JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

I didn’t post my results from the personality survey Beth Grigg linked last week because I didn’t like them. I scored strong in emotions and intellect, but also strong in dutifulness. Duty. I don’t like that word. It brings to mind a robot executing orders or a legalist lacking love. I do have a dutiful side. It’s probably part personality and part latch-key kid in origin. But I also hope I am growing in creativity and flexibility. Personality test results seem to depend on my mood and the type of questions. This week though, I’ve seen the duty in me.

Yesterday I didn’t want to take my daughters to the pool. Months have passed since we have practiced swimming. Various excuses including Ted’s travel and Michaela’s surgery have been effective on previous weekends. Although I felt too tired to go, even falling asleep suddenly mid-morning, I knew that I should take them.

I don’t like swimming for its inefficiency. As a runner, I’m used to lacing a pair of shoes, going out the door and on the road fast. Yesterday, it took us 50 minutes to go from inside the kitchen to inside the pool, and another 30 afterwards to shower, change and come home. Since we only spent 35 minutes in the water, it took us twice as long for preparations as for exercise. Part of the delay in our arrival was due to our inexperience, remembering what and how to pack the swim bag again for three people. I also misplaced our swim pass and had to purchase another one.

Frustrated and desperate, I mumbled a prayer as I drove out of the neighborhood, hoping someone would stop my grumbling. I am dutiful but I can also be miserable. Mostly I felt tired, too tired to take two kids through the acrobatics of locker room and swimming pool. But I also felt guilty: I wanted to want to spend time with my girls, but I wasn’t able to make myself have the right emotions.

Once we were in the water, somehow I forgot to grumble. We floated and splashed. We blew bubbles. The girls jumped. We took turns curving a blue noodle. I carried Michaela on my back and Abigail by the hand through several rounds of the lazy river, letting the current pull us along, pull us together. We had fun. I wanted to be there. Duty had disappeared into joy.

While playing with my girls, I noticed many mothers sitting on chairs at the pool side, staring out at the water, some consciously counting the clock. The number of parents swimming with children was much lower than the number seated. I could have envied those poolside moms. They didn’t have to get wet. Instead I wondered why they were sitting there by themselves when they could be enjoying their children. I wanted to shout across the pool and invite them to join us. After all, it was my duty to let them know what they were missing.

I didn’t think of this one
One reason to teach your children sign language via Gentle Breezes

glimpse inside another world
The Children of HAN in Somaliland

what else did girls think of?
Through Don Boudreaux I learned about a book I want to read, Girls Think of Everything and Margaret Knight, the mother of the grocery bag.

hip-Daddies dig big wheels
Brian Chin pointed to a Wall Street Journal article detailing men’s obsession with strollers:the hip-Daddy market.

how a children’s book can change you
Jeff Sandquist explained how the Berenstain bears have affected him:Old Hat New Hat has become a crede for our family.

Life with Stuart Little’s writer
The week Abigail and I were reading Stuart Little, The New Yorker published Andy, a view of E.B. White from his stepson’s perspective [first via Rebecca Blood]. It was fun to be able to share details of the author’s life with my daughter, such as the fact that he liked to go ice-skating. Betsy Devine thought that the piece suffered from TMI (too much information) regarding E.B. White’s medical conditions, but I felt it offered insight into who he was. I’d never read Stuart Little, and the book is a bit odd. I suspect it might not be accepted by mainstream children’s publishers today. For example, Stuart is born into a human family, as a two-inch mouse, no explanation given (or needed?). (I think the recent movie version had Stuart adopted from an orphanage instead). Reading E.B. White’s works (Charlotte’s Web last summer) and learning a little of his personal life painted a picture of a quirky (to borrow from another post’s of Betsy’s), courageous and sensitive artist.

I should have paid more attention to those baby smells

From Stuart Little:

(Stuart is teaching school): “Henry Rackmeyer, you tell us what is important.”

“A shaft of sunlight at the end of a dark afternoon, a note in music, and the way the back of a baby’s neck smells if its mother keeps it tidy,” answered Henry.

From U2’s Miracle Drug

Freedom has a scent
Like the top of a newborn baby’s head

Speaking of newborns…

Scott Koon and his wife started a genetic experiment (to use his words):The experiment is about 6-7 weeks along now and looks to come to fruition sometime in late Sept/early Oct.

Lenn Pryor and his wife are preparing for their baby.

I can’t wait to hear Jenny and Paul’s news sometime soon, and I’m not the only one…

…these are the moments…

Excerpt from Mitch Ratcliffe’s post on Life is fractal happiness among the eddies of experience referring to pieces Lenn and I had each written earlier in the week

…- the look in my son’s eye when he learns something or when my daughter tells me she wants to be like me, when my wife tells me she loves me or a friend shakes my hand and looks me in the eye, these are the moments when the patterns of life begin to appear out of the fragments of memory and friendships and loves past and passing.

An article in Saturday’s Bainbridge Review profiled two local residents who struggled with eating disorders and commented on island culture.

Eighteen-year-old Kristen Kelly of Bainbridge Island knows that voice well. But back when her mother Susan tried to get help for the teen, she screamed at her and denied she had a problem. Once, when a Seattle physician confronted Kelly, she screamed at her, too, ran out of the office and wandered the streets for several hours.

[…]

“I was born on Bainbridge, and I feel like I died there,” she says now. “Something I learned is that you are only as sick as your secrets, and there are a lot of secrets on Bainbridge. A lot of appearances – ‘everything is fine.’
“Well, everything is not fine. That’s a big part of it.”

Tuesday we visited the Port Gamble Museum of Shells and Natural History.

A jewel of a town, Victorian homes alongside the sea, north of the Hood Canal Bridge (this picture taken at Sedgwick Park, south of Port Gamble) I plan to return in the summer when it will be even better.

In the seashell museum I remembered a turban shell I had as a child, silver and small, my favorite, one my grandmother bought for me on a trip to the beach.

For a moment in the museum, I was four again, sitting in the back seat of our car on our way home from the beach. My parents were together: my father driving, my mom sitting beside him. I curled my finger inside the shell; it felt safe.

While the girls and I were sick earlier this month, we made two dioramas. For one we placed a plastic octopus in the center, with hanging fishes, coral and sea stars. Abigail’s idea to use sandpaper for the sea floor resulted in greater light reflection.

Appropriate Audio Accompaniment for this post:
Seb Paquet in his Webjay demo for the Lightning Tools panel happened to play the song Im Garten eines Kraken, a German version of the Muppet version of the Beatles song Octopus’s Garden.

If you’d like come along see an octopus’s garden, and you live on Bainbridge Island, simply stop by the Paper Products store window on Winslow Way where the dioramas are displayed.

Here’s the one I made, but I’m not as fond of it as I am of the octopus…