Smartmouth Mombie

That’s ‘Anti-social’ Media not ANTI-   Social Media, if you follow me.

I’m a pretty typical INFJ. If that means nothing to you, let’s summarize it by saying that I am a fairly social introvert. I need lots of time at home or my energy flags, I find casual conversations exhausting sometimes, and I don’t seek out social interaction often – but I’m in no way shy, and I can find something to talk about with almost anyone.

It’s hard to be a social introvert on social media. It takes a lot of my energy to engage with people in blog comments, or on twitter, or even on facebook, because there is so much room to be misunderstood and the effort required to maintain all of those (fairly) casual social outlets seems exhausting to me.

Sure, I can retweet what you just said. Or answer your call for information. Or I can post a ‘I’m sorry that happened’ or ‘Whoo hoo!’ in your blog comments or in reply to your facebook status but engaging in extended conversations or planning to comment on blogs/facebook/twitter feels really hard. *

I like to dig deep when I’m talking to someone. I don’t like to argue, and I try not to pry, but I do try to figure out where you’re coming from, why you think that way, and if we have common ground.

That’s hard to do online. There’s the time lag, the problem with lack of tone (my sense of humour relies a lot on tone, so it’s hard to convey my own funny), the potential to be misread or to mispeak. It makes for awkward. A whole wall of awkward I have to climb or tunnel under before I can chat with you online.

Adding to the awkward are my privacy issues. I don’t want people on twitter to know exactly where I am. I don’t want random people to be able to identify my kids from pictures on my blog. I don’t want to publish all the details of my life. The idea of doing so makes me make a squirmy motion that there are no words to describe.

The thoughts I choose to share are probably very telling in themselves. No doubt people can tell all sorts of things about me from my writing that I didn’t intend to reveal but I can live with that risk.

So, that leaves me feeling like the most Antisocial Social Media participant ever. I will chat, but only about x,y,z. I lurk and rarely comment. I’m on facebook, but I might leave a status up for a week and I hardly ever pictures. I tweet, but not every thought in my head.

I blog, but I go long stretches without saying anything. And since I won’t get too much into the details of my family’s life, I don’t always know what to talk about .

I feel like I am not fully participating in blogging, tweeting, facebooking, socializing online, but I am inching forward. I can see the Great Wall of Awkward** at all times, though, and I may never break it down. I’m not even sure I want to.

*Well, for personal stuff anyway, it’s easier for business stuff because the rules are clearer.

**Not unlike the Great Wall of China, but I doubt it is visible from space. At least I hope not. ergh

I had thought that 2008 was a difficult year.  Then I met 2009.  Now THAT was a difficult year.

Sure I had many marvellous moments, and I had lots of fun,so that was good.  And I learned a lot of great stuff, and met some great people.  So in many ways 2009 brought good things, but I was pretty annoyed with how I was operating in my own life.  I was happy with my friends, with my family, with many things, but frustrated at the trouble I was causing myself by being ineffective.

As a result, 2009 felt like the most unproductive year I’ve ever had.  I spent all 12 months feeling like I was running behind a train I was supposed to be on, sizing up whether I could safely jump aboard.  I never could.

All manner of important events whizzed by half done and I felt like most of my work was sheer drudgery, all about getting to the end of the to do list, rather than being involved in the process of doing.

2010, however, is a shining beacon.  2010 turns 2009 from a difficult year into a learning process.  All of that drudgery taught me what I need to change about how I operate in various parts of my life, it taught me what I want to spend more time on and what I want to let slide.

So I have spent the last few days making lists, and assessing my priorities, and seeing what ideas feel good.  And I have made a list of intentions for this year.  Not resolutions, but intentions (Thanks, Ann – I saw that in your twitterfeed).  And I am feeling very optimistic about where I stand for 2010.

And today, New Year’s Day, I have already done a fun set of exercises, worked on my novel, and had a great time making pancakes with my family.

It bodes well, methinks.

For the last 262 days, I have written at least 1 page of fiction each day.

That would be really impressive if it was all part of the same work, but, alas, about 90% is unrelated little vignettes, snippets of someone’s thoughts, pieces of their lives, utterly unconnected.

I wish I could make an art project out of them or something, perhaps a huge apartment building and behind each window would be this string of thoughts from one person or another, or perhaps a conversation between the apartment’s inhabitants.

I’m not sure if I have the desire or the ability to write a novel, or even the book of short stories that I have been toying with but I do know I can write shreds of the fabric of people’s lives.  I wonder if I can make a quilt out of them?

I started Taekwondo (hereafter TKD) in September (the same week as AAMP’s big arts festival, the first days of school – it was all new all the time and totally overwhelming) and I’m enjoying it even as it is driving me crazy.

I had anticipated it being tougher on my body, but I’m finding that I can take that part in stride. The challenge is making my body pay attention to the instructions.

Coordination and quick reaction times are not big factors in my life, I’m working on them, but it’s uphill all the way. So, stepping out with my left foot while punching and then stepping back while blocking is brainfrying. Absolutely brainfrying.

I’m sure it will be good for me overall, but it’s damn hard to accept feeling stupid for an hour at a time twice a week. I’m sure it’s soul enhancing or something, maybe it creates humility?

All I know is that I am proud of myself for not shying away from the feeling, usually that sort of discomfort and uncertainty makes me back off. And sometimes cry. But so far, I’m sticking with it and my eyes are dry.

Let’s see how far I can take this.

In November of 2001, The Boy arrived 7 weeks early, a few days after we moved in to our new house, while we were still housesitting for my inlaws.  I spent a week in the hospital after he was born, and came home to our new house, leaving him in the NICU for another week.  That week was one of the most surreal weeks of my life.  I was no longer pregnant, yet I had no baby home with me.  I had to go back and forth to the hospital to feed him, but I was supposed to let him sleep as much as possible so he could grow and come home.*

So I was in this weird space between one state and another, and I spent a lot of time sitting in my new house, which barely felt like mine, listening to music and reading and wondering about how things would unfold from there.

Today I dropped TLG off at morning kindergarten and I am finding myself with the same category of feelings. I’m alone in my house, between being a stay-at-home mom (who squeezes writing and volunteering in when she can) and a mom of full-time school kids (who works from home), and I’m not sure how things will work.

TLG has been in Kindergarten for a couple of weeks now, but in afternoons.  And as anyone with a kid in afternoon K knows, the afternoons are no time.  By the time you get home (or back to work or wherever) and get settled in to a project, it’s time to go back and get them.  Add the fact that I was run off my feet for the first week, and then he was sick and then I was sick and the first days of Kindergarten passed in an absolute blur.

This morning, however, I left him at school at walked home with the morning stretching in front of me and I felt, well, weird.  Like I was shirking my responsiblities. And I felt a little anxious.  I want to make the best use of this time, so I feel a little less torn when I am hanging out with the boys later but I’m not sure what ‘the best’ is.

I figured writing something was a good start.

It’s 9:33, I’ve got 2 hours and 10 mins left.  Wish me luck.

*Depending on who I talked to.  That week I spent a lot of things doing things ‘wrong’, it’s hard to learn to mother with 6 nurses assisting.  Sometimes I was told to keep him awake as much as possible, other times I was told to let him sleep.  I was told to come to nurse him as often as I could, but I had no daytime transportation and no one told me I could stay in the parents’ room.  It was damn guilt inducing.  They don’t make people who have other kinds of abdominal surgery (I had had a Caesarian birth) face that kind of guilt.

This is the first day of The Boy’s summer vacation,  so by all rights things should be hectic – no schedule, two kids instead of one, and so on but this has been a lovely morning so far.

Sure, the kids are entertaining themselves with a computer game, so that’s something, but my peaceful morning has little or nothing to do with that.  It has to do with the fact that I could pretty much set my own pace for the day, and I have gotten a ton of stuff done already and it’s only 9:15.

I am soooooo not a morning person, but one way for me to conquer that is to get up and get going, doing a bunch of mindless but necessary task before I get my breakfast and then sit down with a bagel and tea and do some reading or writing.

I can’t do that on school days, unless I get up at 6 and that’s not happening.  A school day schedule means either that the boys wake me at an ungodly hour in a  bad mood, or that we all get up an hour or so before we leave for school,  we get breakfast, get ourselves dressed,  get teeth brushed, hustle and bustle our way to walk to school (or drive if it is really raining out) and then me and TLG come back to the house by 9.  By 9 I’m fully awake, and it’s too late for the mindless housekeeping/organizing tasks but they need to be done anyway so I’m puttering through them, feeling like I should be playing with TLG and he interrupts the flow of my tasks constantly so they take way longer than they should.  And then I settle into playing with him but he is usually desperate to play a video game by that point and then blah de blah it’s time to make lunch,  after lunch it is only an hour and a half before it’s time to pick up the boy, and so on and so on (no need to bore you with all of the details – too late!).  My day is all chopped up into bits by the school schedule and The Man’s lunch schedule, and homework and it’s so far from the natural work rhythm of my brain that I feel like I am swimming upstream all the time (and unlike the proverbial salmon, I don’t get a reward for my efforts).

But in summer I can move closer to my own rhythm, finding ways to entertain the boys first thing in the morning so I can get the shitwork out of the way and then match our activities to my brain.  It doesn’t ALWAYS  work, but it works often enough for me.

When I started this blog I called myself the mombie because I was seriously sleep-deprived (as in less than two hours sleep at a time for YEARS). Obviously things have changed since then, and both of the kids sleep much better now (upwards of 10 hours most nights – I never thought the day would come) and I sometimes feel like my blog title is no longer as dead-on as it once was.*

Today, however, I am totally a Mombie.

I haven’t been sleeping well for the last week or so. No big worries, nothing weighing me down, plenty of time to sleep, but I’m just getting poor quality sleep all around.**

I know this will pass, but in the mean time I am driving myself batty.

For example, today I sent out invites to my annual Canada Day party. Correction: I created a facebook event for my party, and somehow managed to not invite anyone. I only discovered that when I asked The Man to log on to facebook and accept the invite so I wouldn’t be the only one attending (I hate that!) and he started to laugh because he hadn’t been invited to a party at his own house. Mistake the first.

I didn’t find out about my second mistake until I went to pick up The Boy from school and my friend G asked me how my party was going.

Turns out I facebook-scheduled the party for today instead of Canada Day and when she accepted the invite, her phone sent her a reminder that she should be on the way to the party – TODAY.

Luckily I am a writer and not a surgeon (I just typed sturgeon – ack!), or things would be going seriously wrong right now.

*For the record, my online ID varies between Ms. Strident, Smartmouth Mombie, Mombie, and my latest: isekhmet – they all fit for different reasons and different contexts.
**I had dream the other night about vampires who could only attack in dance formation, luckily I was dealing with the ones doing the hustle and I only had to dust them one at a time – I may be watching too much Buffy lately.

So I was going to a physiotherapist in late 2007 because my back was messed up and he was very research-y, had a lot of papers published and the like, so he had a much more extensive questionnaire than other providers of that sort seem to.  Once he looked at my answers he mentioned something about me being uncoordinated.

Now, I would never have described myself that way.  I think of uncoordinated people as tripping all the time, or unable to dance or what have you.  I walk and dance and so on just fine but I have a hard time learning new physical things, it takes me a long time to form a body memory, and I have trouble organizing my movements with someone else)*.  I thought these things were problems but not ones of coordination.

I usually get my sister Neece to walk through things with me because she has a way of getting these sort of things through to me that other people can’t (I always feel bad for my teacher and worry that they are going to see my inability to learn as a problem with their teaching) and she helps me make the movement make sense.  When I talked to her about the oddness of being called uncoordinated, she, with her usual directness, said ‘Chris, not being able to make your body do what your brain understands IS being uncoordinated.’ 

Another Neece lightbulb went on in my brain (she often lights them for me) and I let myself off the hook for not being able to get these things quickly.  That doesn’t mean I stopped trying or just said ‘Oh well, uncoordinated!’ (totally not my style) but I stopped feeling so frustrated.

Fast forward to May/June of this year.

I’ve been using the WiiFit a lot, especially the balance games because I am so bad at them.  After 147 tries (I kid you not, I am a persistent dame) I finally manage to get a decent score in the soccer game where you have to head the balls while avoiding soccer cleats and panda heads (!) that also fly at you. 

That’s when the pattern emerges, the picture comes into focus, the ideas crystalize:

I am uncoordinated, and I have a slow reaction time but I CAN WORK ON THESE THINGS.  I can teach myself to be more coordinated, and I can improve my reaction time with PRACTICE. (odd how I have to learn the practice lesson over and over, but there you go)

It’s not that I am bad at sports and learning physical activities, per se, it’s that I don’t have the full set of basic skills to do them yet.  I can do some parts intuitively, but without the basic practice I won’t be able to move ahead.  It’s like I have  been trying to learn to eat with a fork but I can’t make a fist, nor make a pincher grip, so I grab the fork between the palms of both hands and make do with that method – I get some food, but not as effectively as I could if I was able to do the other movements, and I frustrate myself and people trying to explain forks to me.  Okay, so I’m not all that bad, but it’s the closest analogy I could think of at the moment.

So, I need to rewrite my mindset and my brain yet again.  I am not ‘bad at sports’, I need to practice my coordination and my reaction time.

I wish things like this had been dealt with in gym classes when I was a kid, but it seemed like we focused on sports and the kids who had natural inclinations left the rest of us in the dust. 

So one of my summer projects is to increase my coordination and reduce my response time, and my lucky sons are getting dragged into it with me.  Bring on the obstacle courses!

*Obviously, not the case in ALL circumstances.

Have you ever heard of Muscle Man?  What? You haven’t?  Do you live under a rock?

I kid, of course. Muscle Man* is TLG’s fictional superhero.  We’ve been hearing about him for at least a year now.  Not only is he  huge, red and strong (he can lift TWO houses!) but he can do whatever he likes, and he has access to everything TLG can imagine.  As a result, we have a lot of conversations like this:

Mombie: “I’m sorry, darling, but there’s no such thing as the Playstation 52.  They are only up to Playstation 3.”

TLG: “Well, MUSCLE MAN, has a Playstation 52!  And he has all the games for it, too!  And if we go to his house we will be able to play them all and I will win!”

It’s amazing really, Muscle Man can do EVERYTHING, absolutely everything.  And he’s not limited by finances, time or even the laws of physics.  The added bonus is that he ensures that TLG is never wrong.

The Boy: “No, TLG, that’s not how you do it.  You have to jump over the crack.”

TLG: “The Boyyyy, that’s how (insert condescension here) Muscle Man does it.  In Muscle Man’s world, that’s how you do it.”

The Boy: “(loud sigh) FINE, TLG, but we don’t live in Muscle Man’s world.”

I’m sure this is extremely appealing to a four year old who is probably tired of being taught things all the time.  It must be nice to be so very solidly right.

So, I’m thinking of adopting this sort of approach to conversation, just for my own amusement.  I just have to think of a situation that makes my every statement true.  Maybe I can invoke Wonder Woman instead.

*FYI – Muscle Man lives in Toronto.  But not the CITY Toronto, his Toronto is called Muscle Man’s Toronto, but he visits the City of Toronto sometimes.  I have now typed Toronto so often that it has lost all meaning.

I had this great plan for posting my second annual Mother’s Day Meme on Mother’s Day (which would be quite sensible), alas my cold had other plans and I spend the entire weekend lying in bed bemoaning my fate.  Hopefully it is not too unfashionable to post this a day late (you know how I worry about fashion!).

In The Success Principles, Jack Canfield (of the Chicken Soup series fame) says that one important thing to do in business is to focus on what you do best.  I’m paraphrasing here, but, the theory is that you have to find the intersection between the things you do best, the things you enjoy the most, and the things that bring in the most money.  That intersection is your Core Genius, and once you have identified it you are supposed to focus on that thing (or those things) and delegate the rest.

When I read that a few years ago, it reminded me about something I had read in Jennifer Lawler’s Dojo Wisdom for Mothers  - a reminder that you don’t have to be everything to your kid.  If he or she enjoys something that drives you crazy, you can always find someone else to do that actviity while you spend your time doing the things you both enjoy.

That, in turn, got me thinking about core genius in mothering.

To be clear, when Lawler was talking about activities, she wasn’t referring to the daily labours of mothering she wasn’t suggesting that you can ditch all the unpleasant tasks. You will have to do at least some of the toilet training and some of the dsciplining.  But in the midst of all of those necessary tasks there are some that you can choose between and you can always choose to celebrate the tasks you are best at and cut yourself some slack on the rest.

So, it’s hard for you to entertain your kids on a busy day, or you find it a challenge to let them roam as freely as you like. That’s fine, you can either work on those things or accept them (and yourself) as is, whichever your personality dictates. But what is your core genius of mothering? We can’t really talk about mothering in terms of the money it brings in but we can talk about it in terms of the rewards of joy or satisfaction.

My core genius of mothering is communication. I get a lot of satisfaction out of really listening, of making sure as much of the world makes sense to my sons as possible, out of teaching them to communicate effectively verbally an non-verbally. I may suck at home schedules but I TALk to my kids and I LISTEN to them.

And I feel good about that.

So, in the tradition that I started last year this is my second annual mothering meme:

What is your ‘core genius’ of mothering? What is the common theme running through all of your mothering successes? If we were creating some sort of über-franken-mother what part would we take from you?

Tell me about it in the comments or on your own blog or on facebook or hell, even on twitter.