The swirl the world made this week, from riots to Wall Street’s mood swings, almost has me wanting to resign from civic engagement. At the very same time, I was reminded that the best thing to do when the overall mania of the world, capital W, feels overwhelming is to act locally.
On a very ad hoc basis I operate a micro not-nonprofit, which is to say this isn’t an organization rather a tiny thing-I-do: when a client at Safe Passage needs baby gear, I reach out to my impressive network to see whether I can find crib, stroller, baby bath or soft carrier or whatever else. If there’s overflow, I hang onto extras in my basement for the next woman who needs something. Sometimes, I get a call from one of the midwives at the Cooley Dickinson Hospital’s Midwifery Center and find car seat or baby clothing for one of their clients. It’s so simple and so tangible and I feel much better for having helped a fellow mama a little bit.
The other lesson here: small victories are sometimes hard to recognize. We should recognize every single one of them.
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When you look around, just as you can note—easily, if you choose to do the exercise—three good things each day, you can see that so many people achieve small victories.
I’ve been thinking about this, too, because it’s the first day of not writing Remy a letter to camp for about two weeks. I started a few days before his arrival to ensure a steady stream. We pick him up tomorrow and I can barely wait. I happen to love letters, postcards, letter writing and even the act of putting stamp on card and card into mailbox. Email, Facebook, blogging, four kids, more work… all these things have really killed my physical correspondence—or at least taken what was a gush and turned it to a trickle. I really enjoyed writing to him. I hope I write more people more often.
He wrote to us, twice as required. I have no idea what EZ Moe is fun! means.
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Of having our two teens hanging around yesterday, the dear husband and I shared a sense of befuddlement that people have babies without any preparation for parenting adolescents. Put another way, childbirth classes are stupid. Scare ‘em straight about teenagers, instead. Put the whole childhood era into perspective. Adolescents in rare form make babies seem cute, even at their most trying and sleep depriving worst. On this one, trust me.
I am not allowed to offer any details, so I won’t.
We also observe that our house resembles a Jill Murphy picture book about some harried animal parent feeling unable to eek out any peace and quiet or sleep. Her books do exist here but are better in the actual English.
Side note: I’ve been contributing to Teen Life’s blog each month and this month I interviewed two teens. One traveled to Peru with the Experiment in International Living and the other worked at McDonald’s. Teaser: there’s a fascinating twist to the story of the young man who just wanted a job-job for spending money. I want to interview three more teens for next month: one who did an enrichment program, preferably on a campus somewhere, one who did an internship and one who did pretty much nothing.
After one day of two teens doing pretty much nothing, I am certain of this: I do not want to the parent of whatever teen I interview for that slot.
And after the actual struggle with teendom, we even got an apology. The end result of the summer is likely to be that we like teenagers way more often than wishing we could hide from them.
