one year ago

One year ago, I arrived on a plane in Raleigh, North Carolina, with my family. After leaving Utah the week before, we spent some time in Austin, Texas, for my brother's wedding with my parents.

After taking too long to get tacos from a food truck in Austin, we nearly missed our departing flight, but we made it, and after a short layover in Atlanta, we got to RDU around 11:30 p.m.

I remember noticing that it seemed to smell nice when I arrived in NC. The humidity wasn't quite as intense as it was in Atlanta but still noticeably present. Tim went to get the car which he had parked at the airport while I waited with our luggage, almost all of what we would live with until my brother drove our moving truck from Utah.

We drove home but part of our bumper was falling off, so we stuck to Hwy 70 and went quite slow. We slept on two twin mattresses on the floor strapped together. We had a couple of camp chairs, some house plants, our clothes, a few toys, one pot and one wooden spoon and a knife. Not much else.

The apartment smelled like smoke.

I walked with the kids to the tiny town library the next day in a country town with no sidewalks. We went back regularly--it's the only time I've been consistent about going to story time.

Maya was learning to crawl and kept falling and hitting her head because we had hard floors, so we finally bought a rug. That helped.

Tim installed our diaper sprayer but something was messed up on the toilet valve in the apartment and it became a veritable fire hydrant and flooded everything.

I bought a damaged but functional slow cooker from Goodwill and it served me well, and we bought a lot of take and bake pizzas from Aldi. We never eat those anymore.

A few months later we bought a house and moved to Greensboro and started the process of acclimating to North Carolina all over again. When people asked where we moved from, we weren't sure what to say because we had only been in Gibsonville for a few months. It was a weird interim.

I think those fields are tobacco fields? I still don't understand the placement of fire hydrants. Sidewalks are never reliably offered and neither are road shoulders. People put bags in abandoned cars on the side of the road for some reason sometimes. Occasionally you see cars with cardboard signs in place of license plates that say "Lost Tags" with the plate number, or "Stolen Tags . . . " That's weird. People park on grass here sometimes, especially in the country, because I suppose it's not quite so weird to have grass in a place that's not actually a desert. It's lovely not to ever see sprinkler systems, though. I always felt like sprinklers were an annoying waste of water. The country is not a vast no-man's land, but rather a place where a lot of people live. Streets are not straight and sometimes they go in circles. I still can't navigate driving around.

I'll be returning to Utah visit in a couple weeks. I think I've forgiven Utah for the things I didn't like about it and look forward to seeing the rocky mountains that rise above tree lines again.

time to one's self

I read a post recently titled "This Stage of Life? It's Hard." It resonated with me, as I'm sure it could with arguably most parents of young children. But the discussion about what you "need" when you're the parent of young children (especially the stay-at-home parent, it seems) has sort of stuck with me in a nettling sort of way. I find myself constantly thinking in some way or another about what my needs are or are not as a stay-at-home mom. I go through phases where clearly I'm not thriving, and I think maybe it's because I'm not caring for myself as I should. With a little more attention to myself, would I be able to avoid burn-out? Would I take more pleasure and joy in the day to day?

And then there's this part about adult discretionary time. It seems a huge difference between me and pretty much every other parent I know is that I have zero built-in adult discretionary time. We have our kids in bed with us and they depend on us helping them to fall asleep. Our bedtime structure basically involves everyone lying down in bed at essentially the same time. And during the night, we're always there. Nighttime parenting is not a break, a chance to be alone or with one's spouse, or a period to have uninterrupted rest. Parenting happens around the clock. I think we've adapted, but there are some serious limitations to this structure. Obvious restrictions. And I question it constantly! Do I need to teach my kids to sleep by themselves? Do I need time every night, or at least regularly, where I definitely don't have to worry about wearing the "parent hat"? Do we need to go on dates? (Can't remember the last time we got a babysitter and went on a date.) Do we need to go on vacations that don't involve the kids or leave them overnight? (Never done that!) Do I need to sleep for eight hours straight in order to be healthy? (I've not had a night of uninterrupted sleep for over 4 years!)

The author of the blog post writes that you need to "put your kids down for bed early . . .  you need your mom, . . . you need to not feel bad about using your kids [sic] nap time every now and again to just do whatever the heck you want, . . . you need to be ok leaving your kids overnight, and going away somewhere, . . . you need to do something you enjoy, every day, even if it’s for no more than 15 minutes."

So . . . what if you don't have those things? I don't think I'm trying to be a martyr here, although it might seem like that is my motivation. I hear a lot about the importance of self-care for moms, especially in the form of time away from your kids. It seems like we (moms? parents? media? culture?) are constantly talking about that in the conversation of parenting and childcare. "It's very demanding! You need time for you!"I totally agree and support that concept of ensuring that parents have the care and support they need to do right by their children (not to mention themselves)! I'm constantly getting messages about the necessity of structural space away from being "mom." Have I gone about this mom thing all wrong?  I haven't created this kind of structure in the (albeit relatively short) time I've been a mom. In some ways, I don't want to. In some ways I really do want to. Am I setting myself up for disaster? Am I dooming my marriage? Are these sorts of sacrifices inevitable? Are my compromises unforgivable? Is this component of my life simply another choice among many in the world of acceptable family lifestyles and ways to raise young children? Is it more essential and fundamental than that? Is it going to be the death of me and somehow permanently handicap my children's development too?

These sort of questions linger and hover over me a lot of the time. I've probably even written about it before, so sorrynotsorry if this post is redundant.

neigborhood crime

There was a shooting in our neighborhood last week. Where we live seems to be in a bit of a pocket. A few blocks away in certain directions have more issues with crime, but our development seems to have pushed it out a little. This shooting, though, was within the development. After church on Sunday, we walked around the perimeter of the taped off area a little to see if we could discover any information about what had happened. There were a group of police/investigators taking pictures of some street-parked cars. We saw a woman come out of her house to ask them why they were taking pictures of her car. They told her that there was blood on it. "Sorry," said one of the police officers. "I didn't realize that was your car! Otherwise I would have told you." I keep remembering that little exchange. Like it was no big deal that someone else got blood on your car or something? S. has been very interested in toy guns and was playing with his gun he built from blocks even while we were walking around this crime scene. The timing seemed poor. I've tried to explain that guns hurt people, but the association seems lost on him. The shooting was a bit unsettling, as it occurred at a town home within our development, and there was actually a similar incident about two weeks ago not much farther away. The previous shooting three weeks ago was murky. Apparently they found a man who had been shot in a parking lot and it was unclear where the shooting had taken place. This one over the weekend involved multiple victims and possibly multiple shooters who were at a large party where an argument had taken place. I don't know if either of the shootings ended up involving fatalities, as the news reports don't really seem to include follow-ups after the initial footage.

Where we live has some interesting demographics and I am trying to wrap my head around it. We bought a house through the Good Neighbor Next Door program, so we didn't really choose the location ourselves. We knew it was deemed a "revitalization area" by the government, but we were pretty unaware of what the area was actually like. It's probably not that much different as far as crime goes than where we lived in Salt Lake, but I felt like I understood the neighborhood in Salt Lake and despite sometimes being affected by crime while living there, it didn't seem that threatening. But I have never lived in the South before, so it feels like a new ball game in some ways. My kid is also approaching school-age, so my involvement in the community is going to change, probably. I'm thinking about education with a new urgency than I did before, and I'm just not sure what choices to make. I don't know what to think. Neighborhood schools do not seem to be well respected.

I feel like an outsider where we live. It seems like our neighbors are all black. It sounds stupid to say this, but I kind of used to think that race didn't mean much and people were making a big deal out of nothing. But coming here has broadened my concept of racial identity in some ways. I realize there's a lot more culture associated with this racial group than I had conceived of before, and in some ways that's made me feel alienated and like there is even less common ground between me and people in the black community here. But it's also made me appreciate a bit more the complexity of race relations, so maybe that's a good thing? My world is still pretty small, as I spend my time at home with the young children and mainly only know people from going to church. I'm not necessarily proud of that, but it is what it is. People at church don't live in our neighborhood, so the people I might think of as peers normally also seem demographically different. Does that kind of thing matter or does it not? Color me confused.

lost in the move

Strange things get lost in the moves. I get stressed out about lost stuff and can't forgive them for being missing. Not good at letting things go. I must obsess and categorize and record. But sometimes the randomness of such lists seems humorous:

• a suit jacket, but not the matching suit pants
• a gift card that once found a home in a wallet
• straws to Camelbak-type water bottles

Where do the lost things go?

self-conscious in NC

One thing I didn't necessarily anticipate about being in a new place was this uncomfortable self-consciousness and hyperawareness that I carry with me all the time. Sometimes I feel like I'm just bulging at the seams and not holding things together very well while my children yell and throw tantrums in the tiny library story time while everyone else sits there quietly with their kids who've probably brushed their teeth more regularly in the recent past and eaten something without added preservatives.

when kindness hurts

I read the article "A Daughter Too Kind for Her Own Good" and felt I could relate all too well. Gordon writes, "I’m not just her mother, but another girl who grew up being told not to ruffle feathers or rock the boat."

Kindness runs deeper than just being a people-pleaser, so I believe as a virtue it still deserves a priority place. But I know my tendency to want other people to like me, to be self-sacrificing at least under the guise of serving others' interests, and to avoid arguments on issues ranging from personal to political doesn't do me any favors sometimes, and I worry about what I'm inadvertently teaching my children.

And although I hate to admit that I judge other women with the same unfair measuring stick, I notice that I do. I think it's so culturally ingrained in our ideas about femininity. Just yesterday, I was listening to Hillary Clinton speak on public radio about her presidential campaign, and I found myself feeling uncomfortable because, completely aside from her politics, she didn't sound very matronly.

campus dining

There are a couple of college campuses near us and on MLK day I decided we should try the cafeteria at NC A&T, a HBCU (historically black college/university) very close to where we live. I felt a bit out of place on a few counts: first, we were white; second, we had small kids with us; and third, we were not college students. So it was a bit of a weird choice for dining out, perhaps, but also kind of fun. Oh, the days of college when you could eat cereal with every meal on your meal plan.