Rediscovering parenting tools

One of my all-time favorite parenting books

Growing up, vacuuming was a real chore. Our industrial-strength canister vacuum looked like R2D2 minus the cool lights and funny voice, and hauling that clunky thing around was as much work as the vacuuming itself. We’d bang it against walls and furniture just moving from room to room, and going up and down stairs was out of the question. Dust mopping, in comparison, was efficient. Four times as wide as any broom we had in the house, our dust mop with its nifty little swivel device in the center made it easy to turn at the end of every pass across our hardwood floors. Good tools just make life easier.

Just three reasons I love being 50

Halfway to 100, and life looks good

When my mom turned 50, I thought she was ancient. After all, half a century sounds pretty old to an eight-year-old. (Who knew she’d almost double those years of living?) But now that I stand where she once did, I think this is a vibrant age! In fact, if I knew 50 was going to be this good, I might have looked forward to my birthday a little more. It turns out the fifties are great for lots of reasons, but here are just three:

Just give me a sign!

Should vs. Want

Yesterday I drove through the state of Idaho. After dropping Grant off at college, Ken and I followed our Google Maps directions as carefully as we could, working our way across wide-open spaces crisscrossed by highways. Considering neither of us had ever made the trip before, we did pretty well until we got a little off track in Twin Falls, where we had to ask directions from the lone worker at the Reeder Flying Service (airport). “Just go back across the canal, turn left at the first intersection,” she said flatly, “then drive about five miles, and you’ll catch 93.”

Surrounded by old friends

It's healthy to keep friends nearby

I was only half kidding when I said Mom might love her furniture more than her own children. When it came time to downsize, she was torn up for months about having to part with her precious pieces. “Some people just need their things around them,” my sister tried to explain. (She would know.) Hearing that helped me appreciate Mom’s dilemma better, and I realized, of course, that she’d invested decades collecting and refinishing her antiques, but it wasn’t until I pressed Mom a little more that I finally understood why she was so attached to her possessions.

That’s where you live!

Where we live is more than a place

Our son Grant gives wonderful bear hugs. He often pulls me in close to his over-six-foot frame and croons, “That’s where you live!”

They say you can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep, but you can also tell a lot by knowing where they live—and I don’t just mean which city or house they live in. In college, I tired quickly of the standard trio of introductory questions: “What’s your name? Where are you from? What’s your major?” I have to admit that knowing where people were from provided at least a small dot on my mental map and it did tell me something about them—if they had cold winters, if they grew up by the ocean, or if they were city people or country folks. What it did not explain, though, is what kind of home they lived in. Even a photo of their home and family couldn’t really tell me where they were from.

Timing is everything

Alex Morgan, USA Women's Soccer player

From sports to humor, from health to happiness, timing is everything.  You can throw a zinger to first base, but it doesn’t do a bit of good if the runner beats you there, and who cares if you have a killer swing if you’ve already missed the pitch? In these Summer Olympics, over and over again we’ve seen split-second timing make all the difference. Suppose the women’s water polo coach hadn’t called a timeout with one second left in the game against Australia; no nail-biting overtime would have ensued. On the other hand, what if the most recent women’s soccer game hadn’t gone into overtime? We would have missed Alex Morgan’s spectacular header, the game-winning goal over Canada that sent the U.S. team to the gold-medal round. And half the art of telling a good joke is timing, too. Even with a great punch line, you won’t get any laughs if you deliver it too early or too late.

Just one daughter

My daughter KaRynn surprises and delights me

I’m the mother of four sons and only one daughter. Growing up a tomboy surrounded mostly by brothers, I was well prepared to be a tough-and-tumble kind of mom—the kind that could play catch, rollerblade, and wrestle with boys, and my sons would probably agree that I have, indeed, been that kind of a mom. Raising boys has been mostly a “What-you-see-is-what-you-get” experience—very fun, sometimes funny, and often very physical. No big surprises there. On the other hand, being a mom of just one girl has been full of surprises.

Finding our voices

Grant and Kelsi please the crowd

Grant never sings anymore. The truth is I don’t remember him singing an entire song audibly since he was about five years old. Back then, I actually had to shush him once because he was belting out the music above all the rest of the children. But since then he’s refused to sing in church. In fact, he'll rarely even pick up a hymnbook. 

So, you can imagine my shock the other night when I saw him on stage, cool as could be, singing a duet with his friend Kelsi whom he’s known forever. While she played the guitar, the two of them sang away as if they’d been doing it every day since they were kids. They’re no rock stars, I realize, but their voices blended well and they sounded great to me. Where had Grant been hiding that voice? 

Singing voices are a breed of their own, I suppose, but this experience made us wonder just what helps people find their own voices.

Don’t let geometry define you

The "Given" is essential in geometry and in life

We’ve had more than one child struggle with geometry. Even Bryan, our son who ended up majoring in math, recently admitted at his college graduation that he was “not a geometry guy.” Along with many others in high school, he had a tough time grasping the spatial relationships of points, lines, angles, and figures. 

“I don’t want to major in triangles!” complained another smart but disgruntled guy who joined the ranks of those forced to face the world of geometry. Like Alice arriving in Wonderland, many frustrated teenagers often find themselves puzzled and bewildered by unfamiliar rules and strange new ways of looking at circles and other once-ordinary objects.

Hiding our passions

We're lucky when passions and obligations intersect

For a long time, we had to tuck away Mark’s Harry Potter audiobooks in my drawers. During that same time, we stuffed piles of Grant's favorite books under our bed and buried his Game Boy in a secret place. For a briefer period of time, Ken tried unsuccessfully to conceal Craig’s guitar and ukulele in our closet. Most of these attempts were in vain, however, because somehow the boys always managed to find their cherished CDs, books, or instruments and return to their pleasures.