Dismembering Onion Rings

A good way to kick off a Monday morning…

If… you are my son Finn. As mentioned in an earlier blog post this past Monday was Finn’s Spring Fling. I told him he could take the day off school and we’d do anything he wanted. A mental health day, if you will.

We went to the diner and he ordered Old Fashioned French Toast, a chocolate milkshake and onion rings. I ordered coffee, having devoured half a bag of Embody granola on my way home from the gym.

The main attraction was not so much the food as the experience of pulling the limp opaque white onion from its fried sheathing. My first inclination was to say no. It is enough to make you want to vomit on the spot.

BUT, our doctor said a free-thinking, creative, active child such as Finn has most likely been hearing NO in school far too much and the summer will be a welcomed relief from that!

Plus, the whole point of Spring Fling is to have NO RULES!

So, I said YES!

YES, let’s set the onions free! I helped him. Our styles varied quite a bit. I, personally, chose the all in one extraction. This requires slicing the onion ring and pulling it slowly out of its case.

Finn, on the other hand, subscribed to a more holistic approach… leaving the onion itself intact and peeling away the fried covering in bits and pieces. Seemingly, thousands of bits… enough to cover the placement and surrounding table area.

This is challenging for an obsessively neat, compulsively clean person.

But he looked so happy and focused. So I tried to embrace my inner chillaxed self… Problem is, I couldn’t find her.

I made a note to myself about getting on top of this lack of fun loving, easy-going attitude. Meantime I did my absolute best to smile and nod!

Thank god for cocktail party training because kids pick up everything.

We took pretty much all the food to go and Leo and Joe ate it later. We followed up breakfast with a couple hours of Hands On pottery. AND, we made Father Day’s gifts, which agreed tremendously with my love of efficiency.

I told him NOT to tell dad because we’d make it a surprise!

So, he told him first thing. THIS is obviously not that big of a deal. HOWEVER, it does not bode well for me: UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES can you tell ANYONE at school that you took the day off to goof off with mom!

As I went to bed last night, I thought about how fun it would be on Tuesday to interpret his teachers glare at pick-up. Was he just totally unfocused and impulsive? Or… does she know what happened on his sick day?

The truth is, he was sick.

Sick of school. Sick of being bossed around. Sick of rules. Sick of not measuring up to everyone else’s bar of who and how he supposed to be. He was sick!

And you know what? I think it’s high time we started diagnosing when their spirit is sick. When the heart of who they are is suffering from overload.

What if we allowed them to recharge, regroup, recalibrate how they can actually be present for everything they are being asked to do?

I feel like we all get continually lost of the fray of what everyone else wants.

Anyone else a bit overwhelmed with end of the year school parties and the opportunity volunteer to help?

The first phrase I taught Joe when we went to Paris was: Je suis tres fatigue (and then holding the back of his hand up to his forehead) et mal a la tete aussi.

I told him it was the most important expression you could now and I would tell him what it meant after he perfected it. It was our honeymoon so he went along with me. This gave me inexpressible joy.

I am tired and sick in the head as well.

I translated it after he had the accent and proper intonation down flawlessly. He can still say it pitch perfectly.

And although it was obviously a joke, it occurs to me now, maybe it is actually IS one of the most important expressions you can know.