family life – it is making me

3 Rules of Improv for the Home

As a parent, there are lots of things that come out of your mouth which you never thought you’d have to say, like, “Do not chase the cat with a stick”, and “Yes, you have to change your underwear EVERY DAY”, or “Who took a bite out of the cheese brick in the middle of the night?” But the saying that takes the cake, which tops them all with its ridiculousness and frequency of replays is:

You are not in control of each other’s imagination!

I can’t believe how many times my husband and I have had to say this, usually with one child shedding tears of frustration and another fuming in rage. Here is an actual, real-life example: one daughter wanted her “magic” to be the color blue and wanted her brother’s “magic” to be the color red, but he didn’t want it to be red, he wanted it to be blue. It took us a while to figure out exactly what the conflict was, and I’ll never forget my husband’s face as he said, “Wait, wait, this ‘magic’ you’re talking about… is it an object you’re playing with, or is it pretend, as in imaginary, as in invisible?” It was, in fact, the latter, to which he replied in a low, firm voice, “You are not in control of each other’s imaginations. His ‘magic’ can be whichever color he wants it to be, and you’re just going to have to be okay with it.” He and I then debriefed, and laughed, and marveled at how often we had been called to intervene in imaginary games which made no sense to us but meant everything to our children.

And then it hit me: the rules of improvisational theater applied perfectly in this situation. Now, it’s not often that I realize what I spent a concentrated part of my life studying (and for which I am still paying for monthly) actually becomes useful. I was plum-giddy. I set out to teach my children some rules of improv. And… it worked.

Rules for Imaginative Play

#1 Comedy Comes in 3’s

How many times have you been sitting at the dinner table and heard the same joke repeated six, seven, fourteen times? Yeah, me too, and I’d rather stick a knife in my eye. So I showed my children vaudeville comedy routines like Charlie Chaplin, the Three Stooges, etc., to prove that comedy comes in 3’s. You take a drink from the wrong glass and spit it out once (funny), twice (hilarious), thrice (peeing my pants), four times (bored, what’s wrong with you?). I don’t know why; I don’t know what it is about our brains, but for whatever reason, the 4th time isn’t funny. Neither is the 12^th. Therefore, a joke, punchline, or silly word may only be said three times in one sitting.

#2 We laugh WITH someone, not AT someone

Nothing kills creativity like self-doubt. This was especially apparent in the very small window of time I taught and directed high school theater. One of my mentor-teachers wisely told me (and I remembered this as a teenager) that a drama teacher spends the first year just breaking down the self-consciousness that keeps actors stiff, quiet, and uncertain. They’re so worried about what their peers will think and say (and let’s face it, people can be terrible to one another so the fears are real), that they don’t loosen up enough to play. But children, unless they’ve been through trauma, don’t have those walls up. They’re delightfully silly and their imaginations are wildly free. Imaginative play is vital for a child’s development—I would argue that it’s also vital for a strong faith-life—so it’s super important that each member feels free to be silly. Don’t mock or laugh at your playmates, but absolutely laugh with them! Don’t put down anybody’s ideas, which is related to the next, final, and most important rule:

#3 Yes, AND

One of the more challenging aspects of improv is working alongside someone else’s spontaneous ideas. If someone initiates a scene of invading aliens, you can’t decide that aliens aren’t really your thing and insist you’re an unlucky lobster in a grocery store tank. You also can’t half-ass the effort. The response has to be yes-and, meaning you immediately accept the idea and add to it. And, if you did get stuck with a bum-idea in the first place, the yes-and principle actually saves the scene much quicker than trying to completely change it. This is also the best way for children to approach imaginative play. It takes practice and a little coaching, but when kids use the yes-and principle while playing, each child (ideally) can feel heard, accepted, and included. It’s also important to establish that no one’s idea is dumb, stupid, boring, etc. And you don’t need to try to control the other person’s imagination; your different, unique ideas can work together.

Gaude, Gaude; Pivot, Pivot

Usually, St. Nicholas’s feast day is a big deal in our home. Usually, we open stockings before breakfast. Usually, these stockings have the traditional chocolate coins, clementines, maybe a small gift or two, and a striped candy cane. Usually, we feast on a supper of Greek roast, mashed potatoes, and broiled vegetables. Usually, we enjoy delicious gingerbread for dessert. Usually, we read The Miracle of St. Nicholas, and I do the voices. Usually, it’s magical.

But this year was different.

This year, for the first time, I have three teenagers in away-school, as opposed to home-school. Sure, they come home every night, but they’re tired and people-saturated, and after a quick debriefing, they retreat and complete homework. They’re also in band and theater and board game club and sports and they have a peer group that appropriately takes up a lot of their social energy. AND they have to GO TO SCHOOL on the feast of St. Nicholas.

With younger children still at home– and it’s already been hard for them to adjust to a quieter house with their siblings away– I refused to let these Advent feasts pass by. We had a family meeting, we rearranged expectations, we set the date for our St. Nicholas celebration this weekend. I shall not be moved! Family feasting shall prevail!

But… (sigh)

I forgot that three of my children were going to birthday parties, and one had closing night of the high school play which was followed by a cast party, and inevitably, we ate Greek roast and gingerbread in shifts. Lame.

But… (sigh)

I asked for this. My teenagers were depressed a year ago, desperately wanting more of a community, hungry for peer affirmation, bored with home-schooling. And around this time last year, I started pleading with God to do something: make me ready to do whatever I need to do to help them through these difficult years, open my ears, move mountains, part waters, heal their wounded hearts.

Remember that scene in Friends when they’re moving the new couch up a flight of narrow stairs and Ross keeps shouting, “PIVOT! PIVOT!” That is the secret sauce to parenting that no one ever tells you. You never arrive. You never do it perfectly. People change, times change, communities change, and so we PIVOT-PIVOT. And sometimes that damn couch is never going to get through the narrow stairway. I think in this new age of parenting I’m going to have to let go of a lot of traditions or expectations I hold onto which I love in exchange for something that looks different but might just be better.

It happens to be Gaudete weekend, the third weekend of Advent, the rose candle, the we’re-almost-there-so-rejoice Sunday. This St. Nicholas feast wasn’t quite what I wanted it to be, but damn, I’m so happy. My kids are busy! Dudes, they are going to birthday parties! In an alternate version of my life, I could have easily resented today with all its driving around and having all of us in different places, but my kids are feasting socially with wonderful peers. They are becoming more confident in who they are through performance and music and sports and peer affirmation. I am rejoicing.

lap of luxury

My family sat down to watch All Creatures Great and Small last night, the new series on PBS starring Nicholas Ralph and Samuel West (shout out: West played Prince Caspian in the old-school BBC Narnia series, oh yeah). It’s a show that my teens as well as my younger kids can appreciate, and it’s been rare lately to find a show we can all enjoy together on our traditional movie night.

In the episode, there’s a scene where the housekeeper, Audrey, has just seen the men out the door. The 60 seconds which follow are an indulgent fantasy: Audrey sits down on the couch in front of a fire. She pauses there, smiling at the golden retriever curled up at her feet, then gleefully opens her book (an old, lovely one, the kind that crackles when you open the front cover). And that’s it. The story moves along from there. It was delicious to watch. My mind sort of stayed there in the parlor with Audrey, wistfully thinking how luxuriant it would be to sit in a quiet room— a fire seems a bit indulgent, not necessary, but delightful nonetheless—with a good book, uninterrupted.

And that’s where I’m at in life, the kind of busy-ness where sitting in a quiet room with a book looks like the lap of luxury. I know very well that’s a near-impossibility for me at this stage in life, and to be honest, if I woke up tomorrow morning and my family surprised me with a day-alone-reading-by-the-fire, I know exactly what would happen: I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. On the rare occasion I do have a quiet morning or afternoon (so very rare, mind you), I feel almost overwhelmed by all the things that I could be doing or should be doing that I sort of freeze. If I were granted a day-alone-reading-by-the-fire by a genie, this genie would also need to clean my house, do the dishes, scrub the bathrooms, and organize my garage (and quite possibly a few other things) before I felt the freedom to sit on a couch with a book.

My mind is usually so preoccupied that I forget words. That’s right, just words. Whole nouns will escape my memory. My mind sometimes reads like a fresh mad-libs page with blanks substituting actual nouns and adjectives. Sometimes I find myself saying things like, “I need to go that place to do that thing,” or “Hey, fruit-of-my-womb, can you put that thing in the thing with the thing?” I’m lucky enough that my children and husband can, for the most part, anticipate my meaning. My head is an overstuffed sandwich with mustard oozing through the bread and the pickle sliding out the side. While sometimes I want (and do) just pause and cry, or sneak away to the dog-park for a cigarette (P.S. I don’t have a dog), I’m also overstuffed-thankful for my life. Like, really. I love hanging out with my family.

I recognize that sometime in the not-too-far-future, I will be home alone, and I will sit on a couch with a book, or rather a stack of books that I’ve been meaning to read for decades. I won’t be as put together as Audrey from All Creatures Great and Small; instead of a wool skirt, stockings, and cardigan, I’ll be wearing the synthetic soft elastic clothes of a modern and confident middle-aged woman. Instead of a dog, there may be a cat or two. And I’ll probably sigh—even for just a moment—as I remember bygone days when my home was a madhouse.

O, Happy Festival

or, The Day My Daughter Went All Verruca-Salt On Me

The other day, my four-year-old daughter heard the word “festival” and grew very excited. She said, “Do you remember the Tulip Festival?!! That was SO FUN!”

Do I remember the Tulip Festival? Yes. Yes, do I ever. It was the day my daughter turned Verruca-Salt on me. This is how I remember it:

The local tulip festival is an annual celebration lasting a few weeks during peak tulip-blooming season. We’ve gone a handful of times and I have beautiful photographs of my children at various ages amongst the brightly hued flowers. And this was The Perfect Day for Tulip-Admiring: the sky was clear and blue, it was sunny (yes, in April!), and the tulips were at their peak. It was a rainbow-hued horizon with Mt. Hood in the background to boot.

And that’s when it started. The Biggest Tantrum That Ever Was. Well, I know it probably wasn’t the biggest of all time, but this was the worst I’d ever experienced as a mother.

Mind you, I am a seasoned children-under-five-mom at this point, and my four-year-old (here I call her Blossom) and three-year-old (here I call him Buck) were thoroughly watered, rested, and fed before we even set foot on festival grounds. Usually that guarantees a good two-hour chunk of fit-free-fun. But not on this ill-fated day. I want to blame the festival. Before we even reached the tulips, we had to pass a mini-carnival of bouncy houses and hay-slides. Almost immediately Blossom and Buck were complaining—“When are we going to the bouncy house?” “I want to go on the slide!” “Maybe later,” I replied, without really meaning it, “but we’re here for the tulips.” I was patient at first, but less and less the more this carried on.

Buck started taking off, running through the rows of tulips, the top of his head disappearing beneath the tall stalks. Blossom followed suit. Weighed down with my mom-junk (you know, the big mom purse, water bottles, camera, not to mention the 20 extra pounds of life-giving child-bearing weight), I tried desperately to rally them. They’d hold my hands for a short time, then take off again. I felt helpless.

Sweaty and exhausted, I rallied the troops and we started the long walk back to the parking lot. I had stupidly said in one of my desperate attempts to get them to listen that maybe we could get some ice cream. Feeling I should make good on my promise, I slowed down at the ice cream stand to realize there would be no way I could afford everyone ice cream if we were going to eat dinner for the rest of the week. I kept walking past the ice cream, hoping Buck and Blossom wouldn’t notice, but Blossom started in with the demand that would become her war-cry for the next solid hour: “I want an icey-cone! I want an icey-cone! I want an icey-cone!” If we were at home and this happened, after being asked to stop, she would eventually be sent to her room where she could have her little fit without disturbing the rest of us. But what to do when one is out in public?

I asked her to please stop. I pulled her aside to try and talk sensibly with her. I promised her a treat for later if she would calm down. It only made things worse. “I want an icey-cone!” And now Buck had started in. We slowly inched our way through the festival to the parking lot. It was a long, long walk of humiliation. By that point I had two hysterical children, one on each hand, screaming, “I want an icey cone!” People started to stare. Blossom threw herself onto the gravel and screamed. People started walking around us like we had an imaginary perimeter, but definitely slowed down to stare, like when everyone slows down traffic to leer at the fool that just got pulled over for a traffic violation. Some people tried to be encouraging, others made smart-ass quips. It was like an out-of-body experience. I could see myself, standing in the middle of a gravel parking lot with four befuddled older children behind me as a buffer while two otherwise normal toddlers laid in the dirt screaming. It’s almost funny.

We finally got to the car and I could hardly buckle Blossom, her body was writhing in expert tantrum form. Buck soon calmed down, clearly exhausted. For the first 20 minutes of the drive, Blossom kept going (truly remarkable stamina). My older four kids reached a state of stupor and no longer heard anything. I was so impressed with their saintly patience, I decided that as soon as Blossom fell asleep (which is inevitable, right?) I would go through a drive-thru and get smoothies for my normal, sane children. At last she did, mid-sob, and the car was finally quiet. I pulled into the drive-thru and practically whispered an order to the attendant. Not even kidding you, Blossom woke up, and started right where she left off. “I want an icey-cone!”

There was a lot of good that came from this day. I probably sweat off at least five pounds. Blossom learned a lesson: she did not get a smoothie that day because of her fit, and she brought it up a few times the next few days: “I’m sad because I didn’t get a smoothie.” Me: “Do you remember why?” Blossom: “Yes. Because I threw a fit.” Win.

I also saw my older four children exercise heroic patience. Win.

But I definitely do not remember the tulip festival as “so much fun”, as Blossom does. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, the fact that she doesn’t remember how miserable she was that day, and how miserable she made everyone else. Somehow in her memory all she sees are the beautiful tulips. In her mind, that was a good day, while the rest of us remember a hot sweaty mess.

Yet this is humorously similar to my own recollection of life. There are periods of time in my adult life that I remember fondly, even if they were incredibly difficult. I look back now and I am amazed at God’s hand through it all, but when I really think about it, I was a big stinker during those periods of time too. I was needy, whiny, and I pitched some pretty good fits. But I like to recall all the beauty, the work of God’s hand that I see in retrospect.

I’ve been trying to meditate more on God’s Fatherhood—that He is my Father, I am His Child, and He loves me. Simple, but sometimes difficult to wrap my heart around and truly believe. This isn’t the first time God has used my own experience in parenting to show me His Heart: He holds His ground through my own fits of tunnel-vision and stubbornness with patience and wisdom, and maybe with a little smirk of amusement, is happy when, at long last, I can see the beauty, and have grown a little through the dirt and tears.