Lessons from Mary Poppins

Mary Poppins is my idol. 
She was confident and assertive, but knew fun and magic can be found anywhere. I would love to emulate her more in my life. Of course, Mary Poppins had a couple of advantages over me. I mean, she had supernatural abilities and a three-octave singing voice, for goodness sake. She slid UP the bannister, levitated tea-tables, and charmed children, bankers, and birds with her singing. My musical repertoire is pretty much limited to "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." My super powers are making food appear every night at dinner, and the ability to make my two-year-old disappear simply by holding a tissue in my hand. So I'm trying to focus on learning some of her more attainable skills.

On Self Esteem

Mary Poppins told people she was "kind but extremely firm" and "practically perfect in every way." Of course, since references are "a very old-fashioned idea, to my mind," we only have her word for it. So maybe she isn't quite as great as she says. I bring this up because it's important to have a positive attitude toward yourself, to say good things about yourself. I find myself talking to myself, about myself, in a way that would be totally unacceptable from another human being. When I make a mistake, in my head I sometimes call myself an idiot. I don't think I'm alone in this. But if more of us looked in the mirror every morning, sang a duet with our reflection, and then declared ourselves to be "practically perfect in every way," the world would be considerably closer to awesome. Persuading oneself to be great is an amazing skill.

On Cleaning Up

The most memorable scene in the movie is probably when they tidy up the nursery. Mary Poppins tells Jane and Michael that "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down," and "In every job that must be done there is an element of fun."
Turning chores into games totally works on my kids, as long as I make the effort to make it a compelling game. This doesn't mean complicated, or that I've developed super snapping abilities. (sigh. I wish. Is there a YouTube video tutorial out there?) Let's talk about the dress-up clothes that spend so much time on the floor that I'm pretty sure that hundreds of years from now future archaeologists will study the strata of tiaras and dresses and magician costumes in the remains of our house and write scholarly papers about The Use of Synthetic Fibers in Children's Ceremonial Garb in the Early Twenty-First Century.

There's a PhD in there somewhere

On occasion I decide that it is time to check the floor of April's room, to make sure the carpet is still the color I remember and that the squirrels aren't hiding under a pile of capes, and I gather my brood.  This is crucial: if I tell them to clean this mess, without a game or instructions, not only will the mess not get picked up, but it will immediately spread throughout the house because the girls will stop cleaning and start playing after approximately 37 seconds. So this is where the "element of fun" comes in.

"Okay guys, I'm setting the stopwatch! Let's see if we can beat our best time of one minute, fifty-six seconds! Remember, pick up a whole armful, not one little thing at a time. Ready-Set-GO!!"

And it works, which blows my mind. I mean, basically I'm getting them to clean up by telling them, in a super chipper voice, to do it super fast. This wouldn't work on me if I was, say, doing the dishes or mopping the kitchen or working on our taxes. If you told me I could get these things done by just going faster, I would roll my eyes at you. So. Hard. "What a revelation," I would say. And then I would gather my wits about me, turn off the instinctive sarcasm, and ask you to demonstrate for me on the dishes. I would pull a stool up to the kitchen island and make interested and admiring noises while you showed me how to put dishes in the dishwasher really quickly without breaking them. I would eat a cookie while telling you how amazing you are, and that I could never be as fast as you. Maybe you should do the dishes again tomorrow so I can watch and maybe figure out your technique, which seems super sophisticated.

On Bedtime

Bedtime seems like a simple task: put on pajamas, brush teeth, get in bed, turn off the light. But the reality is that there are days I would rather try to train a herd of cats than try to put my children to bed, because CPS wouldn't come calling if I gave up and put the cats in cages and walked out for an hour. The simplest things take an hour to accomplish. The kids suddenly remember things that absolutely have to be done right now. "I need to go through this stack of Scholastic book order forms and circle the ones I want!" (spoiler: they want the books that come with toys and gizmos.) They forget that they were putting on pajamas and play legos with their trousers around their knees and then get angry when I remind them to get dressed. ("I AM!" they insist indignantly, then go back to building a spaceship that fires flowers.) They dawdle, brushing each tooth individually. They remember how much they love us and have to come back downstairs three or four times to give hugs and kisses. (It would be more adorable if it didn't happen a full hour after we tucked them in.) They develop ailments and itches that torture them into wakefulness.

This is where the best Mary Poppins bit comes in. In the movie, after taking Jane and Michael on a outing to the park, the children are so wound up they can't calm down to sleep. She finally tells them, "Now, not another word or I shall be forced to summon a policeman." This is seriously my favorite line in the whole movie. It isn't so much applicable as it is hilariously reassuring. It gives me a great deal of comfort to know that even Mary Poppins got frustrated at bedtime, and resorted to outlandish empty threats in order to get peace and quiet. She was practically perfect, not totally perfect.

This makes me feel a lot better.