Category Archives: Family

100 posts, Family, mystery, sickville, wellville

100th Post from the Border between Sickville and Wellville

It seems such a long time ago when I began this blog wondering how I would go about explaining the difference between between strategy and tactics to a kid as well as trying to define success (first post).  Now we are a family of five, and 100 posts later I am still trying to come up with truths, better ways to think, new approaches for problems, and most importantly better ways to express what I experience.  
Last week, we went to my grandmother in laws 95thbirthday celebration with family attending from as far away as Germany and Washington State.  It was a chance to see my kids interact with their cousins and to learn from them how other kids and families approach life differently.  It was also a chance for them to see how they fit into our family.  The picture above is one of my favorites because it is A in a dress worn by her older cousin in the picture to our wedding 8 years ago.  It was great to see her looking so beautiful with her great grandmother at the party.  On the funny side, K crawled around the party and had some of the more blind elderly thinking she was a dog as they tripped over her.  It wasn’t till we picked her up, that they realized she was a little, very fast girl.  O spent the entire week with his cousins, but I think the parts he liked most involved sitting up in bed with them late playing with their I-pad, as he had partners in his obsession with anything electronic.  
For me, the week was tiring.  With as much boundless enthusiasm as only a kid can muster, I still notice the slight slowness caused by sickness of varying types.  Whether it was the headache making me want to throw up on the way home or the way A runs with her left arm tucked to her side reminding me she has had a stroke, I kept being reminded our lives are lived somewhere between the mythical Wellville where we all wish to take up residence and the Sickville where so many dreams are forced to lay comatose waiting…for something yet unknown.  For this one week, I had a reminder of what could be when I played soccer with my brother in law against the youngins.  I felt right, if only for the moments in between.  Again, I wish for better words to describe the bitterness I feel as the fondly remembered moments and feelings fade to my ever suspect memory.  Such is life straddling the border, pretending to live firmly on the preferred side.

Maybe in the next 100 posts, my thoughts and words will clarify with new skills and thoughts.  Maybe they will remain as much a mystery to me as this plant we found on one of our walks.  What is this?
 
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Child care, Family, late night musing, Noblesse Oblige, sleepless nights

Value of Effort

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“We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”
― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

It is such an easy thing to forget. For what do we strive? Even for those who say “the all mighty dollar,” is it the money or the things we will (not might) do with it? I’d hate to waste my life for a sheet of paper. Writ large for our society, the same remains true. What is to be the use of being the strongest wealthiest people/country in history?
On another more local note, our family continues without sleep…night after night.  For the past 2 nights my kids have added to the mix and peed themselves, and I am somewhat at a loss.  They both get up in the night to play even when they start in different rooms.  This morning I realized how tired I was last night when I got up and stepped on a matchbox car which A had lined up along the floor with a couple dozen other cars and trucks.  As I looked around, I saw her shirtless, asleep at the foot of the bed.
Thinking about it afterwards, I wonder if she takes comfort in lining up the cars as it is something in her life which she has power to make orderly.  Her mind is very grounded in concrete truths.  In a chaotic life of varying degrees of abstract truths where she assimilates more change at an ever more rapid pace, perhaps the lining up of cars is her minds way of asserting enough control to allow for rest.  She has brought order to that corner of her life.  I used to wonder why she always made her cars sit in traffic jams moving each of them 1 inch forward at a time instead of racing around like I see most kids play.  I hate traffic, but then I never considered how the slow motion might be calming.
 
I, of course, slept through everything.  That’s my mind’s way when the days grow ever longer, and respite from confusion and pain seems further away. Time in a loving wife’s embrace seems such a distant goal.  Still, even on a morning where I hurt from lack of rest,  I take great solace that my time and effort is spent on something more valuable than paper.  As someone to whom much has been given, I hope I spend raising the value of our family’s culture, and through them our society as a whole may gain.  What more should we ask?
 
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