Sink or Swim

 ^ An oldie but a goodie for your listening pleasure.

One of the perks of being a stay at home mom (hereafter known as SAHM) is the whole summer shebang. A round of days at the pool/park/people's backyards/back to the pool again is not bad work if you can get it. I confess, I sometimes feel guilty when my husband comes home from work, all weary and white-faced in his suit, and asks what we did and I say "Well. I went to spin class and then I took the kids to the pool and we had a picnic with our friends and took long naps and then we went outside and took pictures and blew bubbles...". Then I remember that he never ever has to scrub a toilet or experience nipple cracking and it feels slightly less cruel and more like justice.

Summer in Minnesota is lovely and my life is pretty charmed. Unless, of course, you consider that my eldest child acts like a dadgum hellion at the pool. Charging into the water as deep as she can go, blithely ignoring my frantic pleas not to endanger her life. Or running on the concrete in a dead heat to escape the fenced in pool area entirely. Or wallowing in the mud in the playground instead of playing on the slides. Or totally ignoring all her toys until some other kid borrows them and then attempting to hit/splash/otherwise intimidate the other child. Or refusing to poop (despite being potty trained) until she enters the water. 

I could go on, but I won't. Suffice to say, I have yet to enjoy my pool time with Adelaide this summer.

We did the pool thing yesterday and while I was attempting to discipline Addie, Graydon fell face-first into the water and had a few seconds of underwater time. Needless to say, I felt like the world's worst Mama. I was totally frazzled by the time we left.

I pondered all this last night and happened upon this article in the meantime. Why Are American Kids So Spoiled?

This was a timely read for me. If you don't have time to read the whole thing (it's four pages and not the usual TNY 12 pager), I'll briefly summarize. Two teams of ethnographers studied child rearing habits in Los Angeles and in the Amazonian basin and found two extremes of behavior. In the Amazon, toddlers routinely cooked their own meals over open fires. In LA, 25 year olds don't know how to cook their own meals and still rely on Mom to pre-chew their food and deposit the mush into their gaping maws. Slight exaggeration, I just wanted to be sure you were paying attention. 

The authors posit a couple of theories for the prolonged childhood of the average American youth and you can decide for yourself how much validity their ideas possess. I personally think there is some real meat in what they're saying.

Now, I don't plan to have Addie cook her own lunches anytime soon. (Book club: I know you are flashing back to The Glass Castle right now!). But I do think that in order to get more respect, I need to give her more respect. In the pool scenario, that means that I need to respect her intelligence. She's not stupid. If I let her get in over her head...quite literally....then she will quickly learn that I'm not just meeting a word quota for the day and I actually mean what I say. Obviously, I'm not planning on letting her struggle for long here. But I'm going to do less to get more out of her. Because right now I honestly don't think she listens to much that I say and frankly, I'm getting a little tired of being tuned out by a toddler.

And while I'm working on a better give and take with Addie, I need to be sure that I'm not sinking under the weight of my own expectations. I worry about being judged by other parents as being cruel or indifferent or just plain negligent if I let Addie fail or get herself into a pickle. I'm coming to realize that 1) I'm my own harshest critic and 2) other people are too busy with their own kids to notice me anyway and 3) they've most likely been there before in one way or another. After all, I don't judge other parents that have toddlers melting down in Target or at a restaurant or at the gym drop off because I have sooooooo been there, done that, and written the blog post about it.

Anytime that I have a discipline issue with Ads, I try to approach the problem with a negative and a positive strategy in mind. The negative in this case is letting her fail...or flail, if you will...until she figures out that deep = bad. And the positive will be that I'm going to take some time each trip to try to teach her how to swim. After all, it's not like I want her to drown, for the love of Pete. That's obviously a long term solution, but it's a good constructive thing we can do together.

And the good news? Once you know how to swim, you can stop yourself from sinking anytime that you like.

Following that disastrous pool morning, I was lying down with the kids to take a nap. Addie was dreamily murmuring her internal monologue to me, which went something like "Pool pool, so fun, swimming, with Mommy, "that's too deep!" (in her imitation of my voice), Calum, Jen, our friends, Riley, Miss Cold (Nicole), we were splashing...hey, pool, come back!" and so on and so forth. Graydon was nursing and we were all falling asleep in that lovely mix of dappled light and shadow that only happens on summer afternoons. And I felt it again. "It" being that effervescent mix of happiness and contentment that fizzes up through your tummy all the way to the top of your head and the soles of your feet.

We drifted off to sleep together, all of us, and I remember savoring the feeling of my mind and body letting go and letting be, and feeling like I was sinking into sleep. But as I think about it now, I'd say we were swimming instead of sinking. And I enjoyed every minute of it.