People in the Milwaukee area start complaining about winter some time in late November, and they don’t stop until late May, when it’s almost warm enough to wear short sleeves again (with long pants). I think it’s a shame, because this is a spectacular place to winter over.

I spent my first decade in Seoul, which in the 60’s and 70’s was still a third-world metropolis without a whole lot of clean beauty on the streets. Jesse recently saw some black-and-whites from my wee childhood. She pored over the dirty, bleak winter cityscapes contemplatively. “Were you very poor then, mommy?” My next 8 years were in Stockton, the armpit of California, where the air was brown and snow never fell. I went one entire winter in high school without socks. You could drive to the mountains nearby, but that wasn’t what my family did. We stuck around Stockton, staying warm and bored. Eventually I ended up in the DC area for a long time. Once in a while we’d get hit with a great snow storm, but mostly it was unpleasant ice and freezing rain. Then we moved to St. Louis, where the winters, like the city, did nothing exciting at all for me.

Then came Milwaukee. There’s nothing sexy about the name and place, but that’s because Lake Michigan is profoundly underappreciated. When we arrived here, we were struck dumb by how beautiful the lakefront is, all up and down the state. Lake Michigan really is a freshwater ocean. What we didn’t realize is that the shore is really at its best in winter. In late winter, after it’s been extremely cold for a good long while, you can walk hundreds of yards past the summer shoreline on the frozen lake. Ice volcanoes are weird and wonderful. Nooks and crannies beckon, and little holes and caves are waiting to be eyed cautiously.  Catch all this in a snowstorm, and it will take your breath away.

Today Anthony and I took the kids to the Audubon nature reserve to hit the shore. It’s only a 10 minute drive away, and then it’s just a 3 or 4 minute pelting run after the kids as they race joyfully down to the lake. The walkable frozen shore today was still only a couple hundred feet past the sand, but there should still be another month of cold weather to take that out further. Well past where we could walk, perhaps 300 yards out to sea, there were rising stands of frozen volcanoes, with ice the unearthly blue color of glaciers. The arctic temperatures of the past few weeks have made everything beautifully cold cold cold.

We found ice formations that look like they belong in Yellowstone.

ice formations on the shores of Lake Michigan

There were crevices to explore, and holes to visit.

Anthony drops into a hole to rest

There were newly formed sheets of ice to skid across, with care. Jesse crawled into a deep crack and spent 15 minutes pulling out chunks of snow the size of cinderblocks to build a wall. We found spots where nature had formed heart-shaped sheets of ice in freshly-frozen parts of the lake’s surface. Happy Valentine’s Day from mother earth! We wandered and stared. We lay down here and there to soak it in. It was quiet and peaceful (except for when Nick became a dragon for a while, but we mostly ignored that), and as always, it reminded me in all the right ways that I’m grateful to be enjoying my kids’ magical childhood with them, right here in Milwaukee.

People complain and complain about the cold winter here. It drives me crazy. I don’t like being cold either, and we’ve got a drafty house for sure. But winter in Milwaukee gives us Lake Michigan at its finest (plus no mosquitos or biting flies!), and there’s always time for a warm snuggle with loved ones when it’s too cold to go outside. If you’re feeling down about the winter in Milwaukee, you might consider throwing on some snow gear and heading down to the lake. If that doesn’t take the grumpy out of you, I guess nothing will until May comes down the pike.

There are so many blessed lists to read every day on the Internet, on anything and everything you can possibly think of. It’s all so confusing and intimidating. Do I really, really need to eat those 7 foods every day to live past next year? I was so ashamed to learn that I only implemented 4 of the 27 ESSENTIAL child safety measures in my home while my kids were babies. Jesse and Nick are ruined. Why did that hiker magazine publish a list of the 14 most secret and amazing backcountry sites that no one knows about? Am I allowed to use the list? It’s so wrong. I know I’m missing something.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself over the past 47 years, it’s that I’m a joiner, and not like a power tool but like a lemming, a very low skill lemming. Accordingly, here is my list of 10 reasons why I don’t like numbered lists:

1. There appears to be no rule for how long lists are allowed to be. They should always be nice simple numbers, preferably on a metric scale and thus divisible by 5 or 10. Why would anyone publish a help list of, say, 17 items? It makes no sense to me to use any prime number of two digits or more. Why isn’t there some kind of list protocol equivalent to OSI or whatever those internet protocols are called? We could call it the LIP, list interface protocol.

2. I usually feel like lists are longer than they ought to be, like there’s filler or duplication. I don’t know why someone would add filler to get to a list of 14 items, when you can leave out the crap and do 10.

3. I don’t have the attention span to read most lists all the way. I usually drop out by 6 or 7. It makes me feel like I have ADHD, or list depression.

4. This is a filler item to make my list longer, because I’m running out of ideas.

5. I feel like lots of lists are written by needy people, which annoys me and makes me grumpy. It’s basically the author saying, I have so much advice for you! I am full of amazing insight and ideas! Look at me look at me! I made a list because I’m too lazy to write a whole piece about each item and also I might lose your attention before you realize how awesome I am! (Except for this list of mine, which is different because I’m not needy.)

6. My experience is that many lists are snarky in a way that implicates me. I don’t need to be told that I’m part of a large cohort of dorks. I already know that. Stop wasting my time.

7. List sharing makes me feel so left out. I’ve never really fit in, and now everyone’s into lists and I just don’t really get it. Everyone’s so cool and I’m such a dork and a loser. God, I’m lonely.

In a fey moment, Anthony and I decided to get the kids iPad minis for Christmas. We should have given them pajamas and socks instead. There would have been more collective joy in the long run.

Since 12/25/2013 I’ve been listening to a constant refrain of “can I play with my iPad?”, like the buzzing noise of plague locusts. Then there are constant demands for help, incessant requests for new games, and a lot of bitching about game results.

The iPad minis also generate some quiet moments for me, which I treasure and NEED. So it’s really my fault, because I say yes to their use much more than I should. So sue me.

It took just 6 weeks for Jesse to break hers, via a series of temper tantrums over whatever thing was bothering her, as well as a Tourette’s-ian need to drop the device experimentally onto any hard surface that presented itself to her attention. That test protocol achieved expected results when Jesse discovered last night that the screen is cracked all over. Then she performed a separate empirical test of how much emotional melting-down and ululating I can tolerate without turning into a yeti. A lot, apparently, but not as much as she wanted.

I tried explaining the cost of these devices, but my kids rarely see cash in this age of debit cards, so they can’t evaluate relative quantity as viscerally as I got to as a kid. I don’t have a stack of twenties sitting around. I also tried the food comparison perspective. (One iPad mini) + (1 failed safety cover) = (2 weeks of food for our entire family). EVEN THOUGH I SHOP AT WHOLE FOODS.

That emphatic closer, which I thought was compelling, got me nothing. Jesse gave me a teenage “whatever” glare. I think all Nick heard was a Peanuts adult (wa-wah, wa-wah).

I went to the Apple Store this morning and discovered that iPad mini screens won’t be repaired by Apple because they’re so fully integrated. All I can do is buy a replacement from Apple at cost for about 200 bucks or try to find some third party willing to take my money for a maybe-destroy-the-iPad repair attempt.

“Are you kidding me??” I snapped at poor J.J. from the Genius Bar. He didn’t look like a genius to me. I glared at him as his eyes wandered innocently around the store, la la la, but I didn’t curse even once. Good Carla, good. Bad Apple, bad.

I huddled with Anthony afterwards and he authorized me to make the following offer to Jesse: You can have a replacement iPad mini, or you can have a big birthday party this year, but not both.

I’m hoping desperately that she chooses the party, because then I don’t have to deal with this shit anymore. I’m also hoping desperately that she chooses the iPad mini, because then I don’t have to go through the hassle of putting on a big party.

Either way, I’m probably f#*%ed.

Last week I was all cheerful and upbeat. Not to worry. I’m back to grumpy and bleak. Jesse gave herself a hack-up haircut yesterday. It’s probably the 4th or 5th time since the first occasion when she was four.

We were having a boring Sunday. I woke up under the weather and with another bad rash from the swimming pool, so I was lazing about on the sofa feeling like crap and indulging my own needs. As a result, the children circled me like starving sharks coming in for a clean kill, needy emotional teeth bared. Then Jesse coughed on my face.

The face-cough is on my least-favorite-tics list. Jesse suddenly puts her face right next to mine and issues a bark-like cough right on my face. Often there’s spittle. Bonus! There’s no real explaining when or why, though no doubt it’s about stress and anxiety, and possibly hostility toward mama. Words can’t capture the feeling of invasion and insult her face-cough tic creates.

The tic thing seems to be an awful lot like OCD, which Jesse also struggles with. I could give her meds for these disorders, but I don’t want Jesse to explore that option until she’s an adult, if she still needs it. The best long-term “cure”, if there is one, is to exercise self control. That’s much harder than the words suggest, especially when you’re little and feeling a burning, burning, desperate need to do your tic and you don’t yet understand fully what the hell is going wrong in your brain. It probably feels just like sick diarrhea about to rip out of your feverish viral ass, or vomit you’re fighting to keep down, and the only way you’re going to be able to move on is to let it rip.

But if you want to win the tic battle, you have to face the fire and walk through it, eyes wide open. You have to say no to yourself, over and over again. You have to keep the shit and vomit in, until the wave passes. When you’re little, like Jesse, you also get to have mom and dad tell you not to do it, over and over again. Correcting and disciplining Jesse for her tics sucks. She’s working hard on this stuff, and I don’t expect her to be perfect. But I can’t let her get away with a tic, not once. I have to call her on it, every time, and ask her to muster the strength to keep beating this demon back. That’s her best chance for long-term success, and it’s a lot of pressure for a little girl.

So I sent her to her room when she coughed on me. Before she ran upstairs she crushed some play-do eggs in frustration, and as an added irritant Nick started bawling about it. He was being a jackass, fight-picking and overreacting, but Jesse takes that stuff to heart and gets down on herself. She slammed her door and I heard a variety of complaining and mewling sounds for a while. This was normal. Then silence, also normal. Eventually she crept out of her room and I heard her little pixie voice speaking quietly on the stairs. “Oh nooo. I cut my hair. Mommy?”

That was unexpected, but not novel. I’d been down this road before.

“Good for you,” I said. “Do you like how it turned out?”

I heard mewling whiny noises as a little blur sped down the stairs and across the room, landing under the dining room table in a fetal ball. She wouldn’t show me her face, so I went into the kitchen to chop up an apple. She finally agreed to join me for a snack, and her chair was perfectly placed for viewing. I eyed the blank spot around her left ear where hair used to be, thinking to myself, it’s only a couple inches. I can fix this without channeling Flock of Seagulls, and Jesse won’t have to wait 6 months to stop being lop-sided (that was her Kindergarten cut).

She started. “I’m sorry I cut my hair without your permission, mommy.”

I didn’t expect that. We’ve never talked about “permission” for that. So I replied, “you don’t need my permission. It’s your hair. You can do what you want with it, even cut it.” Then I asked the Big Question. “Why did you cut your hair, Jesse?”

I can imagine a lot of mundane answers that would be irritating but also funny. Jesse’s answer wasn’t one of those. She looked down; she sounded ashamed but firm. “I was punishing myself. I deserved it because I coughed on you and made Nick cry.”

Sometimes I think there’s no path to Jesse’s adulthood that won’t break me. Self-destructive behavior is a birthright for my lot, coupled with a good measure of self-loathing and addiction. We’ve gotten Jesse to stop hitting herself for now, but she’s always ready to beat herself up in some way or another. When I look in the crystal ball, I feel like I have only a few years left before more serious problems start appearing. Drugs, alcohol, self-abuse, sex, who knows. I know she’ll surprise me.

Dr. Abrams thinks I should be more optimistic. After all, Jesse’s family is walking through the fire with her, and we’re facing our collective demons together. But I’m decidedly NOT feeling good about it all tonight. I have the passion and commitment, but I’m not sure I have the stamina or the skill set Jesse needs to make it through her life whole.

It’s human nature to give it a go anyway, right? So we sat over the apple and talked about it, going through the motions of parent and child. We chatted about not hurting ourselves, about forgiveness and imperfection, about discipline versus “punishment.” We talked about love and self-love. We planned how I’d fix the cut, and then we went about the business of doing that.

Jesse has a very short and sassy bob now. I’ll try to add a picture here soon. She has silky straight hair that flounces about beautifully when it’s short, so this new do helps her look more cheerful and light-hearted. Here’s wishing it sinks in.