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Reminiscing
Aug. 6th, 2011 12:07 amAna and I ended up in a conversation where I started to tell her stories of her early years, and it occurred to me after the fact that I was beginning to give her the stories she would later grow up with and tell others.
We had been watching Cotton roll around in delight because a couple of his toys were near one another, and I'd noticed for a couple of months now, his habit of dragging his toys into one place so he can hold onto and play with all of them at once. I mentioned that it reminded me of Ana as a toddler.
ME: You used to throw all your toys down on the floor, put them in piles, and lay on them, no matter how hard or sharp or pointy.
ANA: Yeah, they were comfortable.
ME: That's how I knew I definitely had a dragon, it's dragon-like behavior to horde your treasures and lay on them. You used to hide your toys in cabinets around the house, and at various times of the day, you'd pull all of them out at once, scoop them into piles, and lay on them!
[Ana laughed and seemed to recall it.]
ANA: I still do that sometimes.
ME: Do you remember that as a toddler you also ran your own daycare?
ANA: No.
ME: You did. You would take out all your dolls and you'd lay them on their tummies on receiving blankets. Then you'd lay baby blankets over them and pat each of them on their backs to comfort them for their naps.
ANA: I don't remember that.
ME: Well, you had your own preschool as a toddler, and you made sure every doll had a good nap.
Recently, we went through a box of memorabilia mostly related to my Grandpa Vin and Uncle Buzz. We went through Buzz's year book from high school and found pages and pages of him in there; he was incredibly popular. Not one person made a generic comment; many of them went on and on about how wonderful he was and how fortunate they were to have known him. He was voted as the senior male student with the greatest amount of school spirit, which surprised me that he wasn't the one voted most popular.
What I kept noticing, though, was not so much about him, but about people in general. There were still signs of a different social structure than we have today, certain social boundaries still being kept up and silent agreements about how people treated one another in a given way, but despite all their seeming intelligence and adherence to certain codes of ethics and behavior, most of them had as much trouble differentiating between "your" and "you're." I wasn't sure whether to feel disheartened or to think that maybe certain things hadn't become as awful linguistically as I once thought. Then again, I realized these are the parents of people who would later raise the current youth, a great many of whom have trouble differentiating between "your," "you're," and "ur" on formal papers.
But I digress . . .
The stories I'm telling Ana now are overdue. There are things that I have taken for granted in my life: my ability to parse out what people mean to say from their actual words, a trait I think I picked up in part due to my many bouts of temporary hearing loss from multiple ear infections. I also take for granted my role as parent, and assume that Ana should understand things through osmosis, she was, after all, inside me for nine months . . . shouldn't she have already gained all the knowledge previously learned up to that point? I take for granted my linguistic capabilities to breakdown unfamiliar words in English and in languages that use a Roman alphabet, and glean information about the meaning of those words, often enough so that I can understand the gist of a completely foreign statement. I take for granted that Ana should, after years of educational neglect on my part (even to this day), be able to comprehend the basics of what she reads, analyze it, and draw upon elven years worth of foundational knowledge--a foundation I did not truly help build and is quite obviously unstable.
I keep hoping that it's not too late; I also keep hoping that I'll somehow remember on a daily basis what I must do each day to support her education, not just academically, but on all levels and in all aspects of her life. It's very hard for me to stay consistent, to be proactive on a regular basis, to make the priorities in my mind, priorities on my daily schedule. Story telling is not ritual in our house as I believe it ought to be; many of Ana's communication difficulties might never have been had I made two very different choices in my early years as a parent: 1) controlling my temper and creating a different environment in which she could develop her voice, and 2) reading, singing, and telling stories more than I did.
In truth, I shirked my storytelling responsibilities; I did not make them a daily priority, I did not sing much for the first few years of her life, even though I wanted to, and I didn't sit down with her each day to guide her through the challenges of basic motor skills, behavior, communication, and life skills. These are failures in my parenting, flaws I'm still struggling with. Lately, homeschooling her has become a lesson for me in what mistakes I've made, and finding ways to solve them. The hardest part for me is still to be hands-on, to move away from my own inner world, my internet life, my writing, my hang ups, my own inner drama, and sit down for an hour or two each day and say, "here's what we're going to work on until I help you make sense of it."
Because I wasn't consistent with these things from day one, she's resistant to it. Add the early signs of puberty, and her resistance is greater. These are my challenges, the majority of their cause being my own failure to do the very basics of what was necessary to help her live up to her potential up to this point. In tiny ways I'm getting better. I see myself becoming more consistent in other ways, with my health, with maintaining the house, and with working toward a routine in my career goals. Now I must translate these forms of personal responsibility into meaningful work to do with Ana to meet my parental responsibility.
Ana reads constantly, and yet, I find that she does not read well. She may slide through a book and get some pleasure from it, but there are large gaps in her comprehension. This is known as functional illiteracy. A lot of this has to do with a combination of laziness (if it takes effort, she doesn't want to do it, no matter how great her original interest, e.g. robotics) and a fear of asking for help. My frustration with the former contributes to the sources of the latter. I don't abide laziness, lies, or stupidity (which I define as a choice to remain ignorant, where as ignorance can be cured with a desire to learn and gain knowledge), and all of these behaviors are rampant in the person most important to me in this world. All of these behaviors are in large part due to my own past actions and choices.
I continue to try to find ways to redirect her energy, to learn how to parent better, and to push myself to do what I know is necessary to implement the methods I feel will best support us as mother/teacher-child/student. When I realized tonight that lately I had been reminiscing with Ana about her early years, I believe it is a sign that I am beginning to better understand my role in her life and am becoming more active in making positive changes to guide her. I also believe that reminiscing together is an act of healing, one which is helping bring clarity to what is most needful and how to achieve the goals we set forth together.
We had been watching Cotton roll around in delight because a couple of his toys were near one another, and I'd noticed for a couple of months now, his habit of dragging his toys into one place so he can hold onto and play with all of them at once. I mentioned that it reminded me of Ana as a toddler.
ME: You used to throw all your toys down on the floor, put them in piles, and lay on them, no matter how hard or sharp or pointy.
ANA: Yeah, they were comfortable.
ME: That's how I knew I definitely had a dragon, it's dragon-like behavior to horde your treasures and lay on them. You used to hide your toys in cabinets around the house, and at various times of the day, you'd pull all of them out at once, scoop them into piles, and lay on them!
[Ana laughed and seemed to recall it.]
ANA: I still do that sometimes.
ME: Do you remember that as a toddler you also ran your own daycare?
ANA: No.
ME: You did. You would take out all your dolls and you'd lay them on their tummies on receiving blankets. Then you'd lay baby blankets over them and pat each of them on their backs to comfort them for their naps.
ANA: I don't remember that.
ME: Well, you had your own preschool as a toddler, and you made sure every doll had a good nap.
Recently, we went through a box of memorabilia mostly related to my Grandpa Vin and Uncle Buzz. We went through Buzz's year book from high school and found pages and pages of him in there; he was incredibly popular. Not one person made a generic comment; many of them went on and on about how wonderful he was and how fortunate they were to have known him. He was voted as the senior male student with the greatest amount of school spirit, which surprised me that he wasn't the one voted most popular.
What I kept noticing, though, was not so much about him, but about people in general. There were still signs of a different social structure than we have today, certain social boundaries still being kept up and silent agreements about how people treated one another in a given way, but despite all their seeming intelligence and adherence to certain codes of ethics and behavior, most of them had as much trouble differentiating between "your" and "you're." I wasn't sure whether to feel disheartened or to think that maybe certain things hadn't become as awful linguistically as I once thought. Then again, I realized these are the parents of people who would later raise the current youth, a great many of whom have trouble differentiating between "your," "you're," and "ur" on formal papers.
But I digress . . .
The stories I'm telling Ana now are overdue. There are things that I have taken for granted in my life: my ability to parse out what people mean to say from their actual words, a trait I think I picked up in part due to my many bouts of temporary hearing loss from multiple ear infections. I also take for granted my role as parent, and assume that Ana should understand things through osmosis, she was, after all, inside me for nine months . . . shouldn't she have already gained all the knowledge previously learned up to that point? I take for granted my linguistic capabilities to breakdown unfamiliar words in English and in languages that use a Roman alphabet, and glean information about the meaning of those words, often enough so that I can understand the gist of a completely foreign statement. I take for granted that Ana should, after years of educational neglect on my part (even to this day), be able to comprehend the basics of what she reads, analyze it, and draw upon elven years worth of foundational knowledge--a foundation I did not truly help build and is quite obviously unstable.
I keep hoping that it's not too late; I also keep hoping that I'll somehow remember on a daily basis what I must do each day to support her education, not just academically, but on all levels and in all aspects of her life. It's very hard for me to stay consistent, to be proactive on a regular basis, to make the priorities in my mind, priorities on my daily schedule. Story telling is not ritual in our house as I believe it ought to be; many of Ana's communication difficulties might never have been had I made two very different choices in my early years as a parent: 1) controlling my temper and creating a different environment in which she could develop her voice, and 2) reading, singing, and telling stories more than I did.
In truth, I shirked my storytelling responsibilities; I did not make them a daily priority, I did not sing much for the first few years of her life, even though I wanted to, and I didn't sit down with her each day to guide her through the challenges of basic motor skills, behavior, communication, and life skills. These are failures in my parenting, flaws I'm still struggling with. Lately, homeschooling her has become a lesson for me in what mistakes I've made, and finding ways to solve them. The hardest part for me is still to be hands-on, to move away from my own inner world, my internet life, my writing, my hang ups, my own inner drama, and sit down for an hour or two each day and say, "here's what we're going to work on until I help you make sense of it."
Because I wasn't consistent with these things from day one, she's resistant to it. Add the early signs of puberty, and her resistance is greater. These are my challenges, the majority of their cause being my own failure to do the very basics of what was necessary to help her live up to her potential up to this point. In tiny ways I'm getting better. I see myself becoming more consistent in other ways, with my health, with maintaining the house, and with working toward a routine in my career goals. Now I must translate these forms of personal responsibility into meaningful work to do with Ana to meet my parental responsibility.
Ana reads constantly, and yet, I find that she does not read well. She may slide through a book and get some pleasure from it, but there are large gaps in her comprehension. This is known as functional illiteracy. A lot of this has to do with a combination of laziness (if it takes effort, she doesn't want to do it, no matter how great her original interest, e.g. robotics) and a fear of asking for help. My frustration with the former contributes to the sources of the latter. I don't abide laziness, lies, or stupidity (which I define as a choice to remain ignorant, where as ignorance can be cured with a desire to learn and gain knowledge), and all of these behaviors are rampant in the person most important to me in this world. All of these behaviors are in large part due to my own past actions and choices.
I continue to try to find ways to redirect her energy, to learn how to parent better, and to push myself to do what I know is necessary to implement the methods I feel will best support us as mother/teacher-child/student. When I realized tonight that lately I had been reminiscing with Ana about her early years, I believe it is a sign that I am beginning to better understand my role in her life and am becoming more active in making positive changes to guide her. I also believe that reminiscing together is an act of healing, one which is helping bring clarity to what is most needful and how to achieve the goals we set forth together.
