Coping | Bethany Bassett

Tag: Coping

Association-Free

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 3 Comments

Today was a better day.

Perhaps that’s all the explanation I need to give for the last few weeks. That, and the fact that I’m finally putting letters together on a page without abusing the backspace key most disgracefully.

We’re on Day 4 of a settimana bianca in the Alps, and the wild incongruity of cautious, southern-bred me whizzing down slopes on a snowboard is doing me good. I love feeling like the wind, or at least the wind’s unfashionable second cousin who occasionally goes sprawling in a ploof of powder. It’s like breathing caffeine. Not even my ridiculously painful snowboard boots matter when I’m taking off down the mountain into a more alive version of myself.

Growing up in Texas gave me no context for cable cars and snow-tufted lodge gables, and I’m okay with that. This week can just be, free from associations. It can just be the glitter of fresh-faced sunrises on the snow. Pots of hot chocolate for breakfast. The soft crunch of boots and whirring of ski lifts. Funny bruises. Adorable preschoolers shuffling in misspelled lines during ski school. Pure air in our faces. At least one Better Day to remember this vacation by.

22Jan

Poltergeist

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 5 Comments

January is the poltergeist of months—all shivers and creaks and rattles and filmy-gray. It never snows in our city (though both north and south of us celebrated white Christmases), and we’re now stuck in a stagnant patch of blah until March. It helps if you say it out loud: “BLAH.” It also helps to roll along with the creaky, shivery days, not expect too much from them, and (perpetual moral alert) enjoy the little things.

Like,

Fresh Asiago cheese sliced thin and nibbled compulsively (by me, Dan, and the girls, who would gladly live on cheese alone)

Being in one of my husband’s biomechanics studies and thus having incentive to exercise every day (instead of sitting around feeling exactly like uncooked bacon)

Feist (I especially love climbing up inside “Mushaboom” and daydreaming about spring)

My sexy new microplane zester (Come on, baby, zest those lemons!)

Cheering along (from my bed) with kajillions of people on the Washington Mall for a hopeful, refreshing change

Sweet-smelling laundry hung around the house to dry (too cold outside, but I no longer mind)

Keeping the girls up late because we’re just having too much fun being silly together (is there any better reason?)

It also helps that January’s three-quarters over. May it rest in peace.

7Jan

Drink More Pie

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 5 Comments

The new year so far has been set to Radiohead and Frou Frou with too much black eyeliner and madly-swirled daydreams with sprinkles on top to prove it’s not moping. I’m not fooled though. It’s been hard to face these lumbering gray skies and the remains of last year lying belly-up in the recycling pile. Too many days on that calendar are circled in charcoal and navy, and I’m still not sure I took the right steps to climb out of my mental sludge. 2008 knows, but it will never tell. So I do what little I can to welcome a fresh-faced year I’m unready for: pour myself a mug of hot peppermint tea, light a cluster of candles, and write to discover the good.

A surprise pops up when I glance over a post from one year ago. Despite my pulverized post-partum emotions, 2008 granted me nearly all my weakling hopes. To enjoy my girls, to branch out in cooking, to get confidence in Italian, to take better care of my body, to befriend others, to start down a new spiritual path, to fill myself with others’ words and to fill others with my own… each resolution blossoming quietly while I looked the other way. I would feel sure I floundered through last year if not for the wealth of gifts I hold on this side of it. Several new friends. Morning dates with The Message. Pages upon pages of whimsical love letters to my girls. A recipe treasure trove. Italian vocabulary sets to go with snowboarding, doctor’s visits, board games, babysitting, school, and pie (most important of all, that one). I am rich.

Another surprise: After thinking and thinking and drawing blanks and finally giving up on a word for 2009, I bumped straight into it—Drink—one accidental word to tie up all the loose trails of thought that have wound through my head lately. Drink stands for being present in my own life and rushing headlong into meaningful experiences. It stands for choosing adventure. It stands for refusing to let fear shrivel my decisions and for indulging my ever-present thirst to learn. No resolutions this year, just this one word to live out.

Well, okay, maybe one little resolution: More pie. Yes, that will do.

4Dec

Ducks AWOL

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 5 Comments

It’s a little after midnight, and I really should be in bed. If a 24-hour virus hadn’t made bed a necessity, my 8 a.m. dentist appointment tomorrow certainly should… but I can’t pull myself off the couch just yet. It’s been a hard couple of days. On Monday, Sophie snuggled up to me on the rocking chair and sweetly threw up 15 gallons of curdled milk. I came down with it yesterday around lunch, then Natalie at bed time last night, then Dan this morning, and I would just about trade my soul for a sick day right now. Just one day to settle into my skin without dishes piling up or little tears to wipe. Paid leave to hibernate under the covers and figure out who the heck I am again.

I feel as though my reserves of mothering strength have worn down over the last few weeks through rainy days and too many bouts of sickness, but mommies can’t be pansies. No, every bit of strength goes by instinct to the girls, which means other things suffer—marriage, health (ha!) career aspirations (ha²!). Nothing is terrible right now… just a little frayed. Too tired to exercise, too tired to write, too tired to fully engage my mind with my husband’s, too tired to shut down the computer and go to bed already.

When I was in school, autumn never lagged like this. A little by late November, sure, but there were always still tidy typed deadlines and bursts of knowledge to keep my mind churning along. Without that pressure, without someone dictating most of my time to me, I feel grossly incapable. I come up with aspirations for myself, then divide them by two little daughters, then subtract housecleaning duties, then lower them by several degrees of self-esteem… and still I can never seem to reach. It sure looks a lot like failure around here.

This isn’t exactly how I wanted this year to end. I guess I supposed that 2008 was going to be the year I would get my ducks in a row… but here I am, and one of those ducks is lost somewhere under the couch, and one is partying in Bali, and one drowned just four hours ago under a deluge of preschool vomit, and six are wearing cool glasses in NYC getting published without me, and one tiny one is pecking around in the fridge for something resembling food. The ducks, they’re decidedly NOT in a row, and I’m not sure how okay I am with that. I can’t get to officially living my life until they are, right?

Probably not. I’ve always like John Lennon’s quote, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans,” though I kind of hate it when it applies to me. I enjoy my plans working from time to time… but I’m pretty sure that nothing—plans or life or ducks-getting-in-a-row—is going to happen tonight. Perhaps I should get myself tucked responsibly into bed to get some of that sleep I keep complaining about not having, eh?

—
P.S. – If you like getting surprises in your mailbox, the holiday goodie from my last entry still stands!

1Dec

Gloom and Cheer

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 5 Comments

My little sister is sixteen and gorgeous. She sports a sparkly little nose stud, stylish clothes, and a haircut adorable enough to kill. She brims over with smiles, and in the Thanksgiving pictures, she and my mom are cheek-to-cheek with matching lipgloss, making silly faces together. I grin at the photos, but I can’t help the urgent stinging under my eyelids.

It’s not jealousy. I love my sister, and I’m quite honestly delighted with my current life. However, I wasn’t when I was her age. Frumpiness was thrust upon me young, and I spent nearly every moment of my early teenage years sinking with humiliation. Sinking and hiding. My mother—burdened with griefs I’m only now beginning to understand—never smiled at me. We never giggled together or shared makeup or staged silly photos. Any photos, for that matter. And when I see my beautiful sister and my beautiful mom having fun together, it inflames my war wounds. I may be a decade and an ocean removed from my past, but recovery still eludes.

Holidays in particular bring out the tangles in my emotions. No matter how happy I am with my sweet husband and precious girls, I can’t entirely forget the family life that once hurt me so deeply—the tense mealtimes, the clouds of violence, and the Christmastime hopes that always failed to fully materialize. While the New Year rang in on my fifteenth year, I lay in bed discussing suicide with myself. Happy holidays!

If I could ask any gift from my sister this year, it would be a memory—just one would do, and I’d return it in perfect condition. If I could just once remember my teenage self feeling beautiful or treasured or brimming over with shared smiles… well, Christmas would be a bit easier to look forward to.

—

With the gloom worked out of my system, I have to say that I really am excited about this month. We’re planning Christmas crafts and outreach projects and deliciously sneaky shopping trips with frost-tipped noses and hot chocolate at the end. One of my favorite parts of the holiday is planning gifts for friends, and I certainly can’t overlook the wonderful blog community this year. My husband may be getting tired of me telling him how much I like the internet, but I really do. I’m madly in love with it. I love having a place to spill my thoughts and having you all sop them up for me, and I love the way gratuitous kindness can spread unhindered across the globe. I know it’s not much, but I’m excited to send out a little end-of-the-year gift to you in time for Christmas. (Hint: It’s a recipe, and it’s Italian, and I promise it will be in the best interest of your happiness… and that of your sweet tooth. Enough said.) Just e-mail me with your mailing address, and I’ll send an envelope of holiday cheer your way! ‘Tis the season… and I’m grateful for you all.

25Oct

False Lullabies

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 3 Comments

Thursday, October 23, 2008

After hours, the hospital hums a false lullaby. The road rage nurse has finally stopped jabbing your baby with needles, and her sobs have finally subsided into a stone-heavy sleep. The other little girl in your room has finally stopped throwing up from stress; her parents are no longer shouting to each other across the room or banging large metal things around. (Are you the only parent in Italy who thinks children should have a peaceful environment in which to sleep? Sheesh.) You are folded up on a blue plastic chair for the night. Though you are exhausted beyond all reason, sleep will be hard to come by.

You wonder when—or if—your roommate will turn off the late-night action flicks, though maybe quiet is too much to ask in a building that never rests. You mentally calculate how much time you have before the nurses burst in to flip on lights and take temperatures. (Not enough.) You watch your baby breathe the sterile air, needle-sharp with disinfectant. She is so fragile tonight—pallid, dehydrated skin sticking to tiny ribs—that you feel afraid to touch her, yet it takes all your self-control not to scoop her out of her crib and cuddle her the whole night long. You try to decompress. It proves impossible.

At last, the TV is off, but the resulting quiet is as menacing and green as a storm warning… and it really isn’t all that quiet. Somewhere down the hall, someone else’s baby screams. Operating room doors bang shut, and feet scuttle to and fro outside your room. Even your chair squeaks in opposition as you try to find a comfortable pose. (There is none.) All the mistakes and anxieties of your life converge on you at once, and you can’t summon the energy to bat them away. It doesn’t really matter though, because in two minutes, a nurse will wake your daughter up, and you will spend the rest of the long night trying to get her back to sleep.

If you ran a hospital, you think, you’d have dimming lights and soundproof walls and whispering nurses tiptoeing around in vanilla-scented socks. At 9:00 p.m., everyone would get a sleeping pill with a mug of chamomile tea, and the TV would automatically switch to old-school Coldplay music videos. Every patient’s medical chart would include a prescription for intense rest. You reflect that your common sense is apparently some kind of revolutionary medical secret; does this make you the smartest person in the hospital?

Perhaps the tiredest, at any rate.

—

Update: We are finally home safe and sound now after Sophie’s hospitalization for gingivostomatitis and the resulting fever and dehydration. Our plans for the evening include SLEEP.

13Oct

Thinking Without Responsibility

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 6 Comments

It’s the third full day of some eerie symptomless sickness that has left me bedridden. There’s no pain or congestion or nausea or anything out of the ordinary except for a vast hollowness where my head used to be, and even reading ten pages of a book tires me out. In between the heavy sleeping and the dizzy waking, I’ve been thinking. It’s nice to be able to think without responsibility, when no one expects you to be coherent or figure out so much as a lunch menu.

I’ve thought a lot about the upcoming elections and America’s future. I have little faith in candidates’ platforms, though I am concerned what McCain and Obama plan to do regarding our drowning economy. I find myself drawn toward the candidate exhibiting the most sincere goodwill toward people—not America’s status in the world, not its corporate wealth, not any generalized patriotic ideals—but individuals who are struggling to pay their rent. Who can’t afford health care (raise your hand, anyone?). Who don’t make enough to support their families because of corrupt corporations and an impersonal government. Who feel cheated by decisions our leadership never adequately informed us about (no names, but it rhymes with Shmiraq). Our nation needs a hefty dose of TLC.

I pretty much keep my political ideas confined to 1) my husband, who has always respected what I think, and 2) my own head, because people are pretty polarized about the presidential election and I have no immediate death wish. So no, I won’t tell you who I’m voting for… but here’s a hint: If you’re Alaskan, we may or may not agree. ::Grin::

My thoughts of late have also been occupied with family life. I am a hopeless perfectionist, and my addled brain has latched onto the following ideal of motherhood:

Takes the kids for daily hikes, nature walks, and/or camping trips. Teaches survival skills, knot-tying, etc.
Structures each day according to Somebody-or-the-Other’s accredited theory of education, packing spare knowledge into all empty spots of the day and raising bright-eyed geniuses. Creepy nighttime learning tapes optional.
Plays regular sports with the family. Kids get a wide enough exposure to athletics that they can make educated decisions whether they want to become MBA players or make the Olympic curling team.
Converts a portion of the house into a communal art studio, complete with miniature canvases, safety glass scissors, and sippy cups of gel medium.
Earns the nickname Mrs. Montessori for her colorful playroom always stocked with dress-up clothes, abaci, and imagination enhancement drugs.
Reigns over her little domestic kingdom in high heels and oven mitts, singing supercalifragilistic ditties to scare toys into place and always baking something light and fluffy. By age four, kids would know how to scrub grout and make perfect quiche.

I feel like I’m just now waking up and OMG! I have spawn! and OMG! I have no parenting archetype! It feels a lot like the flu. I’ve done a lot of problem-solving over the last 3.6 years—figuring out how much rice cereal to fix at a time, how to battle diaper rash, how to get a stubborn toddler to stay in her bed—and I’ve relied heavily on mamalove to fill in the gaps. It’s not a bad way to parent. And yet, I want incredibly special girlhoods for my daughters. I want them to remember a mother who was fully present with them, not constantly thinking about writing or worrying about the dirty house. I want us to use our imaginations together and create sparkling memories, whether we’re learning multiplication tables or simply having a ticklefest.

I haven’t done a good job getting my genetic anxiety under control, and OMG! it’s time for me to relax and enjoy life already. Especially with my little girls, who matter 1,000,000% more than anything I spend my time worrying over. So now the question: How to parent more purposefully without stressing out about all the versions of mother I am not? Because I so am not a sports person. Survival skills I have none. We have no space for dress-up clothes, and I don’t even know how to use gel medium. Something tells me that I don’t have to be perfect at everything in the world to be a great mom, but that something has a “Kick me” sign stuck to its bum, compliments of my brain. Stupid brain.

My bedridden thoughts have also drifted toward holiday gifts and Matt Damon and tarte tatin and how I really should shower once this week and I’m just going to stop there. After all, sick people aren’t responsible for hygiene any more than they are for perfect parenting or political involvement. OMG! whew.

Page 7 of 9« First...«5 678 9 »