my other worry, that bad ideas seem to catch like wild fire. And so I decided last year that abolishing DST was going on my bucket list.

Given the fullness of our lives at present, I wasn’t going to make a fuss about DST this year. We are just getting settled in back home after our Detroit visit, and I’ve got all sorts of projects in the hopper, my homage to Detroit tops the list. But today was our third day waking up around five ante meridiem (husband stays in bed, mind you) and frankly I’ve had enough. Traveling across time zones on top of adjusting to the new hour is too much for my patience to bear.

And so here begins my quest: rid humanity of a bad idea that has been given way more benefit of a doubt than it ever deserved.

I created this space as an outlet for myself. My hope was that having this outlet would give me a way of facing what challenges me with a positive outcome. Given that I am still not writing as consistently as my original plan called for, by the time I sit to write, more often than not these days, I’m at the end of my wits. So here I am. A mess. Wondering which aspects of my life could do with the sort of revision that would yield less blahs and more goods. I find it challenging to avoid comparing my life to others’. Today this tendency of mine is challenged by the blogosphere which I’m very peripherally engaged in. I’ve got a handful of mama-written blogs that I read regularly. They are always at once a comfort and inspiration to me. I am a silent reader and a new blogger. Certainly not part of the inner circle that I have some sort of notion exists somewhere in cyberspace. So here are some of my thoughts of late.

I wouldn’t mind some full disclosure captions under photos of perfectly clean homes, something along the lines of, just how often on a weekly basis the room actually looks the way it does in the photo or perhaps how much preparation went into the finished product. With respect to craft projects, how about some lists of what chores didn’t get done while that new sweater was being knit or that quilt top was getting put together? Maybe it’s just my lifestyle. I’m sure that has something to do with it. The fact that I own and run (somehow, by the skin of my teeth) a small business. The fact that I’m only 15 months into this parenting gig. The fact that my husband (along with his partner) also works in his own business. The fact that we live in a fast-paced, urban area. I don’t know…but I’m pretty sure that I’d find even more comfort from these gals if they occasionally included some admission of imperfection. Or something like that. Just an idea.

I write here under a pen name so that I can share thoughts that aren’t necessarily conversational in polite company. It seems to me that different blogs have different approaches to this. While all the blogs that I frequent clearly have a limit on what aspects of their life are shared in the public sphere (knitting, sewing, home décor, and food being the most common), it seems to me that there is a limit on what a person would feel comfortable putting out on the internet as her opinion. On the one hand, I could entertain the notion that my choice of anonymity has granted me a cop-out. On the other, I could say that it’s giving me the full measure of what I was looking for in starting this project: a true outlet for what happens in my head, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

As I’ve been dealing with my own experiences of overwhelm lately I’ve been giving my pet theory of village style parenting more consideration. We are a family of three, without participatory family members close by. We do have a community of friends and neighbors and the communities that result from our businesses. But at the end of each day and through each night we are just three. When I read about moms who are alone with their kids for the majority of their days, I am amazed. I simply cannot fathom how they do it. Perhaps their kids are different than mine? Not quite so active? Perhaps they have a more effective means of putting limits on their kids? There really are too many factors to consider, which could very well be another reason that bloggers chose to avoid such topics. It’s not the sort of thing that can be written about with any real authority. All things are relative. But if we are just looking to have a discussion without arriving at any sort of definitive conclusion. Just so that we are fully equipped with ideas to consider, I’ve got some thoughts to add to the hopper.

Firstly there is the underlying philosophy of each parent. No matter how aware each parent is of this philosophy, it is there. It is the sort of base reasoning for why we do what we do. Mine is something like this, my job as a parent is to bear witness to my child so that I can offer him / her the best possible support in his / her process of self-realization. In order to truly bear witness to another person, I must have the capacity to be present in every moment which inevitably engages me in the exciting processes of self growth and continual learning. Inherent in this philosophy of mine is respect for my child as an individual separate from me. In order to have even a fighting chance of putting my philosophy into action, I need to be in good health, which, in my case, means that I call upon the support of many people.

My recent read gave me lots of food for thought about this culture of ours and how it differs from others. I find it amazing that there are so many aspects to human cultures that are beneath the surface of communication. This is my interpretation of Druckerman’s experience in investigating certain aspects of French parenting. While she had plenty of conversations with French parents, there were particular ways and means which no amount of questioning could uncover. She ended up discovering these “secrets” through conversations with a French pediatrician who lives here in the US. Who has written a book. Which is to say that he’s a bit further along the path of describing just what it is that the French do. Looking at this notion of cultural comparisons from another angle, it seems to me that there are so many relevant characteristics of cultures which dictate parenting styles. In the case of the French, The size and cohesion of cultural practices, their fairly recent history of more harsh parenting practices, and the impact of two world wars on the families of those eras surely must play a role in shaping the France of today. Here in the US we were not ravaged by war in the same way in the last century. And we are a vast country, with a tremendous amount of diversity. As for the harsh parenting, given what I know anecdotally, we are on our own path toward respecting even the youngest members of our society.

Inherent in any discussion of parenting is the presence of learning. Perhaps it is a mystical assumption, but it is rooted in the common sense of enough cultures that it bears mention. However it is understood from culture to culture, each generation builds upon the last. Here in the public discourse of the US, this is framed in terms of technological advancements and schooling. Regardless of how the opportunity is described or understood, it exists. Children provide us with the opportunity to learn.

It’s been a while since this post, and yet given my daily grind, my thoughts often return to it. Usually they go something like this, one kid is challenge enough! Why not get some help? Of course, that is my strategy and I write those words not as advice but rather as what idea comes to my mind in the face of a problem which I’ve abstracted for the sake of discussion but which is my current state of normal. Being new to this band of mothers, I am realizing though, how relevant my notion is. Recently in conversation with a mama-friend I once again laid out my theory that in a truly civilized society, no one would be alone with a small child or infant for more than twenty minutes at a time. It bears mention that when I share this theory with other full-time moms of small children they vehemently agree, but that my theory has also been met with plenty of blank stares. I’ve got two theories about the reason behind the void. In my (clearly limited) experience, much older moms, generally the ones that went it alone for many years while their male co-parents were off earning money, tend to have a hardness around their experience as mothers which somehow separates them from camaraderie around such theories of how to make the experience of parenting better. One that is, for obvious reasons, characterized by definite limits. And then, there are the people who have not experienced the life of the stay at home parent. Enough digression, back to the theory itself. There are so many moments of stress and awkwardness with little ones when only one adult is present which simply do not exist when two or more adults are in company. These are simply matters of logistics and coordination. Then there is the matter of morale. Companionship in caring for small humans is priceless. While I love the notion of the village as much as the next person, the reality is that it is not necessarily reliable for the sort of situation that I’m prescribing with my theory. Because of the importance behind what I’m laying out, it seems that the best way to ensure it’s implementation is to make it real work. Furthermore, given my perceived veracity, I figure that someday this notion that I’m laying out here will be more common sense knowledge than some crazy idea that a self-indulgent-mom-who-wants-it-all-and-cake-for-dinner-too had. Oh and I’m not presuming by any means that I alone will champion this idea into the minds of the masses, no I think that it’s a logical next step for us here in the US given some of the general trends in parenting styles that we see these days.

Which brings me back to cultural context. And to Druckerman’s comparisons between French and American cultures of parenting. To make this point: perhaps what is missing in parenting styles here in the US isn’t the firm discipline of French parenting, the sleeping and eating regimens, etc; but rather enough people to make what we are doing actually work reasonably well. My therapist has helped me to understand my son’s current life experience as one of nearly constant expansion. We support him in this by offering him new experiences regularly and when he falls upon something that we wish he wouldn’t, we distract him. That is to say, we give him yet another thing to consider. This process is made infinitely easier the more people there are around. And as his world view expands, I can only imagine that this will continue to be the case. While I do have fairly traditional expectations around behavior, the more time I spend with my son, the more I realize that the behavior I expect is the behavior of a person in respectful relationship to his surroundings within the limits of what is developmentally appropriate. Which is to say that kids need space to have their experience. And the more they have a safe and supportive space to live their lives, the more likely that they will be highly motivated to make positive and lasting contributions to our society as the individuals that they truly are. I realize that I just made a pretty big jump of logic, but I’m running out of time for today.

These thoughts have been rolling around my brain for quite a while so it is with great relief that I hit the publish button, and move back into the present moment which just so happens to involve a runny nose, hands reaching for my laptop, and a sweater made moist with newly discovered spray bottle skills. Here’s to constant expansion with continual respect for each person’s experience.