Tag Archives: Parenting

April 3, 2013 · 10:25 am

Ordinary, Extraordinary People

canstockphoto12816975She was optimistic, energetic, earnest and animated. Decision time. Do I say something funny, but sarcastic and possibly mean? Later, as I listened to her art presentation to a class of engaged elementary kids, something in me shifted slightly. My envy and inferiority and smugness dissipated and in its place, distilled and unfamiliar, was admiration. She was extraordinary and I had something to learn.

It is a hard won battle with myself, to see outwardly optimistic people without the lens of cynicism. Something sadistic in me wants to cut them down to size, wants to make them see reality, wants to make them realize that life is hard and not particularly sunny and why the hell are they always freaking smiling? I want them to be real, failing to remember that their real and my real are two entirely different animals.

Why this necessity to force someone to view the world as I do? Am I so uncomfortable with myself that I irrationally need to create a mini-me, in order to feel like I belong? Are outwardly happy people such an anathema to me that I must right the situation?

I ask this question more frequently of myself than I ever did before.  Since having a child, I regularly cross paths with other people who raise, teach or care for children. These are often soft-spoken, patient, gentle people who get down on the floor and play. They smile a lot. They shrug off temper tantrums and seem interested when a child tells their never-ending story in gasping breaths.

I’ll be the first to admit that I often feel uncomfortable around children. I was the person who never wanted to hold other people’s babies because the child would sense imminent danger and in a wail, shriek out “Baby-dropper, baby dropper!” You would have heard it, if you spoke baby. Now, in case you wondered, I managed to get my baby upright and independently walking without actually dropping her on her head. Although after one 6 hour crying jag (hers and eventually mine), I was sorely tempted.

The down side to being assertive and intense and introverted is that my people skills border on misanthropic. I’m uncomfortable with how uncomfortable I am. I’ve read that one of the guidelines to success (and I assume that purveyors of these guidelines mean happiness) is to surround yourself with the people who have qualities you aspire to possessing as well.

Here’s the beautiful thing about kids and people who work well with kids. They don’t care if you’re a misanthropic, awkward adult. They are so damned happy you are there and involved, that they laugh along with your wry commentary. They seem delighted to see you. Every damned time. When I visit a classroom, I’m popular. Not through my dour personality, but because I’m there. I have days when it nearly brings me to tears. How would life be, if every time you walked into a room, you were flocked to and welcomed? It’s a marvelous, heady feeling.

Connecting with optimistic people has not been deliberate on my part, but my dark subconscious mind must understand how badly I need to be engulfed by light. I am surrounded by people who lift me up and it astonishes me  – and I suspect, saves me from disappearing into the shadows.

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March 19, 2013 · 7:13 am

Self-sufficiency in a World of Automated Doors

Last night I taught my daughter how to sew. I wish I could write that sentence without a snort of derision. In 8th grade, I had a home economics teacher who was more concerned about being popular with the cool kids than whether or not she taught me. She held my shirt project up in front of the class and they all had a good laugh. One sleeve was two inches shorter than the other. From that point on, I believed that I could not sew.

canstockphoto2020194The women in my family do not cook. Basic dishes can be made under duress -  like four hungry children and a state mandate that they should be fed. I believed also that I could not cook. I did know, under the tutelage of parental OCD, how to clean the hell out of things. My hands look like a sharecropper’s, from the many hours spent dipping into scrub buckets of hot, soapy water. Cleaning was cheap and manageable and gave some semblance of control in a world of government cheese and subsistence living.

These days, I am middle class living below my means, but unlike gun enthusiasts, my apocalyptic preparations involve learning basic skills – how to grow my own food, cook meals from basic ingredients, sew and fix things. Sure, none of it will mean anything when the starving gun enthusiast steals all my stuff at gunpoint, but we share a similar institutional paranoia. The government has some ‘splainin’ to do about how it has manipulated our food supplies, set up regulatory entities that don’t regulate and allowed us to become so dependent on corporations that we can hardly open doors on our own.

Paranoia aside, there is something personally gratifying about knowing how to do things on your own. I am self-taught on just about anything domestic and it seems more important now that I have a child. In an age of information, you can find directions on how to do just about anything, but I want her to remember what her mother taught her – how to Google. Barely kidding. My daughter will know how to cook and sew for herself, though. She will know that she is capable of growing food. She will know what homemade means.

Last week, while getting a class on art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, I was amazed at the intricate and beautiful beadwork done by the Ojibwe Native Americans. No machines, no YouTube videos, no prepackaged kit – hand sewn and woven. The time and effort required must have been intense. And that is what it boils down to – time. We say we don’t have time for anything, but that’s rarely true. We have plenty of time, but the many ways in which we can spend it, diverts it into tiny fragments, the moment, the now.

I taught myself to bake bread. I found a recipe on the internet. After a few practice rounds, I modified the recipe more to my liking. It’s time-consuming, but only requires basic ingredients and an oven. I don’t bake our bread all the time, but enough so that I know the recipe by heart and my daughter will have images of her childhood that include a mother baking bread. It is weirdly important to me that she remembers more than mommy surfing the internet.

canstockphoto3932201This spring, we will plant another garden. We’ve experimented over the years and have learned the hard way about growing things organically (damn you, squash bugs!). Our suburban yard is not a vast acreage, but every time growing season comes around, it seems like miles, as it teems with a wide variety of foods. We have a cherry tree, raspberries, blackberries, and Concord grapes that grow on the border of our vegetable garden. Each year we try new things. My daughter has, over the years, stood in the middle of it, alternately eating green beans and raspberries straight off the plants.

In an age when we barely have to climb stairs or pick our own food or sew our clothes, we become further removed from the making of the goods we use, wear and eat. I feel uncomfortable with that. A vision of a gigantic urban over-pampered baby comes to mind. Helpless, waiting for someone, dependent on whatever we are given. It’s unlikely I’ll be living “off the grid” any time soon, but even maintaining the slightest self-sufficiency makes me imagine that if I had to, I could.

Kirsten Whyte wrote yesterday that she’d like to un-invent automated doors, which got me thinking about self-sufficiency. Thanks for the inspiration, Kirsten!

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March 4, 2013 · 9:23 am

Saying Good-Bye to Parenting Advice

canstockphoto11601244There is some information that worms its way inside your head and grows, like a lab culture, into self-doubt and judgment. For me, it ranges from blogging advice to how I’m supposed to give a rat’s ass about fashion (that advice dies a quick death, but it’s there). Parenting advice is the absolute worst, though. It made me feel both ineffectual and incompetent, doubting even the most minor lapses.

I commented on someone’s blog post yesterday regarding kids and food. I immediately wanted to delete it, because it felt wrong. Apparently, I was the milder of pompously commenting parents, who were both defensive and right. Any parent worth their salt knows that kids have a way of turning us into know-it-alls or angrily sensitive about our parenting choices (two sides of the insecurity coin, methinks).

When I started out as a parent, I was hungry for advice. I wanted to get it right. I went to classes, I talked enthusiastically with other mothers. I read books. I watched videos. I listened to CDs. I familiarized myself with Ferber, Sears, Faber & Mazlish and the five million other parenting advice gurus.  I researched best methods for potty training and eating and even, I am embarrassed to say, how to play. My daughter had Baby Einstein playing when her biggest interest was waving her fingers in front of her face.

Getting it right had little or nothing to do with my actual child. It was a fear that I would be a bad parent. It was a fear that I would be an inconsistent misery to live with and that my child would be a reflection of that chaos. I put into practice all kinds of advice, 90% of which did nothing but make more work for me and I think, slightly bemuse her. Reward charts, potty celebrations, signing up for classes, reading yet more books and on and on and on.

About three years in, I stopped reading advice books. Incentive systems got tossed out the window. I was too tired. She was growing up in spite of my best efforts to turn her into a baby genius, super athlete and much better version of me. I started to just be amazed and curious about the person she was actually becoming.

Fortunately, once kids get older, people stop offering arbitrary advice. Old ladies stop telling you how all their children were potty-trained straight out of the womb and how a good swat will set the little miscreants right. Other parents learn to bite their tongues – in front of you – but you’re on trial when you’re out of earshot. I’m just as guilty of this – watching from afar and feeling smug that my child doesn’t like Cheetos or eat dirt. Until she does.

The things that I look back on, which were most valuable to our experience as a family, may be utterly different than someone else’s experience and yet our kids will be just as well-adjusted and happy. I ignored a lot of advice in favor of intuition about my child. I slept with her the first year, my arm outstretched above my head to avoid rolling over on her. I gave up trying to potty train her. A mere few months later (it felt like forever), she decided to do it on her own.

We are strict parents in some ways. Manners are always enforced. Fruits and vegetables required. School is first priority. TV watching is limited. But also lax in others. Mud is good. Hair combing is optional. Farts are funny. How she looks is her choice.

I am firmly against corporal punishment. I grew up with it and while many people like to say “I got hit as a kid and I grew up fine”, I didn’t grow up fine. I grew up struggling and fearful. I grew up wishing for nothing more than the power to strike back. She’s never been hit, but has occasionally gotten a retributive face lick or noogie. We’re barbarians.

We don’t insist on the best for her, but she is adept at making the best of every situation. We say no a lot, but are learning to pick our battles.  We admit when we’re wrong and rarely use “because I said so” as a reason.

Parental self-righteousness is shaky at best and in its place, a truism remains strong. Just when you think you’ve got it right, you’ll be wrong. Nothing seems to put people up on their high horses faster than parenting advice. Enjoy your 8 seconds of “I would never…” because you will and then you will completely forget what a judgmental prick you were before you did.

There is no doubt that parenting advice has value when it leads you out of the tall grass. When it is about the best footwear or which path to take or what snacks to take along, sometimes it’s best to ignore advice and just enjoy the journey.

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February 5, 2013 · 6:00 am

You Were One of Them, Once

canstockphoto1661289

I try very hard to not use this blog as a vehicle for pointless ranting, but on occasion, I just have to get it out. Today I read that some airlines are now having child-free seating. I have high hopes for asshole-free seating, but the screening process may be too subjective. I’m fed up with people complaining about everything under the sun, but the vitriolic rants unleashed about children and parents alike are getting out of hand.

I don’t have a natural affinity for kids. I’ll be honest. I’m fond of quiet environments. I don’t like my seat being kicked or finding stray boogers attached to arm rests. But, holy shit, when did our intolerance for humankind become so high that we now need to travel in our own little bubbles?

I don’t think my little darling is the center of the universe (mine perhaps, but not everyone else’s). When she was a toddler, I had to swiftly escort her from a grocery store when she had a temper tantrum. Of course, I did not escape without being glared at – it was humiliating.  Parenting is hard, but apparently being a spectator is even worse. And please don’t regale me with bullshit tales about how your parents beat you into submission or silenced you with a glance. And that you never acted up or were tired or hungry or scared. You need to sit in the memory-free section, apparently.

Intolerance has reached an all-time high in our society, where people are allowed to sue and rail against and be indignant about and indulged over every petty little irritant, all while living in their annoying and hypocritical glass houses, yakking on their cell phones and snipping their toenail clippings off in every direction. Humans are annoying. Little humans are annoying, too – they’re just slightly more ignorant about that fact.

Kids aren’t for everyone. I get it. But neither are crabby old people and boorish salesmen and perfume-y blabbers or depressed slackers who smell like smoke or uptight business people attached to their umbilical cords of technology and miniature booze bottles. Everyone likes to think that they are models of decorum, even if they whistle when they breathe, crack their knuckles, shake their leg nervously, expel heavy sighs every two minutes or have to get up to pee every five. Loud people, smelly people, cranky people, lonely people – which are you today and why should I put up with it?

I’ll tell you why. Because none of us are any more special than the other. We’re humans. I am a naturally irritable person and I have a low sensory tolerance for all kinds of shit. But is that your problem? Are your behaviors any less legitimate than my pissiness? It’s on me to cultivate compassion and tolerance. It is my responsibility. What someone else does, unless it endangers my safety, is a gift, an everyday challenge to my abilities to be tolerant, to not rage, to not believe that my space and time should be an inviolate temperature-controlled soundproof buffer zone at all times.

There’s a lot of people on this planet. Airlines are doing their best to keep a flailing industry aloft by screwing over their economy passengers with miniscule seat space and a passenger starvation plan. I get claustrophobic just looking at the picture of airline seats. I’m pretty sure as kids, most of us weren’t shoved elbows to ass into a tin can and asked to respect each others’ space/privacy/knees jammed into the back of the seat.

They’re creating box seats for the corporate elite and are growing a segregated seating system. Does anybody remember sucking secondhand smoke during an entire flight? With how many more irritations will we feed airlines’ sagging bottom lines? They are doing their damnedest to turn us all into intolerant jerks. I want, I deserve, you have no right to, you shouldn’t… It reminds me of Dr. Doolittle’s Pushmi-pullyu with decency stuck squarely in the middle. This sense of entitlement to a pristine environment is a losing game on a planet with 7+ billion people.

We’re getting ready to take our daughter on her first airline flight this next year. The intolerant better hope they don’t end up sitting next to me. They’ll wish they’d purchased a ticket in the snore and vomit-free seating section.

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December 2, 2012 · 8:27 am

Finding Your Way Without a Star

canstockphoto0108300We are a secular family, so every December, we wend our way through a minefield of holiday traditions. When you’re an adult, you have settled on a belief system that hopefully gets challenged and re-evaluated on a regular basis. One of the things that forces you to look things over again is having a child.

This is a particularly difficult subject to even write about, because I know it can be emotionally charged for many people. Please don’t try to convert me. I don’t operate that way and you shouldn’t tire yourself out.

My husband and I had our biannual heated discussion about religion yesterday. He was raised in a Lutheran Church with a sense of community and belonging. His experiences with God and organized religion were so inherently positive, that he doesn’t understand my disinterest and occasional hostility.

I was raised and baptized into the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. I attended church regularly until I was 13. There are evangelical and orthodox churches that are much more intense. The SDA rates about an 8, between churches you only attend on holidays and churches at which you make animal sacrifices. People are fierce about their beliefs and this is the point at which I depart. I don’t know the answers and I’m really comfortable with that. I don’t know if there is any god or twenty.

People of faith talk of being touched by the hand of God, but I’ve never felt that touch in organized religion. There are things in the world that make me feel that way – when I am outside, in nature, when I watch my husband and daughter play together or when I read or see astounding literature or art or music (the first note of a live music performance is rapturous).

As a child, I believed everything that I was taught at church, so hellfire and damnation were just around the corner waiting for me for the mildest infractions. We were once read a story in Bible study class to illustrate that the Sabbath is a holy day. A little girl went rollerskating on the Sabbath and she broke her leg. What kind of God does that? The church had movie night on Sundays. I saw the apocalyptic movie “A Thief in the Night”. For months after that, I expected to wake one morning to find my family gone and “666″ burned on my forehead. I was 10 years old, two years older than my daughter is now.

I have a hard time with organized religion and man made ideas of God for a few reasons:

Chauvinism. This is where my husband and I part ways on a very intrinsic level. It’s taken me years to come into my own as a woman and to recognize that no one has the right to belittle or abuse me. I have a knee-jerk reaction about men telling me what to do. Most major religions have chauvinism built right into the system, from using texts that treat women as property, whores or virgins, to blocking them from being church leaders.

Born Sinners. Some religions purport the idea that children are born inherently flawed and in need of redemption. I find this disturbing, especially now that I’m a parent. I could never look into a baby’s eyes and see evil – although all that crying, spitting up and pooping reminds me of “The Exorcist”.

Hypocrisy. I’ve simply met too many people who have declared themselves, imposed themselves and announced themselves to be of a particular faith when they are the people I would least put my faith in. I feel the same way when people say “I’ll be honest with you” right before they lie or “I don’t want to hurt your feelings” right before they insult you.

Exclusivity. For many religions, proselytizing and spreading the word are a requirement. The inherent nature of telling people how wonderful your beliefs are, is that you are saying that you know the answer and anybody else is, well, not a member of the club.

Exceptionalism. I realize I’m being petty, but every time there is a disaster and people die, there are always people who say this to the news camera: “God was looking out for me.” In their relief that they survived, they express gratitude that God skipped everyone else to save just them. It defies logic.

I had a great exchange with S. Smith, the author of Seed Savers this week. It was regarding the knee-jerk reaction people have to religious references – a reaction of which I’m definitely guilty. My daughter just finished the first book in Ms. Smith’s series, called “Treasure”. The book was wonderful and the biblical references fitting, but I had to look beyond my own prejudices to see that. Wisdom can come from a variety of sources and I believe, for many people, organized religion and spiritual text serves a positive purpose.

I spent about five years of my adult life “church shopping”, trying to find a place where I felt comfortable, where I could find a spiritual home. It was me, not the churches. Much like the old Groucho Marx quote “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.” The bottom line is that I’m an introvert. Clubs, meetings, congregations, parties, riots – these cause me anxiety and do not keep me grounded in humbling and spiritual thoughts. Religious beliefs are personal, but so is one’s experience with organized religion.

How will this translate for my daughter? She knows a little about a lot of religions. We read and talk about religious and philosophical texts in our home. When she is curious enough, we will take her to a range of church services. She must know her choices to make choices, so my daughter will be raised with a weird hybrid of religion and nature and art. But she was born good and we’ll do our best to help her remain on that path.

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November 24, 2012 · 7:58 am

Making Family Where You’re At

The holiday season is a great time to realize, once again, everything that is wrong with your family. This used to be a really hard time of year for me. I have a very small family of origin that fled our shared memories of misery and abuse. I haven’t spoken to my brothers in over a decade. My sister, who is considerably younger than I, stays in touch, but we have an uneasy relationship, much of which is tied up in mutual ambivalence about our mother. My normal is like a lot of people’s normal. It’s not.

As I continue to write my novel, Phoenix Rock, the character relationships are complex, alternating between deeply ambivalent and complete apathy. But I have created some loving relationships between siblings – relationships tainted by a secret, but relationships that can heal. It has made me think about my siblings and the past and the complex emotions we have shared. I am revisiting a sadness that I have not felt in a long time. After years of trying to awkwardly, painfully talk to each other, we gave up. There was too much geographical and emotional distance between us. We see each other as the children of thirty years ago, frozen in a time when there was incredible unhappiness.

A friend pointed out to me that I am trying to resolve those issues in writing this novel, but I believe that there is no resolution in real life, only acceptance. Like a Lifetime movie, one of us would need a unique organ transplant before we’d be able to unfreeze and move forward. We’re beyond blame and recriminations. We have lives and families across the country from each other. When what you share is an overarching unhappy story, there is little to motivate you to try and start again. Maybe one of us will need that organ, but like mending the past, it’s a long shot.

Over the years, as I’ve traveled and moved about, I have spent very few holidays alone. Early on I developed the skills to create a family wherever I was at the time. In the Army, I’d organize parties for many of us that weren’t traveling home for the holidays, cramming people into my small German efficiency apartment or serving a holiday meal to 30 people from the closet-sized communal kitchen in the barracks at Ft. Ord. Like my childhood holidays, it usually involved a lot of booze.

When I was single, I’d make a big meal on Valentine’s Day and invite disparate people like me, from work or school or the neighborhood. I’ve had some oddball gatherings. When I was struggling financially and didn’t have a car, I would still make a big Thanksgiving dinner and friends would travel to see me. I learned to appreciate the relationships I had and how to meet my needs for a sense of shared camaraderie – a sense of belonging somewhere in the world.

I have a small family now as well, but it’s a loving one. Even though both my husband and I came from relatively big families, we married late and that determined that we’d only have one child. She’s enough for us, but I often worry about the task we’ve set before her. She was disappointed at Thanksgiving this year. She’s always been the youngest, but the other kids have grown into teenagers who are not so interested in playing with an eight year old. She is an outgoing child who has had to learn how to live in a world peopled by adults. We have a lot of play dates for her, but the holidays are different, highlighting a lack of similarly-aged companions.

My husband and I console ourselves by recognizing that the presence of siblings is no guarantee of friends or playmates. But in the end, when we are gone, they would be the people who would have shared her collective memory of her childhood and family life. I’d like to believe that if she’d had siblings, they would have had happy adult relationships.

There are a lot of ‘only child’ myths that persist, but my daughter has a wide open heart that says she will be loved by people other than her parents. I hope that as she grows up and begins travels of her own that she can make home where she finds it. I hope that we will have helped her develop the skills to seek out those people who would be her family. I hope that she can find her sense of place in the world. I hope…

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November 18, 2012 · 10:38 am

Turning the Holiday Bulldozer Around

Do you feel that? Do you hear that? It is the sound of a stampede of retailers preparing to ruin the next two months for you. But it’s not just the retailers – it’s your office holiday planners, it’s your mediocre pop and country singers, your great Aunt Marge’s sewing circle, your children’s classmates. Everyone is gearing up for the holiday season. Scheduling parties, making commercials, making homemade gifts, talking about what they’re going to get, to give, to make, to take.

I’ve already been asked by relatives what we want to do for Christmas. It’s an easy answer – we do nothing on that day. We have our old beaten down artificial tree with its ratty homemade ornaments and our time worn traditions of pretending there’s a Santa Claus. It’s just our little family of three, in our pajamas, hanging out, playing games. We don’t go anywhere, we have a nice, but not extravagant meal. We play favorite music, we watch old movies. Time stands still.

I dislike the full-on dumping of sentimentality at the holidays, as if we’ve been hoarding it all year long. We get to spend a lot of time with people we wouldn’t pick as friends. Small children, who have spent the year entertaining themselves with cardboard boxes and mud, now expect a 76 trombone parade to accompany the loads of cheap crap we give them. We, the adults, goad ourselves into overspending, telling ourselves “it’s for the kids”.  That’s bullshit – most of us are trying to resolve or replicate our childhoods. Our kids are often bemused by our holiday craziness.

Our daughter has never believed in Santa Claus. She was an inquisitive child and her continued interrogation of me meant that I would have to recite one lie after another. I wasn’t comfortable with that, because someday, I’ll really need her to trust and believe me when I say “don’t drink and drive” or “people who love you don’t hit you”. After a discussion with my husband, we went with the truth. She’s a smart kid and I think parental integrity is going to be a necessary tool in our arsenal for the future.

When we discussed this issue in one of my parenting groups years ago, I was chastised for taking away my daughter’s holiday, taking away the magic that is Christmas. Really? The magic that is Christmas is an old white guy breaking into our house and leaving crap from his sweatshop staffed by little people? I asked my daughter what her favorite thing about the holiday season was. Her immediate answer was “cookies”.

Every year, we bake cookies and make up gift bags for friends and relatives, with Kleenex packs, hand lotion, lip balm, cough drops and hot cocoa packets. We spend an entire day baking cookies. The next day we decorate and package them up. We get punchy after so much decorating and burst into giggles as our cookies start looking more and more Picasso-esque. We have cyclops snowmen and gingerbread ladies with clown noses and googly eyes. We talk about where our charity money is going for the year. We spend time. Together. Doing something for someone else.

I didn’t start out with a plan for our family holidays. We would drag ourselves through various rituals imposed upon us, attending multiple celebrations to deal with shared custody situations in relatives’ families. I would get angrier and more exhausted. I began to hate the holidays. I hated the shopping. I hated the forced cheerfulness. I hated the constant stream of holiday music (and I LOVE music) and stupid commercials designed to make you feel like your family was the anti-Waltons or the dysfunctional Huxtables.

I put the brakes on about three years ago. It was hard at first. People would buy gifts for our family and I’d feel a little miserly giving them their bag of baked goodies with the winter wellness kit. I kept waiting for their gifts to taper off or for similar ideas to crop up from their side, but it never happened. Now I only have to make a couple of shopping trips to get supplies. And I like to believe that my daughter, who receives exactly two presents (one from Mom & Dad, one from “Santa”), understands the magic of the holidays – spending time together and the joy of giving to others. Plus, our cookies are REALLY good.

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November 13, 2012 · 8:36 am

Congratulations! You Barely Met My Expectations

Michelle, we’d like you to know how much we’ve appreciated your presence and to let you know that we’ve come up with a new review and salary plan for your role here.

I am intrigued. Please sir, continue.

We’ve noticed that Bob is doing great at his job and you are sucking eggs at yours. In order for you to keep your job, we’ve decided to lower our minimum expectations of your work performance.

I am astonished. I protest.

But Bob was mentored into his role. He received extra training and hand holding. How can I compare when you just stuck me at a computer and left me alone for three years?

Your smile is magnanimous and you try to speak in small words.

This is the boo-boo we’re addressing. Don’t you see? You only have to show up and the next raise is yours!

He waits for my grunt of enthusiasm, but I continue to stare dumbly, as is my wont to do.

The next day, I come into the office wearing my pajamas, load up Netflix and microwave some popcorn. No point in doing much else.

I’ve been listening to the news and reading articles regarding the latest move by the state of Virginia’s education board. To address testing disparities among specific races (yes, let’s use that term), they’ve set different minimal standards for kids, depending on whether or not they are Asian (highest standards), White, Hispanic, Black or kids with disabilities. Before I jump in with a political correctness knee-jerk response, I want to say that I recognize the difficulty and expense of addressing the education gap. It seems nearly intractable, but not impossible.

We heard very little talk about the decimation of our country’s education system during this election cycle. Like infrastructure, it cannot be treated like a short term budget trick, trimming and cutting a little here and here and here. This will truly bite us all in the ass. For people without kids, your ass will be bitten too, because these kids are the economic crystal ball that determines quality of life in your dotage. It says a lot about our country that our war machine is well-oiled and maintained, while the machinery that educates our offspring lies rusting away under benign budgetary neglect.

What Virginia has decided to do is to take the most expeditious and least expensive route towards making their state education’s report card look good, in order to receive funding from the federal government. They, like 32 other states, get money while being exempt from portions of the federal No Child Left Behind program. Regardless of how you feel about the NCLB law, Virgina has lowered their expectations of the children in their state. They are focusing on a forward-looking goal by walking backwards.

I am not an educator, so I can only look at this issue from a personal and parental perspective. What impact does it have on a person’s psyche when they are told that the expectations for their performance is lower than that of the person next to them, because that is all they can manage? I would feel defeated before I even began.

Here’s the deal. It’s okay for Asians to have dumb ass kids and okay for blacks to have geniuses. Don’t institutionalize your inability to problem solve by telling kids that the baseline expectations for their performance are dependent on their race. We’ve been there, done that. We have some brilliant minds in this country, many of whom are products of a public education system. Time to put our creative minds, our imaginations and our money to work to realize a bright, intelligent future for our nation. We should expect nothing less of ourselves or of our children.

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October 31, 2012 · 10:04 pm

The Women in My Tribe

I had an experience today that I haven’t had in a long time. I met someone I want to induct into my tribe.

My tribe of women is not formal – most of the time the members have no idea that they belong. There’s a longtime playwright friend and mentor – generous, encouraging and talented. There’s a woman I’ve worked for over the last decade – thoughtful, grounded, physically fit and funny. There’s a “mom” friend, starting her own cottage industry, with common sense and a great sense of humor. There is my personal trainer and friend, who is smart and well-read and passionate about issues. There’s my mother-in-law, who has such a lovely temperament despite the fact that hearing loss means she misses out on most conversations (we could probably learn something from that). There’s a dear friend with whom I spend inordinate amounts of time Skyping, because she “gets” me.

Today I met another one of those women – interesting, passionate, intelligent, animated and willing to take responsibility for her worth in the world. I love those amazing moments when you meet someone and things click. Admittedly, I tend to be in awe of powerful women. I love women who know themselves so completely and express a full range of human emotion. They can be emotional and be powerful. They can have flaws, but not bend over backwards apologizing to anyone who crosses their paths. They can take a compliment and not be an arrogant jerk. They can be loud and brassy, and still be sensitive and kind. They can demand their value in the world and still be humble.

I grew up around women where passive-aggression was an art form. You could control people by pursing your lips or giving a backhanded compliment or sighing dramatically and making a “poor me” statement.  You couldn’t just come right out and say what you wanted or felt. That would be selfish. I was raised to be a consummate wallflower, to write bad melodramatic poetry and to stuff every emotion down until I was a seething ball of rage. Don’t bring attention to myself. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t be loud. Don’t ask for too much.

Having a daughter has changed me and not in the maternal, isn’t-she-adorable kind of way. I have written this before, but mothering a girl has forced me to think about and decide what I want to teach her. Leading by example is simply the best way to teach and influence. It is no longer okay for me to be indirect, subtle, and passive-aggressive. It is no longer okay for me to be falsely humble, to deflect compliments (oh, this old thing?) and to devalue my skill set so I don’t appear to be bragging. You can be self-deprecating without being self-defecating.

One of my favorite things about the women in my tribe is that they laugh. Some of them have wonderful, loud, barking laughs – the public kind that, in the past, would have had me sinking down in my chair and pretending that I didn’t know them. Now I know the secret to their joyfulness – they have carved their place in the world.  And most of the time, they’ve got a great tribe of their own. I hope they’ll let me in. No – I DEMAND that they let me in. Please? If you wouldn’t mind. I don’t want to be a bother. I guess I’m just a terrible friend and human being.

I might have to do a little more work, before meeting the membership requirements.

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October 11, 2012 · 9:49 pm

Gender Benders

Yesterday, my daughter told me about her recent school picture session. The photographer asked her name and she told him. His assistant came over and asked her what her name was again. He whispered loudly in the photographer’s ear, “He says that IS his name”. My daughter’s name is decidedly a typical girl’s name – even in most foreign languages. They were not to be dissuaded from a quickly drawn, preconceived opinion, despite evidence to the contrary.

My daughter insists on a Harry Potter haircut and refuses to wear girl’s clothes. She has a clear case about the clothes, as those marketed to girls are not utilitarian, primary colors or found without “bling”. Somewhere between the cute-animal-primary-colors toddler clothing and turning six, my daughter was supposed to become a corporate shill for Hannah Montana, with the clothing preferences of a “Jersey Shore” resident. So believe me when I say, I’m thrilled she loves blue jeans and simple cotton t-shirts.

It’s a beautiful age for children to be wild and wonderful, before society steps in and tells them what they are supposed to look like. An elderly family friend expressed concern that my child would become a lesbian if she never wore dresses. That was at least laughable. Less funny was when one of my daughter’s teachers made her draw long hair on a self-portrait, so that people would know she was a girl. I hardily endorsed a subversive replacement of the drawing.  On a fairly regular basis other girls at school tell my daughter that she is in the wrong bathroom. When she relays these stories, I ask her if it bothers her. The mistaken gender doesn’t bother her, it’s being called a liar when she tries to correct them.

My daughter has a lot of friends who are boys and during play dates, they’ll pull out the costume box. He’ll be a wood sprite and she’ll be a Jedi knight – no judgments, no questions, just being what appeals to them in the moment. She’s drawn to adventure and action stories. There are very few fictional venues where girls are the action heroes (at least ones that don’t have pointy Madonna bustiers). There’s lots of super smart sidekick action, but she actually wants to be in the heat of battle with Voldemort or the Sheriff of Nottingham or the White Witch.

I worried early on that I somehow made being a girl seem so incredibly unappealing (housework, discipline, mysterious monthly stomachaches – what the hell kind of imaginative play is that?), that she was simply rejecting gender stereotypes out of hand. That was egocentric of me, since it has become obvious to me that kids are born with their personalities from the get go. This girl kicked her way through my entire pregnancy, already roundhouse kicking my rib cage and having imaginary sword fights with my bladder.

It took me years to become as enlightened as my daughter is at this moment in time. I never questioned dresses or forehead stretching ponytail holders. My tomboy self came in the form of ripped tights, torn lace, missing buttons and “lost” barrettes. I climbed trees, fences, did death-defying skateboard and bicycle stunts, ran with a mob of little hooligans, all at the expense of my ill-fitting, uncomfortable clothes.

I didn’t know anything about gender wars or feminism or how I was supposed to look – I just was. In my preteen years, when boys held more than a passing interest, I recognized that I would rather be a boy than kiss one. I just couldn’t see what the appeal of being a girl was – painful hairdos, being told how unladylike I was and the insistence that I be quiet, be still, be invisible. I knew who had the power and it wasn’t girls. I became quiet and well-behaved, all the while daydreaming that I was the new sheriff in town, six guns a-blazing, with a wild West holler.

These days, it’s easier for girls to cross gender lines in terms of doing, but the expectations of how girls should look have such a long way to go. My daughter is going as Robin Hood for Halloween and wrote a sign to wear: “I am NOT Peter Pan”. She’s my hero.

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