My first attempt with markers

Once upon a time there was a girl.  She wasn’t a particularly happy child, but she loved to be creative and spent every spare moment adding to the towering stacks of drawing books and canvases and endlessly scribbled her poems and short stories in her school notebooks.  Her dad had been an artist, and it made her feel like she was closer to him, that she was like him, when she drew her little pictures.  She dreamed of going to art school, and unsuccessfully tried to talk people into paying for painting classes.  She dreamed of writing books.  She just wanted to CREATE…

And then she did.  But not the way she thought she would.

The girl got pregnant.  It was a struggle to finish high school while caring for a little baby all by herself, but she did it.  She signed up for community college and watched all her friends head off to bright futures without her.   She felt so sad, alone, and unfulfilled.  She dropped out of classes the first week.  She stopped drawing.  She stopped writing.  She started hiding.  She floundered and flopped through the end of her teen years and the start of her twenties.

When she was twenty-one she forced herself out of her hidey-hole.  She started school again and signed up for an art class.  She hadn’t so much as scribbled in years and the first day she felt so outclassed and intimidated that she dropped out and signed up for accounting instead.

And then she met the man who would be her husband.  She fell in love, got married, started a blog and started having babies.  That little blog gave her a creative outlet and for a long time she was content enough to share her thoughts with a small following.  Her husband would occasionally gift her with art supplies but she was too scared to try again, afraid she would make a fool out herself.  And maybe still grieving for the part of her that thought she had been headed in a different direction.

Then she made a friend who taught her how to do henna and gave her a job.  It was frustrating and hard at first, but she was motivated by the idea that she could help support her family.  And she did henna like a boss.  It was satisfying to drape and lay out lines and dots until they grew into intricate, lacy patterns.  Only after she had been doing it for several years did it occur to her that this was indeed ART.

She grew a little more confident.  She started another blog and befriended a kickass website designer who talked her into sketching for her layout.  People liked it, and one kind soul compared her sketches to Alphonse Mucha and she cried.  And then she stuck her toes into the arty world and tentatively started doodling cartoons for her blog.  People liked them and asked for more.  She cried some more.  Her husband outfitted her with everything she could possibly need to draw and paint and she sat and stared at the blank paper, overwhelmed by the possibilities and the very real fear that she would never be good enough to make all this worthwhile.

She completed her very first painting.  It wasn’t great but she was so proud to actually finish something for the first time in over a decade. And then she saw the work of some of her childhood friends and realized it amateurish and crap and put it all away again.  A few months later she scooped up enough courage to try again and when she finished her drawing she put it on her facebook page.  She got such awesome, supportive comments and emails-  but all she could see were the mistakes.  The eyes were askew, the shading was wrong, it wasn’t good enough.  People liked it anyway.  They wanted prints, and several people wanted to commission her to paint something for them. She was embarrassed. It was hard for her to look at anything she had drawn or painted and think it was worthy enough to sell; she was just learning to be brave about showing her “art” to people.

And now we move forward to today….   And the girl stares at her blank page and is struggling with the urge to put it all away again because the idea of people who actually want to put something she has done ON THEIR WALLS is freaking her out.  She’s afraid that she will disappoint someone, or herself.

Hannah is a babywearing sister!

I have a bunch of littles (sometimes it feels like fifty but really it is just three) and one daughter firmly entrenched in her teen years.  So many blogs are devoted to parenting a young child; I thought it might be a refreshing change to address what it is like to be an attachment parent with a teenager.

Whenever I post something thoughtful or awesome that Hannah has said or done (like Sunday, when she got out the laptop and put together a quiche to surprise me with dinner while I put Cooper down for a nap, or the time she wrote this letter) it results in several people asking me what it is that we did to get such an amazing kid.  It isn’t one particular thing.  In fact, I think its two parts her awesomeness by nature and one part how we work as a family. Do we fight and yell at each other? To be honest, yeah. I wish it was not the case, but we do have our yelling matches.  My mom was a yeller, and my natural reaction is to yell when I get overwhelmed or aggravated.  I’m working on it, and I’m getting better at taking a breath and a moment to calm down before I flip out.  It helps that Hannah sounds exactly like me- sometimes half way through an argument we fall into giggles because it sounds like one person arguing back and forth.

But we also talk. A LOT. Our kids aren’t just our kids.  They’re people and we treat them as such.  There is a ton of “it bothers me when you do A, B, C,” and “it hurt my feelings when” and “I feel blah blah when” going on around here.  When I screw up or make a bad decision, I talk about what happened and why. We talk about how we feel, what we’re thinking, all day long. Hannah is a person with valid opinions and reasons for her actions, and we talk about the choices she has and what she could do with them. When I’m upset with her, I explain why and when she is upset with me she does the same.

If I had to give advice on how to raise a thoughtful and kind person, I would say…

1) Listen to your kid.  Actively listen.  Don’t just nod your head and make agreeable noises, but hear them.  Last night Hannah and I stayed up until two in the morning talking.  I needed sleep, and so did she, but it was more important that we spent some time together.  Listening is imperative. 

2) Own up to your mistakes.  Your kids will learn more from you admitting you screwed up and then seeing you try to fix it than thinking they have a perfect parent. 

3) Explain why you set a boundary or rule in place.  We have very few rules in our home, and Hannah understands why each one exists.

4) Nurture honesty.  My kids know that if they have screwed up big time they just have to tell us- and we’ll help them fix it, whatever it is. 

Is there a recipe for producing the perfect child?  Of course not, but the way we choose to interact with our children sets up the way they treat others and how they feel about themselves.  I would love it if she wouldn’t nitpick at her brother so much, or if she could do the dishes the first time I ask or even just remember to take the dog out more often…  But the flip side is that I have a daughter that is strong, thoughtful, compassionate, talented and kind.  She is articulate, funny, and a fierce protector of her siblings.   She stands up for what she thinks is right and isn’t afraid to speak her mind.  She is beyond awesome.

Upon request, here is the epic thread from The Good Letdown.  The idea of her (the woman that took screenshots from my page and wouldn’t remove the images and names of my readers, even after she was repeatedly asked) complaining about improper use of someone’s images was just too much.  If that’s true, it sucks, but it is still hypocritical and funny.  We just couldn’t help ourselves!