A couple of weeks ago, we came home from church and as we were making lunch, I asked Taytem what they had learned in children’s church that day.

“Um, we learned about self-control.  Or, I don’t know, maybe it was just about control.”

I just about spewed the drink of water out of my mouth, because the statement was so apropos of Taytem.  She thinks she’s in charge.  She’s been known to actually say aloud, “I know everything,” and “Sometimes grown-ups don’t know a lot,” and she’s constantly trying to correct me.  Humble, she’s not.

I confess that I don’t always handle this very well.  I mean, who enjoys being constantly corrected by a five-year-old?  Who maintains constant patience when your child is interrupting you to finish what she thinks you’re trying to say?  And clearly, Taytem gets her ego from me, for I confess, I have been known to retaliate in my most flustered moments, “Oh yeah?  You think you know everything?  Can you name all of the planets in our solar system?  Do you know what a pancreas does?  Do you know what the Roman Colosseum is?  Because I do!”

It was not my shining moment as a parent.  Lukus gave me look that had paragraphs of chastisement written in his eyes.  With one glance, I read, “Really?  That’s the level you’re going down to?  Who’s the adult here?  You’re ego is honestly that fragile?  Do you actually know what a pancreas does?”

No, my love.  I do not “actually” know what a pancreas does.  But I do know how to Google it, and Taytem does not.  There’s still at least a week before she has that little gem figured out.  Then, I’m screwed.

I thought I had my parenting-style figured out.  I’d read books on discipline versus punishment, then I read books on training versus discipline, and soaked it all in.  I was open to lots of ideas, but I still held fast to my belief in spanking.  Spanking was the only thing that worked on me as a kid.  If my parents gave me a time-out or grounded me, I just sat in my room growing resentful and pondering all the reasons why my parents were wrong and I was right.  There was something about spankings that humbled my heart, reassured me of my parent’s love for me, and the “get-it-over-with” method of discipline helped me move on and cheerfully go about the rest of my day.

Lukus, likewise, grew up with spankings, and considered them effective and appropriate.  Our parents weren’t perfect by any means, but we didn’t grow up in fear of them, nor did we ever pick up (what is often the main argument against spanking) hitting others or violent tendencies.

But apart from her huge ego, Taytem is completely different person than me or Lukus.  She’s a totally unique human being, which did not occur to me for the first four years of her life.  And she did NOT respond well to spankings.  We had read the books that taught the proper way to spank a child: be calm, gently tell them what they did wrong, use an instrument like a paddle so they know that your hands are for loving, spank only on the bottom with an appropriate amount of force, expect an apology for their disobedience, then immediately forgive them, give them lots of hugs and reassure them that you’re not angry and you love them.

It was all very controlled and specific.  But it started becoming more and more clear that this was not the method for Taytem.  I was probably more calm and gentle than my own parents were, and yet she was clearly more afraid than I ever was.  And she could not get over the spankings.  She would cry and cry until she was almost hysterical, and fortunately, God gave us the grace to set aside our egos and recognize that maybe this was not the path for Taytem.

I wrote in The Mom Tattoo post how I chose to become a mom in order to grow closer to God, to know His father’s heart through my mother’s heart.  Often, the Holy Spirit reminds me of this when I feel I’m lacking as a parent – look to your heavenly Father he whispers, what does He do with you?

As I pondered how God treats me as His own daughter, I began to realize that God almost never uses force on me.  In His discipline of me, I know there have been times that He has restrained me.  He has withheld from me.  He has reasoned with me.  He has challenged my heart and my attitude.  He has used others to correct or expose me.  He has let me experience the consequences of my own choices.  He’s put me in positions where I had to work extra hard to clean up my own mess.  God has never been slow to discipline me when I need it, and I wouldn’t say that He’s always gentle either.  But for the life of me, I cannot conjure up any kind of image of some kind of spiritual/figurative spanking.

The more I consider this concept, the more I start to believe that, though God Himself is unchanging, His method of dealing with humankind has changed since Christ came and took our punishment upon Himself.  The God of the Old Testament, who struck Miriam with leprosy when she bad-mouthed Moses’ wife, who caused the earth to swallow up Korah when he tried to start a rebellion among the Israelites, and who turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt when she disobeyed the angel’s instructions, does not seem to deal so with us any longer.  Because He has given us His Spirit through Christ, God appeals to our hearts much more so than punishing the flesh.  The punishment of the flesh can only bring about a response from the flesh – the primal instinct to avoid pain, rather than genuine contrition from the heart.  Wasn’t this God’s entire point in the whole period that was the Old Testament?  External discipline and external obedience is not an obedience of the heart.

I don’t think that means that there’s not any place for spankings.  I just think perhaps it’s much more rare and extreme of a measure than I previously thought for my own kid.  You have to get to a child’s heart in order to bring about true obedience, but that’s not always going to happen, and sometimes you do have to resort to appealing to their natural instincts in order to spare them from even greater consequences.  For some kids, a spanking IS what gets to their heart.

To spare your eyesight, I’m going to stop here and continue this in a Part 2 later this week.  I’ll be sharing some thoughts from yet some other great books I’ve read lately and how those approaches have affected our dealings with our little grown-up, smarty-pants, sweet and sensitive Taytem.

In the meantime, whatcha think?  Is spanking the only thing that seems to work with your kids like it was with me?  Is it a last resort for you?  Do you think it’s an act of violence and all spanking is wrong?  Let’s talk about it folks, respectfully and honestly – let’s get it all out there.

I bawled at my sixth grade graduation.  I’m not afraid to admit it.  Every other kid was grinning from ear to ear, ready to move up to junior high, then high school and off into the world.  But I blubbered like a baby through our entire hand-holding performance of “Friends are Friends Forever.”  The fact that we held hands and sang “Friends are Friends Forever” is the part that I’m ashamed of, along with this awesome 1991 photo of me and my Life Goes On glasses.

The girl next to me is Jill Cagle.  We weren’t friends.  I didn’t have a perm or Gitano jeans, so we weren’t friends.  The guy behind me is Mr. Hultberg, aka “Mr. H.”, the best sixth grade teacher in the history of the world.  This is a fact, because our class actually gave him a trophy that named him the “Best Teacher in the History of the World,” on Teacher Appreciation Day.  I organized the trophy purchase and the surprise party myself because, truth be told, I had a major crush Mr. H.  For one thing, he was a really incredible story teller, he played basketball with us during recess, and whenever Johnny Wallace made fun of my glasses or clothes or pimples, Mr. H. made fun of Johnny Wallace.  So yeah, now you know why I cried at my sixth grade graduation.

Years later, when Lukus and I visited a university in L.A. to pursue our master’s degrees, I walked by a faculty office door that had “Professor A. Hultberg” on a sign on the door.  I had a funny feeling it might be him, nudged Lukus and told him my suspicion, and that I absolutely HAD to find out.  Lukus knew there was no way it could be THE Mr. H., and the professor probably wasn’t in his office anyway.  I gathered some gumption, tried very hard not to feel like that awkward 12-year-old girl with giant blue glasses on, and knocked on the door.  The door flung open, and there before me stood a much shorter, much grayer, but much handsomer Mr. H. than I had remembered.  Of course he didn’t recognize me (thank God!) until I told him my name.  We chatted for a few moments until I realized that my experience in the sixth grade was much more special to me than it was to him; not to mention the fact that the room was about to explode from all of the tension of having the two greatest loves of my life in the same room together!

I tend to be immensely sentimental about the past, and I positively hate change.  By the time I would graduate high school, I would have gone to 13 different schools, lived in 9 different cities, and said goodbye to more potential best friends than I could ever count.  So when I got comfortable somewhere, leaving that place was like having a kidney removed each time.

It wasn’t any easier at my college graduation.  My lonely, constantly moving self had watched too many episodes of Saved by the Bell, and I had few ambitions in life beyond having my own posse to make innocent mischief with.  Home-life wasn’t exactly stable, so I constantly daydreamed of a time when my amazingly cool circle of friends would emerge as a surrogate family – kind of like a gang, except with more ice cream and less teardrop tattooing.

College fulfilled that fantasy.  I had the best roommate that any after-school special director could possibly hope for:  Mandy was responsible and clean, but hilarious and mischievous, and someone that I could spend all hours of the night talking with before we finally fell asleep.  Oh yeah, and she didn’t mind dressing up as Sidekick Stinky to my Captain Poopy for our hall meeting.  I really have no excuse for this…

I had a boyfriend who was in a band with one of my good friends who was also his roommate who was dating another one of my friends who turned out to be my long-lost sister from a previous marriage to my birth mom’s….okay just kidding about that last part.  But aren’t we just too cool for this leather couch?  I really miss those pants.

Nevermind getting a degree, pursuing a career, planning for my future…THIS was what I wanted out of college:  road trips, skipping class to play frisbee, going to concerts, pulling pranks on my roommate, having random girls that I didn’t know cut my hair in the dorm bathroom, ordering pizza at 2 a.m. to fuel my Spanish studies, making-out with Lukus in the student newspaper offices, stealing cafeteria trays on snow days to use to sled down the back hill with the rest of the student body…who wanted a future beyond that?!

So you guessed it – come graduation, I cried again.  At least I had the sense to do it in the privacy of my own apartment that I now shared with my new husband (a sloppy boy who refused to dress up as my toilet sidekick, who, instead of talking till all hours of the night, would fall asleep within 3.7 minutes of his head hitting his pillow).

With all of my fond college memories, and an already strong propensity to romanticize the past, I thought that our 10-year college reunion would be torture.  It would be like having a 30 minute lay-over in Paris and not getting to really experience the place where you are.  But with several of our friends attending, there was no way we were going to miss it, so last week, we went.

Turned out it was surreal, fun, and there wasn’t quite as much catching up to do as in the Olden Days before Ye Ol’ Facebook was invented.  But it wasn’t torture.  No, only fondness (the best fondness being that Lukus and I are still remembered as “the girl on the balcony who got proposed to by the guy playing guitar and singing an original song.”  Yeah, most legendary proposal evah!!!).

I’m not sure exactly when I crossed the threshold, but at some point in the last few years, I finally stopped missing college.  Stepping back onto the set of my old college show was about as fun as reruns get.  We know we loved that episode, but we’ve seen it before, and really, watching it again is just killing time until the new season of Mad Men starts.  It’s always nice to know that the old shows are still running and the old memories are still alive between friends, and that the people you shared a season with will always be a part of your life.  But really, who wants to watch Season 40 of Saved By The Bell?  Thanks to my 10-year reunion, I finally realized that I don’t.  I’m ready for new sets, new plot lines, some new characters mixed in with the originals, and perhaps, most of all, I’m ready for new wardrobes – Doc Martin knock-offs with a khaki skirt?  What was I thinking?!

Here’s a few of my favorite cast members…

And yeah, I’ll take the “now” over the past, even if it’s just for my sexy shoe upgrade.

It’s quite fortunate for me that God still loves me when I’m pissed off at His whole beautiful world for no good reason.  I woke up angry this morning.  I can’t explain it except that maybe it’s because all of last week I had strep throat and wasn’t able to take my anti-depressant vitamins.  They were really working there for a whole five weeks, and it was starting to feel like I was learning how to live life without punching innocent stuffed animals in the face when no one’s looking.  I wonder if that Care Bear still cares?

But apparently, that week off of the vitamins took it’s toll, and this morning, the best I could do was throw some frozen waffles in the toaster for my girls, and turn on some cartoons so I could retreat to my bedroom in solitude.  Most days, I can push through the stress, the depression or the anger, but there are a few days that I just plummet to the bottom of a cave and don’t want to come out.  Today has been a cave-day as I wait for my vitamins to start taking effect again.  But I’m also waiting for someone to show up.

It was around the same time that I confessed here on my blog that I struggle with depression, that God also began showing me the immensity and constancy of His grace.  It used to be that whenever I had a chemical meltdown that sent my emotions running in fourteen different directions that I would feel incredibly guilty and like such a failure.  If I REALLY knew God, I could never be depressed.  I just knew He was disappointed in me because I hadn’t mastered a joyful spirit.  Compounded with that sense of guilt was a great deal of anger with God for his disappointment in me over a problem that I felt like I couldn’t find a solution for.  It wasn’t until He revealed to me my own prideful heart in the parking lot of a hot dog restaurant that I literally felt his grace rush into that car with me and wrap me in tight hugs.  It was like God, for the first time that I was aware of it, took me by the shoulders, stared me in straight in the eyes, and with ferocious tenderness told me, “I love you – NO MATTER WHAT!  Don’t you get it yet?  I love you!”

And something in me heard Him for the first time.  Grace suddenly became not a word, but almost a person – a person who, when I began to feel alone, she’d whisper, “I’m here, and I think you’re hilarious and wonderful.”  Or when I felt like I’d really f***** up (probably for saying the f-word) Grace would take my hand and say, “That’s what I’m here for.  No one has ever expected you to be perfect on your own.  Here, let me help you wash those dishes,” and strangely, I’d find that I had the strength of ten grandmothers in me.  Grace has ridden in the car beside me, giving me the patience to listen to 27 straight minutes of Taytem talking.  Grace has reminded me that I don’t have to do it all, I just have to put one foot in front of the other while I hold her hand.

But sometimes it’s hard to find that hand.  I don’t know why.  I know that David wrote some pretty heartsick and despairing psalms.  I know that Jesus wept in the garden and then asked God why He’d forsaken him.  I know that I have to take vitamins for depression and that when I’m angry, sometimes the only thing that even begins to help is to turn on some angry music and dance until I’m breathless.  Sometimes I have to punch a Care Bear.  Is that also Grace?  I suppose in some ways it is, though I’m honestly not sure.

What I do know is that whatever state I’m in, no matter how unjustifiably angry I am, I at least don’t have to try to pretend I’m something I’m not.  I get depressed, I get angry and stressed out, I let my kids watch too many cartoons sometimes, I’m not always very productive around the house, every now and then I’ve even said the f-word.  But Grace reminds me that I’m loved anyway.  Grace tells me that tomorrow is a new day and even then, I’m not expected to be perfect.  Grace reminds me that, it may not always look like it, but she’s making me perfect and I don’t have to do it on my own.  Grace advises me that there are moments that she’ll run and I’ll have to hold on tight to keep up, there will be moments that the going will be slow, but I just have to put one foot in front of the other, and then, there are days like today when it’s okay to just sit very still and wait while I keep my darn mouth shut.

So yeah, considering that the girls soaked my whole bathroom from their bath time, I just discovered red crayon all over my bedspread, and Eisley took off her poopy diaper by herself and walked all over the house with it, and that my fancy vitamins haven’t kicked back in yet, I think it’s fair to say that today, I’m just going to sit and wait for Grace.

I mentioned around Christmas time that we’ve had some students living with us while they attend classes to learn English so they can enter American universities.  It’s been such a rewarding experience in so many aspects:  our family gets to learn about another culture; we get to share our faith along with our home; it’s a decent financial help; it makes our house feel more like a home in sharing it with others…..I could go on.

However….

Fairly often, there are those awkward moments that arise from 1) Living with college-age boys; 2) Dealing with another culture, their beliefs & customs; 3) Dealing with another culture’s standard of hygiene and manners; and 4) Having a talkative little girl who doesn’t know when to keep her mouth shut.

Since last July, we have had 3 students live with us, usually 2 at a time.  Two of them have been from Saudi Arabia, and the other from South Korea; all young men in their early twenties.  And since then, we’ve had our share of awkward moments.

—————————

“You tell him.”  ”No, YOU tell him.  YOU’RE the GUY.”  ”But you’re better at confronting people than I am.”  ”Still, on matters of hygiene, I think it’s best that he hears it from you.”  ”Fine.”  Lukus lumbers up the stairs, dreading to tell our first Saudi student that he absolutely MUST take a shower.  The odor from his room is creeping down the stairs in an almost visible form, his presence at the dinner table makes me nauseas, and in two weeks’ time, we haven’t heard the shower run once.  And yet, Lukus goes for the subtle approach.

“Hey Houssen!  Uh, do you have any deodorant?  Like this?  I’ve got some extra if you need some.  Have you figured out how to work the shower knobs?  Oh, okay, good.  Alright, see ya.”

Two hours pass and the shower hasn’t run, and Houssen comes downstairs, walks out the kitchen door to take a smoke in the backyard.  I’m painting our pantry.  Houssen comes back inside, adding the smell of cigarettes to his personal odor, and I stop him.

“Hi Houssen.  You need to go take a shower.  Right now.  You stink.  You need to take a shower at least 3 times a week, okay?”

Houssen smiles his charming boyish smile and says, “Okay Mom.  Thank you.”

The next month, he moves out, saying that he’s moving to Houston to be near friends, but we see him a few weeks later at the school.  At least when he accepts our invitation to spend Christmas with us, it’s obvious when he shows up that he showered that morning by his huge, fuzzy Afro.

———————–

“Taytem!  Stop that smacking right now.  You’ve got better manners than that, but you sound like a dog slurping up his food.”

“Mom, I’m not eating.”

I turn around from doing the dishes to realize that that dreadful slurping is coming from Kun, our Korean student.  I choose to believe that his noisy eating habits must be his cultural way of saying that the food is delicious – since he’s never actually verbally complimented my cooking, even after his fourth helping.

————————

We’re at a Cajun buffet.  I’ve looked over Rusul’s plate and only noticed chicken.  I go back for a second helping of jambalaya, and he follows me, getting his own helping of jambalaya.

“Oh Rusul, you don’t want to eat that.  It has pork in it.”  Rusul is a devout Muslim who prays 5 times a day in his room and absolutely does NOT eat pork.

“Really?  Really?!”

“Yes, see?  There’s pork right there.”

“But I’ve had two helpings!”

He tries to be polite, but he immediately rushes to the bathroom and we spend the next 15 minutes at the table trying not to think about what he’s doing in there.

—————————-

In a discussion about politics, the troubles in the Middle East and Jews:

“But Hitler was an evil, evil man,” says Lukus.

Rusul shrugs.  He’s not a fan of Jews and doesn’t necessarily agree.  We have no idea what to say after this.

—————————–

It’s Monday.  Lukus is at work and has taken Kun and Rusul to school as usual.  So I’m walking around downstairs in my underwear to get some water, singing my tribute to Whitney Houston in my silliest American Idol audition style.  I go upstairs to put on some pajama pants and get the girls up.  I come downstairs, and almost pee my pants because a shadowy figure is standing in the kitchen and I’m trying to estimate how quickly I can get to the shotgun upstairs.  A moment later, I realize it’s Rusul, who stayed home that day.  He’s probably heard my Whitney Houston impression, and fortunately, barely missed seeing me in my underwear.

——————————

“Kun!  We’re ready to go to the restaurant!”  Taytem yells through Kun’s door.

“Okay.  I’ll be five minutes,” says Kun.

“Taytem Bjorn!”  I whisper/yell frantically.  ”We were just going as a family!  That’s why we ordered pizza for the guys!”

“Oh.  Sorry.”

Rusul and Kun are ready to go.  The pizza arrives, goes straight into the fridge and we have to shell out an extra $30 at the restaurant.

—————————–

This is the wonderfully, awkward life of living with foreign college-age guys who don’t speak English very well.  And every day, I’m thankful that this is my life.  Well, almost every day.

Maybe it’s the second vodka-infused peach bellini talking, but tonight I’m making a major, official declaration.  Someone call channel 4, because I think everyone will want to know that, as of tonight: I officially don’t hate Oklahoma anymore.

I know, shocking, right?  But it occurred to me while I was on the way home from a blogger’s party (yeah, I didn’t know those existed either, but my friend Evie invited me spur of the moment, so I figured, “Sure, why not go to the locally-owned cosmetic store where they’ll serve some hors de’ouvres, give me a free bra-fitting, an eyebrow waxing, and let me mingle with some other local OKC bloggers over an open bar?”).

It was while I was talking with all of these multi-faceted women that I realized that I have now lived in Oklahoma for almost eight years.  Eight years!!!  After attending 13 different schools and moving back and forth between Texas and California about half a dozen times (and no, my parents were NOT in the military) this is officially the longest I have ever lived in one place.  And it was somewhere between talking with the shopping blogger, the food blogger, my fourth potato puff, and that second peach bellini, that I realized that maybe, just maybe, I’m kinda becoming okay with OK.  I mean, THESE people are here – throwing things like “blogger parties” and making things like “potato puffs”.  I mean, how great are potato puffs?!

I do remember that it was somewhere around our sixth year here that the edge of constantly longing for California, or Italy, or heck, even Arkansas started to not feel so sharp in my gut.  A new coffee shop had just opened that made lattes to my satisfaction, and had comfortable enough seats so that I could park myself for some time and just stare and daydream while being somewhere outside of my house.  A few new shopping developments popped up that weren’t heinous to look at.  Some really decent, non-steakhouse restaurants opened up.  And I think we made it pretty big-time when Whole Foods finally opened up a store right here in the city.  We’re practically the New York City of the Midwest right now.  Well, besides Chicago.  And Dallas.  And Kansas City.  And…well, we’re the New York City of Oklahoma at least.

But it’s more than that.  We have a church home for the first time in the history of ever.  We have neighbors that make us feel like we’re on the set of Desperate Housewives (without the murder and adultery – we’re pretty much just talking nice people who don’t mind if you park your bike in their yard for the afternoon).  We’ve got dear, wonderful friends who are taking our kids for the weekend so we can go to our 10-year-college reunion, and new friends who invite us to things like “blog parties.”

And it’s taken eight years.  Eight long, painful, boring years.  And in the meantime, I’ve been learning to not run away.  Because that’s what it felt like we did when I was growing up.  If a place was too boring, or not beautiful enough, or the economy wasn’t great, or everything didn’t just fall into place right away, we moved on.  And we moved on and on and on.  And to this day, I tell people that my home is a town on the coast of North San Diego County, where I no longer know a single soul and not a single family member has lived there since the day I moved away.  My hometown is a place where there is no sign that I was ever there except for an underground drainage pipe where I used to smoke stolen cigarettes and draw rainbows on the cement walls with my crayons – you know, the awkward PG-13 stage between coloring rainbows and stealing cigarettes.

It’s been eight years of me internally chanting to myself, “Only boring people get bored, and you’re NOT boring, so stop being bored!”  Eight years of me waiting for European vacations that never come, of the “big job” that will make us move, of drawing my own “perfect cities” on sheets and sheets of graph paper.  And all the while, Oklahoma City is growing up around me, gathering to herself other creatives who find food and fashion and design that’s worth blogging about right here in the place I’ve been all along.

Suddenly, I realize that the reason I love to travel so much is because everywhere I go, I like to imagine being home there.  Wherever I go, I’m looking for home, except for the place I’m at.  Even the place I’m at for eight years.

So I’m sure that there will always be the perpetual gypsy inside of me that wants to simply grab my toothbrush and tell the perky lady at the airport ticket counter to “surprise me” with my destination, but as this city evolves, so do I, and so will this blog.  Changes are coming just as soon as I can figure out the back-end of this site, but mostly, the changes are in me.  I’m learning the definition of “home” for the first time in my life, and it’s maybe not as boring as I thought it was for so long.  It’s maybe kind of OK after all.

Alright, that last line was so cheesy I have to blame it on the peach bellini.

Anywho, these are some of the blogs by the nice people I met tonight.  Won’t you check them out with me?:

Evie @ http://evie-s.com/news/

Sarah Gray @ Joyfully Gray

Allison @ Shopcrawlr

Brandy @ Bella Vita Jewelry

Rachael @ Rachael Really

Sally @ Sally Spins

Melissa @ Sassafrass 2.0

Brigette @ Settling West

Marek @ Mareks Musings

Whitney English