I apologize for the last post. It was really depressing.

Now, onto something a little more inspiring. Well, we’ll see. Let’s not count the comments before the post is written.

A while back, I posted about divorce and mentioned some of the difficult situations that I have been witnessing. My children have been playing a lot with M. She is seven, and being our neighbor’s granddaughter, we have known her since she was about a year old. M has finally been granted a custody situation that involves being able to go to school every day, live predominantly with the responsible parent, and still get to visit with her other parent on a regular basis.

M also happens to be African American. She was hanging out with us yesterday and decided to try to teach me to talk black. We’d been talking about birthday money, and C was going on about how she’d gotten $107 from her granddaddy for her 7th birthday, but it was in her bank account. So M asked me which bank, to which I answered “Bank of None of Your BizNess”. She guffawed, and said I had gotten the phrase wrong. “It’s supposed to be None A Ya BizWax,” she told me, “like our color says it,” as she gestured at her own face, giving me one of her characteristically adorable grins.

It was hilarious, being coached by her. Her personality is so sparkly and bubbly that you just can’t feel blue when she’s around. She’s also the kid who told me I was like, eighty hundred thousand percent COOL a while back. What a great kid.

I was really blown away when she made reference recently to the fact that she is different from us — ie, not white. It’s not something I would ever directly refer to. I am not sure why that is, since I live in a neighborhood that is quite mixed racially, as far as black and white. In my immediate block, I’d say of the 5 closest neighbors, two families are white, and three are black. We live side by side, greet one another, our kids play, our block is friendly and comfortable. It’s a kind of racial paradise.

In fact, the neighborhood that I live in is known for its tolerant attitudes. There are many bi-racial families; and families with two moms, or two dads; there are Quakers, and Catholics, Jews and Protestants. There are Muslim families, too, though no Mosque that I know of. There is a Hindu Temple and a Jewish Center within a quarter mile of each other, just down the road from the Lutheran Seminary. We all live side by side; it’s peaceful here.

In spite of all this lovey dovey living together that we try to do here, I have always felt a strong sense of the other. Or maybe of being an outsider. It’s hard to explain. I think it’s because I grew up in such a racist environment, where blacks and whites were quite segregated. (Obviously, I did not grow up here in Philadelphia, though I’m told that not all neighborhoods of our city are as cozy as the one we live in. I rarely leave the zip code, though, so I have this lovely illusion of living in a harmonious glade.)

The small town I grew up in was mostly white, with a small part of town that was kind of like a small town ghetto block where the blacks all lived. The schools I went to, public schools all, had different educational tracks - ones for kids headed to college and ones for kids who were destined to start working right out of high school, as say, hair dressers, mechanics, office assistants, or other jobs that don’t require a higher education. There were no local black kids in my ‘honors’ classes (that’s not strictly accurate, as there was ONE though she was not a local kid, but came from a neighboring affluent area that was so sparsely populated that they do not have a high school of their own). The blacks kids did not hang out with white kids. They just didn’t. We didn’t compare the way we talked, or chat about common things, or feel at ease with each other. Ever. I walked around with this tense feeling that dictated that we are all same and our color doesn’t matter, which was neither comfortable nor true.

So that is why it’s so heart warming that I find myself feeling included, feeling appreciated, feeling that I can be who I am and at the same time enjoy the company of others who aren’t the same as me. I love being able to embrace and accept the differences that we have in this region. When M talks about ‘her color,’ she speaks of it with pride and pleasure, which is just as it should be. When I think of the diversity of my neighborhood, I’m not just giving lip service to the politically correct Diversity concept. I just love that we can and do get along and not in the “good fences make good neighbors” way.

I hope that my children are learning that crucial lesson that is put so succinctly in The Muppets Take Manhattan:

Peoples is peoples. No is buildings. Is tomatoes, huh? Is peoples, is dancing, is music, is potatoes. So, peoples is peoples. Okay?

I tried to drive home this easy to remember phrase (Peoples Is Peoples!) some weeks back when we were shopping at the discount store. My daughters were kind of taken aback at seeing a woman shopping, dressed head to toe in black robes, her face showing only the tiniest strip across her eyes, for she was clearly of the Muslim faith and was choosing to dress quite conservatively. The younger one stopped and stared, and started to point. This made me feel just terrible, because my instinct was that I felt the kids should be polite, not stare, and act as if nothing was different. But that’s silly, because obviously, the woman shopping dressed in her Islamic garb is different from us, as any little kid can tell you.

The Peoples Is Peoples line jumped into my head and I pulled my girls aside. I spoke quietly to them, and reminded them what I’d told them in the car the last time we chanced to see some women dressed this way. “Underneath her clothes, that woman is just another person like anybody. People are people, no matter what they happen to be wearing. Don’t be afraid, but please also don’t point or stare because that is not a polite way to behave.”

The woman overheard my little speech and came over to us. I felt a little nervous; had she been offended? Had my kids seemed disrespectful and ignorant? Was my little pep talk too inane, did I fail to impart some important lesson? Not at all. She said to me, “I really appreciate that you took the time to talk to your kids and tell them that.” She opened her veil so that my girls could see her face, and she smiled at them. “See,” she said, “your mama is right. I’m just a regular person under here!”

Something about that encounter brought tears to my eyes. It was very emotional. I felt like if people would just talk to each other and not make assumptions, we could all breathe a little easier.

Back to my lessons on how to say None of Your BizWax properly… Maya didn’t think much of my inflection and intonation as I tried to copy her phrases exactly, but I did the best I could, and we were all amused. She told me to practice on it a while and get back to her. As Miss Mary Lennox, that sour girl who grows healthy out on the moor in The Secret Garden, says of the broad Yorkshire dialect: I’m learning it as if it were French. My kids just say we’re learning to talk Philly. I like that.

Do you ever get overwhelmed by the crises and miseries and war that are going on all around the world?  I do and I am.

I’m overwhelmed thinking what life will be like in 10, 20, 30 years. I fear the worst and feel very grim about it. How will my children get by? When will the great oil shortages begin? When will the climate change cause catastrophes akin to Katrina and worse? I am far past “what if” and am now onto “When” and I’m getting really freaked out.

Will there be rioting? Starvation? Lack of clean water, basic health services and food? What will happen to me, to us, to our friends? Will we need to grow all our own food? There are already so many people in the world who are actually starving; when will it be happening here too?

It is much easier to just go on with life, doing the laundry, making the meals, doing what we can for now than to contemplate all this Woe. I am amazed at my own pessimism. Are these anti-depressants failing to work all of a sudden?  Sadly, I don’t think these fears of my have anything to do with my own brain chemistry and they have everything to do with my having just spent a while searching the internet to try to catch up on what is going on in the world.

Most of the time, I live in a fairly media-sheltered way, by choice. Because you know, I get overwhelmed by reality and avoid it like the plague.  Then I go and dip into CNN and MoveOn.Org and Michael Moore and more and more and then shrink back again, feeling like I’ve just stuck my emotions into a pot of boiling water.

I think we’ll have turkey burgers for dinner with swiss chard on the side.

Happy WW. This photo is of Drob and C paddling on Lake Paupacken (Pennsylvania) where we spent an idyllic Labor Day weekend.

Last night I de-cluttered our credenza. What’s a credenza, you say? It’s a long piece of furniture designed to hold a lot of clutter.  Ours boasts a record player, two speakers, the ‘inbox’ where we put the mail and nothing else, now that I’ve removed all the other stuff.  These are just the things that belong there. Everything else either got thrown away, or put away. (Pictured at right: A credenza that looks a lot like ours, but isn’t.)

The only problem is, of course, that I often feel that I am just moving around the clutter to other surfaces.   Nevertheless, my theory is that if I keep on moving the stuff, and throwing out some of it as I go, I will wash over my house like a wave, spreading the clutter as driftwood along the beach.  Then another wave will take away more things, and send more to less annoying areas, until at last things will find their way to the proper places (even if that might well be a landfill).

I’m really tired. I didn’t sleep enough last night– late night spice-purging activities kept both of us up late, and although I had the most leisurely day at work in recent memory, I’m still feeling pretty exhausted at this point. But, I promised a post on self-help books today, so here it is.

A lot of people ridicule the self-help book industry. This is partly deserved– many self-help books paint themselves as The Solution to All of Your Problems. And of course, no book is going to solve all of anyone’s problems. Not even Panaceas for Complete Idiots.

But I’ve found these books fairly helpful over the years. I won’t go through the whole list of books– maybe some time when I’m less tired– but we’ve read books that have helped us be better parents, helped our relationship with each other, helped our relationship with Pann’s crazy parents, and helped us learn new skills.

One of the skills I’ve learned from these books is organization. Actually, I’d say I’ve learned several different skills, from several different books. I started this particular odyssey about 10 years ago and I’d say I read about one book on organization or time-management per year. Here are some of the best:

• From Julia Morganstern’s Organizing from the Inside Out I learned about organizing rooms and space and stuff.
• Barbara Hemphill’s “Taming the Paper Tiger” taught me some useful skills for managing the piles of paper that build up in my life (not linked because the version I have is out of print; she’s now got two separate Paper Tiger books, which I haven’t read).
• Organizing for the Creative Person, a book which deals with some of the special challenges that we creatives run into when we try to get organized– and some creative solutions to those problems.
• Also from Julia Morganstern, Time Management from the Inside Out taught me to map out my time, set up a schedule, and manage it.
• David Allen’s Getting Things Done, a favorite of geeks everywhere, taught me to manage the incoming demands on my time and maintain a comprehensive set of to-do lists.

All of these books have taught me skills, and I see their authors as mentors: people who realized “I understand something that’s difficult for other people; let me write a book to teach what I know.” I could imagine that if I knew these people personally, they could help me get even more organized than I am now.

Which brings me to this year’s book, on the topic of decluttering. As Pann already mentioned, we’re reading It’s All Too Much by Peter Walsh. Clutter is definitely our biggest organization problem at the moment– a variety of factors have caused to us to compress our possessions into an ever-smaller number of rooms, while new things seem to keep coming in the door each day, and oh baby do we have clutter.

It’s All Too Much is, I should be clear, a pretty good book. Reading it, I definitely picked up some lessons that will help us have a less cluttered house– one thing is that I’m kind of pumped right now to get all of our books to fit on the bookshelves by the end of the year. Walsh makes the excellent point that if you claim something is important to you, you should treat it like it’s important to you, not shove it in the back of a closet. The book has good insights, and like the others above, we’re learning from it. It’s already having a positive impact on our lives.

The problem, though, is that Walsh comes off as kind of an asshole. Unlike the other authors I mentioned above, I can’t imagine talking to Walsh about my clutter problems. The style of his book is “I’m not going to accept any of your nonsense excuses for why you need to keep this clutter. Out it goes!” And while that can be a kind of liberating thing to say to yourself, it isn’t really the attitude I want from a self-help book.

Interestingly, Walsh seems to have it in for self-help books:

I walked over to their bookshelf and started scanning the titles. There were diet books. Exercise books. Self-esteem books. Parenting books. Finance books. Marriage books. Books on how to live better, happier, richer, fuller lives. It was a complete library of self-help books for every issue a family might have…. “You think the state of this house is no big deal, but look at all the problems you’re trying to solve.” (pp 5-6)

An odd attitude from the author of a self-help book.

Decluttering is great. It’s liberating, it makes you more at peace with your home, your family, and your stuff. But it is not The Solution to All of Your Problems. It’s just one more skill. A skill you can learn from a book.

The toilet is stopped up after A went up to have a poop. (Wow, that’s something to put in her baby book : first time clogging the toilet with a big one!)

C suggested that we freeze the water and toilet paper (which is all you can see there) and bring it to a museum.

“It would be our art. Toilet Paper in Ice. We’d have to transport it in a frozen compartment so it wouldn’t melt. We’d show it in a frozen exhibit or it could be part of the museum.”

Happy Monday morning, everyone!

Like Swistle, I’m finding that a hot cup of coffee sure does wonders. I wouldn’t be so tired this morning if I had not foolishly stayed up so late last night. But D and I are on this getting-organized kick, and de-cluttering can be kind of fun once you get past the first painful few items that you are so sure you’re going to want again before the week is out.

Last night, when I entered the kitchen at 10:00 PM to get together the lunches (for the girls, and for D), I suddenly noticed that there were WAY more spices than I thought I’d EVER use. D is reading this snarky book on getting organized which basically argues that you should throw out clutter that you don’t use and aren’t likely to use. He’s read out loud to me the passages that he’s found to be good advice, but also to have this incredible snide tone about the things that clutter from having too many hobbies and too many projects.

I admit I’m guilty of having a lot of projects going at all times. It’s part of being a creative person; doing things with my hands and watching things change, grow, take shape is a part of who I am. If I didn’t seek out many forms of artistic and creative expression, I think I’d explode, or maybe just slowly melt into a sad little puddle on the floor.

So it is that I have a pile of clothes to mend, a quilt to finish, a large fabric stash for the day when I learn to make children’s clothes, a set of watercolor paints and paper at hand, a big box of scrapbooking materials, piles of photos, stockpiles of seeds for planting next season, heaps of books and enough rennet and citric acid to make 25 pounds of mozzarella or ricotta. Finally, and significant to the point of this caffeine-powered post, a ridiculous collection of spices. Weird shit that I probably won’t ever have cause to use.

It was to this collection that I turned my de-cluttering eye last night. I even got rid of two out of the three spice racks that were in my kitchen, both on the wall and the counter. It was funny making little bargains with myself: I chose the smallest spice rack and agreed to limit my spice containers to what would fit in it: about a dozen different little glass jars with various herbs and seeds. A few more that I couldn’t bear to part with were neatly filed away in the cupboard (thanks D, for the little plastic organization unit!). And the rest? I dumped donated twenty different spice containers in a rotating spice rack to the kitchen in my daughter’s school. I hope it will be useful in some cooking project for the school, because I feel a little guilty for transferring clutter from my kitchen to the school!

Those who know me might scoff, but I’m fairly well organized.

I’ve started this post about four times, and I can’t write that sentence without following it up with a paragraph of defensiveness. I’m going to physically restrain myself, and stick to my guns on this statement. Here, I’ll say it again: I’m fairly well organized.

There are a couple of reasons I’m well organized. One is that I’m on medication, and therefore my attention deficit disorder isn’t as bad as it was when I was unmedicated. This goes a long way.

However, the other reason is that about 10 years ago I realized this organization stuff was something that I don’t have a natural aptitude for. And I realized it was going to be important to my life to keep both my stuff and my time organized. This turns out to be particularly prescient, since when I had this realization I wasn’t even really thinking about having kids.

It turns out that organization is a skill that can be learned. Although I’m by no means perfect at it– and I have a deep and abiding jealousy for people who are– I’ve managed to acquire some skills at time management, at organizing my space, and at keeping the enormous piles of paper at bay (you just feed them raw meat twice a day and they stay away from your family members.)

So this is the first in a series of posts on this topic. Tomorrow, I’ll talk a little bit about my love-hate relationship with self-help books.

TBH has a post about how tired she is from all her cooperative commitments. Like TBH, Pann and I are members of lots of cooperative organizations. We’re members of two cooperative schools (one for each kid), a food coop, and a babysitting coop. I feel sure I’m missing at least one organization, but that may be all of them at this point– Our kids also went to a cooperative camp but have since outgrown it. And I’m actually deliberately leaving out two organizations that are structured as co-ops but don’t have an explicit work requirement for all members (although we do participate anyway).

I should be clear that I love these organizations. I don’t regret joining them. My older daughter’s school, in particular, is a real source of community for me, and I also think they provide great value– more on this later.

That said, I feel TBH’s pain. I’ve been thinking a lot about the energy we put into co-ops and whether it’s worth it. Making this work for a family is sort of a martial art, something you get better at with time and hard practice; it was a lot more overwhelming a year ago. I think we’ve gotten a little better at this.

Here’s a quick braindump of some of the things I wish someone had said to me when I first got involved with so many cooperatives around the time our kids reached toddlerhood.

1. Have a time-management system. I think lots of parents, coming from working a single job and being the master of the rest of their time, are not prepared at first for the number of evening and weekend commitments you start to have once your kids are in school. Being part of coops magnifies this. You’ve got to have a good system for keeping up with all those commitments, to make sure you can be in the right place at the right time, to make sure you don’t double book yourself, to help you predict your own energy levels, and also to make sure you’re covered for your own kids.
   
   Pann once accidentally committed to coop at two schools at once, but beyond that we’ve also run into a few situations where we both needed to be somewhere (cooping, a meeting, whatever) but we never got around to making arrangements for our own kids while doing that. (We’ve gotten better about this one, but we still mess it up occasionally).
   
2. Find out whether your cooperative organizations have options where you can do work with your family or kids, instead of taking additional time away from them to do coop work.
   
   My family spent 2 hours picking vegetables at the local cooperative farm this morning, for credit at our food co-op. Although we had to get up REALLY early, it was something we were able to do as a family, and get 4 hours of credit (for two adults) in two hours of time. And the kids hung out with us and had a good time too!
   
3. More generally, can you choose the work you do? If so, this goes a long way toward making it all less draining. Sometimes you don’t have a choice, but sometimes you do. I’ve tended to move my school cooping commitments toward administrative and technical stuff, which is valuable to the school, but takes less out of me than chaperoning on field trips. I still go on field trips when I feel like it, but it’s not because I have to do it. Schools have other needs– If you’re a writer, can you fulfill some of your obligation to the school by writing an article about the school and getting it published in a local newspaper? Or something else that uses your unique skills?
   
   One parent at my older daughter’s school recently shared with me that he started out doing fundraising, and then switched over to helping the art teacher keep her materials organized. He hated the fundraising, but he loves working with the art teacher and has now been doing it for nearly 10 years (two kids in the school through 8th grade); the change of job made all the difference in his satisfaction with the cooperative organization.
   
4. For babysitting coops in particular, consider the age of the children and what they’re going to be doing in addition to simple logistical concerns.For me, there are certain plum sits I’ll take anytime they come up, and others that require a lot more thought. For example:
   • Sits which start after I’d get home for work, and end after bedtime. Assuming the kids are reasonably good about going to bed when they’re supposed to and reasonably okay about having a babysitter put them to bed, these can be great because once the kids are asleep, I can get my own work or reading done.
   • Having a kid the same age as one of mine come over for a “playdate”– the kids do a lot of the work. Sure, there’s supervision involved, but I find this takes a lot less energy than many other kinds of sits.

   These aren’t the only sits I’ll take, but for other kinds of sits, it takes a lot more consideration– how badly do we need that credit? Am I likely to be really exhausted at that time? Will it be taking me away from something I want to do with my family?

5. Is the coop work distributed equitably in the family? For the coops we’re part of, Pann and I try to participate somewhat equitably. This really helps avoid burnout on the part of either parent. It isn’t always possible– for example, our younger daughter’s school requires classroom cooping around once a month from 8:30 to 12:00, and while my work schedule is flexible; it would be really hard for me to do half of that, so I end up doing it once or twice a year and Pann does the rest. However, I make up for that by doing other parts of the commitment for that school.
   
6. Are you taking on too much? Sometimes these organizations need specific additional help, and they just know you’d be the best person for the job. If you don’t have the time or energy for it, it doesn’t matter how good you’d be, you shouldn’t take it on. Doing so can only lead to burnout. And ultimately, if you’re burned out, the job doesn’t actually get done well.
   

At the end of the day– is the value we get from the co-op worth the energy we put into it? Co-ops allow us to save money on a product or service by performing some of the labor involved in delivering that product or service. In other words, they allow us to trade time for money. There are other ways to trade time for money (”work”, “do it yourself”, and also “doing without”) and sometimes those other methods provide better value than the co-op does.

On the other hand, sometimes the cooperative organization provides qualitative value that can’t be purchased elsewhere (community, better quality food, better quality school, babysitters who aren’t teenagers, etc.) so that has to be taken into account. But my personal store of energy also provides me with qualitative value that can’t be purchased elsewhere, and I need to consider that every time I take on a cooperative commitment. It comes down to honoring our own energy, something that can be exceedingly difficult to do as a parent.

Ok, today Luna was a total darling of a cat. Slept with me during my two (!) naps and purred and didn’t bite or scratch me or anyone else. Even let my husband pet her a little.

Now she’s on the dining room table, eating left over greenbeans.  What a weird cat.