Prattle Chatter, Owl Pellets and Meditation

Chatter with 10 year olds is like a constant ocean tide that we wade through every day. Often the tide rises and it gets to be a bit much and I end up begging them (well, especially Riley, since he talks, always, as long as he's awake) to 'be quiet', even to 'shut up for a while!'

Bear with me here, this may get long.

I was writing to my friend Karen this morning. Her brother passed on a week and a half ago, too young, from cancer. While we were driving back from LA and dealing with a broken transmission over the Grapevine, Karen was having to deal with all the funeral and burial arrangements and paperwork and craziness that happens when someone in your family dies. Her brother has 2 children, a nine-year old boy and a little toddler girl. I wasn't very close to her brother, but Karen is family, so he was family of family, if that makes any sense. It's going to be very hard for his family for a long time, and I wish there was more I could do. There's not much, it feels like. I was thinking about the boy, though. He's really into Magic the Gathering, played it with his dad, loves the game. Now that's something I know about, since Paul introduced our boys to it and they play it and Riley in particular goes through periods when he is completely obsessed with it. Karen mentioned that her nephew was obsessed with Magic even during all that's been going on and of course it made me think about my guys and how they deal with things.

Boys. They chatter, they prattle. I hear that girls do that even more, but in different ways. Boys talk a lot, but rarely about the really big things. They talk of games, superheroes, movies, tv shows, stuff going on at school, friends. They can talk on for hours about stuff. Just, you know, stuff, mom. I frequently sit with the guys at bedtime and we sometimes read a book together, or we tell stories, or we just talk. And the most interesting things come out within the chatter. I was telling Karen that boys talk around things, by the edges, underneath whatever they're ostensibly talking about. They sneak the big stuff in there under the radar and it's easy to miss if you're tired and distracted and not listening closely.

I guess I think of boytalk like owl pellets. I have several owl pellets, those mud balls that owls puke up from their gullets periodically to get rid of bones and fur and such. They're sitting on my kitchen counter. Hey, I know, but I have 10 year old boys and owl pellets a hecka cool, actually. If you open up the owl pellets and sort through them you can figure out what that owl ate and all sorts of interesting info. Ooh, this one ate a mouse; here look, the skull is almost intact and there's brown fur too... How do you think he caught the mouse, mom? Did the mouse suffer when he died? Was he afraid?

So I suggested to Karen that if she can manage it, she try to listen to her nephew's chatter, even especially the stuff that seems trivial. Odds are nobody at home has the bandwidth right now to listen to that boy's chatter, and he may end up not talking much at all, especially if it goes on too long with nobody to listen to him, to find him interesting and worth the attention. Who will pick up on the big stuff that gets snuck in around the edges, like the bones in the owl pellet?

***

I was over at Michealle's last night, with the wonderful friends who helped me put together my portfolio a few weeks back. We were talking about what Michealle had been learning at a great, intense workshop she'd been going to, and she led us in a guided meditation, to help us become more aware of our breathing. Breathing in, down, through and out, letting go of things, cleansing out. All good. Michealle gently told us to breathe in, bring the breath deep down past the chest and down, deep into the belly, let it dissipate and flow out, then around and back out. And I couldn't do it, the breath catching right at my chest, hung up and shallow, like it was caught by a web of strands, tough and stringy.

Think of a memory, her voice said, and I was laying on the bed with a towel clenched in my teeth to keep myself from screaming with the pain while Paul had to push a six-inch wooden q-tip with a gauze bandage around it down deep into my chest to fill the surgery site there, so it could heal gradually, slowly, over several months with twice-daily bandage changes, healing from the inside out. Breathe in, she said gently. Caught in a web there, like scar tissue, a little bit of breath could leak like smoke down and around, but not much. Five years, Karen had told me. The doctors told her brother that his cancer must have been there for at least five years before they found out about it and by then. Deep breath. I went off the Tamoxifen anti-cancer drug after five years, just a few months ago. It was a bit over five years ago that I had the surgery and that long healing and then the radiation and more healing. We didn't get a clean margin around the cancer tissue, they said, so you need radiation. That should get it. Five years clean is what we aim for, they said. Five years.

Did the mouse suffer, mom? Was he afraid?

Into Summer

It's already the end of June; next weekend is the Fourth of July weekend. Too fast. Last Thursday I took the boys to Natural Bridges State Park and Beach, one of our favorite beaches. You do have to pay to park there; the park prices have gone up to $10 a pop. Considering the dire financial straits of the State of California, the fact that the parks had to raise their prices isn't at all surprising; there were plenty of park closures happening and they get almost no funding anymore from the state despite the fact that they're supposed to be State Parks, available for anyone. If you're too poor to pay, you park outside the park boundaries and hike on in. I paid; I figure if I can contribute in a very small way to keep the parks going, I'll do it.

The boys have gradually entered into an odd in-between age, teetering between wildly varying states of total independence and then demanding attention and reassurance. They want more say in where we go and what we do but then they get stuck in their own tape-loops of stagnation and habit and need to be shaken out of them. It's a struggle, honestly, to get them to agree on a place to go and to get there without major drama struggles between who doesn't feel like going there right at that time. Once we get there, they have a good time and enjoy themselves, but shaking them out of the house can be a major pain the the butt.

Most of the time I just 'Make It So!' and we go and do what we need to (or just Do What I Say) and I brook no arguments (though they still try). I'm having them take on more of the chores as they get older, and more personal responsibility for taking care of their homework and keeping track of where they need to be and when for the various activities. And in what may be a foolish attempt to give them more control and responsibility for what they do with their own lives I'm gradually giving them more of the bigger choices where I can; for what activities they take on, who they want to play with, where they want to go. It makes everything take longer and need much more negotiation to get anywhere. I need so much more patience than I really have. After all, it's not so easy for any of us (even adults) to learn to compromise and go where someone else wants and be a good sport about it. And sometimes when you do get to go exactly where you thought you wanted to it turns out to be disappointing. All part of regular everyday life, of course.

Riley

 There's also the fact that the two boys have radically different talents and social interests. Casey's more of an introvert, like Paul and I, whereas Riley is one of the most social people I've ever met and absolutely craves social contact. We wonder how he does that or where he learned that, frankly. Every time we turn around he's off talking to someone else. It's that old phrase, "he's never met a stranger" for Riley. He talks to adults and kids alike as equals. Casey makes less of an immediate impression on people who meet them because not only is he more shy, but he doesn't really care what others think of him and thus feels no need to please or try to impress others. It's an odd trait that I see sometimes in both Paul and myself at different times, but it's disconcerting to see it shown by one of the boys. Seeing these adult sorts of behaviors displayed by either one is a bit of a shock, really. I guess we'll get used to it.

Casey

Casey is doing summer gymnastics all day, three days a week, but Riley doesn't have such structured plans, and that means that he's spending more time hanging out with just me, as I try to get work done and take care of all of my usual things- pretty dull for an active 10 year old boy. If I allowed it, I could easily end up spending every moment doing things with him to keep him active and occupied and busy and learning and enriched and fulfilled and... well, you get the idea. He's having to learn a bit this summer about how to entertain himself by himself and he's having a hard time with it, frankly. He's not used to having so much free time apart from Casey, though I think they need more time apart than they used to, since when they're together too much they get on each others' nerves. This way they're more than happy to spend time together after the time apart; they have to catch each other up on all the things that happened while they were apart.

 

I need to find some summer workbook type things and impose some math and writing and reading stuff so they don't get out of the habit, but all of the local bookstores where I used to easily find such things are gone now. Riley and I have lost one of our favorite activities together: browsing through the bookstore and then having a hot chocolate while reading. Bookstores were always good for sparking interesting things to get Riley interested in reading and researching new things. That lack of bookstores is compounded by the local library having cut back their hours as well, though we'll be going there this summer for sure.

Brown Pelican

So we have plans for any number of summer day trips as well as a vacation-type trip to places this summer. But summer is flying by on me and somehow I suspect that we won't do nearly as many as seemed possible when the whole summer was spread out in front of us like an all-you-can-eat buffet. This odd time compression seems to happen to us every summer.

Hopefully it'll be enough, though. It's hard to predict what will stick with a kid about a summer, or being 10, or what life was like with his folks when he was a kid. We try to do a decent job and give them good memories. But it seems reasonable that a certain amount of boredom and learning to get along with others and their limitations are just a part of the process. How can you ever learn how to entertain yourself and learn things for yourself if you are always catered to, everything is always handed to you in easily digested, fun bits? I suspect both boys would retort that they sure aren't getting everything they want, that's for sure. :P Just wait until I pull out some math pages and make them write an essay or two...