Last night the Chatterings held a family meeting at the dining room table. We took turns holding a “talking stick,” which initially was a lit candlestick ringed with tiny Christmas ornaments. Later, when the candlestick proved too distracting and delicate, we switched to holding a long paintbrush.

I am an Aries and always the first to talk, so the opening theme was that my life has become unmanageable. I am blogging all day, not exercising enough, struggling to keep the house in order, cooking without any assistance from the rest of the family, preparing for the upcoming religious festivities, and worried that we haven’t finished our homemade teacher gifts.

More aggravating than all that, the Chattering sons have been fighting more. Lately, it has seemed like they couldn’t get into the car without rudely punching or stepping on each other, then arguing about who had slugged the other first. The angry climate is taking its toll on me as well. Yesterday, one boy had mislaid his vitamin-C-loaded candies in the car’s backseat, and when he got upset about this, I yelled at him. At the family meeting, I confessed that I felt awful about this.

“What are we to do?” I asked. I acknowledged that Mr. Chattering and I tend to be disorganized at home. We have not instituted any chore chart or regular chore schedule. We forget to consistently give the boys a weekly allowance. It is our wish to improve, I said.

Then the nine-year-old Chattering took the talking stick and (after pretending it was a microphone and saying “Hi” into it a dozen times), he said something that bowled me over.

He felt we should do more yoga. Together.

Ah, that’s just what Chattering Mind’s son would suggest, you say with bemused
admiration (or annoyance.) But no! Although I’ve exposed the boys to yoga, I’ve tried hard not to push it on them for fear they would reject it and never use it in college!

“Yoga!” I said. “You mean doing it in the mornings or after school as a group?”

“Yes,” he said. He said that he had found that, when he did it, he didn’t feel quite as angry.

But then, this morning, he came down for breakfast, happily listening through earphones to an old Ramones CD.

“Hey!” I said, looking over my shoulder at the clock. “I thought we were going to do yoga!”

“Huh? I can’t hear you!”

“The yoga! The yoga!”

“What?”

Stay tuned, friends. The idea is in play, but the execution is something we haven’t yet mastered.