Chunking!

Wendy Wisner's newest piece for Scary Mommy introduced me to the word chunking:

"The latest theories on time management advise strongly against multitasking—good news for me. The new catchphrase is “chunking,” and it basically means that rather than trying to get everything done at once, you set aside specific chunks of time, and then just work. Do nothing else."

I love this word that describes my approach to accomplishing anything since adding motherhood to the juggling act of cobbling together a full-time job from part-time ones: poet, adjunct, writing teacher and private writing coach. (How's that last sentence for mixed metaphors? That is pretty much what it feels like. Varied, fun and sometimes confusing.)

I live by my calendar program. I input everything, from taking a walk to doing laundry to grading exams to submitting poems to hustling for teaching assignments the following semester. Everything is color coded and in-person appointments are in separate "calendars" shared with my husband, so that we can better coordinate who is picking up our son from daycare and when we might be free for, imagine that!, a date night.

My main time management tip is to literally schedule your writing time and other projects that easily get pushed to the side since the creative projects are (usually) less time sensitive. If you schedule the time to write and accomplish a task, one that you want to do or would rather procrastinate, you will actually show up to do it.

It is like setting a timer: You can focus on anything for a short period of time and then give yourself a break. But first, you have to show up and do the work. And then it will perhaps be done, but at least be started.

What is your best approach to making sure that the balls you are juggling don't hit you in the head on their way down?

Our Bodies: Knowledge and Consent Starting in Toddlerhood

Our attentive son has noticed some physical differences between his mother and father.

OK, the truth is that he would occasionally point and laugh at me. And I, who used to lead an occasional safer sex seminar for first years at an American university in Italy, was stumped about what to say about the genitalia that I was "missing" and and how we weren't going to "go to the store, Mommy, and buy one. Now!"

Ahem.

Avoiding Googling and seeing images I could never un-see, I turned to my many knowledgeable friends. Thank you to Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd and sex educators Danielle Foote and Bianca Palmisano for their recommendations, which you can find below. These resources have helped him to learn about his body and to start open conversations between the three of us.

The Netherlands offers sexuality education for kids as young as four. Clearly it can be done with the right resources and support. I imagine that we will next turn to books about gender and sexuality. For now, our son has stopped asking questions, which suggests he learned what he wanted to know about his body. (Now he's asking about other things, like planets, moons and dinosaurs.)

Do you have favorite resources about sex, gender and/or sexuality for toddlers? Please share them below in the Comments section. 

Here are the best resources I found:

These two books are very informative and straight-forward about bodies:

Amazing You!: Getting Smart About Your Private Parts by Gail Saltz (Author) and Lynne Avril Cravath (Illustrator). This book is very clear about what boys and girls have as children. There are even pictures to show how their bodies are likely to change as they grow.

Related to naming and understanding their bodies, kids should start to learn consent with adults and other children. Children can start to learn the concept by having physical autonomy. This book, Your Body Belongs to You, by Cornelia Maude Spelman (Author) and Teri Weidner (Illustrator) helps to explain these issues.

This next book doesn't address genitalia, but it does explain how other parts of our body work.With interactive flaps, our son is mesmerized about the world beneath his skin.

Little Explorers: My Amazing Body by Ruth Martin  (Author), Allan Sanders (Illustrator)

What Makes a Baby by Cory Silverberg  (Author), Fiona Smyth (Illustrator) addresses the many ways that an adult can become a parent, while showing non-gender specific people.

For more book recommendations, including for older children, Dr. Nadine Thornhill's  article Let's Read About Sex! 6 Books About Sex for Toddler to Teen has some great suggestions. Planned Parenthood also has great tools and recommendations for talking with your teen.

Birds + Bees + Kids is an online program by Amy Lang, a sexual health educator, about talking to kids about the birds and the bees. (It is pay-for content, but comes highly recommended.) She has an "Ages & Stages Seminar" that addresses kids as young as two.

If you are interested in working directly with a health, sex or sexuality educator in order to help you to educate yourself and your children, you might try: The MamaSutra, Superstar Health Education or Dr. Nadine Thornhill.

The Unitarian Universalists have an educational program about birth, babies, bodies and families. (They also have programs that follow for older children and adults, too.) You might be interested in seeing their recommended books and more about the program. Here is the link to their program, OWL. 

Talking and Writing About Racism

How do I talk about our country's deep racism with my son? How do I write about it in my poems? I certainly don't have all the answers, but I know that I need to address it now, starting when he is young and now, in all of my poems. There are too many tragedies continuing in our country and sometimes led by young people. Racism will not die out with older generations, nor will my generation's "color blind" education work.

The subject can't be ignored until my son is "old enough." He sees and hears things and is always growing and being shaped by his world. He witnesses my actions, hears my words and plays with a community of friends at daycare and on the playground. That is all to say that we live in America.

I've been editing a poem that directly addresses race and recent events. But I realize that's the wrong approach. Even when I'm not writing about race, race is implied and present. We can't not talk and write about it.

Here were some insightful  articles on the issue of talking with your kids about race and racism from the Atlantic, Slate and PBS.

Library Books Vs. MINE

One night our sleeping son sat up in his crib and shouted, "Mine!" and then resumed a peaceful position.

I wish we knew what he was dreaming. We do know that he (like other toddlers) is challenged by the idea of ownership and sharing. He and his peers on the playground argue about whose turn it is and who owns what, including the slide and Mamma.

Perhaps regular visits to the library will help him to understand what it means to share, take turns and care for something in someone else's absence. We visit almost weekly and always leave with an armful of books. We're hopeful that our bambino is starting to understand the idea of choosing books to borrow for a period of time.

I led a workshop at the local library and returned home with new books for him. When he saw the books, he exclaimed, "Library books!" Happily, he recognized them immediately as not his. We keep these books in a special section of the shelf and he's become an expert at separating them from the books that are indeed his.

In the library, I love watching him look through the books and turn the pages. One day soon he'll be reading the words himself. Right now he points to the words and says, "ABCs!"

What are your favorite books to borrow from the library? We've enjoyed some of the Dinosaur Vs. series. Click through to watch videos and download coloring sheets. We look forward to coloring Dinosaur Vs. The Library!

Guest Post: Getting Out of the Basement by David Ebenbach

Thanks to David Ebenbach for today's guest post about parenthood, writing and the corner (basement?) where they intersect. For more, do read his collection of short stories, Into the Wilderness, to see how his autobiographical story was transformed and offered him new insight.

David Ebenbach is the author of two books of short stories—Between Camelots (University of Pittsburgh Press), and Into the Wilderness (Washington Writers’ Publishing House)—plus a chapbook of poetry entitled Autogeography (Finishing Line Press), and a non-fiction guide to creativity called The Artist’s Torah (Cascade Books). He has been awarded the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center, and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Ebenbach teaches at Georgetown University.  Find out more at www.davidebenbach.com.


Getting Out of the Basement

When I was a teenager, I locked my mother in the basement. It was an accident, but that didn’t do her any good after I locked that door and left the house to go to work. She had to physically break out of the basement through the bulkhead door, climb the backyard fence, and go to her own job without keys or a purse or anything else. When I got to my job, naturally there was an angry phone message waiting for me.

And how did I react when I found out what I’d done? With sympathy and apologies? Of course not—I was a teenager, and totally resentful that I had to go all the way home to unlock the door and get my mother the things she needed. Honestly, I don’t think I really felt sympathy for what she went through that day until I had a child myself.

Actually, I didn’t get it until my son was three years old and I was working on my second book of short stories, a book all about parenthood. I was writing it because parenthood was (and is) such an enormous, complicated, uncharted experience—the book is called Into the Wilderness—and writing is my way of trying to understand the important and complex things about life. Inhabiting characters—in this case, fictional parents going through many of the same things I was—helps me to see my own experiences and emotions more clearly.

But it doesn’t end there. One of the greatest pleasures of writing fiction comes from the fact that my characters aren’t entirely like me; through them I get to touch not only my own life but also the imagined lives of other people. Writing fiction means a constantly enlarging sense of empathy—at least if I’m doing it right. Short stories in particular allow me to see things from all kinds of angles. My characters were single parents, same-sex parents, parents of different religious and ethnic backgrounds, people struggling to get pregnant and people uninterested in becoming parents at all. The stories came from everywhere.

And then I found myself writing a story about a woman getting accidentally locked in the basement by her son—and (because it was a book about parents) I was writing it from the woman’s point of view.

This was a culmination of something that had been building for a few years. Before my son was born I brought together several important men in my life to mark and celebrate the transition into fatherhood. The guys told me stories and gave me advice, and one of those men—my own father—told me to remember to make time for myself once my child was born. Not only did that turn out to be essential advice—it also impressed me deeply with the truth that a father, a parent, my father, is of course a person, a person with needs and a point of view. I had always known that, but there’s a big difference between knowing something and really getting it.

From that point on, as I received more stories and advice, as I changed my first diapers and made my first bottles and figured out how (approximately) to parent, I had many occasions to think about all the times my parents had done similar things. How, instead of lounging around on the couch, they had worked and fed me and taken me places—all of the ordinary things people do for their children. Ordinary, yes—but the ordinariness doesn’t rob their deeds of their profundity. Hour after hour, day after day, they elevated my needs (mine and my sister’s) over their own—because that’s what parents do. And what parents do is frankly amazing.

But the most enlightening thing about being a parent is that the empathy grows in more than one direction; not only was I finally truly understanding what my own mother and father experienced—I was also learning a lot about the experience of children, through my own child, and through writing my book.

In “The Escape Artist,” that story about the mother locked in the basement, my favorite scene comes toward the end, when the mother and the son are finally in the same place at the same time, unlocking the front door of the house to get back in. In that moment, I see both characters, and there’s finally room enough in the house for both of them.

Obama's Second Inaugural Speech

I've wondered if it makes sense to bring a child into a country where inequality (in regards to poverty, health, gender, sexuality, education, etc.) makes headlines regularly. Today's inaugural speech gives me hope for our country's future. While a public, prepared inaugural speech won't make instant changes, it marks a positive direction for our country's leadership and a public dialogue.

In the womb and after birth, our child could be anyone and could aspire to be anyone. I can only hope that all of our children have the same opportunities to be his or herself safely, happily and productively. And isn't that the American dream?

I was proud - and tearful - to listen to Obama's speech (which you can read in its entirety here.)

Here was a particularly moving section:


"We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity; until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm."

Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you.