Sharing the love

Drawing and photo by E-Grrrl.   Happy Valentines Day.

Holiday break at Chez V and a few movie reviews

Ten-year- old E-Grrrl has been out of school since December 21 and hasn’t requested a single play date. She’s entertained herself steadily for more than two weeks, making art, reading book after book after book, playing her Nintendo DS, and doing jigsaw puzzles. She's been clamoring for all things domestic, and and asked me to teach her to crochet and let her have free rein in the kitchen.  She has a number of cookbooks, but her favorite is by Mollie Katzen and is called “Honest Pretzels.” Over break she’s made muffins, real pretzels, pizza with a homemade crust, macaroni and cheese( from scratch), pumpkin bread, pumpkin pies, chocolate chip cookies, omelets, and french toast.  She’s been able to manage all the cooking and baking without any supervision and is even beginning to clean up a bit afterwards. Woo hoo.

Her brother, twelve-year-old A, has had a constant stream of play dates and a tendency to park in front of anything electronic. Today he started melting my votive candles and sculpting with warm wax and I let him do it, just because it was an improvement over having him veg out on the sofa. He’s done some reading along the way, noodled around in the garage, and shot airsoft guns with his buddies. We took the kids swimming one afternoon and E also took them to see Enchanted.

While E spent most of his holiday break getting ready for our move, he also indulged in watching a string of the type of violent, historical movies that I never watch: 300, Apocalypto, We Were All Soldiers, Letters from Iwo Jima, the Passion of the Christ, and others.

I watched From Here to Eternity (old version), The Girl in the Café, and The Shipping News. All three were really good.

From Here to Eternity stars Robert Mitchum, Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra, Deborah Kerr, and Donna Reed. It follows the love affairs and careers of two soldiers in Hawaii during WWII. The story line was well developed, the acting was well done (except when the characters were drunk and it was oh-so-exaggerated), and the female leads played surprisingly strong and independent women.

The Girl in the Café was an HBO movie starring British actor Bill Nighy as an overworked high-level government administrator who is losing hope on ever being able to make a difference in the world through the political process. He’s buried his feelings and ambitions and turned into a bureaucratic drone—until he meets the girl in the café. The movie is a bit like Lost in Translation and is set during the G8 conference where world leaders are being challenged to address the effect of poverty in Africa.

The Shipping News is based on a critically acclaimed book that I haven’t read. It starred Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Cate Blanchett, and Judi Dench. It tells the story of a man (Kevin Spacey) who has been drowning in nothingness his whole life, pushed down by his abusive father. He’s sucked into an even sadder situation by a mesmerizing woman named Petal, played with skill by Cate Blanchett. Judi Dench’s character appears on the scene after a family tragedy and reluctantly takes charge. She convinces the main character to move to Newfoundland and explore the family’s ancestral land while starting a new life. The past and present continually collide in ways that are disturbing and mystical, and yet ultimately, this is a hopeful movie about the pangs that come with rebirth.

Did you watch any good movies over break?

January 4, 2008

Writer Grrrl

One of the joys of being a parent is watching your children's aptitudes and personalities unfold. It's impossible to describe how satisfying it is to be part of the process of seeing someone take ownership of their talents, to have a role in helping them discover and cultivate their best selves.

I have always encouraged my children to think and to question and to consider how their choices and actions impact their own lives and the world around them.  Often as they mull things over in their own minds and share their thoughts with me, I'm struck by how much I learn from them and how much I've learned about myself in the process of being their mother.

My 12-year-old son is reserved and quiet but a keen observer with a sly sense of humor. He was born a scientist and an engineer and is cautious but calculated in assessing risk. He's single minded in pursuing his passions and an adept problem solver. He's very in tune to emotional undercurrents in situations and great at arguing his case with intelligence and finesse. I share his love of science and emotional intelligence, and I'm in awe of the engineering skills he inherited from his dad. My son always gets my jokes, no matter how finely nuanced the humor, and often in social situations, we exchange knowing glances across the room, confident we're thinking the exact same thing.

My 10-year-old daughter is self-assured, bright, and mature beyond her years. She's often described by teachers as wise, not just smart. She's a peacemaker among her peers, spiritual, and sensitive to the needs and feelings of others--a good citizen of the world. She has a mile-wide nurturing streak, and her vibrant and clever sense of humor completely undoes me at times.  She's a list maker, organizer, and goal setter. And she's turned out to be a writer, which bonds her to me all the more. 

Like me, she always has a small notebook with her so she can sketch out ideas or write whenever the spirit moves her. The other day when she got off the school bus, she told me she'd written a poem in her notebook, which was inspired by a bare-limbed tree she saw on her way to school:

The Nest

There it was

Amidst the branches was a home

The birds

The cold nest abandoned

Perhaps they went south to France

Whatever the reason, it sits

Alone and frost covered

The branches reach out like gnarled fingers

Reaching into the early morning sky

The frost looks like a fairy dropped glitter

Over the cold hard earth

That nest is a place of memories

Hopefully they will be restored next year

For now it is alone

The nest.

E-Grrrl, Age 10

Lessons learned

Recently ten-year-old E-Grrrl was given a writing assignment at school, asked to write about something precious to her. She tackled the assignment on two fronts--writing about her favorite stuffed animal and her beloved pets. Here's what she turned in, exactly as she wrote it:

The Story of Piggy

I got Piggy our first Christmas here. I asked Santa for a stuffed animal, but I did not expect a pig! I was not too interested in her at first, but during Christmas break, she became my favorite stuffed animal.

On our first day back to school, I started crying. “I don’t wanna go without Piggy!” I cryed, holding her tight. “Okay,” my mom agreed. “She can come.” And she did.

A month before our second Christmas, Pete joined the family. He was a fun, cute, wild black ball of fur. Our other cat, Amy, did not take a liking to Pete, who tried many times to be her friend.

At Christmas, Pete was always running and out of the tree. Once he even tried to climb it! The best presents Pete got that Christmas were a home and wrapping paper!

Piggy got ribbons that Christmas. She looked adorable all decked up in holiday cheer!

Shortly after Christmas, mid-January, my cat Amy was diagnosed with cancer. When I found out, all I did was cry and hug Piggy. She had cancer around her lungs, and the cancer was bleeding making her lungs shrink. She could not breathe.

The worst night of my life was when Amy died. We had taken her to an animal clinic to see if we could do anything. It was horrible!

Half way home my cat started crying, which made us cry harder. The vet said that the best thing to do would be to put her to sleep a.k.a. kill her. I cryed so hard. I thought I would die. I said goodbye a million times. Then my dad took her to the vet. I cried myself to sleep that night, hugging Piggy the whole time. In the morning, I found out that my cat had died before the shot. I barely said anything the following week. Amy lived to be 14. I still miss her a lot. As you can see, Piggy has been through a lot and I love her.

When I read her composition, I realized how much Amy's death back in January was still on her mind, so I opened up a conversation with her about it, telling her that I still missed Amy a lot too, the way she slept on my bed and how she loved to be held and handled, something our younger more energetic cat is not so fond of.

E-Grrrl responded that she wished Amy hadn't died, that horrible things like that didn't happen.

I paused trying to collect my thoughts before saying, "It is sad that terrible things happen, but good things can come from our bad experiences."

She was incredulous. "How can anything good happen from something so bad?"

I said, "I think you learned some valuable lessons from Amy's death, things that maybe you couldn't have learned any other way."

"Like what?" she said.

"You tell me. What did you learn from Amy's death?"

She jumped on the most obvious point first, "Well I learned that pets die. They don't live forever."

"True. What else?"

"Well because they don't live forever, you need to appreciate them while you have them. One day they may be gone."

"That's true too. It's important to appreciate the things and people we love, but there's another lesson you learned from losing Amy. A big one," I added.

I gave her time to think and she still was drawing a blank.

I said, "Before you lost Amy,you didn't know how hard it was to lose a pet or experience a death. You didn't know what it felt like, how much it hurt, how sad you'd feel about it even many months later, how it could be, as you said, the worst thing that had ever happened to you," I told her.

"Because you went through that experience, you now know what it's like for someone else to suffer that kind of loss. When a friend or classmate loses a pet, you can talk to them about it, or hug them, or just be with them when they feel sad.  That's called being compassionate.

"The hard experiences in our life provide an opportunity for us to learn to be compassionate, and if we all act more compassionately toward one another, the world would be a better place. Some people just let their bad experiences make them angry or bitter or sad, and it's OK to feel that way for a time, but it's important to look for ways to turn the bad things in our life into something good. It makes them easier to bear and it helps us be better people," I concluded.

I could see the gears turning in E-Grrrl's head. "That makes sense. Rachel lost her cat a few weeks before Amy died and she was my best friend in helping me after Amy died. She understood how I felt."

Bingo.

E-Grrrl and I both learned a lesson, and Piggy came along for the ride.

October 9, 2007