Velveteen Mind

You Loot, We Shoot

Three years ago today, Hurricane Katrina demolished the Gulf Coast.  We lost everything we owned, save for three days' worth of clothes, one guitar, a handful of photos, and our lives.

We evacuated ahead of the storm, as we always do and always will.

We had no idea what Katrina had wrought until a few days after she was gone.  The video below is of us at Maguire's parents' house, blissfully ignorant of how our lives were changing as we sat in the dark. 

While we played with a 13 month old Q, our home was going under water.  It was being battered and blown to bits.  His toys were being submerged and smashed and dragged out to the Gulf of Mexico.  His Christening gown, passed down from his great-grandfather, worn by his grandfather, by Maguire, and then by him, being swept away. 

Every photograph and journal I had saved so carefully since elementary school, warping and floating away.  The photos from college, where Maguire and I met.  Our wedding.  Our honeymoon.  The photos of me pregnant.  The photos and videos of Q's birth.  The videos of him learning to walk and talk...  all gone.  And we had no idea.

Night of Katrina from Megan Jordan on Vimeo. 

What Katrina left us was the gift of charity.  The importance of family and friends.  The impermanence of the material and the futility of regret.

As I sit here, hurricanes are forming to the south of us.  And yet we remain.  We will evacuate, but not before protecting all that we have rebuilt.  All that we have fought for and struggled to call home again.

But we will evacuate.  And with us, we will take our most precious gift from Katrina, our son Goose.  Because one other possession Hurricane Katrina took away from me was the illusion of control.  Had it not been for her, I would not have released my need to plan every moment.  I would not have opened my carefully guarded life to the unexpected gift of the right baby at the wrong time.

Thank you, Katrina, you complete and utter wench.

But Gustav and Hanna? 

Stay off of my property because looters will be shot.

And yeah, that's my dad.  And, yes, he will shoot you. 

~~~

Feed readers, if you don't see the video, be sure to click through.

~~~

Related Posts:

Victor Vito (our Katrina story)

Camille was a Lady, Katrina was a Bitch (on the 2nd anniversary)

Hierarchy of Suffering (why being a victim is a waste of energy)

Resilience or Defiance: on the Third Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

 

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Supernanny Don't Fail Me Now

Goose turned two in July.  Since then, he has welcomed the "terrible" with open arms.  He has become a yelling, pouting, hitting, throwing, crying, stomping cliché.

In turn, he has turned me into the clichéd fretting mother, constantly wondering where I have gone wrong and how I can save him from himself.  Looking for stopgap solutions so that we can all just make it through the day, for crying out loud.

When, in truth, what I need to do is back away, put the cookie back into the cookie jar, and let him work his way through it on his own.  Tough love and all that jazz.

But damn if that isn't hard.

Goose started attending preschool two half-days a week this month.  Nicely coinciding with that was the introduction of separation anxiety that arrives so conveniently at his age.   The result is an undercurrent of mutteringly-hostile "I no go school" chants under his breath any time I look like I might put shoes on him.  Or brush his hair.  Or look in the direction of the garage.

A weaker mother might give in to his sad eyes and pouting lips as he proclaims that he is, in fact, ready to go back to bed at 7:45 a.m. because he "no go school."  A weaker mother like, say, his father.

But no.  We are going to tough this out.  We are not going to decide that he's just two and doesn't really need to be in preschool, anyway.  That he can stay home another year and risk even having a spot in the impossible-to-get-into preschool that we love because they are not overly competitive or encourage over-scheduling.

We are not going to decide that this is too hard for Goose.

The surest way to make life hard for your kids is to make it soft for them.

I have said that before and I'm saying it here again because I need it as a reminder.  I will not bail out my kids just because they are uncomfortable.

But damn if this isn't hard.

None of us likes to see our children struggle or in pain.  Particularly if we can help them.  But by helping them, by bailing them out, by protecting them from disappointment, what are we truly accomplishing in the long run?

We are depriving them of pride.

I used to watch Supernanny all the time.  One of my favorite episodes focused on a mother that had slept in her son's room every night since she brought him home from the hospital.  Take that a step further and you realize that she had not spent the night in bed with her husband since she brought her son home from the hospital five years earlier.

Not that she hadn't tried.  She had tried to persuade her son to sleep alone, but the resulting tantrums and visible emotional pain were too much for her to bear.  So she caved.  Night after night.  She caved.

Needless to say, this kind of weakness extended into other areas of their life to the point that they had to bring in Supernanny, Jo Frost. 

One of the first things Jo did was walk the mother through getting her son to sleep through the night alone for the first time.  Her technique is simple and boils down to that after some measure of comfort, you simply return them to bed each and every time they try to leave the room and you do not engage them.  After hours of this tortuously stoic approach, I'll be damned if the little boy didn't sleep in his bed alone.  For the first time in his life.

The next morning, he entered the kitchen and displayed something his mother had never witnessed so purely before:  pride.  He was proud of himself for having slept by himself. 

Despite all of her best efforts to protect him from pain and discomfort, his mother had been surely succeeding in doing one thing that would last longer than any amount of comfort that her presence in his bedroom could provide: She had been depriving him of pride.

This realization was stunning, to say the least.  It was also not nearly as dramatic as I am making it out to be, but it dramatically impressed upon me the importance of allowing our children to, in essence, learn how to fish rather than giving them a fish.  Regardless of how hungry they may appear at that moment.

So tonight, when Goose came out of his bedroom in tears for the fourth time in as many minutes, I caught myself engaging him.  I was literally in mid-comforting hysteria (you know the kind, as you are on the edge of breaking down but don't want to let them know that you might have to throw them out the window), when I stopped mid-sentence and saw Supernanny in my mind. 

Crazy as that sounds.

I stopped talking, or, I should say that I stopped pleading, closed my mouth, scooped him up, delivered him to his bed, and walked out.  I only had to do this one more time and as I sit here, he has still not left his bed.  Sure, there was some sniffling, but if you can't handle some sniffling and mumbling about "no, Q's bed!" and "no go school," then you might want to reconsider having that second or third child.

...

Wait...

...

Well, I'll be damned. 

I just heard Maguire, my husband, leave Goose's room. 

A weaker mother would have snuck in there and lain on the floor until Goose fell asleep. 

I appear to have married a weaker mother.

I'll be damned.

Consider this to be continued...

...........................

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Tall Glass of Southern Sass? More like a Short Shot.

My first post for Deep South Moms Blog, the sassy sister site of Silicon Valley Moms Blog network, is finally up.

Well, "finally" in that I finally wrote a post for them.  I signed on to the site well before they launched, but became thoroughly distracted with our BlogHer The People's Party and Blog Nosh Magazine.  When I showed up for the SVMB Group headshots shindig at Saks Fifth Avenue in San Francisco, some whispers hounded my tail along the lines of "Does she really write for us or is she crashing?"

I may steal movies, but I don't generally crash parties.

Hm, that would look good on my headstone.  But I digress...

The post I wrote for them is "Resilience or Defiance" and it is something that has been on my mind every day for years.  It would mean a lot to me if you would head over there, check it out, and if you feel compelled--  leave a comment.  In fact, I worked my sassy ass off this weekend and have some free time today (seriously finally!), so I promise to visit and comment on every single one of the blogs that leave a comment on my first post over there.  Something I should do more regularly over here, I am well aware.  But still...

For all of your hard mouse clicking and keyboard tapping, here is a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes of my Deep South Moms post:

Do you love all of the Sonic cups in there?  I was bribing my boys with Sprite and cups of cereal so that I could take the photos I needed to along the beach for the post.  You can see the live oaks along the waterline in the reflection in the window.

Now then...

Let's show those girls that I can pull my own weight on their fancy blog.

Sweet tea and pearls, my ass.

...........................

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