By Tracee Sioux
In the middle of Ainsley’s Disney Princess Obsession I found a coffee table book about Princess Diana at the library and showed it to her.
She honestly had never considered the fact that there might actually be real princesses. She was as fascinated, if not more, with Princess Diana, Fergie, Duchess of York, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Caroline and any others I could think of. She loved having me Google them on the Internet.
They are really real Princesses? she would ask over and over.
It was actually a great segue way into politics and history lessons. I explained how our ancestors had come from England (we’re American mutts, but some of them did come from England) and other European countries that really do have royalty as a form of government still today.
Then I explained how the pilgrims had come to America and decided having kings and queens wasn’t the best idea. So, we now have presidents and representatives elected by the people who live here. I take her with me to go vote and we talk about how important it is for the people to vote on who leads the country. (When she was two we were leaving the polls and she said, But, Mommy when are we going on the boat?)
But, in England, where Princess Diana lived, they still have princes and princesses, I tell her.
We just watched The Queen together. I would have thought she’d find this boring. But, she made me pause it every single time she had to go to the bathroom. She kept asking who Tony Blair was and how he ruled the country at the same time as the Queen. She can not wait to be able to go to Buckingham Palace in real life. I pointed out that Prince Charles really is just a man and he cheated on his Princess so she divorced him.
Funny side note: the only Barbi-like doll she has is actually a talking Bill Clinton that I bought for my husband for Christmas a few years ago. His foot came off the other day and she said, Oh Mommy, I broke my favorite Bill Clinton that I love to play with! Can’t you fix my Bill Clinton? We also have a talking George Bush giant bobble head which Zack enjoys quite a bit.
Use the Disney Princess Obsession to open the door to teach girls about history and politics. It’s way more empowering that girls will be privileged enough to vote than sitting around hoping for some prince on a white horse to come save them.
By Tracee Sioux
I was on the john reading this little devotional. It was a scripture pretty much everyone has memorized, even if they aren’t Christian.
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self. Gal. 5:11
And I thought, How many people hate themselves? Women and girls especially. Cutting on themselves, saying “I hate myself’ over and over, not allowing themselves to eat, or any number of other destructive behaviors.
The devotional was saying it’s hard to love other people when they are so flawed. Boo Hoo. I think it’s harder to love yourself if you perceive so many flaws and won’t cut yourself any slack.
I had a similar epiphany moment when I heard something else I’ve heard a million times.
You teach people how to treat you.
I had always thought that meant that if you allow people to keep crossing your boundaries they will keep doing it until you stop accepting that behavior. And it totally does mean that.
But, one day I heard someone use it in a different context. How can you expect anyone on earth to treat you better than you treat yourself?
Of course, she was talking about the way women will sacrifice virtually everything and never even take care of their own physical bodies or mental health. Then women wonder why everyone takes advantage of us and treat us like crap. Well, obviously it’s because we treat ourselves with a lack of respect.
I’m a word lover. I love a paradigm shift from a phrase or scripture I’ve heard a million times and an epiphany about how I’m living my life.
I’ve started treating myself in a kinder way by taking yoga, exercising, eating better, stopping smoking. I couldn’t really say I “love myself” as much as “I love my neighbor” if I’m eating like crap, smoking and running my body into the ground and not taking care of my mental and emotional health. I’m treating my neighbor way better than that, because obviously I’m not actively trying to kill my neighbor with neglect and bad habits.
I’ve also come to a place where I’m not accepting behavior from friends and family that I used to accept. I’m going to be kind enough to myself to say, “no, you may no longer treat me that way,” when someone disregards my boundaries or takes advantage of me or takes my generosity for granted.
I’m not longer going to treat my neighbor better than I treat me. Nor am I going to allow my neighbor to treat me as badly as she treats herself. Because that’s not what the verse requires of me.
I hope you’ll do the same for yourself and model that for your daughter. Already I’ve heard the words I hate myself come out of my 5-year-old’s mouth when she was upset, frustrated or disappointed that she wasn’t perfect the first time she tried something. She can only be getting that from me, because I am the person she emulates. I don’t have to verbalize it for her to know it’s true.
My task is to make it untrue and make sure she knows it’s untrue.
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June 9th, 2007 — Family Life
By Tracee Sioux
Fill in the blank with whatever you want to believe I thought. I didn’t say it because my kids were present and I didn’t want them to freak out. Inside, I was totally freaking out though. It was a parenting moment for which I found myself with no other response than What the $^#%! my head.
Sometimes my daughter sees me bite my son’s nails. If you’ve ever clipped a baby’s nails and cut him, you understand that it makes your gut lurch like you want to perform some kind of flagellation on your self as penance. I read that I should bite his nails to trim them in a baby magazine. My daughter is a little mommy. She takes quite good care of her little brother. Always making sure I am aware of his needs and taking care of him herself if I am blatantly ignoring them while writing these columns.
Today she was climbing over him to get out of the van and noticed his toenail needed trimming and bent over and pulled the entire toenail out of his big toe. He barely flinched. She wanted to know if we should save it for his baby box.
There were so many things wrong with this picture all I could think was What the F$%&!
What I said was, Ainsley, how hard did you bite his toenail? You pulled his whole toenail out. You are not his mother. You need to let ME do things like that. I am his mother. You must be gentle with your brother.
But, I said it calmly, like it was no big deal. Unlike when I’ve asked her to pick up the living room numerous times and I really raise my voice as if it’s a life and death situation.
I bandaged it up in the gym nursery and went back out the front door to cry and call the pediatrician. Who never called me back.
What truly disturbed me about the incident was that he barely flinched. In fact, he very rarely cries for more than a few seconds when he gets hurt. He’s fallen down stairs and didn’t cry much. Yesterday, I tried to surgically remove a piece of glass stuck in his heel and he cried while daddy had him trapped in a blanket to keep him still, but the second he was loose he was over it. In fact, just the other day my husband was proudly bragging about Zack’s pain tolerance and how we should really exploit that to push him to excel in sports.
But, didn’t they pull people’s fingernails out as a form of torture? When my daughter lost her thumb nail after smashing it in the car door you would have thought it was about as painful as natural birth. I thought back to that poor little girl I’d seen on Oprah who didn’t experience pain at all, they’d had to remove her teeth because she would chew up her arm when she was nervous as a toddler. She would get serious injuries, like burns on her hands, because her brain didn’t register when she was touching something hot. She had no pain.
I spent the next hour on the elliptical and treadmill fervently praying for health and wholeness and normal physical, mental, and emotional development for my son, and my daughter too.
Sometimes as parents, I think we wish our children could go through life with no pain. We don’t want them to suffer because we love them. But pain is good for kids, it allows them to pull their foot back or remove their hand from fire. Or learn never to something that again.
But, I was extremely relieved as he gave a wail of pain when I poured alcohol on his naked big toe to disinfect it. I was also relieved that he stopped crying rather quickly.
Mr. Z is tough and Ms. Thornton needs to stop doing my job.
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June 8th, 2007 — Mother-Daughter Emotional Osmosis
By Tracee Sioux
One of our neighbors is this nice autistic man who is prone to random screaming at the top of his lungs. When they first moved in I ran over there to help whoever was being murdered.
He knocked on the door last week with his niece, a playmate for Ainsley, and asked if Ainsley could come over and play. Ainsley had been eying their new above-ground swimming pool with more than a little envy. I politely told him that we were on our way out, but that Cheyenne was welcome over at our house to jump on the trampoline anytime.
In my head, I had already decided that this man and his elderly mother was not enough supervision, so no way was Ainsley going over there to play by herself. My gut told me it was a bad idea and I’m learning to trust my gut.
A few days later Ainsley said, Mom, you know that guy brought that girl and said I could come swim in their pool?
Yeah, I said.
Well, I don’t think I want to go over there alone. I’m a little scared, she told me.
You’re right Ainsley, I told her proudly. My little voice told me the same thing. I’m not going to let you go play over there, but Cheyenne can come over here and play on the trampoline. I’m proud of you for listening to your gut when it’s telling you something is not a good idea. You should always listen to your gut or the little voice inside you, because you can always trust it. It’s God’s way of telling you the right thing to do.
I don’t know when it happens but somewhere along the way we stop listening to our guts. Or the little voice inside ourselves that might feel like a simple butterfly, becomes easily ignored. I think perhaps our parents tell us to suck up fear sometimes, so we quit listening to that intuition or instinct that tells us when there is danger. We start looking for “evidence” or “proof” of danger rather than accepting our butterflies as the evidence.
I don’t need proof that the man across the street might be dangerous to my child. My gut is telling me “don’t let her” and I’m going to listen. I’ve taken her out of childcare situations for the same reason – I just “had a bad feeling.”
What makes me the happiest is that my daughter is tuning into her intuition, instinct, gut feeling, conscience, God or still small voice of the Holy Spirit working inside her own self.
The trick is to teach a girl (or boy) to go with her gut rather than stifle it or ignore it. Otherwise, she’ll have to learn how to rely on it all over again, later in life after she’s already gotten into a bit of trouble.
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