Pausing to Give Thanks

This year I’m blessed with TWO Thanksgivings! My son Ian flew out from NYC to spend his first California Thanksgiving since (as far as he and I could figure out) his freshman year in college — that is, nine years ago!

I’ve been “off-duty” from blogging, posting, tweeting and the like, since Friday. I treated myself to really savoring the grocery shopping, home care and general preparation for Ian’s arrival to my mountain cottage. I’m wishing the same for you — moments, even fleeting ones, that are set apart from the normal routine. Moments in which to pause and feel that enlivening wave of gratitude.

I cooked a full-on Thanksgiving feast for the evening Ian arrived, on Sunday. The next day we went on a forest outing to take in the fresh air, gorgeous sun… and forage for great fire kindling! We did some cool local brew IPA tasting, watched select TV highlights and a couple movies, and shared lots of wonderful conversation. We caught up in that deep heart-way that really only happens in person, and when there are many hours here and there over a few days.

Can you pick out the New Yorker, lol? Ian (center) with my friend Sarah-Jane and my love Larry.

Can you pick out the New Yorker, lol? Ian (center) with my friend Sarah-Jane and my love Larry.

Ian just now hit the road back to L.A. to spend actual Thanksgiving with his dad and grandmother. I sent him forth equipped with multiple containers packed with leftover food. (It’s official: I have become my mother-in-law, the aforementioned grandmother. At least in that regard.)

Ian’s younger sister Eve is three weeks into a 2-month artist’s residency in upstate New York. She could spend the holiday with a college friend whose family invited her,  but that would mean missing five days at her studio. So she’s chosen instead to stay at the residency grounds with a handful of other artists.

Not long before Ian left, I got a text from Eve: “Can I have your stuffing and cranberry sauce recipes?”

Mmmm, wave of gratitude.

I plan to spend time on the (good ol’-fashioned) phone over the next few days connecting with friends & family without the usual “tick-tock” time pressure that busy-life-as-usual tends to exert. Thursday I’ll go with Larry to spend turkey day with some of his family, and meet lots of new people.

My wish for you is the opportunity to be present to YOUR blessings, with the gift of a lightened agenda. A pause in the typically daily To-Do roster.

So… (for those of you in the U.S., that is) what might you drop off your To-Do list these coming few days to help mark Thanksgiving in a more joyful, thankful way??

WearGratitude

Catch you on the flip side of thanks!

Blessings,

Marcy

 

 

 

Holidays With Your New Baby

MotheringFeaturedSantaBaby2For anyone who becomes a mother within nine months of a major holiday season (and, taking into account all of the holidays within every faith and cultural tradition, that means almost everybody!) I have a radical idea for you: Simplify your idea of how the holidays will look this year. Better yet, let yourself let someone ELSE handle everything. {Read more at mothering.com}

Image:
JodyDigger through a Creative Commons license | Flickr

 

Not Your Mother’s “Mommy” Problem?

MotheringMommyProbHeaderI saw that several people on Facebook this weekend were sharing & discussing Heather Havrilesky’s New York Times rant about our cultural uber-focus and pressure on parents, and particularly mothers.

It takes me awhile for my thoughts to coalesce into something I can put on paper (or on screen, rather), and meanwhile, our collective attention span darts away to the next conversation. If you take more than 48 hours to respond, you risk irrelevancy!

If you’re interested in an aspect of this perennial issue that hasn’t been raised yet, read on! Here’s a snippet from Havrilesky’s piece:

We smugly shake our heads at the backward attitudes of Mad Men, but at this particular moment in our history, some combination of overzealous parenting, savvy marketing and glorification of hearth and home have coaxed the public into viewing female parents as a strange breed apart from regular people. You might feel like the same person deep inside, but what the world apparently sees is a woman lugging around a giant umbilical cord.

She seems to suggest that the existential pressures and identity crises of motherhood she so witheringly parodies are unique to this moment in human history. They’re not. {More at mothering.com}

Images
donjd2 through a Creative Commons license / Flickr

Boo! Are Fairy Tales Too Scary for Kids?

RidingHoodColor“But they’re so awful!

This is a response I often hear from parents when I recommend Grimm’s fairy tales as basic reading fare.  The idea of regaling their young children with stories of orphans and witches, kidnappings and murders—at bedtime no less—is daunting, understandably.

As parents we tend to want to present something of a Hallmark world to our children, so we naturally gravitate to soothing, sunny, children’s books, including sanitized versions of fairy tales classics.  Wishing to shield them from the darker aspects of humanity, such as anger, greed, anguish, and cruelty, we wean our children on the proposition that people are all good.  The problem is that even the youngest child knows differently in her heart of hearts. {Read more of this post at mothering.com}

Talking to Children About Tragedy: How Temperaments Help

Talking to Children About TragedyWhen talking to children about tragic events, understanding individual temperament can be a great help. In Part I, I focused mainly on two important aspects for the parent:

    • the fundamental need for some measure of self-possession and calm amidst outer events
    • a level of honesty and clarity in speaking to the child about the events that is not the norm in our culture

Especially related to that second point — honesty and clarity for the child — I want to dive a bit deeper and look at the importance of knowing your individual child, and letting that understanding guide you with more specificity and nuance when navigating the delicate territory of tragedy with them.

One of the reasons that my book Parenting for Peace is based on principles (rather than rules, systems, or techniques) is that meaningful parenting guidance must allow for everyone’s uniqueness. What nurturance looks like to one child will feel like smothering to another; what presence feels like to one mother will feel like imprisonment to another.

A huge dimension of the parenting journey is to be led to ever deeper understandings and appreciation of just who your child is, apart from any other. While the possibilities of uniqueness are infinite, it is sometimes helpful to orient ourselves with the help of various mapping tools. Temperaments is one such tool. {Read the rest at mothering.com}

Image:
obbino (Flickr / Creative Commons)

Raising Secure Children in a Scary World: Talking About Terror

Secure Children in an Insecure World | Marcy Axness, PhDThirteen years since 9/11.

Thirteen years ago last night, our daughter Eve — then ten years old — was so excited that the next morning she was going to wake up by herself for the very first time, using the radio alarm clock we had given her for the occasion. She chose the station carefully (classical was it? maybe soft pop?), but when the radio clicked on at six a.m. in her Los Angeles bedroom it wasn’t music that woke her up. The second plane had just hit its target. Nobody yet had clarity on what was happening, let alone the news media. A fragmented noise skein of unfathomable facts, disbelief, sorrow, and fear came out of the radio that morning.

Eve’s experience is a bit of a metaphor for what we all went through: we woke up that day to a very different world than was familiar, and we didn’t have a mental framework for it, let alone words. In a further topsy-turvy turnabout of how things would have normally been, it was she who first alerted us to the fact that something very big and very bad had happened. {Read more at mothering.com}

Image:
slgckgc (Flickr / Creative Commons license)

Newborns Sleeping Through the Night: A Dangerous Myth

It seems as if every decade delivers a new scheme to get even our youngest babies to sleep through the night. And yep, I figured we were just about due for a book titled The Sleepiest Baby on the Block or 50 Shades of Baby Slumber when, this past lovely Sunday afternoon, I was confronted by the newest baby training idea on the block (which, by the way, makes Ferber sound tame).

Here’s a behind-the-scenes play-by-play — a kind of diary of how it went down in real time (oh–except that Facebook seems to bend time, which I’d never really noticed until trying to build a timeline with their posts… and see that their time-stamps jump time-zones!). The identity of folks I don’t know has been obscured; for my friends, you’re in this with me!

Sunday, 2:30pm — I See a Call Was Sounded on Facebook

Newborn sleep a dangerous myth | Marcy Axness, PhD

 

{You can read the rest of this adventure at mothering.com}

Adoptive Parents in the Delivery Room?

As many of you may know, my roots are in the world of adoption: I myself was adopted, and throughout the 1990s I was a leading  speaker and writer on the psycho-social issues involved in adoption. I am still one of the few experts in the world on the primal issues in adoption — relating to an adoptee’s pre-verbal, pre-cognitive experiences, including those in the womb, at birth, and in the early days postpartum.

Nancy Verrier rocked the adoption world in 1993 when she published The Primal Wound, which proposes: “Many doctors and psychologists now understand that bonding doesn’t begin at birth, but is a continuum of physiological, psychological, and spiritual events which begin in utero and continue throughout the postnatal bonding period. When this natural evolution is interrupted by a postnatal separation from the biological mother, the resultant experience of abandonment and loss is indelibly imprinted upon the unconscious minds of these children, causing that which I call the primal wound.”

Nancy brought three important credentials to the table:  she was a psychotherapist who had worked with many adopted people wrestling with similar constellations of social and emotional difficulties; she was a scholar who had extensively studied the literature on attachment, separation and loss; and she was the mother of two daughters — one biological and one adopted. The insights she found at the intersection of those learning streams comprised her landmark book.

A Personal Journey

Bee&BabyMI have always been open about sharing that at the heart of everything I teach and the tools I use in parent coaching, beats my own raw and ragged story. Finding Nancy’s book was an important moment in my own healing journey, and it also prompted me to investigate the field of prenatal psychology. It didn’t take long to recognize that many of the issues Nancy wrote about — intimacy problems, separation anxieties, self-esteem issues — weren’t the exclusive province of adoptees, far from it!

So just about ten years into a robust speaking and writing career within the adoption field, I earned my PhD in Early Human Development, with a specialization in Prenatal Development. These were universal issues and I wanted to illuminate them more universally!

But what to do with a trove of writing on adoption topics?? And in particular, an exclusive, extensive conversation I had had with Nancy (who by then had become a close colleague) but never really published anywhere? That was about the time when magazines were on the wane and the internet was ascending… but the internet was like the Wild Wild West and one could emerge pretty bruised when engaging in one of the last remaining taboos in our culture — honest talk about adoption.

Dawn Davenport of “Creating a Family” had reached out to me a couple years ago after reading an article I’d written about the primal wound. She found my explanation / interpretation to be most helpful, and invited me to do a radio interview. So I thought of Dawn and her site as a place to entrust my 2-part conversation with Nancy, as well as a round-up of responses to Nancy’s (radical, one could say) ideas from a handful of adoptive parents, birth parents and adoption professionals I respect.

Dawn re-ordered the sequence of topics so as to come right outta the gate with the incendiary question, “Should adoptive parents be in the delivery room?” Her readers aren’t shy with their opinions — see what YOU think!

Should Adoptive Parents be in the Delivery Room?

 

 

5 Out-of-the-Box Ways to Make Your Child “LISTEN!!!”

MotheringBigImage

One of the most frequent questions I get is, How do I get my child to listen to me? What lingers in the roots just beneath this question is, How do I get her to respect me? The two are intimately entwined. As so often happens with Life’s sticky questions, sometimes we can unstick things a bit by turning the question around: rather than How can I get my child to listen to me, we can get far more traction with How can I make myself more “listenable”? {Find out how by reading the 5 tips at mothering.com}

 

Images:
epSos.de under Creative Commons license

Are You REALLY Independent…In Your Birth Choice?

As long as our country continues to show up so poorly in world rankings on maternal health, I continue to run this article every year on America’s birthday, hoping to illuminate issues around our perceived birth choices. Am I naive in thinking that individual independence around these issues can help pave the way to us being a safer nation for mothers and babies?

LaboringWithEFMIt is sad enough that the U.S. sits so poorly in world infant mortality rankings, but a new report published in the prestigious medical journal Lancet and reported in the Washington Post points out that our childbirth-related maternal death rate continues to rise and is at nearly its highest point* in twenty-five years. [*Aside from its sharp spike in 2009 due to the H1N1 influenza virus.] American mothers die in or around childbirth at double the rate they do in Saudi Arabia, and triple the rate of the United Kingdom — and at statistically the same rate as in Iran.

In terms of where it is safest and healthiest to become a mother, America — land of the free and the brave — ranks 60th of 180 nations. In that context, is there any real birth choice?

Okay, now that I’ve totally bummed you out so you feel like you’ve got to reach for an early margarita with a little flag in it, let’s talk about what individual Americans may be able to do to improve the situation. (And even if it doesn’t improve the national situation, it cannot help but to improve your own birthing and parenting wellbeing!) {Grab your marg and read the rest at mothering.com}

Photo:
miguelb under a Creative Commons license