Archives for July 2007

Children and Responsibility

July 30, 2007 by Susanne 18 Comments

This time I don’t want to talk about the responsibility that comes with having children. I want to talk about the responsibilities our children have. Or maybe should have.

For the past year or so my son has been really moody. Sometimes aggressive, sometimes depressed a little. We were fighting so much that we asked the preschool to switch from him going only in the afternoon to almost the whole day. (Yeah, that’s right, I put my son in daycare because we (him and me) were fighting so much.) When I approached his teacher, telling about my difficulties and the constant power struggle in our house, she said that she didn’t see any of it in school. And that maybe it had to do with him being around adults all the time. At home he is always the weak one, the little one, and the one who isn’t allowed to decide on his own. So I’ve been thinking about ways to make him feel more independent.

The other thing I have been thinking constantly about is how many of my students seem to be incapable – and unwilling – of doing anything on their own. It often seems to me that their parents still hold their hands at an age where they should be almost grown-up. And I think that this makes the students (and maybe the parents too) unhappier and doesn’t help building self-esteem

So maybe our children need more responsibility. I’m not talking about child labour here. I’m talking about having to stand up for the consequences of their own actions. Since most of my students come from rather privileged families, I have seen children sent to boarding school when they were about to fail a grade. I have seen parents doing homework, I have seen parents making up for everything their children screw up. Lost a coat? You get a new one. Forgot your homework? Your mother’s doing it. Have to go anywhere? Your parents are driving you everywhere you want. Even in the middle of the night. You don’t know what to do after high school? Well, just sit around at home moping until you find out.

They have nice parents, do they? (Of course, not all parents and students are alike. I do have students who have to be quite self-sufficient too.) But I can’t shake the feeling that these young adults have the deep feeling that they are really dependent on their parents. And that they won’t know what to do when on their own.

While responsibility might be a burden, eventually each and every one of us has to take responsibility for himself and his life. Well, there even might come a time where our children will have to be responsible for their children or, gasp, even us, their parents. With responsibility comes a sense of accomplishment and capability too. It’s not all bad though there are a lot of young adults out there who shy away from it. Who never learned it.

Young adults who grew up thinking that it was their parents they were doing their homework for. Interestingly they started failing school the minute they were old enough to realize that their parents don’t have any real power over them. When I had talked to those parents earlier and said, “Well, let him go to school without his homework then.” The parents had answered, “But then he will have bad grades!” Yeah, he will. Maybe that’ll teach him to do his homework.

I’m not talking about not helping. I’m the first one to explain something for the umpteenth time, to say, “Maybe you should try this.” But today my son refused to get dressed and then had a tantrum about his breakfast (“What do you want for breakfast, müsli or bread?”, “Müsli.”, “Are you sure?”, “Yes, Müsli.” – “Here’s your müsli.”, “But I dooon’t WAAANT MÜÜSLIIII!!!). So I told him if he didn’t get dressed he could walk to preschool naked. Then he dressed. And then we left for preschool. No breakfast. For him that is.

But I’m still behind what I thought I would be doing before I had a child. Back then I thought that a four year-old should be able to dress himself, pick up his toys, and help with housework. Very funny. Right now my son’s responsibilities are: dress and undress himself, know when to use the toilet, and unpack his backpack. Sometimes, very rarely I ask him to put his plate on top of the dishwasher after meals. One reason for this is that housework around here mostly happens when he is at preschool, but maybe we should change that.

Children of his age that are visiting Montessori school already learn how to cook a little, they brush their hair, they brush their teeth and they know how to sweep the floor and cut vegetables. They certainly have to pick up their toys.

So I’m thinking about which responsibilities to introduce next. I don’t want to end up with a boy who’s 16 and who comes home, drops his shoes in the middle of the floor, slumps into the next chair and says, “I need something to eat.” And who then expects me to cook something for him. I definitely don’t want him to grow into a man who says that housework is for women. A man who never will move out because he doesn’t want to be without room service and clean laundry.

I’d like to raise my son with the knowledge that actions have consequences and that he will have to face them on his own someday.

So, what are your children responsible for?

A burden lifted from my shoulders

July 28, 2007 by Susanne 14 Comments

As of now I have zero posts unread in my feed reader. None. Nada. I didn’t know how much it weighed me down until yesterday when through frantic blog-reading I was able to par it down to 25 unread.

Of course, since this is a feed reader and there are such a lot of fantabulous blogs and writers out there this will only last for about an hour or so. And I’m fine with that because it may well be that tomorrow I’ll get restless for some blog-food and then I’ll go and read blogs I haven’t read in years weeks. It’s this pesky little balance things again.

Blog reading and commenting shouldn’t be an obligation, it should be fun. And it is. But not when you’re reading about 90 blogs and have spent the last two weekends attending parties with overnight stays or have gone off visiting friends. With no internet access. And then you come back and you can’t just hit “mark all read” because – there are marvelous posts in there for sure, and there are people you consider to be your friends, and maybe something really important happened to them. So you devote three days to catch up. Three days. And now you’re done. (Well, that would be me.)

But I really don’t like it when I’m that much behind and when I start reading 12 posts of someone in a row. Then I comment on every third or so. But this is not how it’s meant to be. And by the time I’m through the blogroll with reading, I come back and someone else has posted four new posts…

Not me though because I was so busy packing and doing laundry and planning and doing housework and reading blog posts and commenting that I didn’t find the time to write something on my own. But I will. Soon.

Because today is the first day of summer vacation. Six weeks.

(Please don’t remind me that I don’t like summer vacation.)

What do you do to cope with the ever-expanding blogosphere? Of course one could limit reading to a handful of well-selected blogs of interest like my husband does. But then the blogs that I read are hand-picked. I could easily find double or triple the amount of blogs. Good ones. Not commenting is out of the question. Look what De wrote on the subject:

So, any tips?

Why feminists should burn their high heels

July 24, 2007 by Susanne 13 Comments

or at least recycle them.

I really know that there are more pressing social matters than fashion and gender, but somehow I always think of these not so pressing issues first. In fact, I think about them all the time. Which proves how shallow I am (and further proof lies in the fact that I start and finish every single post with I, me, and my). But then maybe these obsessions are only showing my belief that even big issues are made out of a thousand small ones.

So. I have been thinking about fashion again. On one hand this is part of my midlife crisis and the attempt of re-inventing myself, on the other hand fashion is something I used to be very interested in which I then dumped because I thought a) it was too shallow, b) I didn’t have money for clothes anyway, and c) I thought I was too old for fashion. That was ten years ago, by the way, and I have a half written post about that in a notebook. But todays topic are high heels.

When I got pregnant my feet got bigger. That happens to a lot of women. I thought this would be permanent and so I threw away half a dozen pairs of shoes. Some of them I liked a lot, like the shoes I got married in. So I needed new shoes. Since I had thrown away my black pumps and everybody needs black pumps (well, everybody who is female) I then thought about buying new ones. Then I thought again. Because every time I was about to go out, all dressed up and standing in front of the mirror I put on my black pumps and loved the way I looked. And then, nine times out of ten, I’d think about the necessary way to the train station or an evening of standing around holding a glass of wine in one hand, and then I would step out of the pumps and look for my black flats. So I didn’t buy black pumps. I bought black flat Mary Janes.

But now I have a) become more fashion conscious again which you can easily spot by the fact that I have given up on the backpack and now schlepp a big purse around that makes my shoulder ache, and b) my feet have returned to their pre-pregnancy size, and c) I have found four pairs of my old shoes that I had totally forgotten in the basement. So now I am the proud owner of black pumps again. With a 2-inch-heel. And they are Mary Janes of course. Also I have nice little black dress sandals. Also with a little heel. I love the way I look in these. Especially the way my legs look in these. What I don’t like is the way said legs and feet feel when I have worn them for any amount of time. Like last week I felt fancy, and also I was wearing a beige-brown skirt with a brown top and my comfortable sandals are red… I wore the black sandals to preschool. All in all I walked for about twenty minutes. I had three blisters and my hips, knees and back ached. Hm.

I looked at shoe shop windows. Almost every shoe has a heel. A lot of them have stiletto heels. There even are mules with stiletto heels. Hm. Have you ever tried to walk in shoes like these? I have. You have to think about your feet and walking all the time. One careless move leaves you injured on the floor.

I looked at women’s feet: flip flops, sneakers, more flip flops. Hm.

A couple of months ago I bought my first ever copy of “Vogue”. Almost every woman pictured in there wore extremely high heels. I look at the pictures at the Satorialist. I love the blog but nearly all women in the pictures wear high heels, very high heels. I have yet to see a man wearing heels.

Last winter I went into a shoe store and said, “I’d like to buy some nice shoes to wear with a dress or skirt but without a heel, please.” The sales woman showed me a pair. “No ballet flats, please.” Another one. “I don’t want a heel, please.” She, “But that’s not much of a heel.” I, “It’s 2 1/2 inches. If I wear those my back will hurt.” And then she began to rant about todays young women who always wear sneakers and then their feet become all wide and they never will be able to go to the prom in something else than sneakers, and how wearing heels of different heels is good for you. I left the store and haven’t bought a pair of shoes there since.

What I really like is the argument that your feet are getting wide by wearing Birkenstocks or sneakers. See, my feet are very narrow. I have trouble finding shoes that are narrow enough. Even though I haven’t worn anything besides sneakers, Birkenstocks and flat heels for the past five years. And then I thought, “How would a man react if a sales person told him that he should wear heels because this is good for his back?” And how can something be good for my back if it makes it hurt? And, would you let your child wear stilettos? Any heel? Shoes that might make him or her trip? Shoes that are totally rigid? What? You wouldn’t? Why then do you do this to yourself?

Last week my husband and I went to the big city. We walked along the river and I, obsessed with shoes of course, looked at the feet of everyone we passed (and at their bags but that’s another story). Amongst myriads of flip flops (which are not really shoes) I saw a couple before me. She went barefoot with her black stiletto heels in hand. Later we passed them again where there were more people and she again wore her shoes. I remembered the agony of walking in heels. Once I walked for two or three hours in stiletto heels. My feet hurt for days.

My mother crippled her feet with heels. She used to wear nothing but high heels. When she tried to walk barefoot her feet hurt because her tendons or muscles were shortened. Her big toes had been pressed inwards for so many years that she had to have them operated on. Since the operation, by the way, she wears very comfortable and flat shoes too.

So why do we do this to ourselves? Because we want to look pretty. And pretty shoes are hard to find when you look for flats. Comfortable shoes are often quite ugly. Just yesterday as I was walking around in my comfortable sandals the only other women wearing shoes like mine were about 65 or older. That seems to be the usual age for comfort becoming more important than looks. But I think that it must be possible to make shoes that are both comfortable and pretty. Fashion isn’t god-made. It is made by people. That high heels make a woman pretty is a stupid dogma that we have the power to dismantle. If women are asking for shoes that one can walk in, the industry will make them eventually.

Why this is a gender issue? Okay. Imagine a man wearing high heels walking down the stairs at a restaurant. Walking over gravel in the garden. Haha. Well, why isn’t this funny when a woman does it?

So I’m starting a revolution: the high heel boycott. Maybe I’ll even walk into shoe shops and ask for pretty and comfortable flats to wear to a wedding. Anyone in?

Blog me again!

July 23, 2007 by Susanne 5 Comments

Like last year I won’t be attending the BlogHer-conference (Sniff!) but then I’m not entirely sure that I would want to spend my fortieth birthday traveling halfway around the world. Anyways, I will be staying right here. But this meme is also for people who don’t attend. (And Her Bad Mother said something about a list of people who aren’t going.)

This year the task was to write something in 10 seconds. (Very funny, isn’t it? They probably meant that it could be read in ten seconds. Yes, that’s it. Because no one who visits my blog has ever read something that took ten seconds or less either to write or to read.)

Here’s what I wrote on the BlogMe-Thread on BlogHer:

I’m a German music teacher from Germany. I’ll be turning forty on Friday which is one of the reasons why I won’t be going to BlogHer this year. The other is that I will have to teach my students how to sing, play the piano and guitar that day, and that BlogHer is on the wrong continent.

On my blog I’m writing about things like “how to be creative when you don’t have the time”, self-improvement, and occasionally you can hear me sing. I’m mother to a 4 1/2 year old son about whom I blog less than one might think. But I have taken up sewing. Sometimes I even post my to-do-lists.

Really, I should just have copied and pasted my blogger profile. Oh wait, I still can do that:

I’m a piano and singing teacher in midlife crisis. I’m mother to a 4-year-old son, and wife to a wonderful musician who’s teaching electric guitar and bass. Read the chronicles of my attempt to better myself and to be more creative.

Ten seconds… Hahahaha! I hope you all have a fabulous time at the conference.

blogme2007

How to make a yoga bag

July 16, 2007 by Susanne

First download Amy Butler‘s yoga bag pattern. It’s free and so you suddenly find that you always needed a bag for your yoga mat. Never mind that the yoga bag travels only from the right of the computer desk to the front of the computer desk once a week. Besides, hanging the mat up on a hook would certainly lend a more professional look to your teaching room.

Read the pattern about a thousand times, decide that it’s really easy to make. Convert all the inch measurements into centimeters. Measure your yoga mat thrice to ensure that the bag will be big enough. Start looking for fabric.

Find the perfect exterior fabric only to find that it’s a) silk, b) 50€ per meter. Think about making a 70€ yoga bag for about five minutes three times daily. When your mother-in-law throws the sheets out of the window that she has used to cover the floor for some renovation work, think about whether those sheets might be perfect. Decide against the colorful turquoise-and-orange-and-red-striped with elephants pattern. Go and look for the sofa cover that you put away when you threw the sofa out. Think that you have found the sofa cover which then turns out to be leftover fabric from the making of curtains last year. (That, by the way, might have been the lowest I ever sank in my “sewing career”. I was so fed up with sewing and my machine that I had them custom-made.) So, in order to keep the budget low, decide to make a red yoga bag instead of an orange one like you wanted.

Resume quest for suitable piece of lining fabric. That has to match the exterior. Go on several expeditions eyeing expensive fabric and – this is very important – leave the exterior fabric at home. That certainly helps with the matching. Finally buy a scrap of fabric that’s on sale for 5 € with the rationalization, “Well, if it doesn’t match at least I haven’t spent much money on it.”

All the while look for interfacing. Think that you have very bad interfacing karma. Look for at least a package of thin interfacing. There used to be dozens of these in every fabric department, but nowadays you might go to a store three times without seeing even one. When at last you see some, buy every scrap of it. Vow to buy at Lisa’s store next time. A place where when you say, “I’d like some interfacing because I’m making a bag.” the salesperson won’t look at you with a very puzzled frown and answer, “So, do you need it for appliqué?” “Um, I want to make a bag out of light fabric and I need it to strengthen…” “So, you want this then?” You, meekly, “I guess so.” Just saying. And the bonus: I wouldn’t have had to spend money on three trips to the big city. Paying the shipping from London to Germany would have been cheaper. And you can bet that if you told her what you wanted she just would have known which interfacing to use.

Interfacing. I never know how much to use and which kind because, well, I lack experience and then, due to my shopping woes, I only have used the flimsy kind up until now anyway. But there is something to say for the department store I bought my fabric in because last time, when I left the store clutching my packages of flimsy interfacing and went to have a look at the sewing patterns, I caught a glimpse of interfacing on bolts! Interfacing of different thickness! Wow! Not quite the holy grail, but close.

Next decide to be sensible and put your bag project aside for a month of script frenzy. In July start agonizing about it again. Think about how to cut out something that’s 121,92 cm long. Will it all work out when you round it? Should you make a pattern first? Or not? Then remember that you own a tape measure with inches on it. Decide to make a pattern. Look for some old newspaper because you’re too cheap to buy real pattern making paper.

First day: Cut out paper pattern.

Second day: When a student cancels a lesson, start cutting out the lining. Note that the scissors that came with your new sewing machine (more on that in another post) might be worth 47 £ to someone but not to you since they don’t exactly cut. Get out the old sewing scissors of your husband’s grandmother that you have been using as kitchen scissors for the past ten years. Sigh. Lust for a roto-cutter. Look at pictures of roto-cutters on the internet. Discuss the merit of such cutters with your sister. Decide to be sensible and frugal and use the kitchen scissors instead.

Third day: After waiting for this moment for six days, tell your family that come what may, today’s the day you will cut out your DAMN BAG PARTS! Cut them out on the floor because you don’t want to occupy the kitchen table and your writing desk is too small. Get really distracted by reading the ads on your pattern. Remind yourself to use real pattern paper next time so that you don’t have to look at disgusting “sex on the phone”-offers for hours. Find that not even one angle you have cut out is straight, nor anything. If every single bag part is crooked, will the bag turn out okay? What if the exterior and the lining bag are different sizes? What if the lining bag is bigger than the exterior bag? Calm yourself down so that you won’t have a nervous breakdown with the thought that it isn’t woodwork or rocket science. Since you can’t sew a straight line anyway it will all sort itself out somehow in the sewing. Wonder if this is like when you’re recording something that you just can’t get right and then you just leave it at that, telling yourself you will “fix it in the mix”. (That never works by the way. You can make things better but you can’t make bad things good. Better to start with something good and make it better…) Tell yourself that this is only a practice bag anyway. Stress out about your really complicated dress project that you want to sew after that. Take out Liesl’s backpack pattern, carefully study it and decide that you’re never be able to make it. Then think about altering it because you don’t like magnetic snaps. (I didn’t say I was logical, didn’t I?)

Find that you still have a little time before dinner and start ironing the interface parts to the fabric. After all you decided to use flimsy interfacing on both the exterior and the lining. Find that you have just about enough flimsy interfacing to do this if you practice “patchwork interfacing”. Since you lost all patience when cutting out the interfacing and just did it by rule of thumb and where the scissors hit since it doesn’t really matter if the interfacing isn’t as big as the fabric, everything looks a little, um, sloppy. Remind yourself to next time turn the interfacing right side up before cutting. So when you iron your uneven and crooked pieces of interfacing to your uneven and crooked pieces of fabric at least they pretend to fit. Congratulate yourself that at least you haven’t ironed interfacing to your pressing iron. Find that you can pull off already fused interfacing from the ironing board quite easily. Use the quickly cooling iron to iron a tablecloth and a napkin.

Fourth day: After realizing that two students in a row canceled their lessons plan to start sewing the bag. Meet husband for lunch who then reminds you that the berries are ripe. Sigh. Gather berries, clean berries, don’t finish this because it takes so long, lose hope. When another student calls in sick, find that your husband has prepared all the berries and start pinning and sewing. At the end of the day you will be very tired, have severe neck and back pain, an outer pocket pinned to the main panel of the bag and rows of jam glasses:

Fifth day: Promise yourself to go on slowly and careful, start sewing in the morning, and become quite confident and optimistic. Though everything is quite crooked, it is starting to look, well, like an actual bag. Though very small. With bulging and wavy seams. Like the following:

(Yes, I know that seam allowances shouldn’t look like this.)
Manage to somehow put it all together. A little hint: having uneven and crooked pieces doesn’t really help with the alignment. Spend some time with your son and his friend. Cut your son’ hair when his friend is gone. Find that you still have about half an hour before dinner. Put your son in front of a DVD. Finish bag. Keel over. Write a blog post. Take pictures of finished bag.

Sleep deprivation is the new binge eating

July 14, 2007 by Susanne

I have had an eating disorder for about 25 years of my life. I used to be a compulsive overeater. While I’m still compulsive now and then, and I’m still overeating from time to time, those days are gone. Poof. Well, not exactly poof, it took some years and some work, and then some more work, and then I had to bring out my inner parent and now I’m all better. (And if you’re interested in any of that you can look at changing habits.)

But I’ve found something new! Sleep deprivation. Makes you feel even worse than having eaten 1 1/2 bags of potato chips, a bag of gummy bears and lots of chocolate in one sitting. Just train yourself to go to bed at 11.30 when you have to get up at 6.45, when you need about 8 1/2 hours of sleep and voilà, there’s your new obsession.

First you don’t get out of bed on time because you haven’t slept enough yet. Then you stumble through your day, bleary-eyed and barely conscious. You promise yourself a midday nap only to find something really important to do, like for example reading blogs, and that’s it for the nap. You promise yourself to be good from now on, to go to bed on time. “Ah, tonight”, you think, “tonight I’ll snuggle in my cosy bed just when I’m getting tired and then close my eyes. Bliss!”. For the whole day you think of bed. In a wholly platonic way. Sleep. Sleep! SLEEP! Interestingly when evening comes around, you get awake again. There’s just this one thing more to do before going to bed. After all it isn’t that late. And it’s not good to go to bed too early of course. So you still have, let’s say, 30 minutes. So you can start to watch an episode of “Angel”. And of course you will be really good today and stop watching it right in the middle. Don’t you? Only this time it’s that interesting, never mind that you already know it. And if you stay up just a little longer you’ll be past some critical point in your knitting. Or you talk to your husband and just forget the time… Never mind the reason, the result is always the same: You go to bed at 11.30. Rinse and repeat.

After a while you are too tired to exercise. You are too tired to play with your son. You are impatient and cranky. You are too tired to make music. In fact, you are too tired for doing anything much, and everything you do takes twice the time it should take because you’re so slow. You get so tired that you shouldn’t be allowed to drive a car anymore.

So why do you continue going to bed too late? Even though you know that you never can sleep in? And you know that sleeping in isn’t good for you either. better to have a consistent routine, like, going to bed at 10.30 and getting up at 6.45. (We’re not talking about you pre-motherly goal of having nine hours of deep, relaxing, and uninterrupted sleep every night here. Just eight hours for a start.)

In a way, it’s perfect. You get to complain, which is always good, so that people don’t get jealous at you. You life has focus and you never have to shift it because nothing changes. When you’re tired it only shows how hard you work and what amazing things you do. Of course you can’t be expected to do anything for anybody before being rested. You don’t have to be creative because you’re much too tired for that. Better to dream about your projects than have them fall short in any way. You get to eat more because you’re always hungry. And since you’re so low on energy you just deserve a little chocolate to make you feel better. And then, of course, a beer in the evening to help you sleep better. Never mind that alcohol doesn’t help with sleep. At least it feels relaxing.

This of course is wholly fictional and doesn’t bear any resemblance to real, ahem, almost forty-ish singers any of us knows.