Practice Makes Perfect

I'm the kind of person who always wears my seatbelt and sunscreen, gets a flu shot, flosses daily, washes my hands a lot, exercises daily, and tries to eat a well-balanced diet.

But I'm also the kind of person who gets worked up about little things, honestly believes that I can get by on four hours of sleep a night, and worries -- incessantly -- about everything from whether or not my boys are getting enough calcium to what that little old lady down the street does all day by herself in her giant house.

I'm uptight -- a Type A plus, as my husband calls me. And I don't slow down or relax or "chill." EVER.

That is, until a few months ago. I saw a meditation class that was going to be offered in Helena with a Buddhist nun who would assist you in establishing a regular practice. It's not every day that you get to have access to a Buddhist nun, especially in Montana, so I signed up for the class. Every morning, for two weeks, I dragged myself out of bed and across town, where I sat in a very uncomfortable position for 30 minutes in the dark in someone's basement.

You'd think sitting still and concentrating on your breath would be easy. But it's not. First, there's that whole uncomfortable position thing. You sit on a small cushion with your legs crossed and your hands resting on your knees. This might be comfortable for the preschool set, but it's damn uncomfortable when you're old and your stomach muscles have been blown to bits by two very large babies.

But the uncomfortable position is small potatoes to overcome in comparison to managing your mind. During meditation, you're supposed to concentrate on your breath and let any thoughts that enter your mind go so that you can come back to your breath.

I don't know what your mind is like, but my mind is decidedly unquiet. In fact, there's often a cacophony of sound bursting forth in my mind that during meditation, when my mind was supposed to be quiet, sounded something like this: Here we go. It's only 30 minutes. Could the guy next to me breathe any heavier? Is he still awake or is he snoring? I'm hungry. I hope my stomach doesn't start growling. I think I'll have an egg for breakfast. Maybe I'll bake those morning glory muffins today. I wonder if I have any apples. I wish I could take my boys on a hay ride and to an apple orchard. Those pumpkin doughnuts I had at that apple orchard in Vermont were amazing. How long ago was that? Seven years. Wow -- seven years. I was single back then. And childless. I liked Burlington. I wonder if Burlington has good public schools. Maybe we should move there. I need to get back to my breath. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. I'm doing it! I'm paying attention to my breath. Nice work. Hmmmm....I wonder what I need to get done at work this week...

And so on and so forth. A lot of my meditation time was spent wondering how long I could sit in one position and when the nun would ding the bell that signaled it could all be over with. Being the Type A person that I am, I was woefully disappointed in my meditation performance. So, given the chance to meet with the Buddhist nun, I mentioned my inability to concentrate on my breath during meditation and how frustrating it was for me. I expected to hear some great insight, some great process that would make meditating easy for me.

"Hhhmmm," she said, as if she was reaching far into her Buddhist teachings to find the answer. "I guess you just need to keep sitting vipassana."

This essentially means: Keep trying.

I wanted to say to her, "Are you kidding me? You studied Buddhism for years and that's the great insight you have to impart??? I mean, is that IT?!"

But I figured, she was the Buddhist nun, not me, and so I did keep trying. Now I sit vipassana every day and I will tell you after months of practice, it is getting easier. Not easy. Easier.

Then another class came available. This class was a yoga class for 21 days straight, from 6 - 7 a.m. I'm certainly no yoga star, but after talking with the instructor, I decided to give it a whirl. And, since I would be practicing yoga every day for 21 days, I decided to do a cleanse diet as well. I gave up wheat, gluten, dairy, and sugar.

Quite frankly, I expected to feel as if I had been personally kissed by God. I mean, come on -- yoga AND no bread with heaping mounds of butter? Really, what could be better for your body?

But for the first week of it, I felt awful. Horrible. I was exhausted. I was as bloated as one of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade balloons. I was so grumpy and irritable that the cat almost met an unfortunate and early death for walking in front of me one day. And for days 4 - 6, I was certain that a little leprechaun had somehow crawled into my brain and was poking it with a very sharp stick. Read into this people -- my head actually pounded; I could feel my heartbeat IN MY BRAIN -- for 48 hours STRAIGHT.

And then, suddenly, nirvana. If you can call waking up at 5:20 every morning and no pasta nirvana. But for right now, I'm going to. I feel great. I have incredible amounts of energy. My back, a near constant source of pain because of severe scoliosis and arthritis, no longer hurts. I even got up into shoulder stand for the last couple of days. Yes, people, I am standing on my head and I am loving it.

The cleanse diet still pretty much blows. I'm not going to lie to you. I miss sugar. I miss dairy; I now totally understand the power of cheese. But the diet has helped me immensely on this path that I have been traveling -- this path of trying to be more mindful and conscious of my actions and thoughts.

I know Oprah has been on this soapbox for the last several months, but I think there's a good reason. The meditation, yoga, and diet have all worked in concert to help me achieve a significantly better balance in my life -- my whacked out life with two small kids, work, money problems, unfulfilled dreams, kitchen remodeling, and the seemingly impossible task of finding affordable and reliable childcare for my boys.

If I can do it, anybody can do it. It probably would have been easier for me to construct a rocket out of popsicle sticks and cottonballs that actually went to the moon than it is for me to stop myself sometimes and say, "Whoa there. What are you doing? Calm down. Slow down. Take a breath."

That's not to say that I'm suddenly this calm, easygoing, "peace out" kind of person. I'm not and I never will be. What I am is a calmer, significantly more peaceful person than I was last year at this time. And I'm just going to keep working at it -- one breath at a time.

Testing 1...2...3

I was at my beloved Costco the other day where a cashier was trying to get Peter to talk.

“Can you say bye-bye?” she asked, waving at him. “Say bye-bye!”

Peter waved his little hand, but didn’t say boo. Which is pretty typical. Because Peter can’t really talk.

He has about 5-10 words that are recognizable and the rest sounds like a cross between a grunt, a moan, and a question. He makes this noise whether he’s gesturing at the light in the kitchen or for a drink or for his favorite stuffed animal. His inability to speak doesn’t mean he doesn’t understand what you’re saying. In fact, he’s pretty adept at communicating by making his little sound and pointing at things. He follows directions to put things away and if you tell him to head upstairs, he’s already on the first landing by the time I make it over to them. He’s made it evident that he knows his shapes and he has known all of his body parts for months – from his tonsils to his toes.

But this not-talking business – it’s annoying. And even worse than being annoying, it’s worrisome. I know you’re not supposed to compare children and that each child progresses at his own pace, but I can’t help myself. By the time Mike was this age, he was putting sentences together. He was using inflection to demonstrate how much he loved something or how much he didn’t like it. He was singing songs. And if he didn’t know the word for something or couldn’t say it, he just made up his own word and assigned it to that thing until he was able to get it right. A pine cone, for instance, was a “ditty”. A drink was a “nick.”

With Peter, it’s all about grunting and pointing.

Last week, though, we found out there might be a medical explanation for it. Peter has had six double ear infections in the last six months. If you don’t have kids, that’s A LOT. A lot a lot. He has been on penicillin more times in the last six months than Mike ever has in the last four years. So our pediatrician referred us to an ear, nose, and throat specialist. The ENT doc took one look at Peter’s ears and said they’re full of fluid. The fluid in his ears explains his chronic ear infections and might just as well explain his grumpiness, as well as his sleeping and eating issues.

But it could also explain his inability to talk. With all of the fluid in his ears, the doctor said that Peter likely has hearing loss – that to him, everything would sound as if he has cotton in his ears – and that is likely why his language development is delayed. If you can’t hear, or even if your hearing is impaired, your ability to talk is impaired as well.

Brent and I had discussed putting tubes in his ears before, but this cemented it for me as the absolute right decision for our child. The ENT doc said that with tubes in his ears, it would be very likely that his hearing loss wouldn’t be permanent – that once they drained the fluid from his ears during surgery and inserted the tubes, an entire new world of sound would open up for my little guy.

It’s funny how after you get a possible diagnosis, you realize that all of the little things, things that you had chalked up as a little odd, begin to make sense. For instance, Peter rarely notices a bird chirping, but always gets excited when he sees a bird fly by. He never looks up in the sky when a plane goes overhead. I’ve never seen him look up in the trees as the leaves rustle with wind, but he always responds to the physical force of wind and loves it. At night, when I sing him songs, he nestles up as close as he can get, literally resting his right ear against my lips. Is this all because he has a hard time hearing? And if so, how come I didn’t put two and two together months ago?

I am frustrated by Peter’s inability to communicate but I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be for him. I’ve seen him making his little noise and pointing at things, trying to make someone understand, until he gets so frustrated that he stomps his little feet in anger. He is such a funny little boy, always going for the cheap laugh by shoving stuff up his nose, pouring milk over his head, or throwing his little 18 month-old body at you with such force that it literally knocks the wind out of a person. I don’t know that tubes in his ears will be a cure-all, that he’ll never have another ear infection or that he’ll suddenly wake up from surgery hearing the world the way that it’s meant to be heard or that he’ll start talking using real words that people, including me, understand.

But I’m hoping. I’m hoping that this surgery will help my little guy feel better and hear better. And I’m hoping that someday soon, we can go on a walk and he’ll hear the birds singing and the wind as it rustles the new leaves of spring.

Spring is Springing...Slowly

A strange thing has been going on in Helena, MT. It has been raining. A lot.

In fact, the umbrella that has served as a doorstop for the last four years has been used not once, but TWICE, in the last week.

I moved to Montana never having been here before. And my only impression of it was from the movie, “A River Runs Through It.” For those of you who have not seen the movie, let me recap for you: Brad Pitt, raging rivers, snowcapped mountains, and lots of green grass and trees. All in all, a winning combination from anyone’s perspective.

But I moved here in the middle of a drought, which has persisted for approximately EVER. So not only was Brad Pitt in seriously short supply, but so were raging rivers, snowcapped mountains, and green grass and trees. In fact, when I moved here in late September one year, I thought to myself, “My, my, my…Montana is very, very…..brown.”

For a girl who grew up in Michigan, surrounded by trees, grass, and water, Montana’s brown-ness gets very, well, boring. And the dried-up creekbeds, raging fire seasons, and retreating glaciers don’t exactly do much to sell me on the place either.

Yet all around me, I hear people tell of how sick and tired they are of rain and cool temperatures. “When will summer begin?” these folks whine.

Quite frankly, I don’t care if summer in Montana ever starts. Because a Montana summer means 100 degree temperatures, sun that sizzles, and ash from forest fires that rains from the sky. And the cool temperatures and seemingly constant rain (And snow! Yes! Snow! In June!) mean that all of what creates misery in the summer months might just be delayed, maybe until late August. Or better yet, maybe until next summer.

I can’t remember a more perfect spring since moving to Montana. The lilacs, with their heady perfume and riotous color, have been blooming for weeks. We still have tulips that are standing at attention, blooms bursting forth. The hills behind my house are seas of rolling green as the wind blows the grass, all of which seems to be growing inches every day. And the smell – there is nothing quite like the sweet, almost honeyed scent of spring, which hangs in the air everywhere – announcing the end to another long winter and the beginning of something grand.

Breathe In, Breathe Out

The above photo is my kitchen sink and cabinet base. Or what is left of my kitchen sink and cabinet base. Please notice that it bows in the middle (because the countertop on which it is mounted is broken) and, you would have to be blind to miss the fact that there's actually not much of a cabinet base left.

Did I mention that it’s all being held up by a 2X4? Because, yes, my sink and countertop is being held up by a 2X4.

Today we launch MONTH FOUR of our kitchen remodel. That’s not a typo, people. We are working our way towards 160 days of kitchen remodeling. This means that for over three months, I have been neurotically covering all the food I am cooking so we don’t eat pasta a’la plaster of paris for dinner. This means that when I am looking for a pan, I occasionally have to wander out in the backyard to find it in one of our old cabinets. This means that I sometimes have to look in bedrooms for my microwave.

After all of this time, the end is now in sight. We have to paint. We have to install a backsplash for the sink, and then tear out the old sink and put in the new one. That’s it. It sounds like it might take us an afternoon. But this will be no small task, as anyone who has ever done any kind of a kitchen remodel with two small children and full-time jobs would attest. In fact, I am estimating another four weeks of work. Four weeks at a minimum.

What have we done so far? Well…..we have torn out the dropped ceiling and replaced it, which gave us an additional three feet of ceiling space. We have torn down 100+ year-old plaster and replaced it with drywall. We have removed a beehive that was over five feet tall from between our walls. We have insulated. We tore out no less than NINE layers of old flooring and refinished our floor. We have installed new cabinets and lighting. We paid an electrician huge sums of money to rewire the whole room only because we were afraid we might meet our maker if we tried to do it ourselves. We have torn out a section of the wood floor that was rotten with water damage and tiled it with a fancy schmancy design. We have put in a granite countertop and backsplash.

I am very proud of all of the work we have done. It hasn’t been easy. Or fun. I can tell you that after we get the boys in bed at night, the VERY LAST THING IN THE WORLD that I want to do is work on our kitchen remodel. I would rather have a bikini wax. Or go bowling – without alcohol. Or listen to hours of mind-numbing children’s music. But still, we move on – scraping, peeling, hammering, tiling, hanging, painting, and so on.

But what I am most proud of – even more so than all that we have accomplished – is the fact that I have lived in disarray, complete and utter discombobulation, for months now. For those of you who know me personally and are aware of just what an obsessive-compulsive, very tightly-wound human being I am who does NOT "go with the flow", relax, or chill out (or whatever it is that the kids are saying these days) EVER EVER EVER, you are probably thinking to yourselves, "What kind of drugs is she on? And where do I get some?"

But people, I am doing it. Did you read what I wrote a few paragraphs up? I have to hunt for my microwave. I have to GO TO THE BACKYARD for pans. I didn’t even mention that I have to walk sideways to get into some rooms of my house because we have piles of new cabinets and old cabinets and shop-vacs, and paint samples and there very well might be an old hot pink ’67 Cadillac in my laundry room. But I CAN’T SEE IT BECAUSE IT IS UNDER TOO MUCH STUFF. I also didn’t mention that I have to vacuum off the top of my stove before I cook anything on it because part of an exposed brick wall KEEPS FALLING OFF AND someday, I am afraid one of those bricks will not just fall and obliterate on my stove, but will crush my skull and I won’t even be able to dial 9-1-1 by myself. And then while I was at work one afternoon, Brent put everything away in the new cabinets and now I can’t find ANYTHING. And just writing this paragraph is causing me to hyperventilate.

But if I have learned one thing from this kitchen remodel it is that therapy is working. Because I have only yelled “I CAN’T STAND THIS!” maybe a half-dozen times; I mostly mutter it to myself. And when Brent informed me that the old cabinets piled in one room were going to go in our shed outside, I didn’t scream, “YOU MEAN TO TELL ME I HAVE TRIPPED OVER THESE BLANKETY BLANK CABINETS FOR THE LAST BLANKETY BLANK THREE MONTHS AND THEY’RE GOING TO GO IN THE SHED OUTSIDE???! YOU BLANKETY-BLANK BLANKY!” Instead, I said, and very calmly I might add, “Well, do you think you could put them in the shed outside then?”

That was a big moment for me.

So we’re getting there. And, maybe best of all, I’m getting there too.