Patrons of The Arts

This month has been a busy one in our house so far. And a surprisingly creative one, too. As I thought about how to summarize all that's been going on in our family recently, the one theme I can find is that we've all been busy creating something or other, or enjoying the fruits of each others' creations. It all started with Eva's birthday...

Painting
Several members of our extended family went together to buy a swing set for the kids' birthdays. It came in (literally) hundreds of little pieces, and Kyle, Kyle's mom Barb, and I spent a couple of evenings in the garage brushing water sealant on all the boards.

Sculpture
On a Saturday, my dad and his fiance Karen drove up with my brother, and we had a long day assembling the set. They worked from mid-morning until dark, and ALMOST finished.


Culinary Arts
While everyone was in town we had a nice little family party for Eva's birthday, and Barb and I worked hard the night before making a monkey cake for the occasion.


More Sculpture, Acrobatics
Kyle spent a few nights after school finishing up the swingset, and the kids have had a ball, playing on it any time we have a break from the rain.



Performing Arts
Unfortunately, we have actually had quite a lot of rain, so we've been forced to devise some inside activities to entertain the kids. On Tuesday we went to the circus (see Kyle's blog for more details on that). It was a great time; I think we all had a different favorite act.

We also went to a kids' carnival Saturday that was put on by the local Ambulance District. The weather held out long enough for us to go in the bouncy house, down the big slide, and on the train. There was a clown making balloon animals, and Eva asked for a doggy. That poor dog almost made it all the way home in the backseat with the kids. We knew it was in trouble when Daniel commented that Eva was pulling on the doggy, and that it was starting to look more like a worm.

Mixed Media
The kids have also recently struck up an interest in... we'll call it "card-making." What this really means is getting out lots of paper, crayons, stickers, glue, scissors, markers, and a stapler, and going to town making lots of creations for our family and friends. Daniel is currently very enthralled with the stapler. This afternoon I had to refill it with staples two different times. Seriously, if there is someone out there with some tedious office work, this kid would be all over it.

Vocal Stylings
Finally, our kids have been big into singing lately; especially Eva. In her case, though, there is really only one song that she likes to sing, and it is "Happy Birthday." She sings it over and over, happy birthday to me and Daniel and our dog Bailey. And she sings it in this breathy little voice reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe singing "happy birthday, Mr President..." This morning on the way to church we tried to get her to sing something else, and after saying "No, no, NO!" about our singing, she went right on back to the birthday song.

This evening Daniel was walking around the house singing "Jesus likes the little children; all the children of the world." I've posted about Daniel's and my tendency to mangle song lyrics, and he remains strong in this area.

Hopefully the weather will warm up and dry up soon, so I can work on the art of gardening and the kids can continue in the art of getting dirty. Keep your fingers crossed for us, and in the meantime anyone looking for a little culture is welcome at our house.

Best Mother's Day Ever

Okay, so I've really only been able to celebrate four Mother's Days, but this one was pretty good. Kyle, despite being stricken with terrible allergies lately, worked really hard to give me a great day.

First let me tell you what I did NOT do today:
-Cook
-Clean
-Work in the yard
-Write psychology lectures
-Grade

Now let me tell you what I DID do today:
-Ate eggs and cinnamon rolls with coffee for breakfast
-Played outside with the kids in beautiful weather; chatted with the neighbors
-Went shopping by myself for, like, three whole hours this afternoon during nap time
-Went jogging while Kyle made our dinner
-Played Boggle (my favorite game, despite having only beaten Kyle once in ten years)
-Watched two episodes of Arrested Development
-Gave myself a much-needed pedicure
-Wrote this blog post

To top it all off, I got some nice flowers and cards from Kyle and the kids. Daniel's teacher helped him complete a questionnaire about me, which was hilarious (apparently I am 5 years old, my favorite color is black, and my favorite film is some grown-up movie). Before bed, Eva let me trim her nails with NO struggle whatsoever (which is really a miracle worthy of calling the Vatican over). As I tucked Daniel in he said, "I like you, because you're a mom. I love you."

All that equals one satisfying day, and one very lucky mother :)

On Unnatural Childbirth

Four years ago, as I prepared to give birth to our son Daniel, I did what many educated first-time mothers do: I read books on childbirth (and pregnancy and baby care). Lots of them. After reading those books I had a healthy skepticism of what has become the "standard" hospital birth in America. So I made a birth plan, discussed it with my doctor, and prepared myself for the most natural childbirth I thought I could manage short of doing a home birth.

Then about two months before my delivery my doctor unexpectedly left the practice he was in and took several months off work before setting up a new one. I was assigned a new doctor, who was much less on-board with the whole birth-plan idea, and who one day, after I had been dilated past four centimeters for about two weeks, frowned as she listened to my unborn son's heart. She suggested an ultrasound, a non-stress test and some fetal monitoring, then an immediate induction. Nothing super-emergency, but a tired-looking placenta and decelerating heart rate that she didn't want to let go unsupervised over the long Memorial Day weekend. And even though I didn't feel great about the induction, I knew that I would make myself sick for three days wondering if he was wasting away in there, and so I went to the hospital planning to stick to the rest of my birth plan as closely as possible.

After many hours of pitocin-induced contractions, missed meals, and no sleep, I almost kissed the anesthesiologist who put in my epidural. I enjoyed the couple hours of rest I had before all the pushing and pushing that didn't move the baby at all, and then the eventual c-section that finally got that boy out where I could see him. And so I became the poster child for what natural childbirth advocates warn not to do, for the one intervention that leads to another until a full cascade of medical technology was unleashed in my hospital room.

After Daniel's birth I was disappointed. Disappointed that I hadn't followed my plan, that I hadn't boldly refused intervention in favor of a "wait and see" approach like all the books told me I should, and disappointed to have missed what it felt like to actually give birth. Instead I felt like I'd been hit by a truck. But I didn't think too much about it because I had a beautiful, voracious nurser with fabulous APGAR scores and I was just so excited to see him. And that was it; I obsessed over it for a little while afterward, wondering whether something could have been done differently, but in the end I did not feel bitter or sorrowful about Daniel's entry into the world.

Only later did I realize that I was not in The Club. As I met other mothers and talked about birth experiences I started to get a vibe from some women that a person who has a medical birth is foolish or weak or maybe too self-absorbed to have insisted on the very best birth experience for her child. I had several people assume that I must be devastated at the experience of walking out of the hospital with a perfect, healthy child who was born by c-section. I wrote and submitted my birth story for a collection being made by a local nursing support organization, and was stunned to find that it had been placed in the chapter of traumatic births (which included a warning that pregnant women might best avoid reading it until after their deliveries).

At first this bothered me, this feeling that I was somehow not as good as other mothers who had delivered their children vaginally, or that I should be really sad about Daniel's birth. And I thought maybe I could redeem myself with a VBAC (vaginal birth after caesarian). But 18 months later, a new obstetrician completed an exam, reviewed my records, and took a good look at the size of my husband. He said that as much as he knew I wanted a VBAC, he was going to have to recommend a repeat c-section. He reasoned that (because of hospital and anesthesiologist policies in our town) an epidural wouldn't be an option, and he feared my chances of another long, hard labor with a c-section on top might be really good. He encouraged me to get a second opinion, but after going home and giving it a good long think, I never did.

In the end, I decided that for me the stress of whether I'd accomplish the VBAC was worse than the c-section. I didn't want to spend the end of my second pregnancy like the end of my first one, thinking and re-thinking all the possible scenarios, rehearsing all the pain-management positions, and lying awake worrying about whether things would go as I wanted them to. Maybe I'm a perfectionist, and can't stand the thought of doing something I'm not sure will turn out just right. Or maybe I'm lazy and can't live with the chance that I might expend a lot of effort for naught. But I think I realized that I cared more about enjoying welcoming my second child into the world instead of making myself sick over it.

And so, two years ago today I woke up early in the morning, drove calmly to the hospital, checked in, and relaxed in bed listening to my husband read the Longfellow poem Evangeline. At the scheduled time I was wheeled into the operating room and my own beautiful Eva was born. There was no agonizing worry, no yelling, no crying (at least not from stress). I was able to meet and give consent to a number of nursing students who wanted to observe a c-section being performed. I felt really peaceful and calm, and recovered so quickly and easily afterward that I was asking to go home the next morning.

I want to be clear that I am not advocating c-section as the ideal birth method. I would love to have had my children naturally, without medications or bright lights or shiny metal instruments. My neighbor Laurie is a doula, and graciously speaks to my Developmental Psych class each semester about the pros and cons of different birth alternatives. I love to watch the videos she brings of the women giving birth, because of the wonderful look on their faces as they push the baby out and realize what they've accomplished. I am also a reasonable person who is persuaded by research that highlights the benefits of natural childbirth for the mother and the baby. But as Laurie points out each semester, there has to be a good fit between the mother's personality and her support system and her birth method. And I have to admit that as much as I wanted natural childbirth to be a good fit for me, it just wasn't. Eva's birth was really positive for me because I was able to admit that to myself and to choose just this one time not make everything a struggle.

I also want to be clear, though, that I was not passive about this situation, either. There were several decisions I made that I think helped me live with the kids' c-section births. This is where I think many of the childbirth books I read fell short; they spent so much time trying to encourage me to avoid a c-section that they dismissed any discussion of how to improve my experience in having one. I argued to carry Eva fully to term instead of going with the traditional 38 or 39-week delivery common to many planned c-sections. I researched available surgeons and made sure to schedule my delivery on a day the one I liked best was in the OR. Additionally, I fought (and I mean FOUGHT-with both kids) to be allowed to have them with me in the recovery room.

On Eva's birthday, as I think about her birth and come to terms with the idea that we probably won't have any more children, I am just now fully realizing my feelings about this whole situation. I don't want to portray myself as being abused by the natural childbirth community; certainly there are times when I was more a victim of my own self-consciousness than anyone else's condemnation. But I would like to add my birth stories to the dialogue, not as an example of what not to do, and not under the heading of traumatic births, but as an encouragement that even when things don't go as you plan them they can still be satisfying or even beautiful.

(Probably Not) Born to Run

About a month ago, I began jogging. Or maybe I should say returned to jogging after a long hiatus (like, since high school, really). Kyle started it by doing the spring post-season running program with the Truman swim team, and after a few weeks of watching him get regular kid-free time to exercise, I decided I wanted a turn for that, too. So one day I just put on my shoes and took off.

Here's the thing, though: I stink at running. I always have. In high school I went out for track, mostly because my father did track and field in high school and college and was pretty good at it (actually, maybe I shouldn't talk in the past tense; he is still pole vaulting at 55 in the state Senior Olympic games). He was very excited to see me doing track, and would even take me up to the school on the weekends to practice. But at the first meet I ran the 300-meter low hurdles and was so exhausted that at the last hurdle I stopped, put my hands on the hurdle, and stepped over. I could hear my dad calling, “What are you doing?!” in the stands. And so began my illustrious running career. I ran for 2 seasons in high school, but was never very good and had some serious shin splints, so eventually I quit. I went back to it for a few months at a time, once in graduate school (until my running partner revealed she had an eating disorder and needed to quit) and then again before we had the kids (until heavy Daniel in my belly made jogging VERY uncomfortable), but it never stuck.

Because of jogging's and my sordid past, I spent a few weeks on the fence before deciding to begin my current endeavor with it. Really, I have a number of excuses for not jogging, which include:
1.It hurts. It hurts my lungs, it gives me perma-blisters on the arches of my feet, and leaves me with sore muscles the next day. And I am a giant baby about being uncomfortable.
2.Sometimes it is very hot outside. Or very cold. Or raining, or windy, or the sun is in my eyes. Maybe to avoid the heat I will have to get up very early in the morning.
3.All logical running routes from our house begin with going up a hill. Not a good hill, like one that would allow me to say something like, “Yeah, I've been adding some hills into my workout”, but a slight incline that is just enough to make me feel winded right off the bat and gets me thinking “Wait... why am I doing this?”
4.Well-endowed women with short little legs are not built for running.
5.Sometimes circumstances require that I bring along 2 dogs (who insist on frequent stops to sniff at or pee on stuff) and/or push a double jogging stroller with 65 pounds of kid in it, which intensifies excuse #3.

However, there are a number of things I do enjoy about jogging, which include the following:
1.It is cheap. Free, really, if you don't count the running shoes I would have bought for walking anyway. And I am very thrifty.
2.It is fast. Compared to walking, I can burn WAY more calories and exercise the dogs just as much in far less time. I am also pretty Type A, so this is fairly appealing.
3.It is a good stress-reliever. Since we live near edge of town, there is a nice mix of residential areas and cornfields. It's very wholesome-feeling to run past vast rows of crops, with the sun coming up in the distance, with Polyphonic Spree singing Light and Day on my iPod. Speaking of the iPod...
4. I can listen to whatever music I want. Kyle insists that good running music is angry, but I disagree. My workout playlist is a ridiculous assortment of silly, frequently misogynistic music that Kyle wouldn't tolerate and that I would NEVER play for my kids. That's right; it's okay if the Blackeyed Peas want to know what I'm going to do with all that junk inside that trunk, because in a couple of songs Sir Mix-a-Lot will tell me how much he loves my Oakland booty. I enjoy hearing the Beastie Boys scream “Whaaaaaaaaaaa!” really loud, and I want to hear a chorus of “Zut, alohrs, non! Zut, alohrs, non, non!” at the end of Tangerine Speedo.
5.After all, any jogging route that always begins with a slight uphill always ends with a slight downhill, and if I'm lucky Eva will yell “Whee! Fast, fast, fast!” as we speed down it.

So for now jogging is winning over not-jogging. I am even thinking about entering some formal 5K runs this summer, or that local 8K in August. But I think that's it for me. For now I am going to appreciate my willingness to enjoy doing something I am so not-good at. I have enough stress in my life to add competing with other people or feeling the need to push myself faster and faster. Whereas Kyle likes to come home after a run and calculate his distance, time, and speed, I feel pretty indifferent about my run statistics. So don't look for me to post the data from a Nike sport gadget-thing on facebook anytime soon. But for the record it would look something like this:

Erika Sterup plodded around for 3 miles and some change at a speed barely faster than walking today. She feels pretty good about that.

The Daniel and Eva Show

It's been a while since I wrote something totally focused on the kids and the funny things they've been doing, so here's one for the grandmas and far-away friends. Fair warning to those who stumbled upon this blog post through facebook and don't care what cute things the Sterup kids are up to... I won't be hurt if you navigate away from this shameless promotion of my offspring.

So Eva is talking a lot more these days, and is doing a lot of funny things. A couple of weeks ago I was trying to get her excited for another trip to the hardware store to buy something for our garden, and was reviewing all the great things we are going to grow this summer, like
"...peas, and green beans, and tomatoes..."
"Cheese."
"Well, Baby, we don't really grow cheese in the ground, but we can have carrots..."
"No. Cheese."
I think someone is going to be very disappointed a few weeks from now. Actually, maybe two of us, since I spent time planning our nice, organized, square-foot garden only to have Eva shake half a packet of lettuce seeds ALL over the garden and yard. But I digress.

Eva also has been renewing my self-consciousness regarding my singing voice by saying "NONONONONO!" and holding up her hand every time I sing a song to her. This is bad news for both of us, as a good portion of my parenting repertoire involves silly made-up songs.

Daniel is turning into quite the entertainer. We went to Nebraska over the weekend for Kyle's grandma's 85th birthday party, and Daniel spent most of the day working the room. He climbed all over Kyle's cousins, put fake worms on Kyle's aunts, and went ahead and saved Great-Grandma the trouble of having to blow out her own birthday candle.

After a LONG trip back to Missouri today, we pulled in to find the annual dandelion takeover in full swing on our block, and Daniel exclaimed, "Look Eva! Look at ALL the FLOWERS!" While Kyle and I unpacked the car, he went around the yard picking them and showing us all his "Daniel-lions." During the unpacking, a fly got into our house. He was very concerned about getting the fly out of his room before bed, but then told us that after he went to bed we could just let that fly right out the door and then "Don't worry; everything will be back to normal."

Last week our babysitter told me that he sat down at the table and told her "This looks really nice! Thanks for making us this good lunch." then told her that this is what Daddy usually says to Mommy. Another day he told us "I laughed so hard I made myself funny!" Also, he noticed one afternoon that I had neglected to empty the canister on our vacuum, and told me "THAT is NASty-nast. You should empty that." The upside is that when I didn't stop folding laundry to get right on that he took the canister, emptied it, and returned it to the vacuum for me. Finally, he told me this evening that my ability to jump on one foot is just aMAzing. Maybe he was trying to make me feel better about myself in light of my terrible, terrible singing.

It Just Makes Me Feel Like an Id Again

This is a post about how totally geeked-out I am about psychology. Many years ago, when I was in junior high school, a friend's mother gave me one of her psychology textbooks from college. I'm not sure how it came about, but I'm sure I must have told her that I was interested in the subject. I'm also not sure whether she ever thought about the book again, but I have to admit that the summer I received it I read the entire An Introduction to Theories of Personality (second edition) by B.R. Hergenhahn, cover to cover, at least twice. At the time, I think I enjoyed the thought of getting through something so far above my expected reading level, but also I loved learning about the ways people have attempted to explain human behavior over the years.

I went on to major in psychology in college, and then on to a masters' degree in counseling. I have worked as a therapist, and now as a community college instructor. I can no longer keep track of the number of books I have read on the subject of personality, but I am still not tired of psychology. I am always on the lookout for psych-related articles or news stories to discuss with my students, I once took a summer course in psychopharmacology just for fun, and I am constantly updating my stockpile of cool videos and audios to show to my classes.

Through all this time reading and using and teaching psychology, nobody has piqued my curiosity or held my interest better than Sigmund Freud. His theory is at the same time ludicrous and brilliant, and there is nothing quite like teaching a roomful of students about penis envy and the Oedipus complex. One time I was teaching a group of students at another location via satellite, and on my screen I had a power point slide that was obscuring my camera view of the classroom. I heard some talking, then some tittering, then some giggles, and when I turned off the slides to investigate I found a whole group of students crowded around a chart in the textbook, trying to contain their embarrassed laughter over Freud's psychosexual stages.

And this is why Freud is the most fun of all to teach. He strongly believed in the power of our unconscious to direct our behavior, and in the end mostly everything comes back to some kind of threatening, inappropriate deep-seated sexual desire, or to something your parents did to mess you up. He proposed that little boys sexually desire their mothers. He said little girls are just dying to know why they don't have a cool penis like dad's, and are secretly resentful toward their mothers for not keeping better track of theirs. He says having an anal-retentive personality has to do with too early or too high-pressure potty training, and that smoking may be a person's way of coping with the trauma of being taken off their mother's breast. Certainly this is not the kind of lecture that students sleep through.

The thing is, though, that if Freud were only responsible for some wacky theory about the origin of adult personality, he would never have endured the way that he has. No, Freud is really fantastic to me because of his fabulous observations of kids learning to identify with their gender, and his ability to recognize that we often act in ways that don't match our conscious explanation. So many parts of his theory are such givens in our modern thinking that we don't even realize they are Freudian. Ideas like denial, rationalization, repression, and projection are all his. The idea that there is something behind a man forgetting his anniversary, or your slip of the tongue; or the recognition that some things that happen to us as children can shape the way we are even 50 years later. It's fascinating to think that his theory was first, and that his therapy was first, and that everyone else is just kind of a response to him.

In the end, despite the fact that as a therapist I much more resemble Carl Rogers than Freud, there is a part of me that thinks the idea of a terrible unconscious, driving our behavior, so appalling that we would be threatened if we knew its contents is just. so. cool. And so I get a little excited each semester as the chapter on theories of personality rolls around.

I'm aware that there is a joke among my students that I tend to say I just LOVE each new chapter of their text, and that each chapter is SO interesting, but secretly I look forward to talking about personality the most. We just finished the Freud section, and even the promise of discussing social psychology this week is kind of a letdown compared to talking about the id, ego, and superego. My first psych book is still on my shelf, though, in its special little place, waiting for next semester.

I Give Up

As some of you may know, Kyle and I gave up sweets for lent this year. We were both feeling the need to eat better, and felt ready to cut out a lot of the sugar we (and the kids) had been eating. Furthermore, we discussed how self-control is easily the fruit of the spirit least-practiced in our house, and that it would be a good physical and spiritual challenge for us. Doing it together made it easier, since neither of us would be parading dessert around in front of the other.

We got off to a bummer of a start, as on Ash Wednesday dinner at our church included fabulous-looking turtle cheesecake left over from the Valentine's banquet. Someone had calculated that there would be just enough slices for each adult at our Wednesday-night meal, and so we were asked, over and over by platter-wielding church ladies, whether we'd gotten our pieces yet. By the end of the night, practically the entire congregation had heard me announce that we were not eating sweets this lent, which is unfortunate considering I'd been thinking we should not be all forward and braggy about our commitment.

But it turns out that this was really the most difficult night, and that the whole six weeks or so were much, much easier than I'd thought they would be. We had some debates, like the "is a muffin considered a sweet" conversation (Kyle says no, and I say yes unless it's maybe a bran muffin), and some near-forgets at the beginning, but I can actually say that I didn't really even feel deprived. We even each lost a few pounds.

And lest I sound too proud of myself, let me admit that in October I "gave up" eating fast food, but have not had the success that I had with sweets during lent. I still want to allow the kids a Happy Meal once in a while, or I'm on a road trip with another person driving and there are no other non-fast-food (slow food?) options at that highway exit... And, though I've really minimized my fast-food eating, it has been much more difficult and much less absolute than this was. Maybe I've had the holy spirit interceding for me with the sweets, or maybe there is nothing like having God watching you to keep you accountable ALL THE TIME.

So that leaves me in my current state: regret over having to give up giving up sweets. Now a rational person might point out that I could continue giving up sweets any time I want to, and that if need be I could even make another formal commitment to God or myself or Kyle or whatever. But I know that it just won't be the same. There is something about knowing I am participating in a set period of sacrifice, with a finite end, along with many, many other people everywhere. And for a moment I can really understand Catholicism or other denominations that are more focused on corporate traditions than my own church. Something about the solidarity of being a part of a group makes me feel more accountable, like I can't renegotiate the rules when things get difficult.

For now, I am looking forward to enjoying a doughnut and a cup of black coffee (best combination ever) at our church's Easter breakfast. After that, who knows? Maybe I'll find a way to not give up giving up.