I sat in the kitchen losing my ever-loving mind beneath the tumbling, towering waves of anxiety.  I didn’t even know why.  It was just a regular day – no need to perform to a certain standard, no need to get certain things done, no need to do anything other than simple, regular daily chores.

The computer sat on the counter in front of me, and my breath stuttered while I read these words:

One of the ways we find breathing room is by taking apart all the various voices vying for time in our minds and then sit long enough to determine that space where our soul (our deepest desires, longings, our wild) and God meet up. And then sit a little longer . . . and listen.

So I paused.  What were the words in my soul?  What messages did I have on repeat?

Bubbling to the surface came these ugly thoughts…

I can’t do this! There’s too much to do, not enough time, and not enough of me to go around!
I’ll never live a happy life. Anxiety and depression are hopeless.
These babies need more than I can give.
I’m losing myself!

And then, just as I reminded myself of her phrase “sit long enough,” Jude padded into the kitchen, arms raised with book in hand, his eyes imploring.  “Read me the story, Mama?” they asked.

So I set aside my stillness.  Just do the next thing, I told myself, and picked him up to read.

As we turned the last page of the book, I saw Isla streak by out of the corner of my eye.  “Mama! Guess what?!?” she hollered.

“What?” I sighed, steeling myself for what I thought was an inevitable request – any request – that I wasn’t emotionally ready to tackle.  “I love you!” she called back.  And with that, all at once, time slowed her clocks for me, and I became clearly aware that the universe was offering me an enormous gift, one that I needed to consciously open my hands to receive.

You think you’re stressed, that you’re getting it all wrong, that you don’t have what it takes? Nope.  I’ll show you.  I picked you for these children and them for you, and some days might be hard, but you’re doing fine, it said.  Take these gifts – the moments snuggled up to read, the spontaneous declarations of love, and the hundreds of others that trickle by unnoticed – and just breathe.  For now, right this moment, you are where you need to be doing what you need to do and you are doing it well.

I went back to my day, but I didn’t go back to it the same way.  I went back lighter and easier.  I shooed the brain vultures and moved brazenly forward – if only a little bit.

Tomorrow it will start all over again, responsibilities and successes and failures and not-enoughs and effort and uncertainty.  Hopefully I’ll be a little faster at banishing those mind vultures and opening my hands to receive the little gifts being offered to me along the way.

The July sun has cast her spell, betrayed only by the cool breezes that keep drifting through my windows, a decidedly unsummerlike sensation, even here in Wisconsin.  This week has felt much the same – appearing one way but feeling another.  The carefree days of summer and the anticipation of upcoming adventures have been crowded out by a heaviness I sense all around me.

A friend waited to lose her sweet babe.  Dear ones walked through the land mines of a tattered marriage.  A cousin looks ahead to brain surgery, and another friend waits to hear about the same.  Cancer claimed a former coworker’s son.  Another friend’s beloved pup isn’t long for this world.  I’m over here, myopic about crumbed goldfish and how long it’s been since our last round of baths and how many times I have (or, more accurately, haven’t) run this month.  But this week, the incongruousness of life loomed large.

Motherhood is, I think, somewhat isolating.  Our hopes and dreams–the common ones we all share for our children–wave high while we keep our fears and failures tucked low to our chests.  And not only that, but we’re busy.  We drive here, we rush there, we enroll in this, we Pinterest that.  Busy keeps us alone, or if we’re with people, we’re not really with them.

Isolation, for me, is the single biggest threat to my well-being as a mom.  Get me alone for any length of time, and my inner world starts closing in on me.  I cater to my strengths,  I tightly control my environment to manage my anxieties, I let the things I dislike or at which I struggle go unchecked. None of these things are entirely bad, but taken together and constantly unchallenged, they turn into a rut of my own making.  It’s easy to start creating all my own “truths,” forgetting that there’s a whole other world out there with a dozen or a hundred or a million ways to create a life, to raise a child, to approach a problem, to find happiness.

And there’s a whole other world of problems out there, of people who’d trade their own heavy loads for the irritations and struggles that have started to seem heavy to me in my aloneness.

**********

Nine months of pregnancy can take an awfully long time, so for each baby, I knitted a blanket while I waited.  Gabe’s was small and simple because I was green and unskilled, both as a knitter and as a mother, and had no clue what I was doing.  By the time I was pregnant with Isla, I was ready to take on a slightly loftier task, settling on a simple bordered pattern with rainbow stripes for playfulness and impact.

The challenge, however, was in its size.  I’d never worked something quite so large before, and keeping track of the stitches became a wild jumble of counting.  About a third of the way through, I finally settled on the strategy of counting after every few rows.  If I found I’d dropped stitches, I’d add in new ones on the last row or two before I changed stripe colors and I figured everything would work out in the end.

I suppose everything did work out in that I completed the blanket and it’s colorful and happy.  It has been well used and loved, and I smile every time I see it draped over the rail of the crib.  It’s also, however, somewhat trapezoid in shape, and almost exactly in the middle of the blanket is a big old dropped stitch, which–if you’re not a knitter–translates into a sizable hole.

Let me say it again.  There’s a hole in the middle of my precious handknit blanket.

^{I can’t quite see the hole in this picture, but I can see a different error.  Can you? 😉}

Experienced knitters know how to work with dropped stitches.  They know how to spot the error and work back to it while the whole piece is still in progress and correct the error before it becomes permanent.  I, however, was not an experienced knitter, and I simply didn’t know.  In fact, not only did I not know, but I lacked the experience to see the small error along the way.  The fact that there was a hole in the blanket surprised me when I finally spread it out to admire my completed handiwork, a seemingly insignificant error affecting the trajectory of the entire piece.

**********

In motherhood (and life…), the thing is that when left to my own devices, the truths I create aren’t very true at all.  They’re a sliver of inexperienced truth based on my sliver of reality.  They’re just like the plan I developed for counting stitches, seeming good enough in the moment to my inexperience.  But when my reality and experience grow, as they always do, the holes and bare spots become more noticeable.

This is why I need to fight isolation, why I think we all need to do it.  We need to see other people’s stories and see ourselves in other people’s stories, to allow our realities to be expanded through them, and grow along with them.  We need second eyes on our own lives, eyes that are experienced in ways we aren’t and can suggest how our current efforts might be steering us off our desired course.  And, of course, we need the strong network, the community of people who help carry us through the darkest of days, days which are sure to come, days like some of my acquaintances, friends, and family have been facing this week.

I’ve been thinking, too, about who I let in.  After I watched a person unload a particularly judgmental and self-righteous attack, I churned for days at the implications at what had been said, and then churned again at why it had upset me so deeply.  Ultimately, I decided the real problem wasn’t righting an injustice or correcting a mistruth.  The real problem was my decision to let the wrong person in.  A lovely woman, no doubt, this was a case of the wrong place/wrong time/wrong person for the current dynamics.  Fighting isolation requires smart choices, not just proximity of another human being.

Last month, I went away by myself for a weekend, and I came back with two things I decided I needed to implement into my life.  One revolved around busyness and being overwhelmed (you can read about that here), but the other was a quoted phrase (via Beth Moore) I read in The Love Idol by Jennifer Dukes:

We’re going to have to let truth scream louder to our souls than the lies that have infected us.

Summer is a hard time for me to work on isolation and relationships.  Everyone is coming and going on trips and to classes and camps and festivals.  But even if I can’t take action today, I can keep reminding myself of what I know for sure to be true–that I am better with than I am without, that I need others’ stories and they need mine, and that the investment is worth the effort.

And in the meantime, I hold those above-mentioned loved ones close to my heart with prayers for peace, healing, and miracles.

|| how to make the perfect pancakes

|| how high they like the water in the tub

|| how to keep a perfectly stocked, perfectly ready diaper bag

|| how to fix the favorite toy

|| how to make basically anything start working again

|| how to shush a crying baby in the middle of the night without having to pick him up

|| how to get everywhere on time

As a mom, I’m good at some varied and unexpected things, but the above things? They all evade me.  My pancakes taste fried (the last time I made them, it was more like county fair elephant ears), I’m lucky to remember any sort of diaper bag (let alone remember to stock it), I nurse all the babies all the time in the middle of all the nights, and I’m perpetually late.

Thank goodness for Dad!  My kids lucked out in that department! He’s smart, he’s articulate, he’s resourceful, he’s precise, he’s playful, he’s patient, and he’s  just the right amount strict and indulgent.

I believe the saying that there are a million ways to be a good mom, and I also believe loving motherhood more is a worthwhile endeavor.  But much of my learning, growth and experimenting in this area come directly from him – he makes them possible.  For this, I am extremely grateful.

I don’t know all the things, and he doesn’t, either, but together we cobble enough together to get by.  I am certainly a better mother–and a better person–because of him, and it seems like a good things to acknowledge on Father’s Day.

I hope you feel the same way about the father of your children.  And if you don’t, I hope you know how admired you are for carrying a heavy load.

Happiest of days to all the wonderful fathers out there who know the things we don’t know.  Those of us who have you are really lucky!

So I did what I do best – I turned to information gathering.  Blog posts, podcasts, and books.  Which is what I’ve been doing for the last little while.  I don’t have it all figured out yet, but I have come away with a few revelations and points to ponder:

1.  Why I procrastinate, part 1 || When something is really important to me, I set it aside so I can get back to it later when I have time and undivided attention to pay to it.  Guess what?  That never happens.  So I spend my time cleaning up the piddly-but-consuming messes while the more important things wait for later.  #badplan

As you can imagine, this isn’t working for me.  It makes me anxious and it winds up looking like I’m ignoring people.  Really, my lack of action/response is because I care, not due to a lack of care, but I can only imagine how someone would feel if I responded to their important email or phone message with a “I’m so glad you sent this over to me.  I can’t wait to dive in.  I’m going to put it off and put it off and eventually I’ll get around to it.  Thank you so much for your time and effort!”

Realizing this was a lightbulb moment for me.  I didn’t know I was doing it until I noticed I’d dropped the ball on several important things – things I even found enjoyable!

2.  Part 2 || It’s not just little tasks.  I put off starting big tasks, too.  The little tasks from #1 make me feel anxious; these still-not-started big tasks leave me feeling defeated.  I’ve been living as though it’s all or nothing – if I can’t do something from start to finish, it’s not worth starting.  In reality, taking some action is energizing and encouraging.  Incomplete but making progress is better than zero progress, zero plans for progress, ya know?

Of course, I can see this quickly going downhill.  Starting too many projects at once could lead to its own sense of overwhelm.  Take now, for instance.  Our children’s room swap, started in January, still isn’t done because Gabe’s platform bed needs to be built.  My living room is half painted.  Both children’s rooms are half painted.  The floor in the nursery is in need of attention since we pulled up the carpet but still need to refinish it.  I have two pallets of bricks in my back yard waiting to be turned into a patio.  I’m at the point where I definitely can’t add anymore projects until I finish some of these.  But if I hadn’t started these, I’d still be sitting around on my thumbs, depressed about everything I wanted to do but didn’t have time to complete.  Progress is better.

3.  Scarcity || I read about this concept in some of Brene Brown’s materials in the context of shame and perfectionism, not time and to-do lists.  But I think it relates.  I think we (ahem, I) fill up our to-do lists partly because things need to get done and partly because doing things makes us feel something – important, worthwhile, better than, etc.  When we (ahem, I) have an overflowing list, we start internalizing the feelings of “not enoughness.”  It’s no longer just about not having enough time/energy/space/margin – it becomes a situation where we (ahem, I) feel like we’re not enough.  This is sneaky and infiltrates everything.  At least it has for me.  I need a mantra, a way to start the day.  Maybe “This day is enough for me and I am enough for this day?”  I don’t know, but I know I don’t want to live from a place of scarcity anymore.  Thankfully, there’s a lot of good, current information on this topic right now.

4. Productive people chunk their time ||  Related to the last point, if I don’t have enough time to dive headfirst into a project and get lost in it, I don’t start it.  But productive people do amazing things in relatively small chunks of time.  Take the book and planner I’ve been trying to work on for the last 18ish months.  I only write on them when I have a solid few hours at a time.  Yet, apparently some of the most productive writers write in 90 minute blocks maximum.  Research on time chunking suggests that you should start at 30 minutes and gradually build your tolerance to 90 minutes for maximum productivity.  But no one suggests longer than this.  Finding four consecutive hours in a day is nigh impossible.  Finding 30, 60 or 90 minutes?  Totally doable.  But I’ve been frittering away those minutes because they weren’t 4 hours.

5.  My to-do list is backwards ||  There are important things on it, and there are things author Brigid Schulte refers to as the “endless stuff of life.”  I spend most of my time working through the endless stuff so I can clear a path for the important stuff.  Schulte says we need to narrow down our top priorities and spend 95% of our time on those.  The endless stuff should get no more than 5% of our attention.

I’ve been mulling this over since I read it.  I think the first thing I need to do is identify my top priorities – like, really nail them down.  Not what should be important to me, but what I actually want to define my life.  She narrowed hers down to 3 things; I’m not sure I can prune that ruthlessly.  But I can certainly do better than I have been doing.

Once you prune, if a task doesn’t fall into one of those categories, it is relegated to the 5%.  She schedules smaller chunks of time to handle the 5% – the stuff doesn’t just get sandwiched in between other things.  There’s purposeful, protected time for that.  In a recent podcast by Gretchen Rubin, she suggested listeners implement what’s called a “Power Hour” – one hour a week to do the things you’ve been otherwise putting off.  I like this idea.  It seems to blend well with this 5% concept.

6. Done is better than perfect ||  I used to be more of a perfectionist than I am now, but I still have to keep reminding myself of this.  When Gabe was little I read a speed-cleaning blog, and they said that if you quickly sweep your floor every day, over time you’ll gradually be hitting all the areas, and you’ll end up spending less time overall cleaning your floors than if you put it off and put it off and finally have to do a hands-and-knees scrubbing session.

This is an area where Tahd and I don’t see eye-to-eye.  Actually, it’s not so much that we don’t see eye-to-eye.  He doesn’t care if I do my things my (less-than-perfect-but-at-least-complete) way.  But being a lifelong perfectionist himself, he doesn’t subscribe to this “done is better than perfect” thing, so it can create tension between the two of us when I’m doing something he cares about in my less-than-perfect way, or when he’s doing something I care about in his exacting, more time-consuming manner.  So, we’re still working out the kinks on this one.

7.  Everybody does their part || I got this so woefully wrong with Gabe.  I blame this on two things.  One, him being an only child for so long.  I’m convinced that when families have a second child, their first child automatically starts to get more independent because they get annoyed at having to wait to get help while Mom and Dad to finish with the baby.  Gabe was never particularly motivated to do for himself, and I didn’t realize there were things I could expect of him that I wasn’t expecting.  Second, it’s so much easier to just do things myself.  I get it done, done well, and over with.  Delegating is much harder, at least in the short term.

I often joke with Tahd that my life is like Groundhog Day.  We wake up and do all the morning chores.  After a whole morning of living, by lunch I start getting antsy at the condition of the house, so we pick up.  By supper, the day has exploded and I have to redo all the things I did after breakfast and lunch.  Then it all needs doing again before bed.  I’m sure I pick up the same toys and sweep the same crumbs and change the same diapers and make the same meals a billion times a week.

About a month ago, I decided I’d had enough.

I’ve been working on a chore system since then, and we finally put it together this week.  I have no clue if it’s going to help – if it’s age-appropriate, if there’s too much or not enough work, if the system is too simple or too complicated – but it’s a starting point.  Hopefully with everyone doing something, Tahd and I won’t feel completely run over by 9:00 each night.

**********

So…long story short.  I have no answers.  But I do have ideas, and I’m willing to experiment, so I’m hoping that moves us in a good direction.

I’d love to know more about your status with being overwhelmed!  Are you?  How do you cope?  Were you?  How did you get through it?

**********

^{Here are some of the resources I’ve been enjoying in case you’d like to check them out:
Overwhelmed by Brigid Schulte
Gretchen Rubin’s Power Hour podcast episode
Inspired To Action’s Overwhelmed and Unorganized podcast episode
Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
I Know How She Does It by Laura Vanderkam (haven’t read this yet but am eager to)}

After several trips to the bookstore in which I obsessed and pored over a newly released book, Tahd caught my “hint” and got it for me for Mother’s Day.  Actually, it was less of a hint and more of a “the-only-thing-I-REALLY-want-for-Mother’s-Day-is-that-book” sort of situation.  I was really, really, really excited about it. Two points to an attentive, indulgent husband!

Of course, the time to go through the book wasn’t the moment I opened it, so I’d set it aside to enjoy in a lingering quiet moment.  But here we are, nearly 3 weeks later, and guess what?  I haven’t cracked the book.  Not even once!  I actually read the book more before I owned it.  What’s up with that???

Tahd and I have been discussing how we feel like we’re drowning.  Our to-do lists are so long and we’re never able to make much headway.  Can you relate?

And yet, I’ve also noticed that there are people who seemingly  have a lot more demands on their lives than we have, and they’re able to either get more done or live with less stress – or, the holy grail, both!  How does this happen???

I decided I was tired of living from a place of “never enough time,” but I didn’t know what we’ve been getting wrong.  So I started to do a little research and digging.  My mom is one of the most productive people I know, and when I discussed this with her, she suggested checklists.  It’s true I’d gotten away from using my checklist, mostly because it always seems like there are enough fires to put our right in front of my face that I never have time to go looking for the list that tells me what to work on.  Like, yes!  I’d love to finish painting the bedrooms and file all my errant paperwork, but there is no path between the front door and the kitchen and I can’t cook dinner because all available countertops are covered and Jude has dumped a bucket of bubbles on himself and Gabe is hounding Isla while she screams for mercy and Isla is actually sick.  And that’s just scratching the surface!

But I know from reading that my brain doesn’t handle long to-do lists well if I’m trying to keep them in my head.  I wind up forgetting things, dropping balls, and getting lost in anxiety, which makes me even less productive.  So I knew checklists would be a part of the solution.

Another thing I considered was hiring help.  It seems like a lot of productive people have assistance in certain areas of their lives.  They hire someone to clean their house or mow their laundry.  They hire people to do their house projects.  They have regular help with their kids.  We?  Hire none of that.  For one, finances.  We choose to use our money elsewhere.  For two, my husband is super handy, and it bothers him to pay someone for something he could do himself.  For three, I decided I didn’t want to solve my problems through any major childcare commitments.  I have no issues with childcare or daycare or preschool generally – just knew that in order to stay true to what I wanted to do, this wasn’t the ultimate solution to my problem.

More than that, though, was that I don’t think our problem is that we have too much to do.  I mean, we do, but even if we off-loaded a reasonable amount of that, I think we’d still be frustrated, maybe even still feel like we’re drowning.  I think the problem is more in our heads and in how we approach life than in the actual contents of our life.  I think we need to figure that out first and then do logistics second.

Part 2 later on the what I’ve decided to do about this.  In the meantime, do you relate?  Is feeling overwhelmed a common motherhood experience?

 

To the mother who wonders if she can wait through the aches and pains and sleeplessness even one more night for her baby to be born…

To the mother who, with nipples cracked and bleeding and a thousand knives spearing gentle places, wonders if she can keep nursing her baby…

To the mother who knows formula is a better fit for her and her babe but worries about all the opinions…

To the mother whose baby just won’t stop crying…

To the mother whose toddler has throw one big long tantrum all day long and she she feels like she’s going crazy <ahem…me..>…

To the mother whose little one isn’t meeting the developmental milestones no matter how she tries to encourage them…

To the mother who’s going to bed tonight feeling guilty and defeated…

To the mother who’s getting ready to send her little sparrow out into the big wide world for the first time this fall…

To the mother who cooked a meal tonight that everybody told her they hated…

To the mother whose child is poised to bring home a terrible report card…

To the mother who’s doing this all alone…

To the mother who’s afraid to enroll her child in any summer activities because of special needs and social struggles that may cause heartache…

To the mother who doesn’t have any clue where the money is going to come from…

To the mother reading food label after food label, desperately seeking out every last speck of allergen…

To the mother who’s been sassed and talked back to and treated like she’s invisible…

To the mother who’s up in the middle of the night to nurse her sick one back to health…

To the mother whose sick one is facing struggles lasting far longer than one or two nights…

To the mother who’s scared for summer because she’s worried about the choices her pride and joy will make after darkness falls…

To the mother of the tender one who’s cutting or not eating…

To the mother who thinks she doesn’t have enough influence over who her child’s friends are…

To the mother who knows she said the wrong thing…

To the mother who caught her child drinking this or trying that…

To the mother whose 16-year-old newborn is wildly in love…

To the mother who’s trying to summon the courage to watch her capped and tasseled heart walk across a stage before she sends it off into adulthood…

You can do this.

You ARE doing this.

I’m proud of you.

Mamas everywhere are proud of you.

Keep going.

You (really!) can do this.

How can you have a site for moms and not make a Happy Mother’s Day post?  Gah!

All week, I’d been mulling over things to say.  But, truthfully, Mother’s Day is an discomforting time for me.  I don’t know how much crossover there is between readership here and my personal blog, but for those who don’t know, the back story is this…

Five years ago on Mother’s Day, at the beginning of the second trimester and after five years of infertility, we lost a surprise baby.  It’s somewhat odd to miscarry.  It’s pretty odd to miscarry after you’ve seen the heartbeat.  It’s especially odd to miscarry after 12 weeks.  And it’s oddly, horridly unlucky to miscarry on Mother’s Day.

I never know how to “be” around Mother’s Day because I feel conflicted.  On one hand, I don’t feel like a piece of me is missing; I feel like we have the family we’re supposed to have, and I’m okay with things.  On the other hand, I remember how we felt so shredded we were numb, and even just remembering that pain still takes me back to a vivid, agonizing place.  Most of the time, it seems like something that happened to someone else.  But around Mother’s Day, I remember that it happened to me, and it feels traumatic all over again.

And then, there’s Gabe, who, at 5, was excited to be a big brother, and who set the pace for our grieving.  It wasn’t just my loss.  It was his, too, and I try really hard to be respectful of where he is with things and to let him carve his own path through loss.  Even at 10, I still see how he was marked by that experience, and I want to do right by him.

So. Blah.  That’s why there wasn’t a bright, cheerful Happy Mother’s Day post.

But.

Over the past few years, I’ve been struck by the number of women for whom Mother’s Day is equally discomforting.  Reasons differ; for some, Mother’s Day reminds them off loss.  Others desperately want to be mothers but are still waiting.  Some women have lost their own mothers and grieve the profound absence left behind.  Still others are unsuccessful, unappreciated, unacknowledged, or painfully ignored on Mother’s Day.

I do hope you had a wonderful Mother’s Day.  I hope you were doted on and pampered and spoiled by the people who call you theirs.  My own family took great, tender care of me, and I’m thankful they took the time and made the effort to see me and thank me and love me.

But if you did not have a wonderful Mother’s Day…if you are sad and grieving…if you are wounded and Mother’s Day only reminded you of those points of pain…I see you.  I hold space for your grief.

Draw in.

Gather hope.

Muster courage.

Tend your wounds.

And when the sun comes up tomorrow, keep going.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in  || Leonard Cohen

^{(We went to the pet store to take pictures for a little art project we were doing.  Holy chaos.  One didn’t want to be there, one was terrified, and one ran around screaming happily but maniacly for the whole visit.  We might not ever be able to go back.)}

“What do you think about me taking Gabe out for ice cream right now?”

He asked me as we laid on the floor surrounded by 3-year-old antics, trying hard to rally the energy for the final push of the evening when everyone would be asleep and our world would fall quiet and back into place.

Parenting Gabe has never been easy, but it has been especially not-easy lately.  An impromptu indulgence and some one-on-one time seemed like a wise suggestion on my husband’s part, so we quickly negotiated the details to make it happen and set the plan into motion.

By all rights, Tahd should have been the one to tell him.  He came up with the idea and he was the one going with Gabe.  So when I asked him if he’d mind if I told Gabe while he finished up with Isla, he answered, “No, but why?”

“I just want to see him delighted!” I said.  And – what I didn’t say – I just want to see him delighted and know I played a role in making him feel that way.

I don’t expect to be my children’s friends, and I know it’s not their job to make me feel happy and successful as a mother.  But sometimes, even when it’s a difficult season – or, perhaps, especially when it’s a difficult season – we need to use unexpected means to infuse a little extra dose of positivity into your relationship.  It acts like a pause button on the challenges, or maybe as an eraser, wiping the slate clean, even if temporarily, and provides a bonding opportunity that’s a little bit, “Hey!  I’m okay, you’re okay, and we play for the same team!”

Sometimes I worry that if the tween years feel this hard, I don’t know how I’ll survive the teen years!  But I just keep trying to circle back around to the process of healthy attachment and hope that that acts as some level of insulation between what will be and what could be.  More on that later as it’s a subject about which I’ve been reading and thinking about recently.

How do you play up the positive with your child, especially in the midst of adversarial seasons?