A Spirited Mind » Mothering

I Don’t Know How She Does It

Catherine Gillespie@A Spirited Mind — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 10:00:45 +0000

Imagine that Bridget Jones grew up and instead of being concerned with weight loss and men, she was concerned with trying to be a hedge fund manager and supermom to two kids. That pretty much encapsulates I Don’t Know How She Does it .

Don’t get me wrong, I do like funny over-the-top British chick lit every now and then, but as I read this book I found myself wondering if the author was doing mothers any favors by sensationalizing the challenges they face. It reinforces the idea that EITHER you can be a successful career woman (defined in this book as having a 100 hour a week job, traveling internationally every few days, and never, ever sleeping) OR a successful mother (defined in this book as making homemade jams and pies, being with your children every minute, and never, ever sleeping). I think that’s a false dichotomy. Most working moms don’t put in 100 hour weeks. Most stay at home moms don’t make jams and occasionally let their kids out of their sight. I’ll concede the sleep point.

I don’t know, I just felt like there was a lot of hyperbole in the book that overshadowed the chance to make really salient points about the challenges of being a modern mom (working or not). I wished that the author would have made it more difficult for the reader to take sides. I wish she had played up Kate’s background more as a motivation for why she works. I think she did a good job of showing that Kate loves her children but made it too easy for readers to say “oh well then she should quit her job.” At the end she tried to show Kate finding a way to be fulfilled as a mom and professionally, but it was such a small bit that it felt tacked on and rushed.

I don’t want to be too hard on the book – I did enjoy it in a fast-easy-read way, but I’m not sure if I would recommend it or not. I’ve heard that the movie was changed substantially because Americans parent differently and because when the book was written there were no internet accessible phones. So that will be sort of interesting to consider.

Now that I think about it, I wonder if this might not be a good book for a book club. It’s really really light, but there are a lot of interesting issues and questions to discuss about motherhood and expectations and society. So perhaps I’d recommend it if you have a group to chat with about it, and if your group is interested in those issues.

If you’ve read the book, what did you think about it?

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Find Your Strongest Life

Catherine Gillespie@A Spirited Mind — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 09:00:44 +0000

You know I love organizing and time management books, but here is why I loved this one:

“Not only is balance nigh on impossible to achieve, even if you did manage to achieve a perfect state of equilibrium it wouldn’t necessarily fulfill you anyway. There’s nothing inherently fulfilling about balance…when you are balanced you are stationary, holding your breath, trying not to let any sudden twitch or jerk pull you too far one way or the other…This precarious, motionless state is not worth striving for. It’s the wrong life goal. Strive for fullness instead. You don’t have five different selves you can keep separate. You have one life. One mind. One heart. Your challenge is to intentionally unbalance your life toward those few specific moments that will fill your one cup.”

In Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently, Marcus Buckingham argues convincingly that instead of chasing after some elusive idea of “balance,” we should identify our strengths and be discriminating, selective, and intentional in how we spend our time in our various roles to make sure that we’re bringing our best to every aspect of our lives.

Buckingham defines strong moments as those activities that make you feel effective and capable, where you feel flow, where the thought of getting to spend time on them or improve at them makes you feel excited and optimistic. Weak moments are the opposite. Weak moment activities make you feel panicked, incompetent, or numb.

I thought Buckingham’s application of those definitions to balance and time management were insightful. He points out that when you are working in your strengths, you don’t feel as crunched, but that no matter how good your time management is, if you’re filling up those boundaries with activities that don’t strengthen you, you’ll still feel off kilter.

Buckingham encourages readers to consider the roles they play in their lives: wife, mother, worker, volunteer, friend, daughter, and so forth, and think of the moments in that role where they feel they are in a strong moment, and conversely where they feel weak. What if, instead of forcing yourself into the weak moments just because you feel like you should, you focused on the strong moments? This would, theoretically, give you more energy to keep going with everything and also be a better way to fulfill the relationship.

For example, he writes about a mother who is a Motivator, and who loves to spend countless hours on the floor playing endless car crash games with her kids, but who really can’t stand to read to them. “It seems bad or socially unacceptable” Buckingham says, to say that you really hate reading to your kids, but what if instead of slogging through something you really can’t stand you let someone else read to the kids and instead focus on your own strengths as a mother? I think the kids would probably appreciate that. In my case it’s the other way around – I completely loathe crafts and pushing my kids on swings. There, I said it. But I love to read to them. What is a better memory for my kids – cranky mommy who goes to the playground out of duty or happy mommy who reads lovely stories?

Obviously in all areas of life there are things you don’t want to do that you have to do, but the point is that if you can deliberately tip your balance so that you make room for your strengths rather than doing things because you always have or your mother always did or you coworker does or whatnot, you’ll have more strength to give to those moments when you do have to push through.

So I really liked the idea of identifying strong moments and making sure that the best ME goes to each of my roles, rather than trying to fit myself into my preconceived notion of that role. I found it fairly easy to identify my strong points as a mom (because there aren’t that many to pick out so they were obvious) and it was freeing to allow myself to admit that I’m a better mom when I’m in those moments so try to maximize those and minimize areas where I’m not strong (and maybe let Daddy or grandparents or a babysitter take over for those!) It was harder to identify areas where I’m strong or weak in other roles, but I’ve been giving thought to it and trying to notice when I feel effective, capable, and excited (strong moment) and when I feel panic, incompetence, numbness (weak moment). It’s an interesting exercise once you get going.

I do not think that the author was decrying all weakness in life. Certainly there are areas where we need to work hard to mature, to improve, to change our attitude or outlook. But I think it’s foolish to seek out activities that make you feel panicked, incompetent, and numb over the long term. I think if you feel that way for a long time about something, you need to seriously question if you are in the right spot. God gifts us in different ways. In 1 Corinthians 12 Paul writes, “If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.”

I think it’s worthwhile to consider where you’re at your strongest because that is where you’ll be the most effective. Finding a weak moment doesn’t mean you run away from the role, it means you head toward a stronger moment within that role. I think it’s completely biblical to find out and understand your gifts and strengths that God gave you and use those to glorify Him in your home, your church, your community, and your world.

I really enjoyed the different perspective in Find Your Strongest Life, and how it was geared toward the specific ways the idea applies to women. The chapters on how to help your children identify their strengths and grow into their gifts were also illuminating. If you like books about life and time management, this one would be a thought-provoking addition to your reading list.

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The Myth of the Perfect Mother

Catherine Gillespie@A Spirited Mind — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 09:00:59 +0000

Although I disagreed on certain points and emphases of Carla Barnhill’s book The Myth of the Perfect Mother: Rethinking the Spirituality of Women, overall I think she made some strong points that are often overlooked by Christian women.

I thought the strongest point in the book is Barnhill’s identification of the “shiny happy mommies” problem affecting the church. Because we feel like our worth or our faith are validated by having perfect families, it’s exceedingly difficult to be honest and vulnerable with other women, which keeps us from deep relationships and tempts us to make an idol of motherhood. Barnhill points out that a lot of Christian moms feel that “being a good mother means doing everything right, all the time, all alone. To ask for help, to admit to being worn down by motherhood and yearn for respite, to have prayed for God’s strength and wisdom and still feel inadequate, is the ultimate sign of failure.”

As a Christian mom, I could absolutely relate to that statement. Whether we impose it on ourselves or feel it imposed on us by our churches or other women, it’s there. You can tell by how often Christian moms (and probably other moms, but Christians take it to the next level by pinning our spirituality to it) feel like they have to apologize for their choices because they are, or are afraid of being, criticized. I’m not talking about actual sins, I’m talking about methods. In the past few months, I have personally made or heard apologies for decisions like working/not working, sending kids to public school, getting a babysitter so the couple can have a date night, why the mom let the kid eat a Happy Meal or watch TV, why the mom gets her hair highlighted or wears makeup, why she buys pre-made bread instead of baking her own, why she allows her daughter to paint her toenails…in other words, we are terrified that other people will think we are bad moms. Because honestly, they often do. And, if you blog, you get that feedback in writing via comments left on your blog by others who are supposedly Christians.

So yes, this book touched a nerve for me.

The book asserts that there is no perfect model for motherhood. It is a relationship not a job. As such, perfect children are not your success metric. Families are not an end in themselves. We should not look to motherhood to complete us or to validate who we are spiritually. Our families are a means of bringing about the kingdom of God, not the kingdom of us.

Another particular strength of the book is Barnhill’s exhortation to churches to really examine the ways they minister to women. Not all women are mothers, not all women are stay-at-home moms. Our “shiny happy mommy” facade does not attract people to Christ, and it makes it nearly impossible for us to minister to women who are in physical or emotional crisis. If you are involved in women’s ministry I think you would do well to think about those things, whether or not you read the book.

At times I thought the tone of the book was a little aggrieved, although I think perhaps it was necessary to offer the “snap out of it” effect. As I mentioned in the first sentence of this review, I don’t agree with the author on all of her points or emphases. However, I did find The Myth of the Perfect Mother helpful and thought-provoking, and I would recommend it.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

Celebrating with Catechism

Catherine Gillespie@A Spirited Mind — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 09:00:56 +0000

The title of Leigh Bortins’s book, Echo in Celebration, is taken from the English meaning of catechesis, the word from which we get “catechism.” A catechism is a body of knowledge memorized and recited – most often a set of questions and answers about theological beliefs, but also referring to any set of information you memorize and repeat often.

Many people have a negative view of catechism – they see it as meaningless rote memorization and think of kids reciting endless reams of uninspired facts in monotone voices, with all light of joy in learning stripped from their sad, meager little lives. I think that sort of thing only happens when the parents or teachers aren’t excited about what they are teaching. If you’re deeply grateful for God’s sovereignty and love for you, if you’re amazed by how logical and cool math is, if you’re fascinated by the twists and turns of history, your kids will pick up on that and their lives will be broader and deeper, not restricted.

When we teach our children the catechism, we are teaching them wonderful truths about God and we are showing them how all of life hangs together in God’s plan. When we help them memorize history or math facts or foreign languages, we are giving them the tools to build connections and have their own great ideas. If the parents are excited about what they are helping children memorize, the kids get excited too, and then it really is an echo in celebration!

Like any habit, memorizing gets easier the more you do it. Our kids have been memorizing since they learned to talk so it goes pretty smoothly. We’ve learned the first 80 questions and answers of the Children’s Catechism, we’ve memorized lots of poems (right now we’re learning “Rebecca Who Slammed Doors For Fun And Perished Miserably” which has the added advantage of being a great incentive to gentle door handling!), we’ve learned long Bible passages, and we memorize other stuff as it comes up. Next year we’re planning to join a co-op that includes learning a history timeline and memorizing helpful information about science, math, and grammar.

As with most things in life and parenting, catechism is not a hard and fast rule. It fits with some families and not with others. But in general I think catechizing, done with joy and excitement, can be a great tool for “echoing in celebration” together.

Echo in Celebration

Catherine Gillespie@A Spirited Mind — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 09:00:15 +0000

I read Echo in Celebration: A Call to Home-centred Education
because the author founded Classical Conversations, a homeschool co-op group that we hope to join in the fall. I read the book in electronic format, which made it hard for me to interact with the material in the same way that I do with print books, but I thought the book was interesting and engaging in spite of my format issues.

In the book, Leigh Bortins writes about her own view of learning as a life-long journey, and uses her story and stories of other families she has worked with to provide context to her larger points. I found her background interesting: she was an aerospace engineer, stopped working full time after her second child was born, began homeschooling her kids, found out about classical education, and developed a way for families to connect and classically educate together while still remaining home-centered.

In addition to the author’s own experiences, Echo in Celebration considers topics such as the history of literacy and education, ways to recover successful educational methods used in the past and in different cultures today, how to develop a life-long love of learning and ability to learn in your children, and how to think about a home-centered education.

I particularly appreciated the author’s use of the term “home-centered” education because so often people get the idea that homeschooling is this solitary, narrow thing. In reality, a home-centered education is the most broad opportunity available and can encompass all sorts of amazing components depending on your family’s interests and gifts. I like Leigh Bortins’s vision for parents being involved in education and partnering with their children in learning, and I think parents would get a lot out of this book even if you are putting your children in public or private schools.

This books is high on vision and low on implementation, but if you’re in need of encouragement about your educational choices, or if you really NEED a vision for your child’s education, this book might be very helpful to you. The author’s next book, The Core: Teaching Your Child the Foundations of Classical Education reportedly contains much more detail and focuses on implementation of the vision. I’ll review that in a future post.

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Chocolate! Balloons! Pudding! Mess! A Craft Your Kids Will Love

Catherine Gillespie@A Spirited Mind — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:00:26 +0000

Inspired by this great post at Bakerella, I set out to be Fun Mom by engaging in a messy, chocolate-related craft with the kids.

First we melted some chocolate in the microwave and blew up some water balloons. When I say “we” I mean “I” and you should know that I nearly passed out from the balloon blowing up part. Yeesh, water balloons are tough to inflate!

When Bakerella’s instructions said to let the chocolate cool, she wasn’t very specific so we dipped some balloons in it when it was too hot and they popped noisily. The kids loved it! Eventually we had to put the chocolate in the freezer for a bit and then the bowl making went more smoothly.

Hannah got to make the first chocolate bowl because she dearly adores any chance to show the little kids how to do stuff. She is always reminding us that she was “the first baby.”

Next, Jack got to try.

Jack also takes his older sibling teaching responsibilities seriously. Eventually Sarah got a turn. Then she monitored who got to go next. “Hannah TURN! Zhack TURN! Sawah Soo TURRRRRRN!”

After they finished making the bowls, they began arguing over who should get to lick the bowl. As I tried to mediate the dispute, I started twisting the bowl against the spoon to see if I could get some of the chocolate out to dispense in three equal portions when CRASH!

The bowl hit the floor and smashed into smithereens. The kids looked at each other like “Shoot, Mom is really mad. We should stop arguing now.” I wasn’t mad, of course, but it did solve the dispute! It was everything we could do to keep them from coming to lick at the glass shards. Hannah asked, incredulous, “So you’re just going to throw it AWAY? WITH the chocolate on it still?”

While we waited for the bowls to harden, we made the pudding. I got all the ingredients ready in advance so the kids could mix. If you don’t have some of these multi-sized nesting bowls, you should get some. They are invaluable, super handy, great for cooking with kids, and are made of some sort of less breakable glass. If only I had used one for the melting chocolate part of this project!

The kids enjoyed mixing the pudding. Again with the TURNS! Then we watched for the pudding to develop bubbles “like volcanos” on the stove.

I forgot to take a picture of the part where we popped the balloons to get them out of the chocolate bowls, but that was fun. It was hard to get the balloon bits out of the bowls even though I had used cooking spray like Bakerella advised. I had to use tweezers. But we prevailed and got the pudding in the little bowls and the kids applied sprinkles liberally. We invited my in-laws over to help us consume this feast of chocolatey goodness.

Annnnnd this is the face of a child who has consumed a LOT of sugar!!!!

To Tiger Mom or Not To Tiger Mom

Catherine Gillespie@A Spirited Mind — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:00:21 +0000

One of my husband’s friends asked him how homeschooling was working out for us.

“It’s great.” Josh replied. “You know, my wife is a Tiger Mom so she’s all over it.”

Naturally, I flipped out. My husband’s friend now thinks that I have our toddlers sitting at the piano 13 hours a day, refusing to let them use the bathroom until they can play Tchaikovsky with no mistakes. That’s so not the case. They WISH I would let them bang on the piano (or “plee-nanno” as Sarah calls it) every day. On the other hand, I am teaching my three year old Latin. And maybe former Harvard president Larry Summers had a point when he observed of Ivy League alums that the A students are now academics, the C students are sitting on fund-raising committees, and the B students are busy trying to tiger mom their kids into their alma mater.

Well.

In my review of Amy Chua’s book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, I admitted to having some tiger mother tendencies, but pointed out that what was missing in the book was grace. Letting kids skate by with mediocre educations and trifling effort is not doing the kids any favors, but parenting without grace is not a good way to build lasting relationships and reach a child’s heart. One of my goals for this decade is to “teach my children to have tender hearts and love to read,” which is my attempt to aim for balance between grace and achievement. I don’t think the two need to be mutually exclusive.

My husband assures me that when he told his friend I was a Tiger Mom he meant that I take education very seriously. And I do. In fact, I recently found myself using the phrase in my small group Biblestudy to describe how I handled something. No one contradicted me with a heartfelt, “Oh no, Catherine! You’re not a Tiger Mom! You’re so laid back!” I know, you’re shocked.

Still, I hope that I can grow in balance between encouraging excellence in my children and giving them grace. Constantly on my prayer list: patience, understanding, wisdom, that I would be less critical, and that I would see opportunities to be a fun mom.

I don’t know if I want to “own” the Tiger Mom descriptor, but I’m learning that it’s OK for us to parent differently, to have varied family goals and cultures, and there are a lot of different ways to live life in grace. Hopefully my cubs will survive one way or another!

Image Credit: One Inch Punch

Steady Days

Catherine Gillespie@A Spirited Mind — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 10:00:53 +0000

If you are a new mother or know one, or if you’re sort of struggling to find your focus as a mom, you might enjoy Steady Days: A Journey Toward Intentional, Professional Motherhood. The book is a quick read and structured in small snippets, about blog post length, each giving an idea or thought about how to be more intentional and focused in your work as a mom, whether you are at home, working outside the home, or whatever.

The first part of the book covers basic scheduling, how to craft a general routine, and ideas for what that might look like with different ages of children and with or without working. Since I’ve been reading some fairly intense scheduling and time management books recently I found these tips to be really basic, but I remember a time when I was first home with Hannah when I would really have gotten a lot out of this section, so depending on your situation and how intense you want to be about time management, this section might be really helpful for you.

The book also includes tips on how to maintain a thankful focus, make and preserve memories, and how to foster an atmosphere of learning. The author draws from Charlotte Mason’s educational ideas and shows how you can apply those to homeschooling or “afterschooling” if your kids go away from home for school. I liked the concept of afterschooling – just having an atmosphere of joyful learning rather than structured lessons.

Finally, the book also includes lots of blank forms you could use to set up your own home planning binder and schedule. Printables of that sort abound on the internet, but the ones in the book match the ideas the author sets out in the book.

I think Steady Days is a good starting point for thinking through how to be an intentional parent, and I’d recommend it with the caveat that it is a short book and you might find it a little basic if you’ve spent a lot of time reading other parenting/organizing/education books and blogs.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

Tiger Mothering

Catherine Gillespie@A Spirited Mind — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 21:55:20 +0000

A shocking number of people forwarded me the now famous Tiger Mother article. My mother-in-law even brought over the hard copy of the Wall Street Journal when the first excerpt appeared. Surely Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother must be the most well-marketed book of all time. For weeks now excerpts and interviews and rebuttals and horrified counterpoints have appeared in every form of media I regularly read. Clearly, I am the target demographic: overachieving Type A perfectionist mama? Check.

Hysterical online responses to the Tiger Mother excerpts abound, so as someone who has actually read the book in its entirety, allow me to set your mind at rest on a few points:

This is not a manual for how to get your kids to be straight A musical prodigies.
This is not a book about how China is better than America.
This is not a book about child abuse or how to steal all the joy out of your kids’ lives (Well, OK, there is some joy-robbing, but the author thinks it’s for a good cause).

What Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother actually does is chronicle one mother’s quest to give her children the best start she can within her framework of life as the first born daughter of Chinese immigrants. We all have a framework, we all have an idea of proper parenting based on or in rebellion against the way we were raised. Many liberal Western parents responded to Chua’s articles with vitriol – such harsh methods must be child abuse! Chua would probably argue that permissive Western parenting and junk food (physical and intellectual) consumption are more abusive.

While I disagreed with many of Chua’s methods and goals, I found her writing funny and refreshingly honest. She admits where she overstepped and where she pushed too hard. She writes frankly about how she nearly lost her younger daughter’s heart and had to radically re-examine her parenting methods in order to save that relationship. By the end of the book the reader is left with an understanding of how the author thinks and how she has changed, as well as some cultural points to consider.

Like Ms. Chua, I also think Western parents tend to expect too little of their children. A cursory investigation into what was expected of children academically and socially in the past shows how much standards have relaxed. In some ways this is good: I am not an advocate of overloading children with activities or crowding out childhood. However, I think in many ways our culture robs children of the joy of unstructured play and the freedom of being a child by pushing kids into too much busy-ness and giving them too many tools to grow up too fast. At the same time, relaxation of standards means that kids don’t learn as much as they could as well as they could or as early as they could: they aren’t always taught to think or given tools to excel.

However, and I think this is key, I also think that parents have to make sure that their efforts to see their children meet their best potential are seasoned with grace. Yes, as Ms. Chua points out, no child will voluntarily choose to practice an instrument until they are good at it, and yes, you can only really enjoy something when you’ve achieved a certain level of mastery. But no, I don’t think you need to get your kid to practice by screaming at him or threatening to burn her toys. According to the stories in this book, Ms. Chua is given to extremes.

You know what, though? I am too. Like most parents, I care deeply how my children grow up and turn out. I care what their attitudes are, that they have good hearts, that they don’t get lazy. Sometimes my zeal for making them better makes me worse. It makes me get frustrated and impatient and I begin to take things too personally. Ms. Chua’s account, while hyperbolic, showed me how my own heart toward my children is also often clouded by an ends-justify-the-means orientation.

What is the antidote? How can we walk the fine line between wanting what is best for our children and going “all Tiger Mother” on them? I think the answer is grace. Grace helps me sympathize with my child’s weakness, grace gives me patience to think through what is the best way to motivate each individual child, grace reminds me that I have a long way to go myself so it’s ridiculous to expect perfection from my kids.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is not a how-to parenting manual. It is not a proud defense of crazy intense ways to pound your kids into perfection. Whether or not the author intended it, I think the book serves well as an illumination of our hearts towards our children and an invitation to consider what our goals in parenting really are and to evaluate the methods we use to reach them. As a well-written, thought-provoking memoir of one style of parenting, I would recommend it.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

The Princess is Five

Catherine Gillespie@A Spirited Mind — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:00:13 +0000

Hannah turned five earlier this month, much to my surprise. She is a bright, vivacious little girl who always has an idea and takes great joy out of life. She has always been a good helper, but now Hannah has the ability to really be helpful in the helping and that has been wonderful. She often asks what she can do to help or takes on a task of her own initiative. I also love how Hannah has developed a heart of kindness this year. She makes it a point to say kind and encouraging things to everyone all the time, like telling us we look nice in our outfits or telling Jack he did a good job building Legos or clapping for Sarah when she learns a new word.

Hannah is exuberant and loves to have fun. She likes to dance and leap around and tell jokes and make up funny lyrics to songs. She and Jack make up great games together. Hannah has a fabulous imagination and does everything with gusto. It has been so much fun to know this girl for the past five years!

For her birthday party, Hannah requested a princess tea party theme. While the guests arrived, we built princess castles out of graham crackers, colored ice cream cones, pink M&Ms, and candy hearts glued together with purple frosting in little baggies for each girl. I wrapped cardboard in tinfoil to have a base for each girl to build on, and each girl’s materials were on a separate plate. They seemed to think it was fun, although I think it would have been better with stiffer frosting (I added too much water).

After the castles, I read the story of The Princess and the Pea and then we played a game with a “pea” (a golf ball painted green) put between one of three pillows. Each girl took turns guessing which pillow hid the pea and when she did we congratulated her for being a true princess. That was a good game (thank you internet!).

Next we opened presents and then had our tea party. The girls drank hot chocolate with colored marshmallows in real tea cups, and ate little tea sandwiches, cookies decorated with crowns and dragees, and cake.

The party favors were little bundles of decorated cookies, a bottle of princess nailpolish with a crown top, and a fun soap in the shape of a princess, a cupcake, an ice cream cone, or a purse. During the party the favor bags sat in a bowl filled with crepe paper ribbons as the centerpiece.

The cake was red velvet, naturally, with pink marshmallow fondant and purple icing decoration. I added gold and silver dragees to punch up the jeweled effect. Hannah seemed pleased. Happy birthday Hannah-cakes! We love you!