Domestic Psychology

Leap Day 2012

// February 29th, 2012 // No Comments » // flickr, holidays

A new, old birthday

// January 5th, 2012 // 1 Comment » // Family, holidays

Today is my father’s birthday. It wasn’t his birthday last year. It wasn’t his birthday for the past 68 years. His 69th birthday is his first January 5th birthday. It’s also the 69th anniversary of his death.

To say that this day is more contemplative than celebratory would be an astronomical understatement. My father is not the victim in this convoluted mess of social engineering. His life was both normal and remarkable. He was in the first generation in both his adopted and birth family to earn a college degree. He worked white collar jobs and enjoyed the benefits connected to them.

In the pile of paperwork that the state of TN finally released last year, there were a dozen letters written to Georgia Tann that are actually love letters from his adoptive parents to my father. My father was and is loved.

The tragic victim is my father’s birth mother. We will never know how different her life could have been without the unspeakable pain of losing a child. She never left her small, middle TN town. My father’s birth parents are old, frail, and alone. His half sister sits in a jail. It took an additional generation for his maternal birth family to access higher education.

Depending on your perspective, we are either protecting his birth mother from additional pain to the wound that never heals or taking the easy out by not letting her know that, despite what Georgia Tann said, her child did not die. I both hate and understand this. Her pastor knows that we want to help her and don’t know how to do so. Southern women have many strengths and faults but, accepting help from strangers is not something we do easily. I don’t expect to hear from her pastor until she is gone.

We can’t ease her pain. That is foremost on our minds today. On every other day, I am determined to fight against people and politicians who use religion to interfere with the lives of others. Today, I am sad. Not for myself, but for a grandmother I will never know.

Happy Birthday Dad. I love you.

Occupy PEACE

// December 7th, 2011 // No Comments » // flickr, holidays

The case FOR holiday cards

// December 5th, 2011 // 3 Comments » // holidays, mail

All year long, I use email, SMS and social networks to communicate with people. I leave a lot of digital footprints, but nothing that would survive a terrible magnet attack. The exception is the card that I mail every Christmas season. Since I have read several anti-card posts this week, I am going to attempt to explain why I am pro-cards.

1. Making the card is a memory that I treasure. While photographing this year’s card, one of the children declared that their arms were going to fall off their body. Doug and I spontaneously stopped what we were doing, extended our arms to our sides and made little circles. “Now, spin counter-clockwise.” Every card we make has stories.

2. The picture is a snapshot of a moment in time that captures a year of growth, personality and relationships. Someday, I hope that the children look back and notice their older sibling interacting with them in the card pictures. I see the changes from year to year as I learn what does and does not work when photographing a diverse group of children.

3. Christmas cards are one of the only pieces of mail that are neither junk nor bills. Remember when mail actually brought letters and cards? That kind of excitement at the arrival of the mail carrier is something that is almost extinct.

4. Mail is an endangered species. It will cease to exist in my lifetime. I will celebrate the nostalgia of the USPS for as long as it exists. When it goes away, so will Christmas cards.

5. Christmas cards from other people are contributions to our holiday decor. Serious, silly and other images that make our Christmas more diverse, colorful and nostalgic.

6. Cards from years past move old memories out of pine needle littered boxes and into the present. Babies that are now teenagers, friends that have moved far away and loved ones who have left us are temporarily with us again. It’s important to remember.

7. Christmas cards make me happy. Everyone needs more happy.

method to my holiday madness

// November 11th, 2011 // 4 Comments » // flickr, holidays

Dear relatives who have finished all of your Christmas shopping except for my children,

I will send you the requested list of ideas. Making that list requires that I first plan our shopping list. Before I can sit down and plan all that shopping, I have to plan our Christmas Card picture. Deciding that picture has to happen before Thanksgiving, when the picture will be taken. That means that I will compose my master list and your micro lists in less than two weeks. You will still be able to have ALL your shopping completed by Thanksgiving. Remain calm. I will BEGIN my shopping, after the card picture is completed.

In the meantime, a review of past card picture triumphs and failures:

Dress like an idiom

// November 3rd, 2011 // No Comments » // holidays, school

Halloween costumes are not allowed at our elementary school. Instead, the Friday before Halloween was “wear orange” day, which is pretty much every single Friday’s uniform for people of all ages in all of Knox County. On Halloween, the fourth graders were given the assignment to dress like an idiom.

I thought this was a pretty ingenious way to blend learning with silly. We spent hours talking about idioms and how to make sense of them visually. The adults quietly mumbled several dozen completely inappropriate idioms and costumes, like a fake backside worn on the front of your body.

Eventually we agreed on an idiom that wouldn’t require major clean-up on a busy evening with Trick or Treating. A tiny pail was laced into a shoe so that it clanged and bounced with every step. I told Amy to grin and say she was kicking the bucket. In my mind, I pictured Jimmy Durante’s ever so silly bucket kicking scene in “It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world.”

Unbeknownst to me, her father decided that wasn’t enough background information. He told her aaaaall about the origin of the idiom and described examples with humans and animals. I found this out when she was describing her day to me and repeated her graphic monologue about her chosen idiom.

Amy will be very lucky if her classmates don’t start calling her Wednesday Addams. Doug will be the person talking to Social Services when they pay us a visit.

Doug <\3 holidays

// May 6th, 2011 // No Comments » // Doug, holidays

Doug: “What do you want for Mother’s Day?”
Me: “A new splash screen.”
Doug: “What do you want me to BUY you for Mother’s Day?”
Me: “You can give me a new splash screen for my birthday.”

Found: one egg

// May 4th, 2011 // No Comments » // children, holidays, parenting

Six days after Easter and two days after the storms, I found an Easter egg in the yard. It wasn’t one of the four boiled eggs that were not found. Wild animals probably found those. Wild animals is not a euphemism for my children either. No, I found a small yellow plastic egg with candy inside. The candy was a foil wrapped Peepster. Peepsters are chocolate coated Peeps. Not entire marshmallow chicks or bunnies, but small bits of Peeps. Peep giblets dipped in chocolate and wrapped in foil that spent almost a week outside.

As I stared at it bemusingly, Noah asked me if I would be eating it. I delicately said, “Ew. Absolutely not.” Okay, maybe not so delicate, but Noah scooped it up and walked in the house with uncharacteristically swift speed. He turned down the hall as if he was heading to his room, but marched further into his little brother’s room.

“Ouch! Why did you hit me with an egg?”
“It still has candy in it.”
“Can I eat it?”
“Yeeeees.”
“Thanks Noah!”

St. Patrick’s Day

// March 16th, 2011 // No Comments » // holidays, me

As a child, we were not allowed to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day. My father’s speech sounded something like, “That is not a Christian holiday and as Americans, we don’t support the IRA mwah-mwah-mwah-mwah.” All I heard was, “You’re gonna get pinched.” I should make a big deal about St. Patrick’s Day just to maintain my black sheep cred, but I don’t.

For my children, St. Patrick’s Day has changed from wearing green and bruising classmates’ forearms to wearing green, making leprechaun traps and not violating anyone’s personal space. That’s a step toward holiday improvement for them, so yay for St. Patrick’s Day as a children’s holiday. For adults, it is a claim to be Irish and drink too much holiday. Neither of those methods of celebrating sound like fun to me. The descendants of Irish immigrants in rural middle TN don’t celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, but every single college student seems to celebrate it. Since college students celebrate putting on their pants in the morning (or afternoon), they’re not really celebrating this particular holiday as much as they are changing the color of their alcohol for one night.

I do NOT want to squabble with those who claim to be Irish when they can’t even name their relative who immigrated to America. I have my great grandmother’s steamer trunk from her trip to America in my closet, but I don’t get wasted on Gathering Day. If communities start having St.Patrick’s Day celebrations with traditional Irish food, dancing and snakes, I might get excited about the holiday. Green beer? No thank you. Big cities have parades and green rivers that sound like fun. Knoxville just has pub crawls and that makes St. Patrick’s Day equal in priority to Snuggies. So, for now, I will just wear green . . . in front of my father.

Flat Stanley again

// March 8th, 2011 // 3 Comments » // holidays, school

When you have more than one child, you learn quickly that school projects repeat year after year. Some of the projects are more fun than others. Edible cell models can’t be made without giggles. Sometimes, the project is brilliantly easy to replicate. Leaf collections and cell organelle detectors can be assembled in an hour or two. Then, there are the projects that require far too much work for far too little results, like Flat Stanley.

Flat Stanley’s reputation makes an explanation redundant. Our school uses Stanley to make the traditional “What I did for Spring Break” report more fun for children. Instead, he is a photo-journalled reminder of what we didn’t do with our children during Spring Break. Our Stanley never goes to Europe, Disney or someplace exotic. He doesn’t spend the break from school on a cruise or at the lake house.

Once again, Stanley is going to be visiting us during the annual Boy Scout outing that leaves me outnumbered by children. The new factor in the equation is the absence of the absolutely amazing Sarah. Her absence is an unfillable chasm that makes the simplest of tasks unmanageable with Evan the unpredictable. So, I have begun creating Stanley’s schedule.

Stanley is going to experience the thrill of a Quiddich match as he sweeps the piles of dog hair from the floor. He will await a royal rescue and the return of his lost glass shoe during his daily efforts to remove the layers of construction dust from the furniture. His safety is uncertain when he experiences the real life Lord of the Flies aka playing outside in the yard.

If this is too boring for Stanley and the adult who is left at home, there could be Stanley cloning, Stanley mutation or Stanley zombification. One week to have fun with Stanley is worse than a closed Wallyworld with a deranged Chevy Chase. Forced fun is a test of parental creativity and sanity. I might fail both.