It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

More than a byline

Normally I try not to pay much attention to comments on my posts or articles.  It’s almost impossible to write in the age of the internet and take such things seriously.  That way lies madness.  But the last few weeks, I’ve felt sensitized to the endless division and judgment that has become so much a part of computer culture.  I’m tired, again, of people judging those they’ve never met, of calling names or saying things in public fora that they would never say in person.  It feels cowardly and slimy and mean.

We’re all guilty of it to some extent.  I’ve done it, too, ranted about the “idiots” who espouse such-and-such opinion.  It’s easy to forget that behind every posting is a real person.

Earlier this month I wrote a post for Waldorfish on Michaelmas and what that festival has come to mean to me.  I half-laughed with my friend Robyn when we found that my little essay had been posted on an anti-Waldorf/Steiner website.  Half-laughed, because you know you’ve made it as a writer when you incur hatred, but even after four years of writing professionally, I’m still not thick-skinned enough to dismiss being judged by people who’ve never met me. 

After sitting on it for a week or so, I finally decided this morning to submit a comment to the site, and to invite a dialogue here.  I guess we’ll see what happens next.

This, in case anyone is curious, is me taking my sword of courage to my own personal dragon – confrontation.  I’m not acting in violence or anger, but with the hope that maybe courage and compassion can transform confrontation to conversation.

Here is my comment:

 

It’s easy to attach an identity to a byline – to blame, to disagree, to judge.  I’ve done it myself.  But, the writer is more than her name.  Behind every faceless byline on the internet is a real person – with real values, dreams, goals, and feelings. And yes, real flaws, too.

I’m sorry for whatever has happened in the lives of those of you who would question the ethics of a stranger based only on a few paragraphs that you read through your own lens.  I can only guess that there is powerful hurt there somewhere, and that makes me sad.

I’m not responding to the criticism of my essay to argue or to try to change minds.  Different beliefs and opinions are what make life worthwhile.  I’m just here to introduce myself, to put a virtual face to the name whose ethics have been called into question.

I’m not some brainwashed cultist.  I’m a mother, a writer, a scientist, a friend, a lover, a runner, a dreamer, a thinker.  I have plenty of flaws if you’d like some to criticize.  I’m stubborn, klutzy, and sometimes selfish.  I procrastinate.  I’m a terrible housekeeper.  I’m all too apt to hide behind humor.  And I’m incredibly awkward at parties.

I’m also practical, idealistic, the most prepared camper you’ll ever meet.  I’m a loyal beyond reason to those I love.  I can bake birthday cakes in almost any configuration.  I’ve been known to quote Shakespeare while performing a Caesarean section on a cow.  I think about everything.  All of the time.  I love – intensely, painfully, and unconditionally. 

I believe in working for peace, justice, and acceptance for everyone.  Seeing my name equated with eugenics and warmongering hurts.  Yes, I’m also sensitive. 

You don’t know me.  You know only that I wrote about a topic where you have strong feelings.  Great.  Come discuss them with me.  I can’t offer a glass of wine or a cup of tea over the internet, but you’re more than welcome to stop by my blog, read a bit, and share your thoughts.  Conversation is so much easier than anonymous anger.

Librarian's Daughter: Thoughts on Banned Books Week 2014

I am a librarian’s daughter. 

Whatever else I have been or become, I am always this.  It doesn’t matter that I’m in my 40s with children of my own or that my mom hasn’t been the school librarian since I was in college.  The end of summer brings memories of new lunch boxes, weirdly stiff shoes, and books.  Boxes of crisp-covered, tight-paged books.  Books with virgin pages that I would be the first to caress.   Books that would give me secret knowledge unclaimed by my peers.  It didn’t matter that my peers were oblivious to said knowledge or that they wouldn’t care that I’d beaten them to the stories on the shelves – books had power, and for a few weeks of the school year, that power was mine alone.

Books have power.

I’ve understood that since my days of plaid jumpers and knee socks.  Yet, some part of me has never fully integrated the realization that many people fear that power. 

Books are the essence of free speech, a glorious mishmash of the messiness of the human experience -- facts, errors, misunderstandings, epiphanies, outright lies, and soul-shaking truths.  All that is mundane, sacred, and, yes, profane lives in the written word. Books are thought, and thought is both weapon and salvation.

It makes intellectual sense then, that people might fear this power, that parents could wish to keep their children out of the shadows or from straying from a certain mental path.

But the shadows are always with us, and it is off the trail that we find our way.

I live in a liberal college town.  Most of those involved with my children’s education celebrate knowledge and exploration of ideas.  Yet, at least once a year, there will be a discussion in at least one of my children’s classes regarding “appropriate reading material.”  This conversation is nearly always sparked by the latest semi-subversive book popular among the kids who want to believe themselves edgy.  Typically it’s a book written for an older audience and containing sex, violence, or both.  It’s often also abysmally written.

For me, the last is the only real sin a book can commit.

This annual question of age-appropriate literature invariably causes some consternation in our family.  My children’s father and I are both proponents of reading, thinking, and information.  We also believe in supporting teachers.  But neither of us is comfortable with the muddy slide from concern to censorship.

At least once a year, we find ourselves explaining to someone the family rule regarding books:

IF YOU ARE CAPABLE OF READING IT, YOU MAY READ IT, BUT YOU MIGHT HAVE TO ENDURE AN UNCOMFORATBLE CONVERSATION WITH MOM OR DAD.

We both have an open bookshelf policy.  Any of the books – yes, ANY – on the shelves at either of our houses is available to any of the kids.  However, we know the content of the books and reserve the right to discuss it with the kids as they read.  (This corollary usually holds sufficient prospect of awkwardness to deter them from more “adult” content.)

This is my paradox: when it comes to banning or challenging books in schools, I want everyone to approach the written word the way my family does.  In other words, as I expound on the virtues of intellectual freedom, I really want everyone to see it my way.

Maybe that’s the real value of Banned Books Week; thinking about words and controversy opens all of us to the reality that the world is full of ideals other than our own.  When we explore those other, uncomfortable ideals, we grow closer together.

In another timeline, a skinny, bespectacled girl sits crosslegged on beige linoleum in front of a cardboard box.  Her freckled nose sniffs the pages of the paperback in her hands, and heedless of the still unpacked box, undusted shelves, and exhortations not to bend the spine, she dives into another world and absorbs its power.

I am, and will always be, a librarian’s daughter.

 

Banish the Should -- Notes from Yale Creek, 2013

Everything I love about the hour around dawn has coalesced.  The chill, silent breeze embraces the deck where I curl into a futon, glad for my sweatshirt and jeans.  A blank notebook, the first after a too-long hiatus, is propped against my knees.  A thump echoes behind my right shoulder.  The tree just missed my head.  I pick up the lumpy green apple, salute the tree and the rising sun peeking from behind the hill, and take a bite.  Clicking my pen, I begin to write.

The tree threw an apple at me, so I thanked it for my snack.  The lambs have awoken the hillside, bawling their cotton ball dreams to their mothers.  The cows respond with the bass line from downslope.  Light is peering between the hills across the valley.  Its bleary eyes chase a jet trail into the periwinkle sky.

We’re an early lot this morning, kids trickling out of tents and beds.  The occasional body is still cocooned in odd places, the couch, the deck, none in the bathtub, though.

Brand new notepad for dreaming, for letting my pen slide across the lines, straying into the unknown spaces.

The apple was tart and crisp-perfect – until I went too far and got a bitter mouthful of the wormy center.  I spat the metaphor into the bushes and chucked my gift from Newton after.

I have a headache born of a hard mattress and too little sleep.  The moon awoke me on its path; it barged into my window, a violent, beautiful intruder stabbing my eyes with a white knife.

Instruments are everywhere, guitars gossiping in the corners and spilling onto the couch, cellos and violins in their black suits by the hearth.  Here and there the oddball – the almost banjo made from a Sierra Nevada case (perhaps that’s what the guitars are criticizing in their living room klatch), a violin case cracked open in an arm chair, a bongo drum standing mute by the coffee table, Caitlin’s cello case, alone in electric blue glory in a sea of black nylon.

The writing meanders through the week at Yale Creek Farm, drifting down the hill to examine the hops climbing their poles, digging its toes into the mud of the pond with the tiny, translucent leeches, sitting at the edge of a mosquito-bitten evening, listening to campfire tunes drift from the odd conglomerate of cellos, violins and guitars who have magically formed an orchestra.

It is a week of fundamentals – the building of shelter (in the form of two straw/clay construction cabins), the preparation of food (for 30+ from produce gleaned and dug from the soil of the farm), and the gathering of community (through games and music and work).  My body is tired on this first morning back at home, arms and shoulders bear testimony to hours of mixing and packing of straw and clay, legs moaning gently about the hills they encountered.  Yet, the work was effortless, a form of love and play.

“Don’t should on yourself,” a friend tells us, in response to some comment about dishes or dinner prep.  Her blue eyes grin beneath black brows as she waits for us to process through the other “Sh--“ word that hits the ears first.  “Only do what brings you joy,” she finishes.

I have trouble with shoulds and with obligation and joy.  Should is a thief, stealing the joy from basic tasks, necessities.  I “should” make dinner.  I “should” put down the phone and chat with the kids.  I “should” do some laundry.  My shoulds have been particularly toxic and self-critical of late.

But, with clay beneath my fingernails, the sun on my shoulders, and the songs of strings drifting up from the pond, the shoulds are beaten back into a corner.  Anxiety, perfectionism, fear, and judgment can’t stand against the elemental nature of the moment.  A blister has formed and burst on the heel of my hand, worn there by the corner of the chunk of wood I use to pack the straw and clay mixture into the crevices of the cabin framework.  My muddy hand-prints mix with others on the shared mason jar of water one of the women has carried up the hill from the kitchen.  The water is still cool and fresh; we’ve left our fears of germs and the odd stray gnat behind in our communal thirst.

I meditate sometimes at home, on a cushion gazing into a candle flame, or eyes closed on the mosaic bench at the front of our house.  Yet, in those cultivated places, thoughts chase like amphetiminized squirrels through my brain.  In the basic acts of building, of chopping vegetables, of feeling my arms cut through the murky water of the pond, the brain centers into a deep stillness.

Thump.  Thump.  The feel of the stick ramming the straw and clay vibrates up my arm and pounds the blood inside my ears.  I swirl a sudsy sponge across the never-ending mountain of dishes in the sink.  With over 30 hungry and thirsty people, the chore is Sisyphean.  Slicing carrots into awkward sticks, joy wells inside me as a worry dashes through my head and is pushed out.  “This too,” I tell myself quietly, echoing the meditation phrase as I keep chopping.  “This too” and the should is gone.

Back home, it’s easy to feel the shoulds and self-judgments piling up.  The lists and worries started lining up at the back of my brain, demanding entry on the drive south.  I’m not quite sure how to keep them in their place.  ‘I should clean the algae from the water pitcher.’ ‘I should go for a run this morning.’

“Only do what brings you joy.”

The green scum on the paper towel, still smelling slightly of vinegar makes me smile as I rinse and fill the now clear filter pitcher.  Once I hit SAVE and upload this post, I’ll put on my running shoes.  Thinking of the feel of my feet lightly slapping the pavement, of the hard-earned strength of my legs gives me joy.  I find myself planning dinner tonight – not as an obligation, but as an act of love.

 

The Other Path

Have you ever noticed that the closer you get to something you really want – attaining a goal, buying a house, embarking on a new relationship, graduating from school – the more afraid, sad, and downright dissatisfied your mind becomes? 

What’s up with that?

On the one hand, you can see where you want to be; it’s right there, just at the end of the road.  And you’re rubbing your feet together in bed in excitement the way you did when you were a kid on Christmas Eve or before a trip to Disneyland or the day before the public pool opened.  But, on that other, sinister (left) hand, your brain is screaming things like “I can’t do this!” and “This sucks; I hate paperwork” and “I’m all alone.” 

Yep.  That goal, that shiny, haloed, glowing Nirvana is right there in front of you, just steps away, and your brain is turning you around, and forcing you off the road and onto the trail that leads from anxiety to self-loathing and despair.  One minute, you’re rejoicing in the warmth of your connections, the intensity of an emotional bond.  Seconds later, your brain says “Why did you say that?  That was really stupid.”  The brain then leaps off of the road you’ve so carefully paved and into the thickets of “They don’t really want you here.  No one wants you.”  From there, it’s a hop, skip, and a flounder into “You are going to die alone on an iceberg and even the seals won’t want your pathetic corpse.”

It seems deranged that the closer we are to some sort of achievement or happiness, the more likely our brain is to try to snatch that vision away and steer us into the darkness.  Certainly every social condition says that this train of thought is nothing short of demented.  All of our interactions with others, with our computers, our radios, our televisions tell us that in this mindset, we are completely alone. 

And there is nothing like believing you’re the only one so pathetically lost to really fuel that trek through the dark woods.

“Wow, your race is coming up fast.  You must really be excited!”

“No, actually, I’m scared shitless, and I can’t remember why I’m doing this anymore.”

“Oh that’s just nerves.  You’ve been training so hard.  You’re going to do great!”

“Pretty sure I’ll be hauled off by the clean-up wagon as they sweep the streets.  If I bother to go. But thanks.”

OR

“I can’t believe you’re graduating already.  You must be thrilled to be done!”

“Not really.  I think I’ll go back to bed.”

“Aren’t you excited about your new school/job/travel?”

“No.  Pretty sure I failed that last final, and not looking forward to sitting in the sun in a hot gown, but thanks.”

OR

“Ohmigod, congratulations!  You two are just so great together.  I have goosebumps just looking at you!”

“I’m feeling really lonely right now.”

“That’s just because he/she is away tonight.  You’ll be so happy tomorrow!”

“There’s a giant hole burrowing into my heart, and he/she is probably going to dump me anyway, but thanks.”

OR

“Congratulations on your new job!  How fabulous!”

“I think I should stay where I am.”

“Don’t be silly.  This is an amazing opportunity!  You can do so much there!”

“I’ll be canned in a week and a half.  Plus, I don’t like the hours.  But thanks.”

OR

“What a beautiful baby.  You must be so thrilled to be a mom.”

“Not really.  I’m leaking from places I didn’t even know I could leak, and I haven’t showered in three days or slept in seven.”

“Oh, the first week or two is always hard.  You’ll be such a terrific parent!”

“I’m pretty sure I’m going to leave the baby carrier on the car roof, and I’m not certain it’ll be an accident, but thanks.”

I’m going to go out on a vulnerability limb – yes, that’s me sliding along the branch, please put down the saw – and suggest that most people can relate to one or more of the above (purely hypothetical) dialogues.  We’ve all been there.  And we’ve all been the person with the superfluity of exclamation points as well as the person tacking on the obligatory, “but thanks.”

We haven’t learned comfort with our own darkness.  The deranged voice trying to steer us away from our shiny goal isn’t the enemy.  If we let it in, maybe even offer it a nice pillow, it will reveal itself to be, if not a friend, at least an ally.

That voice is our devil’s advocate, our fact checker, our bad cop.  It exists to make sure that we are, in fact, doing the thing that is right for us, that we have prepared, that we understand the risks of both failure and success.  But it has to shout to make itself heard over all of the cheerleaders.  So, like anyone with a sore throat who feels that the pom pom girls and drum majors have once again stolen the spotlight, it gets a little testy – and a lot strident.  Instead of saying, “Hey, maybe you want to slow this attachment thing down a bit; go for a walk or something,” it says “You suck at relationships; you’re going to trash this anyway, so you should just prepare to die alone.”  Rather than pointing out that you might want to make a contingency plan or develop some good self-talk for when you get tired in a race, it says “You haven’t run farther than 20 miles; you’re going to hit that mark and your legs will just stop working.  Don’t even bother thinking about 26.2; just prepare to fall over and die at 20.”

I make no secret about the fact that I adore writer/director Joss Whedon.  Only the tatters of my sanity and self-respect keep me from approaching crazed, stalker, fan girl status where he is concerned.  He gave a graduation speech at Wesleyan University in which he addresses this notion of our inner contradiction and embracing that duality.  I’ve embedded it below.  Watch it.  It’s amazing.

As I’m currently the rope in the tug-o-war between cheerleaders and inner doomsayer, I don’t have spectacular answers for handling this dichotomy.  However, I’ve learned one thing.  Fighting the voice is useless.  It will be heard.  You might as well sit back and listen.  Say to yourself: “I feel like a failure.  I feel sad.  I feel alone.” You can hear it.  You won’t die.  Because, here’s the thing; you do have to listen to the voice, but you don’t have to do anything about it.  You can feel like a loser and still go out and train.  You can feel sad, and still do the things that make you happy.  You can cry into your pillow with loneliness and still form increasingly close connections.  The voice doesn’t change who you are, it just helps tell you all of who you are.

If I come up with any other insights on this, I’ll let you know after my marathon in two weeks.  If I don’t die at the 20 mile mark, that is.

  

The End of the Story?

The hiking boots collapsed into a heap on the floor, crumpled socks tossed by their soles.  The journey had ended.

“When is the story over?  How do you know it’s over?” a friend asked me a while ago.  We were talking then about the stories we tell ourselves, the tales we spin of memory and emotion, the stories that grow, if we aren’t paying attention, to define us.

Another friend, with whom there have been innumerable endings and beginnings, once said during a similar discussion, “Yeah, but there are always sequels.”

When do our stories end?  When does the final page drop into blankness?  Do we close the book and move away, or do the lines and characters linger, writing and rewriting us?

This morning, I came out to the living room to find my hiking boots and a pair of wool socks in a heap near the couch – a cairn marking the end of my oldest daughter’s trip to Hawaii with her class.  Their group’s story is nearing its final pages; graduation, the final chapter, is in three and a half weeks.

And what a story it has been.  I worked with this class earlier in the year during their creative writing block, and we discussed the elements of fiction: setting, character, conflict, plot, theme… the saga of the class of 2013 has had it all.

The story begins in different places and at different times, a rose-accented redwood building and a kindergarten smelling of warm bread for a few; a yellow-painted second grade room full of sun for some others; a room with blue walls echoing the sky; a turquoise room; and for at least one, a periwinkle room with a skeleton in the closet, a room in which their journey ends.

In The Breakfast Club, the students mock the labels the adult world has stuck on them:

“You see us as you want to see us... In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain...and an athlete...and a basket case...a princess...and a criminal... “

It would be equally easy, and equally false, to label the cast of the class of 2013.  A writer, an athlete, a clown, a musician, a bookworm, a cheerleader, a brain…Nope.  It can’t be done.  They all have had their moments of leadership, their moments of triumph and insight, their moments of sloth, of minor cruelties, of extreme dorkiness.  But, one day, during their writing class, they defined themselves.

Me: (discussing dialogue) Your characters will speak differently depending on who they are talking to.  For instance, you talk slightly differently with an adult you don’t know than with a kid your own age, right?

Nodding heads all around

Me: And you talk differently even to adults you do know, like me or Dr. Tan, than to your friends.

Fewer nods, some murmured, “Not really…we know you…well, maybe…”

Me: And you probably even talk differently with your best friends than you do with another classmate you might not be as close to.

Blank looks dropped across the entire classroom.  For an instant, all of their faces bore the stamp of the clueless, stoned out teen.  Then the protests began.  “What do you mean?  We are all close.” The words flew from around the classroom, not just one clique, not just the girls, not just the boys.  They rose up as one, and one sentence defined them.  “We’re all best friends.”

This character sketch, like most, is at best incomplete, and certainly not always literally true.  Like any good story, theirs has held plenty of conflict.  In a school system where the teacher moves with the grades, theirs was the class that couldn’t hold a teacher.  In the lower grades, accusations of “bullying” or “disruptive behavior” were sometimes tossed around.   Their social circles collided, burst, and re-formed, over and over. They argue – not civilly, but in tones that crash off of walls and ring through the rafters – with each other, with their teacher, with their parents, with school administration.  They do not go quietly into acquiescence, particularly when some deeply held value is threatened.  Theirs is democracy – in its coarsest, brashest, and often most eloquent form.  They form sharp edges and knock them off against each other, again and again.

Character, conflict, and setting shape plot.  The events in their story have reached the climax and are sliding into the denouement of graduation.  Solos have been sung and played; presentations have been given; the last lines have been said and bows have been taken.  They have snow-shoed, forded rivers, won and lost competitions with tears and hugs for both.  They have danced their last dances, and they have told their final stories around the campfire.

Yet, theme carries plot past the ending.  When we close a book, the story doesn’t leave us.  When we graduate; when we lose a job or a loved one; when we say goodbye, the story doesn’t end.  The plot is passed.  Events are over, and no amount of attempts can ever recreate them.  Yet, echoes of those people, those events, the joyful and the abhorrent, remain with us, to be passed to those we meet.

We can choose which themes we carry.  Do we bring the memories of squabbles or name-calling?  Do we apply that interpretation to the next people we meet?  Or, do we take with us the memory of a class united in triumph on a basketball court, or the sense of trust that can’t be quantified – the knowledge that a friend has your back, even though they’ve never said it?

 

Feeding the Rat -- Loneliness and Connection

Last night at a second grade parent meeting, the teacher talked about some of the changes in the children this spring.  The girls in particular, she said, were experiencing a shift.  In the Waldorf curriculum, teachers identify a developmental stage known as the Nine Year Change.  Simply put, this is the period when children begin to realize that they are individuals, distinct from their parents and friends.  The world is no longer a cozy dreamland.  They begin to sense their own mortality and their own isolation.

This recognition of the self as an individual is extremely painful for many.  As Sierra’s teacher put it, they begin to be aware of being outside of a group, and often they see themselves as being excluded where no exclusion exists.  “I’m over here, and you are all over there, and you’re leaving me out, and I don’t like it.”  Meanwhile, she said, the other children are saying, “No, we aren’t leaving you out; we want you to join us.  Come play with us.”  But, the child sees that she is on the outside, she is alone.

What kids of that age don’t yet realize, is that the exclusion comes from within.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that most of us never outgrow that Nine Year Change.  We find ways to cope with and, more often, to mask our feelings of exclusion, of isolation, of loneliness.  Yet, we rarely stare at the reality with acceptance.  We are all alone, and our aloneness connects us – or, it could, if we would let it.

Yet, rather than acknowledging that we are all standing outside that magic circle, we scramble to create a culture of inclusion, of belonging.  We pathologize our isolation.  What’s the first thing that is usually published in a profile of anyone who snaps into an action of mass violence?  “Well, he was always kind of a loner.  He kept to himself.”  We prize conformity.  We bend, twist, pluck, and repress ourselves into constructed groups and unions that may in part meet our need for belonging, but ultimately deepen our loneliness.

Listen to the voices in your head sometimes.  We all have them – the anxieties that we can’t name, the anger that wells up suddenly at seemingly trivial causes, the refusal to look behind our own dogma.  What are those voices saying?

“I’m over here.  Everybody else is over there.  I want to be over there, but they won’t let me in.  I’m not good enough, pretty enough, strong enough, smart enough.  I don’t make enough money.  I’m not fit enough.  I can’t talk to strangers.  I don’t know how to connect.  I don’t know how to connect.  I’ll always be alone.”

So, what do we do with those voices?  We fight them, we bury them, we hide from them.  We dress ourselves to fit in.  We diet.  We buy the “right” foods.  We scramble for more money, bigger cars, bigger TVs.  We lock ourselves into rules – politics, religion, cultural traditions.  We structure relationships within rigid boundaries that will “guarantee” that we are not excluded – if no one else is allowed in, we can’t be left out.  And we lash out at those who threaten the safety of our belonging.

I’m a veterinarian.  I grew up with horses – big animals with a strong flight response.  I learned as a child that you can’t fight a horse to make it do what you want.  The horse is too big, too strong, and you will always lose the tug-o-war.

Our individuality is a horse.  The harder we pull on the rope, the harder it pulls back.  The more we scramble for acceptance and certainty, the more we push others away, and the stronger the isolation grows.

My kids have a book called Three Samurai Cats.  This picture book is based on a Japanese tale of a warlord, a daimyo, whose palace is taken over by a giant rat.  The rat sets up camp in the hall of the palace, eats all of the daimyo’s food, terrorizes the servants, and generally trashes the place.

The daimyo goes to the local samurai training house and asks the master to send a samurai, a warrior, to rid his palace of the rat.  The first samurai, a big, strapping cat warrior, goes to the palace, confronts the rat, engages in battle, and gets his ass handed to him.  The daimyo returns to the palace, and tells the master he needs a stronger warrior, one who is better armed, more fully trained.  A second samurai goes to the palace. This warrior is even bigger than the first, with impressive armor and weapons.  He fights the rat even more fiercely.  And once again, the samurai is defeated by the laughing rat.

The poor daimyo has had it by this time.  But now the training house sends a third samurai.  Let’s just say that this particular samurai cat is less than impressive.  In the pictures, he looks like a hyperthyroid, elderly street cat with scraggly fur covering protruding bones, a notched ear, and a loincloth.  Hardly warrior material.

The daimyo is furious and humiliated.  The rat laughs openly and calls for more food.  The third samurai acknowledges the rat, watches the rice balls rolled out to the rat, and sits down on a mat to wait.  At this point, the daimyo can barely stand it.  When is this supposed warrior going to do something?  Why isn’t he even trying to fight the rat?  Is he just too old, too tired, too weak?

The rat eats every last grain of rice in the palace while the cat waits.

Eventually, the rat grows so rotund that his legs can no longer reach the ground.  The cat stretches, stands up, and rolls the rat out of the palace and down the hill.

Our isolation and the voices that arise from it are like the rat.  When we fight them, when we armor ourselves against exclusion with shields of labels, conformity, and arbitrary rules and spears of jealousy and anger, we get our asses handed to us.

What happens instead if we welcome the rat, hand it a comfortable seat in the corner, and give it a rice ball?  What if we say to those voices, “Yes, okay, I see you.  Sit over there for a while will you?  I’ll get to you when I have time, but right now I have parts of myself to share with someone over here.”?  What happens when we stop fighting the universal human truth – that we are all alone, and that it is that loneliness that unites us.

 

8th Grade Lessons

Since winter break dissolved into the new year, our lives have been very 8th-grade-centric.  With the start of basketball season started, and Saturdays have taken place in a gym in Fair Oaks.  Fiction writing, play practice, a snow trip, a dance, the yearbook, raffle ticket sales – events fly at us like confetti shot from a cannon with “The Final Year” emblazoned on the barrel.
Perhaps inevitably, I’ve spent an awful lot of time over the past two months with this class, beginning with teaching a couple of fiction lessons, culminating most recently in a field trip and carpools to various events.  I was supposed to help teach these adolescents how to write pretend lives, but instead they reminded me how to live.
This refresher course on loving, laughing, learning, and letting go has come at a good time for me, so I thought I’d pass it along.  Here you go – life lessons brought to you by the Davis Waldorf School eighth grade.
1.    Be yourself (Unless you can speak in a bad British accent; then do that.  Always)—Adolescents are magpies or sheep, mimics driven by imitation and peer pressure, right?  What if I showed you a group of teenagers who know that they come in all shapes and sizes, who know that one person’s quirk is also that person’s strength, who wear brightly colored skinny jeans, or vests and ties, who push the corners and seams of the dress code to find their own style?  What if I showed you teenaged boys waltzing together or holding hands with giant grins?  What if I showed you a quiet girl doing a Cockney accent in the back of a minivan on the way to a ball?
2.    If plan A won’t work, move to plan B, or, ditch the plan and grab a sled.  On the second morning of the snow trip, the planned sculpture contest unraveled as the perfect snow packing conditions of the day before shifted into crumbly powder.  The kids barely paused.  The teams of three flowed apart, grabbed shovels and began to “build snow caves.”  When this plan proved improbable due to a lack of snow depth and the aforementioned crumbling factor, the cave diggers became toboggan run designers.  When the run turned out to be more of a toboggan crawl, they shrugged, grabbed sleds, and headed up the mountain.
3.    Take the shot that counts.  From basketball to music, from tests to plays, these kids know that the score isn’t counted in practice, rehearsal, or study period.  They may miss a layup or free-throw in practice with a shrug or a grin, flub lines or goof off during dress rehearsal, but when it’s game time, they’ll make the 3-pointer or go down trying, and they’ll be encore-worthy perfect when the curtain goes up.
4.    Acknowledge the awkwardness.  A couple of weekends ago, we held a “fiction party” for the 8th grade at my house.  Even as I was buying pizza and chips, I had the maternal jitters.  “Do you think they’ll have fun, or is this just stupid,” I asked Caitlin more than once.  I worried that the kids would feel obligated to come, and that it would be a wasted Sunday afternoon for them.  Sure enough, as they arrived, our tiny kitchen filled with hovering teenagers.  My mind spun circles generating “fix-it” plans, but my internal writer said, “This is a fiction party; let’s see how the scene plays out.”
Finally, one girl gave a nervous giggle.  “Well, this is awkward.”
As anyone who knows this class could have predicted, this was the cue for everyone to laugh and grab pizza and soda.  Before long, the mood had shifted from freaky ‘what are we all doing here anyway’ awkwardness to a party.  (See below.)
5.    Life is a party.  If it isn’t, you’re probably doing it wrong.  I’ve yet to see a work day, school day, game, or event that this class didn’t turn into a party.  They spend a lot of time together; they know each other’s quirks; and every gathering is really just an excuse to enjoy that bond.  I’m reasonably certain you could line them up at the DMV and after about ten minutes, the lobby would look like a dance club.
6.    You don’t always have to like each other, but families support one another.  This class isn’t a class.  They are a family.  Like siblings, they bicker and badger, but they always, always have each other’s backs.  One weekend, the boys and girls basketball teams had games in close time proximity.  Many of the girls showed up early to support the boys, and the boys stuck around to cheer and advise the girls.  It was as though an entire coaching squad had manifested in one section of the bleachers.  No matter how annoying they find each other’s quirks, they cheered every play by every player.
During the final day of the basketball tournament, the girls battled for third place and lost.  They had given it everything they had – one girl even playing with a fever – but it wasn’t enough.  These are 13 and 14 year old girls.  They could have sulked, gone home to cry, and no one would have blamed them.  Instead, two hours later, the loudest voices from the stands came from those girls, chanting in unison and cheering their male classmates to the tournament championship.
7.    Sometimes common sense is overrated. You don’t know it won’t work unless you try.  Every adult standing on the hill cringed.  It was like one of those nightmares that happen in slow motion.  You know how it will end, but you can’t move fast enough to stop it. 
Two boys, one snow tube, one hill.  What could go wrong?  Well, nothing, unless, the boys in question decide that the best way down the hill is not the middle of the run; after all, that’s already been done, but rather along the edge of the hill, right where it tips into trees, bushes, and a mild precipice.  Yeah, that should work.
The run ended as any of the adults could have predicted.  I had just enough time to think, “At least we made them wear helmets” before the tube slid off the edge and two rather surprised teens became tangled in the bare branches of a tree.
This sort of experimentation may not seem like a great life lesson – or even conducive to long life – but I’ve watched those same boys transform cans of spray paint, an old bedstead, a saw, and raw energy into props for a spooky Halloween garden.  Hang around them long enough and you will hear “What if we…”  It’s hard not to wonder what could happen in the world if more people said those words and then followed through.
8.    Be a surprise.  They only think they know you.  We all carry our own surprises and inconsistencies, yet we cling to the notion that we “know” those close to us.  Watching this class, though, I’ve seen: the least athletic kid go for and make a layup in basketball; one of the most pop-culture-engaged kids express the most conservative views; quiet girls belt out songs that would make your average American Idol contestant green with envy; and my practical daughter don an evil grin along with a party dress, while wondering if she can confuse the boys.
9.    Stand up for what you believe.  No one else is going to do it for you.  Civics is embedded in the 8th grade curriculum, and this class has taken the lessons to heart.  Their teacher commented to me that he’s been able to get through more material with them in previous years, but this year they want to debate and discuss everything – and he’s glad to see them do it.
During the “fiction party” at our house, I imitated a fly on the wall, tucked behind a bookcase, while they discussed the occupation of one of the characters in the show we were screening.  (She’s a high-level courtesan.)  I weighed the merits of jumping in with some pompous adult wisdom, but decided to watch the debate unfold.  Several of the kids were morally shocked, others argued that there was nothing wrong with her profession within the social context of the series, and a couple of mildly misogynistic comments were shot down as quickly as they appeared.
In the end, my input wouldn’t have mattered.  It didn’t matter who was right or wrong; what mattered is that they could work out how to express and defend their opinions against the toughest audience in the world – their peers.
10.    You’re going to have to say goodbye.  Spend as much time together as possible.  The last times are piling up.  They’ve had their last snow trip together as a class; the curtain has come down on their last play; they’ve played their last basketball games together as teams.  There are still plenty of landmarks, big and small, to come over the next few months, but time is rolling them inexorably toward June.  These kids are tight, but after graduation, it won’t be the same.  They’ll move on to different Junior High and High School campuses for ninth grade.  They’ll form new bonds of friendship and conflict.  Time and distance will float them gradually apart.
Faced with separation, adults often prepare emotionally for the inevitable by clinging to the past, or, more commonly, by distancing ourselves in advance.  We seem sometimes to view wholehearted involvement in ephemeral relationships as a wasted investment.
This class of 2013 has shown something different in this last half of their final year together.  They are facing the end in their own way, with class, style, and a sense that they are “all in.”
The gym was being mopped, clusters of parents stood chatting while younger siblings practiced dribbling and half-hearted shots at a hoop far above their heads.  The trophy had been awarded, medals ringed the necks of the boys’ team, and the players hugged, mugged for photos, laughed, passed the trophy around, and basked – girls and boys alike – in being part of school history.  The boys won it, but for the girls, it seemed like their victory, too – the first championship trophy earned by a team from the school. 
Finally, a weary voice raised above the buzz.  We turned to see the senior referee with the microphone.  “We need to clear out the gym.”
It was time to go home.

 

 

Show and Tell: Thoughts on writing, teaching, and learning

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” – Anton Chekhov

What shall I show you?   Shall I show you the woman, staring at a computer screen, embedded in a sea of interview notes?  Shall I show you the blank face of the monitor, staring back at her?  Shall I show you instead young faces, many dotted with the badges of adolescence, some tan, some freckled, chattering and grinning?  Shall I show you the dynamics of character and plot, played out as the teens pass through their morning exercises in movement and dance?  Shall I show you the boy, in lotus position, grinning as his classmates count out crunches in grunts all around him?  Shall I show you the couple, tracing the steps of the salsa, lips murmuring the count while their worried eyes watch their feet and the room?  Shall I show you another couple, hips swaying, spinning with all the bold color of the dance?  Or shall I show you the group that has given up on the salsa, and instead clusters at the back of the room, voices rising over the music, like magpies on a wire?

When I began writing professionally, I saw the occasional essay bemoaning the ease with which writing ceases to be fun once a paycheck is involved.  Intellectually, I knew that obligation often robs us of our joy.  But, I had waited so long to write; I love writing; it would (yes, you can complete the sentence) never happen to me.

Fortunately (from the perspective of my bank account), this has been an obligation-heavy few months.  Reality and I have always had a somewhat uneasy co-existence.  I earn my living through fact, yet my brain creates stories from nearly every experience.  But, since the world has been spectacularly reluctant to feed me for flights of fancy, my bread, butter, and magic beans come from sorting through piles of cold, unyielding evidence.

Caitlin prefers to work with facts.  She will happily devour the literary contents of someone else’s imagination, but she prefers the work generated from her own hand to have its feet solidly planted in consistency and logic.  The uncertainty of a blank page unsettles her.

Her class’s return to 8^th grade following winter break commenced with a block on creative writing – short stories, specifically.  The timing was impeccable.  My imagination had been feeling the cold hand of winter; words were looking less and less friendly by the day.  On a whim, one morning, I emailed Caitlin’s teacher to ask if there was any way I could help with the writing block.

Despite the aforementioned lack of editorial enthusiasm regarding my fiction, I still believe in my stories.  Sure, the catty critic inside my head jabbed me with a couple of needles – What can someone who can’t even get her own stories published teach about fiction – but, if I were in the habit of listening to her, I’d have been found, decaying in the fetal position under a blanket years ago.

The teacher invited me into the classroom last week to teach a couple of lessons on the elements of fiction.  Day One covered character, plot, and conflict.  I had typed out my lesson days in advance, with lots of writerly quotations and excerpts from my own work.  But, arriving early on Wednesday morning, I accompanied the class over to the multipurpose room for their morning movement.  In addition to calisthenics, the class is practicing ballroom dancing in preparation for the ‘big dance’ of their 8^th grade year, the Winter Ball.

Character, plot, and even conflict played out in front of me.  Each kid’s efforts, movement, or lack thereof described his or her personality exactly.  Conflicts, internal and external, played out subtly in the selection of dance partners, in the shifting and changing of action on the dance floor.  They were teaching me my own lesson as I watched.

“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”

No, those words were not spoken by an elderly politician complaining about texting, butt-hanging jeans, and the obesity epidemic.  Socrates said them somewhere around 400 B.C.

I’ve seen rude and/or apathetic teens, but I’ve also encountered more than a reasonable share of rude, lazy, apathetic, and intellectually-stunted adults.  I’ve never bought into the theory that the upcoming generation shows the incipient demise of society.  But, even if I had bought into the generational trope, Caitlin’s class would have shaken that conviction.

Okay, yes, there is a basket for cell phones and electronics in the classroom, and it seems to get fuller by the month.  Yes, these kids tease and joke with teachers and parents.  They chatter instead of, and during exercise, and well, I suspect that Socrates take on food derived from watching a horde of adolescents descend upon the early version of a pepperoni pizza like locusts.

However, if their teacher is tyrannized, he hides it well.  The class did indeed stand as I was introduced (despite the fact that many of them have known me since they were seven or eight.) And forget the stereotype of the bored, rude teen.

For every question I asked or point I made, hands flew up and the room buzzed.  Sure, I had to bring them back from the neverland of chatter, but they weren’t talking about shopping or game scores.  The chatter was more along the lines of “Oh, that’s like in such-and-such book.” “Oh!  Did you see XXXX movie, where the guy did YYYY?  That was totally man vs. himself.”

I don’t know for sure what the kids took away from my couple of mornings with them.  I hope that, if nothing else, something will have seeped into their heads that causes them to look at their books, movies, and video games with new eyes.  Maybe some of them will decide that this story thing is fun.  Maybe some will learn that if you get stuck when writing, you can just blow up a goat.  Maybe they were bored out of their skulls but too polite to show me.

But I know what I learned from them.  I took away memories such as a young man saying, with no trace of self-consciousness, “That’s like in Sense and Sensibility” when we talked about mis-direction.  I will remember the almost unanimous looks of confusion when I stated during a discussion of dialogue that they speak differently to their best friends than to classmates with whom they might not be as close.  “What do you mean?” they asked.  “We’re all close.”

They helped me remember why I write.  I write to better understand my own story.  I write to show myself the glint of light on broken glass, and to remind myself that others see it too.

The Pause

“The Waiting Place…
…for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or a No or waiting for their hair to grow.” –Dr Seuss, Oh the Places You’ll Go!

My kids’ school curriculum has pauses built into the day; the teachers talk about the rhythm of in-breathing and out-breathing.  The space between the notes makes the music.  Negative space balances the picture.  The key points of a dialogue lie between the words.

I know these things.  I know them, but I am not good with the pause, with the negative space, with waiting.  I come from a long line of mostly Anglo-Saxon over-achievers.  My method is less to serve by standing and waiting than it is to power through with a stiff upper lip or work around with cheery flexibility.

Sometimes the universe has other plans.

I recently hit not just a pause, but a full stop, in an interaction.  No work-around.  No fix.  Not even much closure.  Stopped.  Over.  Done.

Did I mention that I’m not comfortable with powerlessness?

Ok, I said to myself, this is obviously here for a reason, just like any other setback or stressor in my life.  It’s here to show me how strong I am, to test me.  We experience pain or loss in order to know who we are, right?  I don’t pause.  I reframe.  Friendships, jobs, house, car, article or book rejection – it isn’t a loss; it’s an opportunity.  There’s a phoenix tattooed on the back of my shoulder for a reason.  I am an optimist; we pull glory from the flames and ashes.

So, in the last month or two, I have pulled out all of the stops in my attempt to show the world exactly how strong I can be.  By “the world,” I mean myself, of course.  Volunteering at the school?  Absolutely.  What do you need?  I’m there.  A co-worker needs something edited?  Sure.  I’ll put my project aside and do that right now.  Half-marathon in the rain with a cold?  No problem.  Personal best time.  A magazine client needs a feature article with a less-than two week deadline that overlaps with a conference?  Piece of cake.  I’m their girl.  In the meantime, I’ll read articles on acceptance and fully experiencing the present. 

Just let me make the present as busy as possible.

Somewhere between the rainy half marathon and Thanksgiving, things started to break down a little.  The cold didn’t seem too bad, and it had mostly resolved by the week after Thanksgiving.  The cold sores that erupted around the time of my rush-article writing could perhaps have been a clue, a warning flag on the track, if you will.  The cough that kicked in the night before we needed to pack up the kids and car to head for Anaheim for a combined conference (me) and Disneyland (Mike and the kids) trip, should probably have told me to at least slow down.

I did slow down.  We only went to Disneyland for a couple of hours the evening that we arrived.  I only ran 2.5 miles on the treadmill the next morning.  Oh, and lifted some weights.  By midway through the conference, my cough was bad enough that I had to walk out of the middle of a talk on recurrent airway obstruction in horses – not ironic at all.  I backed off to two miles on the treadmill that morning.

By the time we were heading home, Mike wound up driving both halves of the trip since I couldn’t do anything without coughing until I was blind.  The holiday party for my job began two hours after we arrived home.  We went.

I went to work the next day, but I’d begun to recognize a problem.  I called my doctor’s office for an appointment, not because my chest hurt when I tried to breathe, or because I felt like crap.  No, I called because I couldn’t run, and it was interfering with my marathon training schedule.  Yes, somewhere in all of that rushing around the “waiting place,” I had registered for the San Francisco marathon in June.

I did take the weekend off.  Well, except for the few hours spent helping my boss edit a speech and running errands on Sunday, that is.

By yesterday (Monday), I was feeling “better,” but I decided to work from home, to rest.  That may have been the first intelligent choice I’ve made in weeks.  But, my body decided that it was too little, too late.  As I was chatting with a friend at the school between pick up times for Sierra and Aidan, it started.  The bright sunlight began to waver between the bare branches of the trees.  I looked toward the shaded buildings – circles shimmered on the yellow walls.  I rummaged through my purse, but naturally, my pills were in my other bag.

Migraine.  My body’s personal stop sign.

There is no multi-tasking through a migraine, at least not for me.  There is nothing but a dark room, a pillow, and the wait.  Waiting for sleep to come.  Waiting for the pain to go.  Waiting.

You can take medication to make the migraine go away sooner, to reduce the length of the inevitable hangover, but there is no escape.  I can’t busy my way out of a migraine.  I can’t read or write – light stabs through my retina and straight into my brain.  Music or books on tape are out.  Sound makes me want to vomit.  A migraine leaves me alone in the dark, with only my own thoughts for company.

Guess what.  That is where we really find ourselves.  Where we learn who we are, how strong we are.  We don’t learn what we can handle when we are rushing around, when we’re bursting with physical, mental, and emotional fitness.  We find ourselves in the broken places, in the dark, with our heads splitting open and leaking tears into our pillows.

Yes, I have articles to write, and marathon training to do.  But I also have healing to do.  The universe only has to whack me over the head so many times before I finally get it.  I’ll take today as a sick day, rest my body and mind, and embrace my time in the waiting place.  I won’t be here forever.  I have things to do.

 

Turning Mistakes

Sierra gets out of school 45 minutes before her older siblings.  Sometimes we wait at the school and play; sometimes she comes back to my office and draws, reads, or does math problems.  Yesterday, I had decided that we would wait at the school since I had work that could be done on my laptop and the weather was fairly nice.  The kid who frequently gripes that “there’s nothing to do at your work” was predictably disappointed that we were staying at the school.

“I wanted to work on my picture!” She waved a large piece of white paper partially decorated with bands of green and blue (presumably grass and sky.)

We stayed at the school, but instead of going to the playground, sat at the wide benches in the breezeway so that she could use one as a table.  Sierra unrolled her crayon case, pointing out the new “graphite pencils” and a couple of colored pencils that I may not have seen last time.  Sierra may be a butterfly most of the time, but art is serious business, and she treats her supplies with professional gravity.

On the first side of the paper, she filled in a house and a row of tulips standing sentinel.  “Are there clouds in Christmas,” she asked me as she pulled her black block crayon from its slot. 

“If you want,” I answered, not bothering to point out that there aren’t generally tulips in Christmas.  “The weather can be however you want.”

She decided that it was snowing, and that some of the snow was melting – the melting snowflakes were depicted by larger and partially open circles.  Once she’d finished the main picture, Sierra flipped the page over to practice writing.

“HIY” she drew in full-page, yellow block letters.  She looked up at me.  “H-I-Y, does that spell ‘hi’?”

“Well,” I paused.  I’ll admit it; I’m a sucker.  I hate disappointing my kids when they’re proud of something they’ve done.  But, we’ve never been fans of unearned praise or of letting mistakes slide by.  “Hi doesn’t have a Y at the end.”

“Oh. I thought it did.” Sierra giggled and pursed her lips, pulling out a blue crayon.

I tried not to cringe as she began to cross out the Y with broad strokes.  I hated seeing her “wreck” her work.  Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything, I thought.  She was doing so well on the picture.  Sierra kept coloring, and slowly I noticed that the blue was keeping the inverted triangle shape of the Y.

“I’m making a blueberry ice cream cone,” she said, pulling out a brown crayon.  Carefully, she outlined a cone around the bottom of the triangle, cross-hatching the cone over the ice cream.  “With cherries because they’re yummy,” she added, drawing small red circles, each with a gracefully curving stem, one after the other, on the mound of blue.

“Do you like my picture, Mommy?” Sierra asked me as we walked toward the upper grades’ classrooms.

“I do.  I especially liked how you turned the Y into an ice cream cone instead of just crossing it out when you messed up.”

“Teacher told us that we can turn mess-ups into something beautiful.”

Sometimes it feels as though one mess-up has ruined the entire picture.  We want to crumple the page, throw it in the trash, and start over.  We want to obliterate the memory of the wrong letter, wrong word, wrong choice.  We’re embarrassed and ashamed that we “made a mistake.”

But, when we shred our mistakes, scribble them out, and turn away, we lose not only the opportunity to create something beautiful, but we eliminate the whole other side of the picture.  When we crumple our “mess-up” and throw it into the trash, we also lose the house and tulips, the gently falling snow with the beauty of the improbable blue sky and sun.

Sometimes when things go awry, we want to forget, to “move on,” to “get over it” as quickly as we can.  We call this healthy, this jettisoning of the “bad.”  But, it doesn’t work.  Our experiences, like our pictures, are too complex; they are mixtures of beauty and pain, light and shadow, triumph and failure.  When we ditch the part that hurts or shames us, we risk losing the lessons we have gained.

In When Things Fall Apart, Buddhist nun Pema Chodron writes of “the four maras,” saying “What we call obstacles are really the way the world and our entire experience teach us where we’re stuck.  What may be an arrow or a sword, we can actually experience as a flower.”

She goes on to talk about obstacles at “the outer level and at the inner level.”  You know the outer level – we all do.  It’s that sense of blame.  Who was wrong.  Who has hurt us.  Who gets in our way.  But, of the inner level, she says:

…perhaps nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion.  Perhaps there is no solid obstacle except our own need to protect ourselves from being touched.  Maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast.  But, what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.

Wait.  So, pain, loneliness, loss, disappointment – those won’t go away until I’ve learned what I need from them?  Crap.  I can’t just crumple up the picture, throw it away, and start a new one?

No.

Think about it.  Think of a recent loss, argument, accident.  Would you really jettison everything that led up to that point?  Do you really want to throw out the ‘good’ to get rid of the ‘bad?’  Can you even tell which parts are good and which are bad?

Maybe all of it has the potential to become something beautiful – even the ugly mess-ups.  Even the endings.  Even the failures.  Maybe we just need to choose a different crayon.

And add cherries. 

Last Times and Letting Go -- Or, Parenting Perilously

Last weekend, my Facebook status read:

I've turned teenagers loose in my garage with spray paint and x-acto knives. #helicopterparentfail

This wasn’t an exaggeration.  Oh, and I also gave them a couple of saws and free range in my cluttered garage.  What could go wrong?  As it turns out – nothing.  No one stabbed themselves or anyone else.  No one mistook a thumb for a tree branch when sawing.  No one decided to explore the neighborhood art or chemical enhancement properties of spray paint.  They took the tools and the responsibility, threw in some creativity, and met and exceeded my expectations.  Of course, the threat that any amputated digits would not be packed in ice and rushed to the ER but rather placed in formalin jars and used in the class Halloween display might have added an extra layer of caution…

My oldest is in 8^th grade.  This is a year of last times and of letting go.  One of the unique side-effects of a small, K-8 private school is the evolution of a class as a living entity.  These kids aren’t shuffled from year to year between several classes and schools.  Yes, some students transfer out of the school and some transfer in, but over the years, the class develops its own personality and energy.  Kids, parents, and teachers learn each others’ strengths, weaknesses, and foibles.  As parents, we go from being asked to help in the classroom as they learn to read, cook, or knit to being asked to step back and let them develop their own projects and to let them travel for a week without us.

At our school, the magnificent (not an exaggeration; if you were dropped into the middle of it from the outside world, you would think you’d entered some utopian fantasy of a childhood Halloween) Halloween Festival divides the dramatic action into two parts.  Children in the lower grades are shepherded, with their parents, by “Angel guides” from room to room along a jack-o-lantern –lit “Protected Path.”  In each room, they watch a scene or vignette from a gentle story.  The rooms are decorated in gauze, twinkle lights, with soft, glowing colors and magical props.  Monsters and evil spirits do not enter this All Hallows Eve.

In the upper grades, Halloween takes on a different character.  Beginning in 5^th grade, students may pass – alone – through the “Perilous Path.”  Think of this as a combination haunted house and Disney ride.  There is a theme or a storyline, but the path is meant to be physically and mentally challenging.  This is a test of bravery and independence.  And here, the monsters, ghouls, and demons are the most frightening of creatures – adolescent humans.

The 8^th grade class puts on the Perilous Path, and this act is, in itself, a rite of passage.  Coming early in the school year, this is each class’s first real opportunity to make its mark upon the school as the top grade.  Of course, this isn’t accomplished without some heavy lifting (figurative and literal) on the part of the teacher and parents.  But, this is where the letting go, the sense of reeling out a line and letting the students run comes in. 

Hi.  My name is Christy and I am a control freak.

I generally don’t volunteer for projects that require input from other people.  Once I’m given a general concept – a theme or design – I like to do things my way.  And I typically only ask for help from people that I know will do those things my way.  Allowing the vision in my head to bend, to take on the ideas and flavors of other people, is not a natural condition.  Yet, once I stuck my hand in the air at the first parent meeting of the year for the new 8^th grade and volunteered to coordinate the Perilous Path, I realized that this was exactly what I was going to have to do.

Essays about the lessons of parenting are a dime-a-dozen.  And like most clichés, they are absolutely true.  In my 20s, I didn’t want kids.  I thought that becoming a parent would cause me to lose myself, that my world would become narrow.  I never guessed that having children would force me to become myself – to grow beyond the boundaries of my anxieties, to push me past my comfort zone daily, not just with my children but with other people.  And, it would teach me to let go.

I’m not good at letting go.  Of control, of people, of anything.  See previous posts.  But, this weekend reminded me once again, that the best things happen when I back off and let others do what they need to do in order to fulfill their visions. 

I watched in stunned and mildly stressed amazement as Friday and Saturday, other parents worked tirelessly to trouble-shoot, construct, and create.  They found ways to make my ideas work when I had no clue myself how to implement some of these things.  They took on various areas of the path and made them their own.

But the kids floored and humbled me.  I had written a rough “script,” that was based around plot elements or roles that they had brain-stormed.  Three boys want to “be seizuring?”  Okay, obviously a mass poisoning has taken place in that room.  Someone wants to be a zombie?  Great.  Zombies require no explanation.  They had a script, but I told them that as long as they stayed somewhat within the plot line (and appropriate) they could improvise.  And, improvise they did.

As we were in the countdown to set up, I was informed that a former corpse was no longer dead, the wounded man was now the zombie, and that the ex-zombie would now be dressed in military uniform and manning the check-in table.  I could sense other parents twitching a bit – “Are they going to know what they’re doing?”

They did.

For two hours, the 8^th grade kept up a frenetic level of dramatic energy, shifting and improvising throughout the night in response to the age and level of fear or disdain of the “mark” and in response to their own levels of boredom.  The boy who was supposed to fall dramatically across a doorway shifted to leaping out in a darkened corridor and at one point joined the “madman” on one part of the deck – the two kept up a demented and horrifying comedic descent into insanity.  Several of the poisoned victims got bored with seizuring quietly and either fell to the curse of madness or opted to leap from behind shelves and doors.

And, do you know what?  It worked.  This fluid, at times chaotic, approach to the plan produced a far better outcome than the tightest controls I could have enacted.

The “Serenity Prayer” is never a bad thing when one is facing peril. Whether the challenge is organizing an event, coping with relationships, or parenting, its lessons apply:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change

The courage to change the things I can

And the wisdom to know the difference.

That is my mantra for this year of last-times and letting go – “The wisdom to know the difference.”

 

Stitches in Time

As my fingers teased the threads from their multicolored rat’s nest, and wound them around the spools – plastic, Styrofoam, and wood – memories strung themselves along the strands…

Chubby, awkward fingers – mine – playing with empty wooden spools, stringing them on bits of yarn, rolling them along the floor and underfoot, stacking them into castles of imagination.

Patterns strewn across the table, fabric stacked on the futon-like bed where my sister and I were to sleep, checking the same bed for needles and pins before rolling out our sleeping bags.

Instructions issued around a mouthful of pins.  “Stand still, and I won’t prick you.”  Standing still was never possible, not in half-finished dresses, shorts, or tops masquerading as porcupines.

Spreading buttons across the table, feeling them bump and clink beneath the pads of my fingers, sifting them like erratic sand into piles of wonder.

Hours in fabric stores, wandering the aisles of notions, sliding between bolts of fabric, sighing at aching legs and dreams of ice cream.

“Tiny stitches.  Take tiny stitches.”  Patiently exasperated fingers, picking apart my rebellious work – stitches grown longer, no tail left to secure the end.  “Tiny, even stitches are stronger.”

Sewing badge tossed in the tray of my lime, plastic sewing box – defiantly unattached to the green sash.

Weakening arms, holding my son, my second child – on a couch in the wrong house.  “When can you take the sewing cabinet back with you?  I want you to have it.”  A toddler and an infant underfoot – what would I do with a faded, mid-century, laminate cabinet in my Craftsman house?

Knitting needles shaping squares and rectangles – something to do with yet another child at the breast.  A memory of buttons, perfect for this purse!  Pushing through cobwebs in the garage, climbing the detritus of cast-off stages of childrearing.  Pulling open a drawer – packed with tangles of thread and elastic; the plastic anchor buttons from my long-ago sailor suit.  A knotted handkerchief is bundled in the jumble of bits and pieces.  The handkerchief is heavy; it clicks and bubbles.  Knots untied reveal the missing pearl necklace.

Moving away from failure – smaller house, more compact life.  The sewing cabinet has to come inside.  Covered with a bright scarf, it becomes the “Nature Table” – layers of feathers, leaves, and pinecones mill about the surface.

“Why don’t you just use your sewing machine?”  “Too much trouble.”

Clothes too worn to donate.  Something of her Depression-induced frugality enters my bones.  A shirt with sentimental value becomes a pillow.  A silk top and old slacks, a purse.  Slowly patching together new from the fragments of the past.

Piles of clothing and fabric creep across the living room.  I run out of thread and turn to the cabinet.  No more pearls, but strands of silk, cotton, and nylon in hues beyond the rainbow. 

Cleaning out the shelves of the cabinet, slowly claiming ownership.  Faces and fashions of an increasingly distant past gleam from still glossy pages stuck with scraps of tweed and knits.  Pillbox hats and cap-sleeves enthrall my children.  “That’s in style again,” says the thirteen year old.  “The miniskirt freed women,” remarks the fifth grade boy.  “Sissy would like that dress; wouldn’t you?” asks the youngest.  We sit, cross-legged, pouring through the old Vogue fashion books, my memory teased by the albums of my childhood.  Finally, the tears come.

“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years” – attributed to Mark Twain

I didn’t want to learn to sew.  Along with cooking, cleaning, ironing, crocheting, and making babies, I relegated sewing to that pile of “Things you’re supposed to do if you’re a girl.”  But I was a girl of the ‘70’s, a child of feminism raised on the saying “Anything boys can do, girls can do better.”  Anything, obviously, did not include sewing.

I loved the outfits my mother and grandmother sewed, knitted, and crocheted for me as a child.  Even during the height of my pre-teen anti-domestic arts campaign, I adored the knickers my grandmother made for me one Christmas.  They were a gorgeous, rich russet brown sateen corduroy with brass buttons at the knees – hey, it was the early ‘80’s; what do you expect?

I even loved trips to the fabric store as a child (when they didn’t take too long).  I loved the endless rows of shimmering colors and textures, the glitter of buttons, the candy-like spools of thread. 

When I was small, before I determined that such things were a path to domestic servitude, I learned to piece together square fabric scraps, making endless quilts and small pillows.  As I got older, I progressed to dresses for the dolls in my dollhouse (muslin, of course.)

But, when Grandma wanted to teach me to use the sewing machine, and started espousing the economic and style benefits of making my own clothes, I put my foot down.   No way.  No how. 

I love food, so I had learned to cook – but, in true form, I became an adherent of the wing-it, recipes are only guidelines, throw in a little of this and a little of that culinary style espoused by the male members of my family.  No leveling the flour with the edge of a knife for me!  Cooking was an expression of creativity, not a job.

Life shifts.  I believed my grandmother hopelessly outdated when she spoke with concern about the difficulties of juggling career and children, when she said things like “children really need their mother.”  I believed she was being condescending when she praised my mother for “even though she works, she’s always at home when you kids are.”  I wasn’t going to have kids anyway, and even if I did, I certainly wasn’t going to compromise my career. 

Life shifts.  I married a man who negotiated me from my position of never having kids to agreeing to two (don’t ask about the third.)  I put down my paintbrushes and sketch pads sometime after school – too much trouble with work and a new child.  But, I began to find that mending the loose buttons and torn seams of life gave my fingers something to do.

My grandmother lived to see two of my three children.  She saw me ask for and receive my first sewing machine when Caitlin was a toddler.  The first Easter without her, my kids wore outfits that I made myself – with pain and swearing and many, many phone calls to my mother.

It is amazing how wise my grandmother became in the years approaching and since her death.  Cooking and sewing became for me, as they had been for her, art, expression, and necessity.  I’ve learned to make career shifts and compromise to balance family and work.  And, the sewing cabinet is finally in our living room.

I finally got around to organizing the drawers and making the cabinet my own this last weekend – roughly a decade since my grandmother’s death.  Time allows us to sort through conflict, guilt, and loss to make the memories our own. 

Making room in the bottom shelves for some of my own materials, I ran across stacks of Vogue fashion magazines – the kind with pattern numbers and fabric swatches.  The kids and I spent close to an hour, cross-legged on the carpet, pouring through one season after another.

As my sister and I had once been, my kids were willing helpers in the tasks of freeing the tangled threads and corralling scraps and bundles of trim and elastic into plastic bins, sorting safety pins and buttons into glass jars.  Watching Sierra earnestly wind separate bits of rickrack around individual strips of cardboard brought smiles and a tear or two.  Grandma was a true product of the Great Depression.  She never threw away anything that could be reused.  I found tails of thread that I would have tossed, neatly coiled around folded cardstock that had once been a card of snaps.  As I appliqué patches cut from an old top onto a pair of cut-off shorts made from tired jeans, I think that somewhere my Grandma is smiling.  And, possibly saying a little “I told you so.”  I wouldn’t put it past her.

Last Day Lessons

Today is the last day of school for my kids.  At the closing ceremonies today, Caitlin will stand with her class and sit down as an 8^th grader; Aidan will stand with his and take his seat as part of the new 5^th grade; Sierra will hand a red rose to her 8^th grade buddy, just as her buddy welcomed her at the beginning of the year, and will sit down as a second grader to watch “the buddies” leave the school the same way they entered in 1^st grade – under an arch of flowers.

There is a beautiful symmetry to the closing ceremonies, tradition and predictability.  The ceremony doesn’t so much provide false security and safety as it supports and embraces all that has been learned and all that is still unknown.

May troubles be less

And blessings be more,

And nothing but happiness come to your door.

And may you have luck

Wherever you go

Your blessings outnumber the shamrocks that grow.

 

May wind be at your back

And sun be overhead

May friends be at your side

Wherever you are led.

 

We sing this song at closing every year – parents, kids, faculty, and staff.  The words blend farewell, see-you-later, and I’ll-always-be-here.  And for all the well-wishing in the song, there remains a sense of journeying into the unknown where there will be troubles (hopefully less) mixed with the blessings (hopefully more), that the wind will blow and that friends will be needed. 

As the kids step away from school today, they won’t stop learning.  None of us will.  Yet, despite the work of teachers, parents, and peers, some lessons must be learned alone.  Here are some of the things I want (and try) to teach my kids, but that I know they have to learn on their own.

• Everything is a choice.  Every choice has a consequence.  Whether you do a thing or leave it undone, you will have to live with the result.
• Use your words.  When you speak from your heart, it has a greater impact than you can possibly realize.
• People who are “mean” are often hurting.  Sometimes if you can find their hurt, they can no longer hurt you.
• Someday you will be most grateful for the teacher you complain about most today.
• Don’t be so quick to brush off that kid who annoys the crap out of you.  You two may someday have more in common than you will with the person who is your “best friend” today.
• The “weirdoes” often become the most interesting adults.
• Everyone has pieces that connect – the punk and the cheerleader, the cowboy and the Goth, the bookworm and the skater – underneath the clothes, hair, and accessories, we have common stories, pains, and desires.  (The Breakfast Club should be mandatory viewing for all 14 year olds.)
• No one can fix your argument with your friend – no one but the two of you.
• Yes, you’re right.  You absolutely will not remember that homework assignment 20 years from now.  However, the discipline muscles that you trained in completing it well and on time will support you throughout your life.
• Yes, you’re right again.  It’s not fair.  Life is neither fair nor easy, but it’s that way for everyone.  So, do you think maybe that means it really is fair after all?
• When someone rejects you or says something cruel, they aren’t exposing your shortcomings, they are revealing their own insecurities or capacities.
• Sometimes you get the most out of the lessons or activities that “suck.”
• Yes, pushups really are important.
• You don’t know yet who you are or what you really like.  You won’t know for years, if ever.  So try everything and learn what you can from it before rejecting it.
• You are your only reliable mirror.  No one else can show you your true self.  Not your classmates, your teachers, your siblings, not even your dad and me.
• You don’t find yourself when you are doing the safe, easy things that you know well.  You find out who you are when things are hard, scary, or just plain crappy.
• The only feet you can stand on and still balance are your own.

The Other Side

I am a child of the 70s, a child of equal rights, of feminism, of the era of sensitive males.  I grew up believing that anything boys could do, girls could do better, that women could compete with men, toe-to-toe and head-to-head, but that men still were supposed to open doors and that boys couldn’t hit girls.

My sister and I were the only children and the only grandchildren.  We learned (with varying degrees of success) to cook, clean, sew, shoot, whittle, fish, sail, row, woodwork, and dig really deep holes in really hard clay (ask about the swimming pool debacle of 1990 sometime.)  There was no “men’s work” or “women’s work” in our childhood home; there was just work.  There were chores to be done and whoever was best suited or was free at the time did them.  We played with dolls and with Tonka trucks, had tea parties and waged battle in forts.  In our day, there was still a term for girls who “played like boys” – tomboy.

I married a man who could cook and clean, who would be an equal partner in child-rearing, not (as I told my mother-in-law early on) because I was lucky, but because in my mind, these things were required.  I entered a profession, once dominated by men, at a time when the pendulum was swinging the other direction.  Today, roughly 90% of graduating veterinarians in the U.S. are female.

This trend in veterinary medicine mirrors educational trends throughout the country – more and more women are holding higher and higher degrees.

In general, I applaud all of these societal shifts.  I’m female.  I have never had any desire to be defined by my gender or my reproductive capacity.  Yet, I can’t help wondering – as our societal expectations for men and women have evolved, what are we leaving behind.

For those of you who are parents, think of your children’s classes for a moment.  What is the gender breakdown of kids who are considered “difficult,” “challenging,” or “hyperactive?”  I’d be willing to bet that the percentages skew heavily toward the boys.  Now think back to your own childhood.  How many of the men among you (or brothers, neighbors, or cousins of the women) played with toy guns, owned a BB gun, set things on fire, or played with illicit explosives?  Come on, don’t be shy.  Raise your hands. 

I’ve been taking the same informal poll for the past 20+ years, and so far the results have been unanimous.  Ever adult man of any generation I have questioned has admitted to lighting something on fire or blowing something up as a kid.  Most of them played army or war.  Many admit to “near misses” and “close calls” – brushes with mortality of which they still hope their mothers are unaware.  Many report getting in the odd fist-fight or two – over name calling, a toy, a girl.

Now, jump back into the present.

How often do kids roam the neighborhood in packs – on foot, bicycle, or skateboard?  We tether them to electronic leashes (cell phones) or shuttle them from one supervised activity to another.  Homemade explosives of any sort tend to attract the attention of federal law enforcement.  Kids are helmeted, padded, and sunscreened to the extent that they may as well be placed in plastic hamster balls.

Historically, the classroom setting – despite the complaints of my generation that teachers “favored boys” – has had a female bias.  Since the late 1800s, teaching has been one of the more feminine professions, and the virtues of the classroom (sit still, wait to speak, focus on one task at a time) tend (though not always) to come more easily to the girl-child than the boy.  But, boys had recess.

Again, think back.  Who dominated your childhood playground?  Where did the exuberance and aggression of youth happen?

My kids are fortunate – their classroom setting provides opportunities for active as well as passive learning.  Boys and girls alike are taught skill such as handwork, cooking, gardening, and woodworking.  They are allowed to wrestle and to climb trees.

Yet, I see a trend that troubles me.  Increasingly, parents are demanding a crackdown on “aggressive play” on the playground – a banning of sticks as “weapons,” a ban on “war games.”  Ok, so I don’t want kids whacking each other with sticks, and I’m generally opposed to war and killing in real life.  But, when did we become so afraid of our innate aggressions that we grew terrified to let our children playact?

I’ve heard people say that kids can’t distinguish between the world of imagination and that of reality.  This may be true for the 3-4 year old, but for the grade-schooler, I call Bullshit.  I’ve seen young kids, immersed in a fantasy world, look derisively at a parent who attempts to join in.  “It’s just make-believe, Mom,” they say.  “Duuuuhhh.”

It isn’t PC nowadays to say it, but men and women are not the same.  Equal is not alike.  Boys and girls have different parts, different hormonal influences, and different evolutionary drives.  Yes, nurture impacts nature.  But we dismiss our nature at our peril.

I’m reading an advance copy of a terrific non-fiction book called Zoobiquity.  This book, written by a human cardiologist, looks at the correlations between diseases and conditions across species.  One chapter is devoted to adolescents and adolescent risk.  Across many species, one demographic stands out in the fields of risk-taking and aggression.  You guessed it: the young male.

Think about it from an evolutionary standpoint.  Which males are most likely to survive and to reproduce their genetics?  Sorry, not the sweet, sensitive, cautious ones.

No, I’m not advocating a return to the era of the cave man or even to disco.  But I do worry that we are systematically stripping away behaviors, mores, and character traits associated with masculinity without replacing these traits.  We have created a world in which women and girls expand well beyond traditional or evolutionary roles, while at the same time narrowing the world of men.  You can nurture, we tell our men – but most primary caregivers are still female.  We honor your service, we tell our soldiers, but we chide our sons for playing army.  Even in the bedroom, we women have taken an increasingly assertive role (and I say yay), but what have we left as “appropriate” for masculine sexual expression?  (I’m only qualified to speak to heterosexual interactions.)

My son turned ten yesterday.  I worry about him sometimes – sandwiched between two sisters, raised by a mother with no brothers and a father who never knew his own dad.  I wonder if we are giving him enough of a sense of his own identity and place, as a male and as a person.  I don’t want him to grow up “masculine” in the misogynistic, hyper-aggressive, insecure-hiding-behind-macho sense, but I do want him to have a strong identity and a place of his own in the world.  I don’t want him to grow up afraid of his own strength, of his darknesses, and of his power.  I don’t want that for him, or for any of his generation.

Right now, Aidan knows who he is.  He will shake his hips to Lady Gaga or wield a Nerf Gun with the best of them.  He’s fine playing “Pretty Pretty Princess” with Sierra (with the indulgent sighs of an older brother humoring his baby sister) or with leading her on an armed assault against an unknown enemy.  He will cuddle into our laps for snuggles or try to burp the alphabet. 

It should (though in deference to the black and white nature of modern society and the internet, I’ll say it anyway) go without saying that I’m not a fan of fighting, war, sexual violence, objectification of women, arson, or risk-taking-induced injuries.  But, the fact that I don’t like these things doesn’t eliminate them from the species.  I wonder what we are losing when we consistently strip away opportunities to test boundaries and to find identity.  Thanks to modern agriculture, technology, and medical advances, we no longer need men to fill the roles of hunter or protector.  But what are we giving our boys in return?

Amazonian fantasies aside, no good will come of a society of ill-educated, insecure, or submissive men.  We need to either find new ways for our boys to test and challenge themselves or to loosen the reins of political correctness and fear.  Shifting the pendulum to a female-centric society will do no more good than a history of patriarchy has done.  Women lose when they are denied the opportunities to work with, compete against, and partner with men equally.  When we are denied the chances to work through our darkness, how are we supposed to fully develop our light?

 

The Pain We Choose

“I just wanted to thank you for making it so easy on me.”

“Huh?” Ok, so my response wasn’t the brightest, but in my defense, I’d been imitating a statue while trying to ignore both the buzzing in my right ear and the needles carving along my shoulder blade for about two hours.

Gus, the tattoo artist, explained.  “Most people move around a lot.  And complain about how much it’s hurting them.”

Nope.  The explanation didn’t help.  My response was still an internal ‘Huh?’  I pondered for a minute, and then said, “I don’t really get that.  I mean, they knew that they were having a tattoo done, right?  And that it involves needles?  I don’t understand.  Why complain about a pain that you chose?”

I could understand how someone’s concept of his or her own pain tolerance might not correspond to what is found in the face of actual pain.  I get the discrepancy between what we think we can handle and how pain manifests to us in the moment.  After all, we aren’t really wired to sit still and let a predator gnaw on us – even if the teeth are sterilized needles dripping ink instead of saliva.  Still, complaining about it seemed odd to me.  It’s not as if tattoo artists run around saying, “Don’t worry.  It doesn’t hurt.  It feels like fairies are tickling you with dandelion fluff.”  C’mon folks, there’s a reason that tattoos have come to symbolize “tough” in our society, despite the increasing number of middle-aged women such as myself sporting ink.  (My apologies to true aficionados of tattoo art.  I can’t help feeling a bit like a poser, a dilettante dabbling in something that feels just a little dangerous and daring.  But, that’s a discussion for another blog…)

Once I moved beyond the notion that it is insane to complain about the side effects of a completely elective event, I started thinking about pain, choices, and acceptance.

My own relationship with physical pain is probably a bit atypical for my background.  In modern society, members of my gender, generation, and education don’t run across a lot of opportunities for injury.  But pain and I are old friends.  No, don’t get the wrong idea here.  My parents were very non-physical (I think I was spanked about three times, pretty average for the ‘70s.), and my only experience with whips has been me holding them while riding or lunging a horse – no other humans anywhere near.  However, the combination of my own clumsiness (my most recent skinned knee happened within the last 12 months), my physicality (I don’t wait for someone big and strong or wearing gloves to move something for me), and 30+ years of working with horses means that I have ample experience with a variety of bruises, lacerations, sprains, strains, and fractures.  Add in an inclination toward migraines and having borne three children, and my response to physical pain tends to be, “Yep, it hurts, but it won’t hurt forever.”

Other pain is different, though.  I realize that like Gus’s other clients, I do sometimes struggle with accepting the pain of my choices.

Tara Brach’s book, Radical Acceptance, has taken up more or less permanent residence on my dresser – handy for me to open on the days when I only have the strength to sink onto my bed and think ‘What the hell am I doing?’ Brach talks about the relationship between pain (emotional or mental, and sometimes even physical) to our feelings of unworthiness.  Think about it.  How often does “This isn’t fair; I can’t believe this is happening to me” really mean “I can’t believe I got myself into this.  I suck.  I’m stupid, lazy, blind, etc…”?  In Radical Acceptance, Brach emphasizes that the way out of this death spiral, what she calls “the trance of unworthiness” is to completely accept our circumstances – where we are, what got us here – and to be compassionate with ourselves in those circumstances and around those choices.  Acceptance, by the way, is not the same as resignation or even as condoning.  For instance, we can accept that we have lied to ourselves or someone else or have done something else not compatible with our own ideals without giving ourselves permission to continue down that path.  Acceptance is neither rolling over and peeing in the face of the inevitable nor giving oneself an out.  Think of it as being one’s own best parent or teacher – clear sighted, loving, but giving firm guidance.  (That’s my best translation.  I recommend reading the book.)

Unfortunately, we aren’t programmed to accept.  The human animal, like most, is wired to hide, escape, or attack in the face of pain or danger.  Even when we have knowingly walked up to the threat and poked it in the nose with a stick, we have trouble accepting the reality.

Modern day risks are less likely to involve stealing a fish from a bear, and more likely to involve emotional, mental, or financial risk.  In other words, it is our sense of self and of self-worth that is most likely to be placed in danger.  We are uncomfortable with risk.  We live in a society that both lauds and demonizes the risk takers.  We make heroes of the highly successful – the bold capitalists, the extreme athletes, the flamboyant artists.  Yet, at the same time, those who step outside of the safe mold are often marginalized.  Why?  Because, their lack of conformity is a threat.  It shows us both what we can be, and what we stand to lose when the gamble fails.  Why else do we avoid eye contact with the panhandler on the corner?  Why do parents come unhinged when their teen comes home with a piercing, punk haircut, or tattoo (yes, I couldn’t resist.)?

We convince ourselves that if we do the “right” things, if we make the “safe” choices, that our lives will be free of pain.  We complain about the pain that we choose, because we are unwilling to accept that the choice was ours.

We have both more and less control over our lives than we would like to think.  The safe, conforming path is no guarantee of happiness, fulfillment, or safety.  However, things rarely “just happen” to us.  We often choose the circumstances that place us in the path of pain.  We frequently choose our pain. 

I first became aware of this tendency to complain about the consequences of our own choices years ago.  It was one of my first experiences with an elementary school event.  I was a shiny new mother, eager to volunteer, with starry-eyed visions of nurturing parents enhancing the educational community.  The glow faded rapidly as the margaritas and dissatisfaction started to flow (at 10:30 in the morning).  These mothers didn’t seem to be feeling the glow of contributing to the growth of the children they had chosen.  They sounded resigned, beaten down, tired, bitter, and frankly resentful.  It was clear that they had volunteered for the event because that was what “good mothers” do, but not because of any true desire on their parts. 

I was almost in tears by the time we headed home.  I remember telling my husband how I was afraid that I would someday resent my own children.  The toxic atmosphere felt as though it had leached into my bones.

Years later, I am one of the older, experienced mothers.  And, I’m now able to see both sides.  Yes, I do find myself volunteering for tasks simply because it seems that there is slack that needs to be taken up.  And yes, sometimes I’d rather be doing something else for myself.  The stars in my eyes cleared out long ago.  Yet, even as I ponder the rash on my arms from the bales of straw lifted at the school May Faire this weekend, I’ve learned to remind myself that this was my choice.  I chose the children, the school, and to say “yes” when asked to volunteer.  Each step along the path is one that I chose and that I need to own.

Most of the pains in my life – physical or non-physical – have stemmed from my choices.  The thing for me to remember, and the thing that helps me to accept and to say, “Yep, it hurts, but it won’t hurt forever” is that most of the time, I made those choices because something else accompanied the pain.  I’m no masochist.  Every choice has two sides – risk and benefit. 

We risk the pain of a failed relationship for the joy that it brings before.  We risk the loss of a job for the rewards that job brings while it exists.  We risk the fear of losing a child or the exhaustion, conflict, and tears of raising the child for the love and laughter the child brings into our lives.  We risk the pain of the tattoo needles for the beauty or symbolism of the art.

And on that note, here is my recent tattoo – a phoenix rising from the flames.  Can you guess what message I was sending to myself when I chose it?

Putting on Your Game Face

When things get tough or scary, it’s easy to forget what we are doing, and even why.  It’s pretty simple to say “Why bother?  This is just too hard,” and, in my case at least, then go eat something loaded with sugar, butter, flour, and chocolate.  It’s easier to turn on the TV, surf the internet, to read a book, or to just goof off than it is to really work at getting past the uncomfortable stuff.

I’ve said it before.  When I really need lessons, (ok, so that’s most of the time) all I have to do is look at my kids and their peers.

Last night was the school’s Spring Strings’ Concert.  In the Winter Concert, all grades (2-8) perform something.  The venue is larger, the focus is dispersed across the student body, and the pieces played are typically familiar and cozy. 

Everything grows in the spring: plants, kids, and musicianship. For the Spring Concert, the kids have to step up.  Only the strings players in grades 4-8 perform, the venue is smaller, the pieces are eclectic, and the 8^th graders perform their solos.  And, the audience is a bit more critical; parents and grandparents have learned to expect significant growth between winter and spring, and I think the kids realize it. 

Change and development occur under pressure, and it’s illustrative for me to watch how these kids respond to that pressure.  As anyone who’s read this blog should know by now, our school is not heavily populated with passive, docile, blindly obedient kids.  I don’t think it is a coincidence that a curriculum that emphasizes active, engaged learning is going to wind up with a population of active, curious, and questioning students. While these traits will probably benefit the kids in the long run, they make preparation for any sort of focused activity such as a play, concert, or game nerve-wracking for the adults involved.  Rehearsals and practices tend to involve a lot of talking, giggling, forgetting (of everything), and general goofing off.  For weeks.  You can almost measure the time until performance by the lines beneath the teacher or coach’s eyes and the set of his or her shoulders.

Yet, if you ask the kids how things are going, the response is typically, “Fine.”  Though, children who are a bit more sensitive to adult aura will generally add that they wish that their classmates would quit goofing around because it’s upsetting the teacher or coach – not because they think it will impact the performance.

The kids know something that the adults forget.  They know the difference between practice and the real thing.  They know that practice is for building the skills they need, for getting a little bit better each time, for failing, and doing it over.  They don’t express it in words, but I think that they know that when the chips are down: when the curtain pulls back, when the whistle blows, when the conductor lifts her bow – they will be ready. 

The kids have learned to play through the pains of learning.  While their approach can be maddening to watch, I can’t help but think that they may have it right.  They know the difference between the small, daily obstacles and failures, and the big moments where results count.  I’ve watched six years of plays, concerts, and games with this school, and I’ve noticed the same thing every time.  No matter how wound up and scattered they seem right before the performance starts, regardless of the running, shoving, joking, clowning around, as soon as they take their places on the field of battle, whether it be stage or court, something changes.

The kids put on their game faces.  The most distractable, goofy, chatterbox of a class clown will metamorphose as soon as he or she picks up a bow, takes a mark on stage, or gets in position for the tip off.  At the beginning of this year, we spent most of our Saturdays in a gymnasium in Fair Oaks, watching basketball.  During Friday’s concert, I recognized the expressions on several of the girls’ faces as they took up their instruments.  Even though their hands held bows instead of a ball, their expression said the same thing.  “Ok, it’s game-on.  I’m taking this to the net, and nothing is getting in my way.”

As adults, we sometimes lose track of the fact that one can have fun and even make mistakes while still holding an underlying seriousness of purpose.  We get so caught up in our small failures, that we forget how to put on our game faces when it really counts.  I wonder sometimes if this is an area where we need to quit trying to teach our children and instead to listen to them.  Does giving yourself an ulcer during preparations or berating yourself for moments of weakness or failure to make the right choice (every single time) really contribute to the end result?  Do stress and anxiety actually indicate greater meaning and purpose, or do they just prevent us from seeing the fun in the process?

I don’t know the answer, but I wonder.  What would happen if we learned to shrug off the smaller failures, to go play, and to come back with our game faces on, saying to ourselves, “This is what I’m going to do.  Nothing is going to get in my way.”

 

 

The Bone Pile and the IDS File

My weekday job involves writing and doing other communications work for an online veterinary community.  One of the longstanding features of this community is the Message Board area where veterinarians post questions, comments, or quandaries regarding cases, clients, life, and almost anything you can think of.  It’s sort of like a giant doctors’ rounds.

Two concepts that pop up in the Message Boards fairly often are ideas that cross over neatly into everyday life.

The Bone Pile -- (Spoiler alert: Do not read the following if you still operate under the belief that “doctors” possess superpowers.)

Whenever someone, often but not always a new graduate, posts about a case that went wrong and about their fear, horror, anxiety, and shame surrounding the case, almost inevitably, a more experienced veterinarian will chime in with this phrase.  “Every practitioner has a bone pile.”

It’s true. Medical practitioners -- whether veterinarians, dentists, or physicians -- are human.  And human beings make mistakes.  We make errors.  We have failures.  Sometimes we fail to communicate.  Sometimes we miss something.  Sometimes we forget something. Sometimes our skills prove to be insufficient.  Sometimes we fail to follow through.  Sometimes fate and physiology are not on our side.  Sometimes we just plain screw up.  These errors, failures, and losses stack one upon the other, forming the “bone pile” of the career.

In life, we all have our bone piles.  All of our failures, mistakes, cruelties, and inadequacies pile in the corners of our lives.  The cutting words spoken to a friend, the failure to listen to our children’s stories, the relationship that we blew entirely, the addictions, the jobs that we’ve lost, the financial setbacks, the burnt pie crusts.  The bone pile isn’t always stocked with T-rex femurs.  Some of the bones are tiny – wispy fish bones that poke and annoy, but are almost invisible.

Most of us don’t like to look at our bone piles.  We stack furniture in front of them, cover them with pretty clothes or expensive electronics, blur the outlines with food, drugs, sex, or alcohol, run from them into the next ill-considered job or relationship.  We call this “moving on.”  And, indeed, one can’t set up residence in the bone pile.  It’s a creepy, hard, and uncomfortable place that lacks the things we need in order to sustain us.  There is no love or nutrition in the bone pile.  It’s haunted by the ghosts of shame and failure.

But, to deny it, is to deny ourselves.

Here’s where medical practitioners do something right.  We speak of the bone pile almost fondly and return to it on occasion, but not with self-flagellation – with a purpose.  You see, doctors (of all stripes and spots) have learned that the purpose of the bone pile is education.  We perform necropsies on our mistakes – carefully dissecting away the layers to discover exactly what happened.  In hospitals, human physicians hold Morbidity and Mortality rounds, in which a case that produced an undesirable outcome is selected and presented in a peer group.  The purpose of these rounds isn’t to shame the doctor in charge.  It isn’t a public flogging.  The M and M is meant to highlight where mistakes occurred and ways of preventing those errors in the future.

We can’t “move on” from our failures or losses until we understand why they happened, and until we learn what we can do to keep the same pattern from repeating.  The bone pile will always grow – that’s the nature of human existence.  Yet, acknowledging the bone pile and its usefulness helps us to grow, to build our experience, and to move away from past errors.  Yes, so that we can make new ones!

If the inevitability of failure depresses you (it depresses all of us a bit, I think), then you may be glad to see the next tool.

The IDS File

The IDS file is usually mentioned in the same message threads that reference the bone pile.  New practitioners often have to be told about this tool, and sometimes experienced practitioners need a reminder to return to the IDS file periodically.  IDS stands for one simple principle: I Don’t Suck.

“I Don’t Suck” is a hard concept for most humans to grasp.  For veterinarians (and I suspect physicians) who tend to be goal-oriented perfectionists, the IDS concept is both incomprehensible and essential.  After all, if we tell ourselves that we are horrible, that we have failed, that we suck, that makes us good people, right?  Self-flagellation is virtuous, isn’t it?  After all, beating ourselves up over a mistake will keep us from making that same mistake again.

Uh, no.

It sounds good.  And we all do it.  We writhe in guilt over the case that went wrong – obsessing, losing sleep, researching until our eyeballs pop out of our heads like Boston Terriers with glaucoma.  We label ourselves – “I did it again.  I can’t be in relationships.  I should just die alone.”  “I can’t believe I said that to her.  I’m a horrible mother.”  The problem with the “I Suck” approach to our humanity is that it doesn’t prevent us from making mistakes, and it doesn’t make us any better in the areas where we’ve failed.  I’d argue that it makes us worse.

This is a hard story to tell.  A number of years ago, I was called out to castrate a horse.  Gelding is a common surgery, and I’d performed hundreds by that time.  The patient was a gorgeous, 6 year old, well-mannered stallion who was only being gelded because he was being moved to a stable that didn’t allow stallions and he wasn’t going to be used as a breeding animal anyway.  The surgery went well.  I never could pinpoint a moment where anything went wrong.  When he stood there was no bleeding beyond the typical few drips.  I watched him in his stall for about 20 minutes to be sure.  I wasn’t on call that night, and I’ll never know what happened exactly, but he began bleeding that evening.  I still don’t fully know the chain of events, but the upshot was that my patient wound up bleeding to death in the trailer on the way to the referral facility.

Realistically, I don’t know if I committed an error in surgery, if the horse did something later on that opened a clot, or if there was an error on the part of one of the other practitioners that saw him that evening.  I never will know.  But, this horse looms large in my bone pile.

Here’s what happened to me.  I excel at self-flagellation.  For months, I spent the drive to work wracked in nausea, my vision blurred so badly I could barely see the road.  I was terrified to do any surgeries.  At all.  The record lurked in my stack of files because I couldn’t face writing it.  I told myself that I could never geld another horse again.

None of this made me a better veterinarian.  Clinical acumen and anxiety-ridden paralysis don’t exactly go hand-in-hand.  Telling myself I sucked only got in the way of the confidence I needed to treat my other patients properly.

Fortunately for me, I had a boss who was more than willing to share the stories of his own bone pile, an office manager who had no intention of coddling me and booked surgeries for me (including geldings) just as she always had, and a technician who blessedly saw the shakes I tried so hard to hide and made certain that she could be there to assist me and who always had the phrase that got me through many a tough case, “I know you can do it.  I have great faith in you.”

And I had my IDS file.  It’s a literal file these days, still hanging in the rack in my home office.  Back then, my IDS file was a collection of cards, notes, and pictures from clients jammed into my cubby slot and briefcase.  Each of those cards said essentially the same thing: “Thank you for caring for our animal.  You are a wonderful veterinarian.  We are grateful for you.”

Human nature is a funny thing.  Even though I said that the story of the gelding disaster was hard to tell, those words were much easier to type than the messages of the IDS file.  We are much more comfortable with our failings than we are with our strengths.  Typing the phrase “you are a wonderful veterinarian” feels awkward and self-aggrandizing.  Even alone in my office in pre-dawn quiet, I feel embarrassed, as though I should duck my head and blush.  Yet, in this same office, I can glance around the room and see at least three mementos belonging to my IDS file.

In our everyday lives, the IDS file may be harder to compile.  I’m learning to build mine from bits and pieces.  Some of it lives in my email folders: kind or funny notes from friends, compliments on articles, thank yous from school or other organizations.  Some of it lives on my refrigerator, dresser, and bulletin boards in the form of art and gifts from my children.  Some of it lives in boxes of old letters (remember those?) and cards.  Some of it lives in the objects about me – my Alice in Wonderland teapot from my husband.  Some of it lives in my mind – in the memories of conversations, small triumphs, and unbelievable joys.  But, I’m learning, on the days when the bone pile seems unmanageably high, to go to the IDS file in whatever form is handy and to find the things that tell me that “I don’t suck” or to find the people who will let me know in their own ways that they “have great faith” in me.

Yes, our pains and failures have to be moved on from, but they must also be learned from.  And we need to learn from and embrace our triumphs and joys to the same degree.  Ultimately, we are the only ones who truly create both our bone piles and our IDS files, and it is up to us to decide how to use them.

What do my kids say?

I worry about what my kids say in public. 

Most parents reading that sentence are probably having one of two reactions.  The honest ones are thinking, “Oh, God, me too!” while those who prefer not to look too closely behind the curtains of their own lives are saying, “Well, then maybe you should raise them better and stop polluting their minds.”

It might come as a surprise to realize that I’m more closely aligning myself with the second set of parents here, but not in the ways you might think.  I don’t worry about the following things:

• Whether my kids have picked up swear words that they might pass along – They have
• Whether my kids will talk about the R rated movies they’ve seen – They will
• Whether they’ll pass along their knowledge of reproductive anatomy or physiology – Oh, well, at least they know the correct terminology.
• Whether they’ll out us for “always going to fast food restaurants for treats” – In my kids’ collective mind, more than once = “always”

I worry more about the value judgments they absorb from us, and how they convey those judgments to the rest of the world.  If there is one lesson in life that I would really like to give them, it is that every person has his own story.  The problem with this is that I also want them to understand that evil and malice do exist in the world and that it is the responsibility of every person to confront injustice.  Reconciling those two ideals becomes, for me, a giant, tangled, who-gave-the-ferret-the-yarn mess.

Mike and I are not perfect, and yeah, I do worry that our children might pick up something that slipped from our mouths in a moment of anger, irritation, irreverence, or sheer stupidity.  But, overall, I think of those things like viruses – something that may cause a transient infection but will be eradicated if the patient is generally healthy.  I believe that when parents try, most of the time, to live and speak the lives they want for their children, that is largely what the children will learn.  But, I worry about the hidden lessons, about the stories that my kids will take away that are right for our family but may not fit another household.

Here, let me give you three examples: two are moments when my children passed along things from our family – with different results, and one where another family’s values intruded on ours.

If you’ve read this blog for a while, then you probably realize that religion holds a somewhat tentative place in our house.  Mike is pretty opposed to organized religion, and while I was confirmed Catholic, I’ve fallen away from the Church whose teachings differ so drastically from my core values.  As a result, our kids have been raised with a pretty sketchy idea of theology.  My general message to them has been that I believe that all religions – throughout history and cultures – are ways of coming toward the same basic truths.  In this, we’ve tried to teach them to respect everyone’s religious beliefs.  Well, that hasn’t always worked.

Caitlin has considered herself a polytheist for several years.  She tends to favor the ancient Greek pantheon, but will consider the influence of the Egyptians.  She has no patience for the notion of one omnipotent and perfect deity.  She prefers the concept of a number of gods, flawed in human ways, and fulfilling different roles.  Since Caitlin is also typically opposed to sharing information with others except on a need to know basis, her beliefs haven’t generally been a problem.  A couple of years ago, however, she came home from school with one of those stories that made me wince.

Somehow she had wound up in a religious debate with a classmate in which she insisted that the Greek gods are real while the classmate, offended, said that the Greek pantheon were myth and that “there is no God but God.”  This was the point where things fractured a bit.  Caitlin, always ready for a good, speculative argument, demanded, “Well, what if the Greek gods are real and your God is imaginary?”

I’m still grateful not to have received an irate parent phone call on that one…

Incident number 2 took place in our car a year or so ago.  Aidan and two of his friends were riding in the back seat of our van while I was driving and trying not to listen to the 3^rd grade boy dialogue.  No one should have to listen to boys who somehow consider themselves out of earshot.   In my attempt to drown out the fart-jokes with internal white noise, I missed the beginning of the conversation.  My attention focused when I heard one of the boys say,

“That’s so gay!”

Aidan didn’t miss a beat.  “What’s wrong with that?”

“Huh?”  The conversation stopped.

“What’s wrong with being gay,” he asked.

Neither boy had an answer, other than a muttered “nothing,” so the world returned to methane-based humor.

My initial, and current, reaction was pride in my son.  I was proud of him for speaking out against a stereotype, and I was proud of him for breaking from the group to look at his own values.  Usually we worry that if one of his buddies said, “Hey, let’s go jump off that bridge,” Aidan would be the first one over the rail.

But, part of me wonders.  Where do we draw the line in speaking out for our beliefs?  Is it more right for my son to assert his value that no way of being should be used as an insult than it is for my daughter’s classmate to try to impose his belief in a single, omnipotent God on her, or her to impose her polytheism on him?  Part of me says, well, of course.  The one is speaking out against injustice while the other shows a disrespect for someone else’s religion.  But, is it ultimately the same thing?

Now, I happen to know the parents of both my son’s friends well, and I’m reasonably confident that none of them would be okay with their offspring using “gay” as a pejorative.  But what if one of those boys had belonged to a family who truly believed homosexuality to be a sin?  I would argue that Aidan was simply asking, “What is wrong with being gay?” and that his intent was to say that it’s not okay to use someone’s identity as a slur, but might not the hypothetical parent view the conversation as an attempt by my son to impose his beliefs on others?  I don’t know.

The third incident may explain some of this further.  While we generally try to provide a healthy balance of foods for our kids – we receive a weekly “farm box” from a local CSA program, we don’t stock fluorescent orange chips except as a special treat maybe twice a year, the bags of Halloween candy last longer than the twelve months between trick-or-treats, and a fruit or vegetable is mandatory in every lunch – Mike and I aren’t fanatic about every ingredient or product that crosses the kitchen threshold.  Sierra may have a whole-grain flour, nut, and raisin bar from Trader Joe’s with a glass of Kefir for breakfast but a Skippy peanut butter and Smuckers strawberry jam on white bread (with the crusts cut off) sandwich in her lunch.  (This week, these are her menu items of choice.)

Most of the time Sierra, like her siblings, packs her own lunch.  And for a first grader, I think she does a damn good job.  Her typical lunch involves the aforementioned sandwich (sometimes she mixes it up and has leftovers in a thermos jar), a pack of dried seaweed, a container of Pirate’s Booty, and a piece of fruit.  Nutrition-wise, I’d have to say, “not bad.”  She’s got her protein, her carbs, multiple vitamins and minerals, and nothing super-processed or with a lot of ingredients whose chemical structures were the stuff of my undergraduate nightmares.

You may have noticed that first graders are not into nuance.  Shade of grey tend to fall into two camps for the seven-year-old: black or white, good or bad, right or wrong, healthy or bad-for-you.

Knowing this, I shouldn’t have been surprised when Sierra came home a couple of months ago saying, “We need to buy a different kind of seaweed.”

Ok, not a comment I would have expected to hear in my former, non-kelp-purchasing, kid-free life.  But, what really threw me was the next line.

“M says that the kind of seaweed I bring in my lunch is bad for you.”

My first reaction was a series of three-letter acronyms for expletives.  Seriously?  Some kid had decided that our brand of seaweed is unhealthy?  What sort of freaky universe was this?  Could someone please choke that child with a Twinkie?

I’ll admit it – we did double check the sodium content (the only potential unhealthy thing I could think of).  It was fine.  As I type this, I feel like an idiot.  What kind of adult allows a 7 year old to influence her perception of how she feeds her children?

Well, we’re nearing the end of the school year, but M is still at it.  Last week, Sierra was visibly upset (since this child’s default expression is a huge grin, upset isn’t exactly hard to discern.)  Sure enough, “M still says that my lunches aren’t healthy.  Now he’s saying that my sandwich is bad for me.”

Aidan, from the back seat, made the noise beloved of pre-teen boys – that sort of cough, laugh, vocal fart that indicates a level of derision un-expressible by words.  “What the heck is wrong with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?”  I have to give Aidan credit; he may rain a torrent of judgment down on Sierra, but other kids are not allowed to make his little sister feel bad.

“He says that the kind of bread we buy is bad.”

Ok, well, white bread criticism makes a bit more sense to me than seaweed-critique, but I was becoming annoyed.  Biting back a number of comments that would not endear me to the 1^st grade parent body, I dredged up, “Well, anything is bad for you in the wrong amount.  Even water can be bad for you if you drink too much of it.  The important thing is eating a reasonable amount of each kind of food.”

This is our default answer to junk food, why pizza is not a vegetable, whether soda=poison, and any other random nutritional question.

So here is my quandary.  M and his family obviously had nutritional right on their side in the white bread question.  Realistically there isn’t anything healthy about the sandwich bread Sierra eats.  (I’ve learned to pick nutritional battles because I fear that if my children decide that cannibalism is the only reasonable antidote to whole grains, I will be the first menu item.)  However, where is the line between M being informed about healthy foods, M educating his friends, and another family’s way of life trampling all over ours?

And where do my kids draw the line?  When does their belief in freedom of religion collide with someone else’s values?  And where does indignation over a slur become telling someone else how to live?

I don’t really know.  I haven’t answered these questions for myself yet.  And so, I do worry about what my kids pass along.

Just Let Go (of the plan)

My phone just sent me a reminder.  “Just let go,” it says to me every morning at 6:00.  Just let go.  I am a widely acknowledged control-freak, and some mornings I need that message more than others.

I ran across this photo yesterday morning on Facebook:

Obviously it’s pretty difficult and rather inefficient to go through life with no plan at all, but I think we program ourselves to believe that PLAN = SAFETY.  Our intellects know this not to be true.  We have a raft of sayings… “The best laid plans of mice and men…” “Life is what happens when you are making other plans.” And on, and on.  Yet, how often do we catch ourselves saying, “This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”

We treat our plans as though we were plugging ingredients into a recipe or numbers into a formula.  If I do A, B, and then C, I will get result Q.  Except sometimes, we don’t get result Q.  Sometimes the outcome is X or 42 or purple.

I’ve been working with a team on developing a student loan simulator designed to help give veterinary students and pre-vet students an idea of how their choices after graduation may affect their loan balances and repayment.  In the introductory text, we have a bunch of disclaimers to the effect that this simulator isn’t a way to predict your future, it’s just an illustration, etc.  And as I have worked on those sentences this week, part of me imagines the students who will be entering their numbers, their visions of their future, and hitting “Calculate.”  I’m willing to bet that they have plans.  Many of them probably have their future mapped out so clearly that they believe they know what path their lives will follow until they die.

I was one of those students.  Yet, at almost every turning point of my life, I have found myself saying, “This wasn’t in the plan.”  We were going to have two children, not three. I was going to own my own equine practice by now.  We were going to live in our old house until our grandchildren were grown.  I went to veterinary school because I would never be able to support myself as a writer.  And, the list goes on…

Yet – and this is the reason for the phone reminder – most of the best things in my life have come from letting go of the plan, from allowing my life to flow with only gentle guidance from myself.

I took a watercolor class taught by Caitlin’s teacher last night.  Rick Tan is not only a terrific teacher but an amazing artist in his own right.  Just check out his blog.  We were working with wet-on-wet watercolors in the method the students use in school.  This particular technique uses a lot of water, and as anyone who has swum or boated in open water knows, water doesn’t like human control.

In high school, I hated watercolors; the pigment never seemed to stay where I wanted it, so I moved on to oils where I could layer pigment and control my brushstrokes and even the thickness of the paint for texture.  The down side to oils is that they take forever to dry, so they aren’t very practical for a two week camping trip in a crowded car in the Pacific Northwest.  I took up watercolors as an adult in order to be able to paint on our vacations.  Very practical for a landscape painter.  Part of the plan.  Gradually, I learned to adapt my perfectionist tendency to work with the watercolors rather than against them, but I still used relatively little water so that I could maintain control.  This painting of the Awahnee hotel in Yosemite shows the detail of the leaves applied with a very dry brush.

Last night, Rick started by telling us that we were going to play with color for our first painting.  He had us begin “with a blob of yellow…”  Something seized up inside me for a moment.  All of the control voices started shouting at once.  “I’m a landscape painter.  I paint from life or photos.  I don’t do abstract.  I know how to paint.  I don’t need to experiment with color.”  I’ve had some practice with these voices lately and I’ve learned not to argue with them.  Instead, I left them to chatter in the back of my head and loaded my brush with yellow pigment.

As soon as my brush touched the meniscus of the film of water coating my paper, the yellow flowed from the bristles and began to tendril out along the page.  I moved my brush in swirls, back and forth, in S-shaped swoops.  I played with deepening color in some areas, and lifting it off in others.  As we added different pigments to the page, I could feel the layers of my emotions flowing with the color – swirling, blending, deepening in some areas, lightening and bouncing along in others.                             C. Corp-Minamiji,  original watercolor 2010

 

 

C. Corp-Minamiji,  original watercolor 2012

 The end result wasn’t what I’d envisioned when I first dipped my brush into the paint, and I think that’s a good thing.  A friend of mine fought with her brush strokes during the first piece, her struggles reminding me of my own watercolor battles in high school.  “I think most of the trick to watercolors is letting go of perfectionism,” I commented.  And as she relaxed into her second work, her painting shifted.

How often do we try so hard to cling to our concept of the way things are “supposed to be?”  How often do we say things to others in the hopes of forcing the response that we want?  And how often are we disappointed?  Yet, it seems, to me at least, that when we let go, let events, people, and feelings follow their own currents, that’s when the richness swirls in.

Try it: “Just let go.”

 

The Gender Line

I don’t much follow celebrity news, but Ashley Judd recently wrote a beautiful essay discussing the harm done by the objectification of women.  Harm done not just to women, but by women as well as men, and the harm done to men as well.  This essay keeps being labeled “feminist.”  [Side note: as I was finding the link for the essay, I noticed the title.  “Ashley Judd Slaps Media in the Face for Speculation Over Her ‘Puffy’ Appearance.”  “Slaps Media in the Face” – really?  The editors at the Daily Beast couldn’t find words to headline an essay about the dangers of stereotyping and objectification that didn’t involve a metaphor that conjures the most stereotypical image of female celebrity?  Shame.]

My own relationship with feminism is an uneasy one.  I don’t even like the word, not because I’m somehow opposed to the philosophical ideal of female strength and equality, but because it is a word that divides.  I don’t believe that men and women are the same.  I like feeling feminine, and I like doing many of the things that are considered “masculine.”  I prefer to exist beyond the labeling of my reproductive organs.  Can I be a humanist instead, please?

Misogyny, sexism, chivalry, feminine oppression, patriarchy, gender-bias – it doesn’t matter what terms are used.  There is an ugly undercurrent to each, a thread that says “We are different members of humanity, our differences and complexities scare the hell out of us, and we can only resolve them by assigning roles and expectations.”  In a world where physical strength conferred a distinct survival advantage, these labels may have made sense.  However, as technology and education have leveled the career (survival) playing field, our expectations around gender serve only to confuse, to enhance conflict and distrust, and to prevent us from celebrating – yes, celebrating – the very real differences that exist between us.

We all contribute to the problem of separation and expectation.  Daily.  The strident feminist who shuns makeup, refuses to buy guns or trucks for her son or dolls for her daughter is as guilty as the middle-aged man who states outright that no woman “can do that job as well as a man.”  And, the mother who pushes makeup on her adolescent daughter “just to cover up that blemish” is as guilty as the father who tells his son to “toughen up; don’t cry.” We all do it.  Don’t pretend you can’t see yourself here.

 What about the mothers whose default is to call the other mom to set up a playdate, even though the father is picking the child up from school?  What about that time you looked at a woman and thought (or said), “There is no way she should be wearing that.” When was the last time you had an opinion, really any opinion, about a man’s attire?  How often do we excuse a man lashing out in anger when we know that he is really frightened or hurt?  Why do we make the excuse?  Oh, well, because that’s just how men handle these things.  Why aren’t we angry at a society that refuses to allow men emotional expression beyond anger or fucking?  Why aren’t we angry that we set separate parenting standards for men and women?  We do.  Don’t deny it.  A man can be a good father just by showing up.  What about the mother who lets her son go off for an overnighter without clean socks or underwear?

Yet, we run around claiming that all is equality and fairness.  We tell our daughters “You can do anything a boy can do.”  Yet, we raise our sons with the expectation that they need to somehow treat women differently than they do other men.  We tell them, “Don’t hit girls.  Well, don’t hit anyone, but especially don’t hit girls.”  We train them to hold the door open for women.  Are they supposed to let it slam shut in the face of the guy behind them?  We tell our daughters, “You can have any career you want.” But we don’t give them the tools for that career.

A man is expected to state his needs and expectations in the workplace.  A man is expected to speak up when he sees someone underperforming.  A woman who speaks her mind professionally risks being classified as a bitch.  Yes, this phenomenon is real.  I have heard male colleagues yell and curse at clients with dangerous horses.  I have had those same clients call the office to complain about how rude I was when I suggested that the horse was dangerous and needed some training.

This isn’t an example of the poor, oppressed woman.  This sort of gender divide harms everyone.  Women lose (obviously) in terms of self-esteem, performance, and career advancement.  Men lose the input and experience of half of their colleagues.  And they lose the opportunity to put their own egos to the side and hear an alternate view.  Whenever we are allowed to entrench deeply within our own experience and self-expectation, we lose.

It starts so early.  Walk onto an elementary school playground and look at the first grade.  In kindergarten, those same children mingled, irrespective of gender. The active children rolled around in the grass and mud like puppies on caffeine while the more sedate children built castles of blocks and dreams.  By first grade, though, the lines begin to be drawn.  Girls clump together, trying on tiaras and cloaks, while the boys wield sticks and charge across the yard.  They still blend their games, but often the cross-over is gender-specific: the girls need a groom for the wedding or a king for the kingdom; the boys need someone to rescue. 

Earlier this year, I had an odd experience.  I was picking Sierra up from school, and as my whirlwind child tore through the classroom and out into the yard with a pack of boys, a mother of one of the other girls smiled and said to me, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but Sierra reminds me a bit of Ramona (from the Beverly Cleary books) – I mean in terms of her…of her physicality.”  The other mother trailed off as though she wasn’t certain that she hadn’t said something inappropriate.  She didn’t look critical; she looked almost half-envious, as though she wished that she had been that exuberant child.  But, that physicality wasn’t, and still isn’t, considered quite the norm for girls.  Sierra is Ramona in many ways.  Thirty years ago, she would have been branded a “tomboy.”  It isn’t unusual to see her, resplendent in princess gown and tiara, chasing her brother through the neighborhood armed to the teeth with Nerf gun and sword.

I hope that she will maintain this balance.  But, I’ve already seen the pressures of society begin to bend her older siblings.  Aidan, by default a sweet, sensitive, cuddly people-pleaser, has begun working on his “cool” act.  He’s always had an affinity for sports, guns, and cars, but he is less and less willing to let any side of him other than the sport/gun/car/class clown face be seen around his peers.  Caitlin struggles socially as she and her peers enter their teens.  “Most of the girls just want to talk about makeup and hair and clothes and music,” she complains.  Caitlin loves to shop, will play with makeup a bit because she likes things that are pretty, even herself, but she doesn’t see the point in talking about these things.  She’d rather hold lengthy discussion about the merits of Marvel vs DC comics, or the more subtle points of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or compare and contrast Star Trek and Star Wars, but already, those conversations are the purview of the boys.  When we separate, sort, and label, everyone loses.

I don’t have a fix.  I wish I did.  I think that the only solutions to the big problems are the small ones.  What if each of us stopped, paused before allowing a judgmental thought on a woman’s body to be fully articulated?  What if we stopped before saying, “Don’t cry” to our sons?  What if we took a breath before leaping to the “bitch” label for a woman stating her case, or before brushing off the rudeness of an angry man?  What if we gave each other small spaces in which to move beyond the labels?  What if we quit blaming clothing, makeup, beer commercials, or politicians for our societal woes?

What if we ditched words like misogyny and feminism and moved toward one label?  I’d like to be a humanist, please.

Vulnerability -- For the Long Term

Caitlin is traveling with friends this week, and the trip involves a flight.  If there is one phobia that I haven’t quite managed to shake, it’s flying.  I love to travel, but you don’t want to be the person stuck next to me in a plan – I gasp and grab the armrests a lot.  Suffice it to say that while I trust the family taking my daughter and I’m so grateful to them for providing her with this adventure, my maternal anxiety is in overdrive today.  Caitlin doesn’t know that.  I’m not a big fan of letting my neuroses impact my children’s experiences.  I was texting a friend last night about my struggles with letting my daughter “spread her wings” despite my personal discomfort.  “Seems like adulthood is all about doing the hard thing for the long-term benefit,” I commented.

For me, “the hard thing” usually involves letting go of control.  (See ‘fear of flying’ – above. I’d probably be fine if I were the pilot.)  I’ve come to realize, though, that most of the time, my desire to control the circumstances around me has less to do with fear of what those circumstances may produce than fear of what will be revealed about me in those circumstances.

I intermittently follow Brené Brown’s blog at www.ordinarycourage.com.  Brown is a research professor whose work focuses a lot on the value of vulnerability and the trap of its opposite, perfectionism.  In an article for CNN, Brown writes, “Perfectionism is a 20-ton shield that we lug around thinking it will protect us when, in fact, it's the thing that's really preventing us from being seen and taking flight.”

I don’t know about you, but I have spent most of my life listening to the voices in my head that give a running commentary about how any thought, word, action, or inaction of mine will be perceived by others – the voices that say “that’s not good enough.”  Yet, all of the cool things, the magical things that have happened in my life have come from allowing myself to be vulnerable, to take risks – including the risk of looking like a screw-up or of being rejected.  It is only when I manage to turn off those voices, that the real me gets a chance to spread her wings and be heard.  (There’s a reason I write with the doors shut.)

But, the hard part is that vulnerability isn’t always rewarded.  Sometimes you will lose something precious.  Sometimes you will be misunderstood.  Sometimes you will, in fact, be rejected for the person you are.  And, it’s hard to keep plugging forward in the face of those losses, to convince yourself that it’s better to risk rejection as yourself than to be accepted for someone that you aren’t.

My son is a perfectionist.  His teacher, my husband, and I have spent most of Aidan’s academic career working on convincing him to take risks with his work, and to accept that the occasional mistake doesn’t necessitate starting over or giving up entirely.  Yesterday morning’s “book report” kerfluffle was emblematic.  When I asked, “How did your book report go on Friday?” I hadn’t expected him to burst into tears and bury his face in his hands.  It turned out that when I had nixed his original idea for the report (which involved copying a section of the book word-for-word), he got stuck and couldn’t figure a way out, but was too ashamed to ask for help. 

Shame is the evil cousin of perfectionism.

Aidan didn’t see his original idea as plagiarism.  To him, the part of the book that he wanted to present had already been written, so it was obviously “right.”  He struggles with the concept of doing anything original or creative to showcase what he got from the book because he’s afraid that what he produces will be “wrong.”

The lesson that I hope someday to get Aidan to see, and the lesson that I hope Caitlin will continue to integrate, is that we are so much more real when we keep ourselves moving forward in the face of our imperfections – our humanity. 

One last anecdote on the beauty of vulnerability:

I’ve written before about my friend, the singer Vatrena King.  Vatrena has one of the most truly lovely voices I have ever heard, but more importantly, she possesses a quiet, generous soul and iron strength.  In December, she held a concert that she and her friend and manager, Poppy Peach, had been planning and working toward for months.  A week or two before the concert, I interviewed Vatrena for our local paper, and she told me the history of one of the songs she would perform.  “It Is Well With My Soul” was written in the 1800s by a gentleman who had lost his family under tragic circumstances, yet, in the face of that loss, he wrote a song of acceptance and strength.

As fate would have it, Vatrena was hit by a nasty respiratory virus on the day of the concert.  Now, we’ve all heard of diva singers cancelling concerts for the merest throat tickle “to preserve their voices” – or, more likely, to preserve their sense of self.  Vatrena, however, though she could barely speak, powered through her concert with joy and humor.  She even joked at one point that while she is normally a soprano, she was having fun seeing what life is like as a tenor.

No, Vatrena’s voice that night wasn’t up to its usual standard, but her performance showcased something far more beautiful – love.  Her love for her friends, family, and fans in the hall that night shone in every note she sang.  She was willing to risk the vulnerability of an imperfect performance in order to be real and to show her gratitude to the people she loves.  And, that vulnerability created something far more powerful than perfection ever could.  Listen:

 

Consistently Inconsistent

“But I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel.  It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.”

“Yes,” said Harriet, “but I am one of them.  I disconcert myself very much.  I never know what I do feel.”

“I don’t think that matters, provided one doesn’t try to persuade one’s self into inappropriate feelings.”

--Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night

 

“Weird.” “Strange.”  “Inconsistent.” “Wishy-washy.” “Cold.” “Heartless.” “Hypocritical.”

How many of us have heard ourselves called these things, either by others, or by the voices rattling around the chambers of our own skulls?  Maybe we got lucky.  Maybe no one ever said the words.  But, I’m betting, most of us have heard the message loud and clear.  There is a certain way of being, a type of person you are supposed to be.  And you aren’t measuring up.  Perhaps the message didn’t come in name calling.  Perhaps it was more insidious.  “That isn’t like you.”  “I know you don’t really feel that way.”  “That’s so out of character for you.” 

Or, maybe the message wasn’t addressed directly to you, but you chose to accept it, to open the envelope, read it, and take it as yours anyway.  Perhaps it came in the form of a criticism of people ‘like’ you – people who eat meat, or shun gluten, or are divorced, or who have multiple children, or have chosen no children; people who home school, who invest in private schools, who send their children to public schools; people who love more than once, people who love differently from the speaker, people between relationships; people who are creative, people who are outgoing, people who are shy…The list of ways of being that we learn are not okay is nearly endless.

And pointless.

No one knows who you are.  Not always.  No one knows who I am.  Sometimes not even me.  Why?  Because, the person I am – the person you are – is an ever shifting tangle of feelings, traits, experiences, and inconsistencies.  Forget layers.  We are kaleidoscopes.  We are shifting fragments of color, light, and shadow.  Our patterns change with movement, with experience, and they change depending on who is holding us.

The person writing this blog right now is not the person who will be on the phone interviewing a source in an hour.  Nor is she the person who went to bed last night.

So, is there a core person in there somewhere?  Yes.  Of course.  I may be shaped by my experiences. Certain traits may leap to the fore depending on my company, the conversation, my level of physical well-being, and a host of other factors.  But, somewhere underneath, below the shifting patterns, I’m still there.

Sadly, most of us get to be pretty good at hiding the core person.  We’re social animals, and we mirror the cues of others for acceptance.  Give me about 15 minutes, and your accent will begin to creep into my voice.  Also, we live in a world that is remarkably intolerant of all things unique or inconsistent.  Have you ever lived in a subdivision with that house on the block?  You know, the one that was painted some color off of the earth-tone section of the wheel?  Or where the owners tinkered with their car in the driveway, even though everyone else on the block parked in the garage?  Do you remember that kid in school?  The one who never listened to the music everyone else was singing?  The one who talked about weird books and didn’t have a clue about the hottest TV shows?

Even societies that pride themselves on iconoclasm expect a certain level of conformity.  Try living in certain “liberal” communities as someone who eats meat, refuses to attempt to bake gluten-free anything, and lets the kids watch Die Hard as a Christmas movie.  No one will say it, not outright, but it is easy to get a sense that something about your way of being is not okay.

When it comes to feelings things get even more tricky.  How many of us try to talk ourselves into the things we should feel?  How often do we deny our own points of inconsistency – with society or with ourselves?  Okay, I’m coming out of the inconsistent closet here.  Feel free to add your own contradictions, quirks, foibles, etc. in the comments.  Please.

• I have devoted my adult life to the preservation of animal welfare, but I eat meat and believe in the humane slaughter of horses.
• I have three children whom I adore, feel passionate about child development, and have absolutely no interest in kids I don’t know.
• I don’t really find newborn babies adorable.
• I would be fine with kicking our TV to the curb, but I’m the first one to turn it on after the kids go to bed.
• I state a preference for being alone, yet I’m the one who usually suggests hosting a party.
• I’m inherently shy, but refuse to dress in a way that lets me fade into the background.
• I like to climb trees, dig in the dirt, and wear stilettos.
• I believe in a divine power, but chances are I won’t discuss it with you, nor am I comfortable hearing about your beliefs – most of the time.
• I hate Hallmark cards, but their commercials make me cry.
• I consider myself the equal of any man, almost any time, but I still like it when a guy makes me feel delicate.
• I’m big on balanced nutrition and seasonal produce, but I won’t take vitamin supplements and I think most “natural” remedies are for suckers.  However, I only buy ginger to offset nausea or motion sickness.

The list could go on for pages, and I’m sure anyone who knows me well can think of two or three or fifteen points to add to the list.  However, the point isn’t the individual paradoxes.  The point is learning to accept what we really do feel.  And perhaps, learning to be a bit more accepting of those things in others which strike us as “off.”

Introverts Among You

Today I’d like to tell you a story of four people, two girls and two women.  Like all stories, this one speaks of more than the characters or events around them.  But, it speaks quietly, and you’ll only hear it if you listen.

The first girl grew up in an era of Saturday morning cartoons, of city-sponsored sports leagues, and of herds of children roaming the suburban plains.  She was tall and usually thin for her age.  She wore coke bottle glasses and usually seemed to be looking somewhere else – somewhere that didn’t exist.  She was the girl who was always picked last in PE, for any sport, even though she wasn’t nearly the worst at some, and was even pretty good at things like floor hockey.  She enjoyed sleepovers with one or two friends, but at a slumber party, she would crawl deep into her sleeping bag with her pillow over her head, wishing for a light to read by, and praying that the ghost stories would stop.  Whenever the teacher assigned a group project, she would sit quietly, barely participating, even though her report card held more A’s than anyone else’s.  She didn’t hear her classmates make the wrong choices or assumptions.  She didn’t hear whether they had good ideas.  She couldn’t hear anything over the roaring in her own ears.

By all accounts, the red-haired woman was fearless.  Tall and athletic, she could handle just about any horse, and would go toe-to-toe with the most cantankerous rancher.  “She’s pretty tough.”  “You wouldn’t want to get in her way,” people said.  She organized educational seminars for horse owners, spoke to groups, and quickly became the public face for her clinic.

The second woman slunk into parties behind her husband, even though, in heels, she was several inches taller than he.  Often low cut, always form-fitting, never frumpy, her clothes didn’t match her demeanor.  You’d find her standing in a corner, clutching a drink, eyes watching the room, like a gazelle at a watering hole, waiting for someone to notice her.   Eventually she would peel away from the wall, smile, and find a group of one or two sympathetic souls where she would stand at the edge, waiting for someone to let her in.  She would talk and laugh with the others, maybe even share a story or two, but only in response to a direct question.  She never asked questions of anyone else.  She knew it made her look cold, like she didn’t care, but she didn’t want to pry, to ask something that might make it look like she wanted them to reveal too much.  She figured that if someone wanted her to know something, they would tell her.  After a couple of hours, she would grow quiet again, excuse herself to the bathroom, mention to her husband that it was getting late and maybe they should be leaving soon, or that she was so sorry but she was starting to get a headache.

The second girl is, like the first, tall and wiry, though more developed at the same age.  She has a solemn face that can light into a dimpled grin.  She was early to talk, and can wax eloquent on subjects that interest her, though the one word used by every teacher at the school is “quiet.”  Sometimes they add “responsible” and “kind” and “maybe a little shy.”  “She’s not like her brother, is she?” they ask.  No, she isn’t.  Her brother bounds through life, never meeting a stranger.  Social isolation, even to do homework alone in his room, is physically painful for him.  The girl, on the other hand, keeps her bedroom like a cave, door closed and curtains drawn.  She gets good grades, and will sometimes surprise her teachers and peers with her passion on certain subjects, but most of the time, she complains that the teacher never notices her, and that the other girls never include her.  She doesn’t try to join the groups or find areas of common interest.  She waits, at the edges of a group, waiting to be invited.  Outsiders are surprised when they see how fearless she is, climbing to the highest branches of a tree, or when they see her burly, outgoing brother defer to her instantly, or when, in a low voice, she rebukes or corrects a classmate and the other child listens.  Parents and teachers comment in amazed voices at her performance after she holds the stage in a class play.  They don’t see her as a performer, or as a leader.  Because she stays at the edges, they assume she is passive, a follower.  They don’t see the steel.

Maybe you’ve guessed it by now.  The first girl and the two women are me.  The second girl is my oldest daughter.  We are introverts.  Yes, even the red-headed veterinarian.  There are more of us out there.  In her book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain writes that one third to one half of the population are introverts.  Yet, we live in a world that treats the introvert as an exception, an anomaly, or – most damaging – and oddball.

Cain does a far better job than I ever could of explaining the world of the introvert.  Her book is impeccably researched, readable, and filled with insights that brought me to tears more than once.  In fact, I probably could have met the needs of this blog post by simply typing – “Read this book.”  Unfortunately, though, the people most likely to read Quiet are the introverts.  And while it is a tremendous gift to read a book that helps you to understand that the things that you have always thought made you “not okay” are actually normal, introverts largely know who we are.  Introspection is in our nature, wired so deeply into us that an introvert will often look confused when someone remarks on their level of self-awareness.  Like most people, introverts tend to assume that there is nothing particularly different about our way of thinking.

This is where everyone needs to read Quiet.  While we may understand, intellectually, that everyone’s brain works differently, and that our experience may not be that of someone else, we live in a world that wants to whittle every peg until it fits in the same sized hole.

You would think that for an introvert, raising an introverted child would be the easiest thing in the world.  You’d be wrong. 

The girl with the glasses got contact lenses, grew up, found people to whom she could relate, and learned to put on the superhero costume of an outgoing expert in professional settings.  But, as a mother, she still sees the girl standing at the edges of the playground as a failure.  She wishes that the awkward adolescent with the pale blonde hair had figured out earlier that she was just as entitled to be a part of the group as anyone else.  She wishes that she had learned to fake enthusiasm, to master the code of “small talk”.  She feels that she would have escaped a lot of pain if she’d learned these things when she was younger.  She believes the message of her childhood and of the adult world, that to be quiet is to be passive, to prefer solitude is to be anti-social, to have a low tolerance for noise and crowds is to be shy.  She believes, in short, that there is something “wrong” with her.

She sees her daughter – bright, eloquent, confident, and fearless at home or with one or two friends – hover at the edges of her peer group, wandering off with a book while the rest of the class chats or plays basketball.  She sees this, and the little girl inside the woman cringes.  ‘Look what you’ve done,’ the voice in her head chides.  ‘She’s turning out just like you.  You have to help her come out of her shell.  You have to help her be more a part of the group.  If she’d just join in more, they’d see how amazing she is.’  And so, in the name of tough love, I have pushed my daughter to join clubs or teams.  Pushed her -- with the tight, angry voice that should tell me that this is about my fears and not about her at all – to sit with and practice with, and be a part of her basketball team rather than taking a few moments before the game to sit alone with her book.  I have brought home pamphlets for theater groups, pushed her into activities because, “You know you’ll enjoy it once you get there, and you can’t stay home all the time.”  Pushed her because I know that the real world eats introverts for lunch.

Fortunately, my daughter is far more stubborn and much less docile than I was as a child.  While I was a shy introvert, living in fear of making waves or disappointing anyone, or – heaven forbid! – being “bad,” she knows exactly who she is, and has no problem being that person.  What she does have a problem with, is people expecting her to be someone other than who she is.  She honestly does not understand why girls who chatter about makeup and clothes, who bounce and flirt, are considered “bright” or “leaders.”  She doesn’t see why the outgoing should get the prime roles in class plays even though they sometime have trouble memorizing their lines.  She doesn’t understand why they are picked as group leaders, or why when group assignments are made, she is always placed with the kids who have trouble focusing or who don’t care about the assignment.  In her head, thought is as important as action or words, and she doesn’t see why people should be expected to cluster in pods or all do the same thing.

She is right.  And she’s wrong – I may need to buy her a book on understanding extroverts.  At almost 13, she doesn’t understand that people can’t know your gifts if you never show them.  She doesn’t see that it is impossible for her teachers or peers to know the depth of her knowledge or enthusiasm if she never lets any of it out.

But, she has grasped something that it takes many introverts decades to realize.  She understands that she functions best alone or with one or two other people.  She knows that when large groups begin talking, particularly all at once, her brain shuts down – overwhelmed by the stimulation.  She already can verbalize the experience, common to introverts and unknown to most extroverts, of being drained by large groups, of feeling as though your energy is being sucked into the room and converted into all of that bubbling enthusiasm.  She knows that she needs to be alone sometimes, that her only way to be herself is to wander away with a book.  And she’s sick and tired of living in a world where the message is clear: ‘there’s something wrong with that.’

She loses by not making some adaptations to the social order of her class, yes.  But the world also loses by not accepting the gifts of introverts when offered. 

I have a bumper sticker, given by a friend who knows me well.  It says:

Introvert*

*insufficient energy for small talk

Most introverts have had the following experience.  (I used to think it was just me.)  We find ourselves in a conversation with someone who seems sympathetic.  We relax just enough.  The other person asks us a question that happens to be about something interesting to us.  We answer.  In depth.  In detail.  In lots of detail.  This is a thing to which we have devoted hours of thought and or research.  The other person looks interested, for a minute or two, but then we notice something.  We notice the eyes glazing over, the scanning of the room.  We see it coming.  Sure enough, the other person excuses him or herself and wanders away.

Both parties have lost.  The introvert has just received yet another message that his or her way of being is not okay.  And the extrovert has missed out on the insights and the opportunity for a deeper conversation.  Yet, this happens all the time: at schools, in the workplace, at parties.  We are living in a ten-second soundbite world that is not overly sympathetic to the documentary.  And we all lose.

Okay, I’ve taken up a lot of your time with this post, and the introvert in me is squirming at my self-indulgence, but if you are still here, this video is from a TED talk given by Susan Cain.  Listen.  There are introverts among you.  

Shakespeare *and* Love

“Shakespeare is boring.”  I’ve heard the declaration throughout my life – from the agonized cries of my classmates in high school English to my peers (and even husband!) as an adult.  Shakespeare is boring and hard to understand.  Shakespeare is for intellectual snobs.

I’ve never gotten that.  For me, Shakespeare wrote life – the entire range of human emotion and experience in gloriously shaded pictures of words.  The man is called “the Bard” for a reason.  He wrote language that sings, not to professors in dim lecture halls, not to the elite in paneled libraries, but to everyone.  This week, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the actor giving us a backstage tour of the theaters in Ashland mentioned that it is estimated that in Shakespeare’s time, some 80% of London’s population crossed the Thames to see his plays.  Can you imagine Hollywood’s glee if 80% of a city, any city, made their way into a theater for the latest blockbuster?

But movies, for all of their polish and effects, lack one element that pulses from the stage in a good production and binds the audience.  Love. 

It is possible – we do it every day – to be moved to laughter, tears, or thought by a movie – but, moviegoers will never feel the connection to the work and to the actors and to each other that comes from seeing a play performed.  In Shakespeare’s time, people packed into cities in ways that made Manhattan look like an example of suburban sprawl.  You could literally reach out your window and shake hands with the neighbor across the street.  Today we fence off quarter acre lots in order to have privacy from our neighbors.  We connect via boxes rather than face to face or hand to hand.  Our entertainment is computer-generated, polished, censored, rated, and scrubbed.  Sure, barring an extreme disaster, most residents of developed cities are unlikely to be felled by cholera, but we are often left trying to purchase connection, trying to fill an inner craving for which we lack the words.

I love Shakespeare, and I love my daughter’s 7^th grade class.  Still, I’ll admit, I had some misgivings about viewing Romeo and Juliet with a horde of 12 and 13 year olds, particularly when the viewing involved herding them back into cars for a 40 minute drive after they had suffered through the 7 hour, technology-deprived caravan from Davis to Oregon.  As we took our seats in a matinee theater packed with junior high and high school students, I looked at the playbill and saw that the running time was over three hours.  I regretted not bringing duct tape.

I was wrong.  The production, set in the haciendas of 1840s California newly under U.S. rule, had the audience from the first breaths.  Caitlin explained it best last night at dinner.  “I was sitting next to Collin, and I looked over and he was just like this.” She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and her mouth slightly agape.

Mike asked, “You mean because he was bored, or enthralled.”

“Enthralled.”

It didn’t hurt, of course, that these actors knew their audience.  I’ll admit it.  I love the bawdy parts of Shakespeare’s plays.  I love the raw sensuality of the double entendres that wink but are never coy.  I love the language that shows us just how prurient our modern notions of decorum are.  I love the sense, whether accurate or not, that there was a time when sex was considered as natural and complete a part of life as jealousy, anger, romantic love, or filial love.  For all of our modern fuss and bother about birth control, movie ratings, sexting, pornography, sexual orientation, etc., we have lost sight somewhere along the line of the fact that our minds and spirits are tied to our bodies, and that the enjoyment of the bodies is as important to our experience as the enlightenment of the mine.  Sorry, but it’s true.

But, “the play’s the thing.” (Yes, I’m mixing my quotational metaphors; deal with it.)  This production ramped up the bawd – in word, expression, and gesture – to so perfectly balance the equal power of the tragedy, that the audience of teens and preteens was left nearly breathless from laughter (and yes) a few tears.  For the parents, any brief hopes of the sort we experience when accidentally taking our young to a movie with more “adult” scenes than we would like, hopes that “maybe they won’t get it,” were quickly dashed.  Elizabethan language or not, there was no question that the kids “got it.”

Something happened in that theater, though.  Sure there were a few gasps and nudges and winks, but pretty soon, Benvolio, Mercutio, the Nurse, et al. had so caught the kids in the story, that the titillation of the forbidden gave way to honest enjoyment.  And the “grown ups” gave up decorum and laughed along with the kids.  And when Tybalt’s sword ran through Mercutio, we all gasped together.

Afterward, one of the boys – a kid who struggles with reading and language, and sometimes with the emotions not only of his peers but of himself – told me and one of the other chaperones, “I kind of almost cried.  When that guy, the funny one with the whip…” (Mercutio carried a bullwhip coiled at his hip.)

“Mercutio?” I asked.

“Yeah, he was funny.  I was sad when he died.  I really liked him.”

“It’s okay,” I said.  “I was right there with you.  I did cry. Mercutio and Benvolio have always been my favorite characters in Romeo and Juliet.”  He looked a little surprised – those were not the scenes that a grownup, a mom, was supposed to like.

That’s the thing about Shakespeare, and about theater in general.  It frees us from the “supposed tos” and gives us liberty to think, feel, and love.  Each of the plays that our group experience this week showed the range of lengths humans will go to in order to experience love – from the tragic (Romeo and Juliet) to the miraculous (the Chinese legend of The White Snake) to the madcap (the Marx Brothers vaudeville play Animal Crackers.)

And as we walked the sidewalks of downtown Ashland in the grey wind, rain, and snow, as we clustered in the wood-fired buildings of the farm, and as we drove from farm to theater and back, I watched my daughter and her classmates and saw the weird and wonderful ways in which they love.

Love is a loaded word for that age – a word of whispers and painful self-consciousness.  Love is a word they have almost outgrown telling their parents, and a word they are nowhere near ready to say to their peers.  But it’s there nonetheless. 

When a few of the boys emerged from the cars, after seven hours, speaking in British accents that they refused to lose over a four-day period and were not strangled, but were instead embraced, by their classmates, that was love.  As they raced each other, heedless of coolness and their usual social order, up and down the grassy hills on the farm, burning the pent up energy of that first long car ride, that was love.  Love showed in the off-beat, from the mixture of chagrin, irritation, and pleasure on the face of a kid hit in the face by a snowball from one of his classmates to the tattling for infractions such as climbing too high in a tree or the failure to brush teeth or wear jackets, to the silent and almost oblivious pairing off of introverts seeking a moment of solace from the mayhem.

There won’t be many more snowball fights for these kids as a group.  Next year will be their last together as a class.  There are only a few moments left before they begin to explore the more conventional definitions of love.  As parents, we only have a few breaths to go before we have to hold our breaths, wondering exactly how much of Shakespeare’s double entendres they truly understand and whether that understanding has a practical foundation.  The kids whose snow battles yesterday reminded me so much of their first snow trip together in second grade will soon find themselves increasingly bound by the constraints of society and expectation.  But, for now, they are more real in their connections to each other than many adults. 

We limit ourselves when we try to tidy the human experience.  Adult life is often constrained by definitions of love, friendship, sex, pain, and joy.  We use words that bind our emotions into tidy boxes – appropriate, inappropriate.  And, in doing so, we cut ourselves off from that connection with our humanity.  Shakespeare had it right – the human experience is a giant, sloppy mud pie of love, hatred, sexual tension, misunderstanding, laughter, and tears.  We can roll around in the language and emotion, laugh, cry, and get dirty, or we can stay clean and safe and watch life roll by on a silver screen.

The Parenting Plan -- An Open Letter to My Kids

Parenting, particularly other people’s parenting, is a weird landscape – sort of a swamp infested with landmines, alligators, and the occasional diamond.  Yet, somehow, we can’t stay away.  Parenting is a last uncharted territory – trodden by millions, yet pristine in its wilderness.  And no one has a map.  Maybe that’s the draw.  Perhaps that explains our fascination with everyone else’s parenting journey.  We either hope that they have a map and that we can follow in their footsteps, or that their missteps will validate our paths. 

This past week or so, I’ve passed a few signposts that caused me to question, check my compass, and ultimately set me back on course parenting-wise.

A friend posted this on Facebook:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An article was released discussing the “superiority” of French parenting.

NPR ran a piece on the next move of the so-called “helicopter parents” – parenting the workforce.

An acquaintance mentioned to me that she had chosen to have her children “to take care of me in my old age, but I don’t think that’s going to work out.”

We went to our school’s Open House.

We offered to pay Caitlin to foul at her basketball game.

I ran a half marathon.

 

I’m tempted here to jump into a defense of the “If you get a foul we’ll pay you $2,” strategy, because I know that out there somewhere is a parent waiting for me to step on that alligator, but we’ll get there.

Instead, I think much of this can best be explained by an open letter to my kids:

 

            Hey guys,

It’s Mom.  Yeah, the one who bugs you to:

• Clean your room
• Do your homework
• Play your cello
• Go outside and do something, anything
• Sort your laundry
• Make your lunch
• Make your breakfast

You know, the one who:

• Takes out splinters
• Snuggles you when you’ve had that kind of day, or when you just want to feel small enough to fit safely into someone’s lap
• Lets you hold my ear while you suck your thumb
• Always has ginger chews on long car rides
• Reads “The Monster at the End of the Book” in a Grover voice
• Climbs trees and skips – yes, in public

So, here’s the deal.  You owe us nothing.  Your father and I chose to bring you into this world, and we chose to repay our parents by giving you the best upbringing we could.  Our only wish for you is that you go out into the world as adults who do the best you can – for yourself and for others.

We will be here for you always.  And sometimes (you might already have noticed) being here for you means allowing you to screw up, fall down, and figure out a way to get back up again. Sometimes it means encouraging you to take chances or (yeah, I know you think it’s weird) even break the rules. Sometimes it means doing the things that we don’t want to do, the things that are hard for us or scare us, because we know that you are watching.  Yes, you help make us better people too.

Sometimes being there for you means challenging you to do more – to do better than what you thought your best was.  Sometimes it means making you rewrite that paragraph until you want to shove it down my throat.  Sometimes it means making you work the math problems until you want to stab Dad with the pencil. Trust me; it’s not fun for us either.  Until it works.

When I watch you guys cope with disappointment, figure out how to solve a problem or fix a broken toy or project on your own, or work out conflicts with each other or your friends, then it’s worth it – it’s worth all of the tears, the red-faced tantrums, the ‘I-hate-yous,’ and the empty place in my heart that comes from seeing one of you hurt, even for a second.

When you talk to us about the stuff that embarrasses, confuses, or hurts you, then it’s all worth it.

I know we can’t help sometimes.  Sometimes all we can do is watch you stumble around through a problem, watch you hurt, watch you feel lost and lonely, and all we have to offer is the cold solace of an insufficient hug.  I know you think at those times that we have no idea what you’re feeling, that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be kids, that if we really loved you, we would fix everything that is hard for you.

I’m sorry.

I remember.  I remember the loneliness of adolescence.  I remember looking in the mirror and wondering whose face stared back at me.  I remember the lost feeling of my friends running off without me.  I remember losing my best friend – again, and again.  I remember that horrible sense that the entire world was staring at me and whispering behind my back.  I remember hating my parents and family for teasing me – laughing at me.  I remember promising myself that if I ever had kids, they would never have to go through any of that.

I remember.  But, there’s a secret that parents know, that we didn’t learn as kids.  We aren’t all-powerful.  We can’t fix everything.  And, even if we could, we shouldn’t.

Someday, you will get out into a world that holds far more pain than that of your buddies ditching you on the playground.  Someday, you will experience far more loss than a broken toy.  Someday, you will feel a failure far deeper than a bad grade on a test or homework assignment.  And, someday, Dad and I won’t be there to make it better.

Someday you’ll enter a world where you have to work with people you can’t stand.  You’ll have to sit for hours in meetings that make you so bored you want to run screaming around the room, tearing off your clothes.  Someday, someone you love will hurt you in a way that makes every nasty word either of your siblings ever said sound like a compliment.  Someday, you’ll face things so scary that going for the ball in a game or climbing a higher tree will seem like brushing your teeth.  Someday you’ll have to push your mind and body much further and harder than Mr. Wolfe’s mile run.

And, when that someday comes, you’ll be ready.  I know, you don’t think so now.  But, you didn’t think you could ever ride your bike without training wheels either.  Remember how you screamed at us?  How you flung your bike to the ground, shouting that it was stupid and so were we?  Remember how you begged us not to let go of the seat, not even for a second?  How long did that last?  A couple of days?  Now you speed to the end of the block and take your turns so fast that your inside pedal nearly scrapes the asphalt.

Someday you’ll call us to tell us about your new job, about how you got fired, about your girlfriend/boyfriend/engagement/divorce.  Someday you’ll call to say that you’re buying a house, or that our grandchild is struggling in school.  Someday you’ll tell us about the volunteer work you’re doing or your terrifying tax audit.  Someday, you’ll ask for a loan or for a night of babysitting.  And we’ll do our best to be there – our parents have been for us.  But, if we are too far away or unable to help you, you’ll be okay.  It’s all part of the master plan.

Now, about that homework…

Love always and forever, even (especially) when you hate me,

Mom

 

Epiphany

Wikipedia has two entries for the word “epiphany” – epiphany (feeling) and Epiphany (the holiday.)  Deriving from the Greek epiphaneia, meaning ‘manifestation, striking appearance,’ epiphany encompasses that feeling of the “aha!” moment, the often fleeting instant when everything clicks.  In Christian tradition, Epiphany falls on January 6 and celebrates the revelation of Jesus to the Gentiles as the Christ, primarily through the visit of the Magi or “Wise Men.”

Maybe it’s the time of year, but my brain can’t help combining these thoughts into my own definition of epiphany – the visitation of wisdom.  To call me an intuitive thinker might be an understatement; my brain has a hard time tracing a thought from point A to point B in any sort of stepwise fashion – it tends to be easily distracted by shiny objects.  As such, I often rely overmuch on moments of epiphany as admittedly lazy intellectual shortcuts.  It’s easier for me to look for the flash of insight than to work my way stepwise through a problem.  Sometimes this approach works, giving me the perfect spark of creativity or a brilliant moment of clarity.  Often, though, it leads down a path of false conclusions.

As in almost everything else, it comes down to balance, leaving room for the moments of epiphany – the “Aha!” bursts of creativity and insight – yet still doing the work to verify the conclusion.  And, as in so many things, I’m beginning to learn this lesson from my children.

Waldorf parents often find ourselves in a perpetual state of justification – justifying paying private school tuition despite cutting every other corner of the family budget (a particularly difficult justification in a city like Davis with a renowned public school system), justifying why our 7 year olds can’t yet read, justifying the weird aversion to television and video games, justifying school festivals layered with incomprehensible overtones of both Paganism and Christianity.  Much of the time, these conversations hinge around the points that draw most parents to Waldorf education, the pieces from the beginning.

Nurturing, creative, appreciation for the arts, peaceful, wholesome, low-tech, age-appropriate – these terms and many more are thrown about when the parents of young Waldorf students gather.  Waldorf education is hugely attractive to parents who worry about their children being “taught to the test,” to parents who have read horror stories about over-scheduled, over-stressed children since the line on the stick turned pink, to parents who fear the influence of a fast-paced, “violent” culture on their sheltered darlings, to parents who bemoan the loss of arts classes in traditional schooling.

Don’t get me wrong, these pieces are all a part of Waldorf education, and for the most part, pieces of what our family appreciates and part of our justification for the seeming insanity of our family budget.  But, I listen to these phrases, hear sentences like: “Well, I’m glad they’ve had that creative foundation in the lower grades, but I don’t think it’s necessary as they get older” and I shake my head.  Something is missing. 

Maybe it’s the pastel-walled classrooms or the assignments that look way too fun and involve far too many colored pencils to be intellectual that make people see this curriculum as something designed for  young children, as something artsy and light, but hardly rigorous.  After all, if the upper grades students aren’t bringing home 6 hours of homework a night, they can’t possibly be learning anything, can they?

I think part of the problem most people have in understanding the Waldorf curriculum is that it is an education formed of interwoven ideas and principles, a complex model that doesn’t mesh with our modern “Insert Tab A into Slot B”  or educational menu thinking.  When Waldorf teachers talk about the curriculum being child-driven, this isn’t some sort of airy-fairy “let the kids do whatever they want and they’ll educate themselves” system.  The curriculum is child-driven only in that it has been crafted to link so inextricably to the physical, mental, and emotional development of the child that everything becomes part of the education.  Waldorf students don’t have a lot of homework because, if it is being done right, they are always in the classroom – or, rather, the classroom is always in them.

Believe it or not, I haven’t strayed that far from my original theme.  I’m coming back to epiphany.  Most epiphanies can only be accurately assessed from behind.  After time passes, we are able to review the evidence, to see if that flash was indeed truth or if it was fool’s gold.  When our children are in the lower grades, most Waldorf parents get only flashes of the whole picture – a form drawing here, the magic of the Michaelmas pageant, classroom songs sung around the house or in the garden.  It isn’t until our children are almost graduated, until our bank accounts are nearly depleted, that we see the pattern, the threads connecting every aspect of their education.

“Art,” “Creativity,” “sweet puppet plays” – I’ve heard the parts for years, and shook my head.  Nope, I thought.  That’s not it.  You aren’t getting it.  There’s more.

Two nights ago, our school held its annual Winter Concert.  Only grades 2-8 perform, but for the last few years, I’ve made it something of a crusade to invite the parents of pre-school – 1^st graders to the concert.  “It’s so good to see what your kids are working towards,” I say.  But, as the words leave my mouth, I know they are incomplete.  I know that the other parents will hear me and think that I am saying – “Look, someday your child will play an instrument like that.” or “Someday your kid will be able to sing a round in multi-part harmonies.”  But, these are parts.

Friday night, I listened and watched as Caitlin and the other 6^th-8^th graders played holiday carols as the audience filed into their seats.  A random observer dropped into the hall would never have guessed the degree of year-round grumbling about practice or the missed notes at home or emanating from the strings room at school.  Someone listening to a recording would picture a far more mature orchestra. 

On my left, my son and his best friend chatted before the performance started.  I listened to their conversation and something clicked.  “No, I don’t want to be James Marshall anymore,” said Aidan in response to a comment from his buddy.

“How come?”

“He wasn’t in the Bear Flag Revolt, and I really want to re-inact that.”

“He wasn’t?  Oh yeah, you’re right.”

The conversation then drifted to John Sutter, and early California.  I believe passports were mentioned.  School had just ended for winter break, yet these two 4^th graders were planning the details of the roles they will assume for their class trip to Sutter’s fort in February.  They were out of school, but school was not out of them.

The Winter Concert always makes me cry – odd, since I’m hardly the type to be overwhelmed by the Hallmark moment.  But, this year, I saw something different.  Yes, the 2^nd graders earnestly singing “O Tannenbaum” in German were adorable in their shiny black, white, and red outfits, but as I watched each class perform, something began to unfold.  As expected, the performances grew slightly more complex for each class.  3^rd and 4^th grade both performed pieces reflective of their curriculum, 5^th and 6^th grade joined in singing more complex choral pieces than the lower grades can manage.  And, then near the end – came two performances that blew me away.  ‘This.  This is why,’ my mind said.

I’ve written about Caitlin’s class before.  They haven’t been labeled an ‘easy’ class by even the most doting of parents.  Intelligent, active (very active), strong-willed, enthusiastic – this class has historically been shy on one leadership quality.  Discipline.  This state began to change last year.  Over the course of the year, the parents watched in no little awe as their teacher began to challenge them, force them to work together, and generally began to make them view discipline as something coming from within rather than imposed from outside.  Dr. Rick Tan has shown these kids, through his own example, the balance of brilliant creativity and disciplined work.  Friday night, it all came together as the class performed a piece written and composed by Dr. Tan, “Winter Angels.”

In Waldorf education, there is a philosophy that while not every child will excel at everything, all children are good at something.  As the 7^th grade performed “Winter Angels” this philosophy shone.  Some sang, some played the instrumental part, and some danced.  Yes, danced – a choreographed, beautifully timed performance.  These pre-teen and teenaged boys and girls worked together to perform not goofily or with shuffling embarrassment, but in a coordinated and professional manner I would never have guessed possible several years ago.  I always knew they had the talent, the creativity, and the pizzazz, but discipline?

As I wiped my cheeks after watching my oldest child and her class take their bows, the 8^th grade took the stage.  Their piece was listed in the program simply as “Mystery Song.”  (Caitlin later told me that the 8^th graders had developed this piece independently even of their teacher.)  Dressed in white shirts, blue jeans, and an assortment of geek-chic hats and glasses, with flags jammed nonchalantly in front pockets, the 8^th grade took the stage with their bodies proclaiming louder than any words – “We are teens.  We have come into our own.  Watch.”

K’naan’s “Wavin’ Flag” began in the background. And the 8^th grade came into its own.  “When I get older/ I will be stronger/ They’ll call me freedom.  Just like a waving flag.” Singing, dancing, clapping overhead, drumming on plastic buckets, these kids showcased unity, discipline, and the raw power of youth.  ‘Here we are,’ they said.  ‘This is who we are.  This is what you have produced.’  These teens held an audience of parents, grandparents, and younger siblings captive, and they knew it.  They owned the stage, and in that moment, they owned us.

“Give me freedom/Give me fire/Give me reason/Take me higher.”

Fittingly, it took the 8^th grade, in a very non-Waldorfy (as my family likes to say) performance, to give that epiphany.  This, this is what it is all about – that balance of creativity and discipline that produces a moment of absolute confidence and power at an age where most kids feel lacking in both.

Winter Traditions -- Light and Song

In the Catholic faith, Advent encompasses the 4 weeks before Christmas.  A candle is lit each of the 4 Sundays; traditionally, there are 3 purple candles and 1 pink.  As a child in plaid jumper and navy knee socks, I was told that Advent was a solemn time of waiting, a time to repent and reflect (not quite as severe as Lent, but not party time, either).  The purple candles symbolized the sorrow of waiting; the pink candle, lit on the 3^rd Sunday represented the joy of the approach of the Christ child.  This all seemed to fit for me – Advent was a time to be good, because Santa knows, and there was definitely something purple in the waiting – waiting for Christmas baking, waiting for grandparents, waiting for Santa, waiting for snow, waiting for Christmas carols, waiting to decorate the tree, waiting to open presents.  Advent was definitely a time of waiting.

As I grew older, Advent came to seem less of a period of waiting, and more of a countdown from Thanksgiving.  Light the candle – 1 week closer.  Tick.  Next candle.  Tick.  Pink candle.  Tick.  Last candle, andohmigodIhaven’tdonemostofmyshoppingyet.  BOOM.

It wasn’t until my children started school (yes, this is one of those posts) that I began to understand the place of light in winter.  In the lower grades, the children make beautiful paper lanterns and attend a Lantern Walk to celebrate Martinmas.  As the fall air begins to bite, the line of lanterns woven through the dark is threaded with song. 

After Thanksgiving, in the first week of Advent, the school offers an Advent (or Winter) spiral to the children in the lower grades.  In a quiet room, a spiral of pine boughs is laid on the floor, punctuated with luminarias.  One at a time, the children enter the spiral, carrying a white candle in a red apple.  The child lights his or her candle from the pillar at the center of the spiral, then bends to light one of the candles along the spiral on the way out. 

This year, the Winter spiral was only offered for the children up through fourth grade.  As my son and his classmates each took their turn in the spiral, I could see why.  Something changed in their faces.  Unlike the few younger siblings that walked the spiral during this session, the fourth graders that exited the spiral were not the same as those who had entered.  While the younger children glowed with a round innocence even after their candles were extinguished, as the fourth graders blew out their candles at the mouth of the spiral, they blew out something else.  Fourth grade marks the transition from little kid to big.  The unquestioning faith of childhood has begun to fall by the wayside, shadows creep into the corners.

The first light of advent is the light of stones,

Stones that live in crystals in seashells and in bones

The second light of advent is the light of plants,

Plants that reach up to the sun, and in the breezes, dance

The third light of advent is the light of beasts,

The light of hope that we may see in greatest and in least

The fourth light of advent is the light of man,

The light of love, the light of thought, to give and to understand

This is the Advent verse my children recite at school.  To me, there is something deeper here, in this marking of points of nature, than just a lighting of candles to mark time.   The verse grounds the moment with the outside world.  It is easy in winter to experience a hibernation of the soul, to direct our thoughts and feelings inward, to protect ourselves from the outer darkness and to protect others from any darkness of ours that might ‘contaminate’ a season of joy.  Yet, as the kids light their candles with a verse, they are connected: to the stones, the plants, the beasts, and to each other.

Singing fills our house (and car, and yard, and grocery store) this time of year.  The English translation of the Swedish Santa Lucia song, the school Advent song, the dreidel song, “Channukah, Oh Channukah,” and a random assortment of Christmas carols (in English, German, French, and Spanish) float through our lives this time of year.  These winter songs have all been adopted by my children, regardless of festival or religion.

Light.  Song. 

The part of my brain that has studied other traditions, the part that remembers history books, or dusty lessons in comparative studies can trace the links between European pagan and modern Christian festivals without bursting any neurons.  However, it wasn’t until my children began coming home from school with songs and verses of light that the point of all of those Solstice candles connected with me on a visceral level.

Robyn Beaufoy, a good friend, wrote a piece in the school newsletter about Advent celebrations.  In this essay, she writes “Writer Annie B. Bond reminds us that ‘Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Christmas, Yule, Diwali, and the celebration of Buddha’s enlightenment all take place in December, the darkest time of the year.’ Despite these different leanings, our common searching for Light in the darkness of Winter unites us.”

When Caitlin was in 5^th grade, the mother of one of Aidan’s friends came in and talked to the class about Diwali, the Indian festival of lights.  As the class began their studies of world civilizations that year, they began to link the commonality of festivals.  In 3^rd grade, one of the other mothers had come into the classroom to teach the students about Channukah.  At the school, the 2^nd graders each year enact the Swedish festival of Santa Lucia.  The oldest girl in the class wears a crown of candles on her head, and the children distribute breads or cookies to everyone in the school – while carrying candles and singing, of course.

Winter has been especially dark the past few years.  When the economy began to flag, we first noticed the inadequacy of my paychecks in winter.  Within the last couple of years, we’ve been forced to tell the children, “Well, you know, Santa’s having a rough time, too.  There are an awful lot of kids out there who don’t have any toys at all, and he needs to take care of them.”  Two years ago, the last of my living grandparents, my maternal grandmother, passed away on Christmas Day. 

Yet, with each shadow, there is a spot of light.  Grandma lived a long and full life, yet her last years had been grey and shadowed with frailty and forgetfulness.  She was ready to move on.  Our economic challenges have forced the focus of Christmas away from elaborate lists and mountains of packages.  Though the bank account is not nearly so bleak this year, I have yet to begin or even fret about any Christmas shopping.  I’d rather inhale the Christmas tree and snuggle on the couch with my family.  There will be presents, but hopefully, they will bring joy, not stress.

Darkness comes.  In each of our lives, there are periods of long, black cold.  We all have our times of sorrowful or solemn waiting.  Rarely do we get to choose when that long Advent of the soul will strike.  But we have a choice.  We can approach these times with the joylessness of time marked, or we can hold moments of that darkness, be present in them, turn them over, and light a candle to move on.

The fourth light of advent is the light of man,

The light of love, the light of thought, to give and to understand

 

 

Good? Bad? But Never Indifferent: My Take on Modern Parenting

Maybe parenting has always been this hard, this fraught with judgment and dogma.  Maybe mothers in the caves of southern France said to one another, “Did you see her with her kid?  Doesn’t she know that you should never turn the sabertooth pelt fur-side against the skin?  Her baby is going to have such a rash…” Or, perhaps not.

Certainly there are literary and historical examples of poor parenting:  No one would give Medea mother-of-the year, and regardless of divine command, I’m not sure that a willingness to slaughter your kid based on the voices in your head is a great illustration of fatherhood.  But, most examples of ‘bad parenting’ from previous centuries and generations seemed to focus on the disastrous extremes.  Nowhere in the Little House books does anyone come up to Ma Ingalls and say, “Do you really want Laura playing with that pig’s bladder?  Little Johnny in the next town over did that last fall and you know how sick he was all winter!”

Yet, for my generation of parents, every choice – from brand of baby food (or homemade baby food) to when, how, or if to let children play – seems to have a rating system attached.  But, nobody seems to agree on the scale.  How are we measuring these things?  Do I get bonus points for letting Caitlin climb our tree in the front lawn, thus empowering her to take risks and improving her muscle tone, connection with nature, and sense of balance?  Or should I be reported to CPS and flogged in the public square for risking so much as one of her precious epithelial cells?  Am I a bad mother for allowing Aidan to possess a NERF arsenal that is the envy of the neighborhood boys, tacitly okaying the casual acceptance of violence pervasive in modern culture?  Or am I good for allowing him to accept and learn to regulate his natural aggression?  Will watching a documentary forever alter the biochemical functioning of Sierra’s brain, or will it give her a better insight into some aspect of our world?  Whose research should I believe?

Caitin in our tree 12/2010 w/ Sierra on the swing watching

And do I even care?

Obviously I care, or I wouldn’t be wasting the word-processor time.  But,(and go ahead and start lobbing stones for this) I don’t care as much about the implications of these studies, opinions and dogma to the children as I do about the scars each one leaves on the parents.  Ok, more specifically on the mothers.  What the hell are we doing to each other and allowing to be done to ourselves?  What weird line have we crossed when an intelligent, educated mother (and I heard this recently) agonizes over the morality of allowing her son to pick up a stick and say ‘Bang. Bang.’?

I hate to say this but I think this intensive maternal navel-gazing (and, to be honest, most of us ‘good mothers’ who nursed our children can’t even find our navels unless we’re wearing killer push-up bras) is at least in part a function of the unprecedented number of educated and career driven women in my generation.  What did society expect? 

I suspect that motherhood was less questioned in previous generations because it was simply something one did.  Like cooking, cleaning, (and a number of other life skills that seem to have been either lost or over-analyzed), parenting was just a part of life.  Parents fed, clothed, and housed their kids, provided them with the type and level of education that seemed appropriate, toys that matched the household budget, and went on with the rest of their lives.  If you had to make every loaf of bread from scratch, or wash all of your laundry by hand, your kids were going to either play outside and do their own thing or they would be pressed into service for chores.  Few households had the luxury of worrying about whether play was age-appropriate or ‘too risky.’  Parents were just glad to get the kids out from underfoot, and they certainly didn’t have time to make modeling dough by hand or to lead elaborate needle-felting projects.

Yet, my generation (particularly of women) is a bit different.  Many of us in the middle and upper-middle classes were raised by the first generation of more broadly educated women, the first women to truly have a shot at a life beyond kitchen, hearth, and child.  And we were raised with expectations.  C’mon, say it with me: “Anything boys can do, girls can do better!”  We were going to take over business, politics, and generally kick the patriarchy’s butt.  My generation (good old generation X) was the first where women equaled (and have now surpassed) the numbers of men in higher education.  We truly can do anything men can do.  But, we can also do the one thing men can’t do – carry a fetus, give birth, and lactate.  Oops.

Sooner or later (often later, and I think that, too is an issue contributing to our current parenting protocol obsession), many of us realized that there probably needed to be a next generation, and that our uteri were going to need to provide the early housing facilities.  And, so, we wound up with a generation of goal-oriented mothers trained to research, to interpret scientific papers, to absorb data like the fibers of the Brawny towels so lovingly advertised to our mothers, to achieve (and over-achieve).  And yet, the mothers of my generation and socio-economic class found that children had not evolved along with the ideals of our society.  Children still need to be fed, housed, and clothed, to learn to walk and talk, and to be educated and to be provided with playthings.

At that point, a generation of women with a veritable alphabet soup of letters after our names lost our collective minds.  Realizing that we would, in fact, be forced to compromise our career trajectory to one extent or another, we decided to channel all of our ambitions, energies, and training into something that humans have done for thousands of years.  But, we would do it better.

This brings me to the personal part of my rant.  No one who has read this blog can possibly doubt that I have some strong views on parenting.  Nor should they doubt that my views are more in line with those of my parents and grandparents than many of my peers.  I believe kids should play – with minimal adult supervision and interference.  I believe that children need scary stories with dark consequences for bad behavior.  I believe children need to learn that the stove really is hot by burning themselves while learning to cook.  I believe (and our house has proven) that a six-year old is capable of preparing his or her own breakfast and lunch.  I believe that a child who ignores instructions to ‘take a jacket’ and is subsequently cold will better remember the jacket next time than the child whose parent rushes back to school with the jacket.  I believe that kids need to deal with teasing, shunning, and name-calling on their own as much as possible and that these experiences (allowing exceptions for what I consider true bullying) make them stronger.  I believe that kids need to fall (physically or metaphorically) and that by doing so they learn to take risks and to pick themselves back up.  I believe that kids need unconditional snuggles and that they need to be corrected when they’ve screwed up.  I don’t believe ever in ‘letting a child win’ to ‘boost self-esteem.’  I don’t believe in empty praise.  I believe in giving kids more respect than that.  I believe in giving them the pride of earned praise.  I believe that the process is more important than the result; that the act of learning is more important than the grade. 

And I believe that kids need to learn to fight their own battles – the real, the pretend, the physical, and the verbal.  I let my kids have (pretend) guns and swords and give them rules that they need to follow to use those: you may not ‘shoot’ anyone who is unarmed or who doesn’t want to play.  You may not whack your sibling with a sword under any circumstances.  If an accidental whacking does occur, you must apologize.  Dragons live in your bedroom or the hallway, not in the kitchen, dining room or hallway.  No firing NERF guns in the house.  A gun, any gun, even a toy is to be pointed at the target or at the ground.

                                                            A well-armed Aidan. 12/2010

Do I believe in violence as a solution – generally no.  However, in self-defense, absolutely.  I have taken self-defense classes (many), my oldest daughter has, and I will insist that my son and youngest daughter do so.  Do I believe in war – generally no.  But I do recognize that while most wars are a useless waste of life and exploitation of our young, that some circumstances are so hideous that they can only be solved through force (the Nazi empire, for example).  Do I believe that humans are inherently aggressive?  Of course.  I fail to see how any person with half a brain can look at human history and say otherwise.  Humans are animals, and phenotypically, we are predators.  Do I believe that humans are also inherently cooperative, social, and capable of independent thought, kindness, and creativity?  Hell, yes.  Again, look at history, and look around.

Back to the personal.  My beliefs are my own.  You may notice that I have not cited a single study, article, or research paper in this piece.  That omission is deliberate.  For every study that substantiates a parenting or sociologic, or even physiologic theory, an opposing body of research can be found.  Statistics lie and all liars are statisticians – I plagiarize freely here, but the truism holds.  Parenting theories are just that – theory.  And they will be neither proven nor debunked until most of us are long gone. 

So, you don’t have to parent your kids my way, but don’t you dare demand that I parent my children your way.  Our classrooms, society, and species have enough room for many ways, and there’s probably a bit of truth everywhere.

Occupying My Mind

Tomorrow at least six of the twelve adults who will gather around our Thanksgiving table are products of the University of California system.  My parents both hold degrees from UC Berkeley, my sister and her husband from UC Santa Cruz, my husband and I from UC Davis. 

My campus is in the news this week.  While I was in Texas, continuing my education, my academic birthplace dominated headlines and social media feeds.  UC Davis isn’t a headline kind of place.  It’s not the school you seek if you’re hoping to rabble-rouse, party hard, or set the world afire.  Pastoral, self-effacing, hard-working – those descriptors generally fit the campus, its students, faculty, and culture.  Seeing that campus in the news, the quad packed with thousands of protestors, is like opening the morning paper to find that the quiet kid in the back of math class is the celebrity of the month.

The Occupy protests and their associated ramifications and consequences trouble me, even as they inspire.  Since Occupy Wall Street began, I’ve been curious to see how the movement would play out, and I’ve been unsettled.  I don’t think I’m alone.  To say that our society is not at a tipping point is naïve.  We’ve been hurtling toward the precipice for a good decade or more.  Like people, all societies have a finite lifespan.  We’re all dying, but some are doing it faster than others.  In the past couple of decades, American society has been chain-smoking, binge-eating, and drunk driving its way toward economic and cultural terminal illness.

Group-think scares the hell out of me.  Most bad ideas manifest as a group saying, “Hey, look.  Here’s a really good idea.”  So, while I believe firmly in advocacy, action, and speaking out, mass demonstrations make me squirm.  As much as my personal economic theories range toward the socialist end of the spectrum – I’m sorry, but I’ve just never understood why the concept of shared wealth and support became a bad word – I’ve also resisted the notion of corporate-political conspiracy.

And yet…

I was born just a few days before the Kent State Massacre.  My parents graduated from UC Berkley in 1967.  I’m not a child of the Free Speech Movement by any means, but I’m old enough that the lessons (good and bad) of the 60’s are a part of my consciousness.  Among the basic principles of my childhood were:

1)      Think for yourself.

2)      Stand up for your beliefs.

3)      Defend those who need you.

4)      Never.  Ever.  Judge another person until you have ‘walked a mile in their shoes.’

That last principle confounds things more than you could possibly imagine.  In an increasingly black-and-white world, it’s tricky to maintain objectivity and even trickier to feel justified in my own opinions while trying to see through someone else’s eyes.  And that’s a good thing.  Despite what pundits, protests, and politicians tell us, thought and belief shouldn’t be easy.  This is hard work, folks.  We should scrutinize protests, even those with goals that generally match ours, and see beyond the placards and chants.  We should look at everything – from the trash on the ground to the behavior of authority – and we should question.

This is one of the things that has always made me a bit queasy about large-scale protest.  It’s like advertising – protest deliberately puts out only one side of the story.  But stories are like onions (and ogres), they have layers.

So, this fall, aware of the layers, I’ve watched the Occupy protests from the distance of a computer screen, ignoring the e-mails from community organizing groups to join the movement.  And there’s the lesson.  Ignoring issues doesn’t drive them away.  No matter how far into that sand we bury our heads, sooner or later the predator finds us and bites us on the ass.

It took the courage of students who were born sometime during my undergraduate years to show me that sometimes the other side doesn’t have much of a point.  These students, raised into a world of $5 coffees and disposable electronics, face a world for which nothing had prepared them.  They lived their childhoods in an America of ridiculous affluence and excess.  They face adulthood in an American that has crumbled under that excess.  They’re mortgaging their futures in the pursuit of education in a system that has failed to deliver its side of the contract.  I’m worried for them.

And, I’m worried about members of my family who will be dissecting their stuffing to pick out offending mushrooms and sticking olives on their fingertips.  I wonder if my children and their cousins will have any hope of obtaining the affordable, amazing education that was taken for granted by previous generations of Californians.  Is education a right or a privilege?   Many who already have or who never wanted higher education seem to now take the view that the experience is a privilege.

They are wrong.  The point of the state university system was to eliminate the concept of a privileged, educated elite.  The driving force behind the public universities of California was the notion that if you were smart enough and willing to work hard enough, you should be entitled to the same caliber of education as that obtainable by the scions of wealth.  Education, in short, was a right.

When I entered UC Davis in the fall of 1988, tuition fees were around $450 per quarter.  My understanding is that UC tuition is now ten times that amount and increasing.  I’ve seen projections of annual tuition of over $20,000 within just a few years.  Add in books, housing, and food (ramen at best), and a Bachelors degree will soon cost roughly the same amount as the house of my childhood.

What are these students getting for what amounts to a mortgage on their lives?  A deal that would cause any businessman worth his salt to break the contract immediately.  In what other business transaction does the seller get to increase the price by an indeterminate amount during the period of the contract while simultaneously lessening the services provided? 

If cutting classes and raising registration fees weren’t insulting enough, the UC system has, for several decades now, decided that the best method of handling client complaints is through condescension, broken promises, and now force.  The tone of Regents and campus Chancellors alike toward students over several years has been one of exasperated adults toward fractious children.  This attitude prevails on most college campuses, I suspect, and it may be inevitable where you have a population comprised of “experts” in their fields placed in positions of teaching and administrating a demographic whose days of Saturday morning cartoons aren’t far in the past.  However, this must cease.  University students are not children.  They are adults by the dictates of law, society, and physiology.

And, on Friday and through the weekend, on the UC Davis campus, the students were indeed the adults.  They occupied a campus, not as trespassers, but as shareholders and stakeholders.  They occupied a campus that is theirs by right as citizens of the state of California and as paying registrants of the UC system.  They held their ground peacefully in the traditions of non-violent protest that have deep roots in academia.  And they were met by violence of the worst kind.  The campus police were not pushed to the brink or threatened by an unruly mob.  They pepper-sprayed a group of seated students with the contempt of pest-control technicians. 

It speaks volumes that the faculty have chosen to stand with the students who swarm their office hours begging for a better curve on the midterm or an extension on a paper.  The faculty of the departments of English and Physics have called for the resignation of Chancellor Linda Katehi.

Chancellor Katehi and UC President Yudof have given lip-service to their “horror” at the actions of the UC police on the Davis and Berkeley campuses.  Yet, more telling than all of the pretty, rote, and empty words, was the expression in Chancellor Katehi’s eyes at the protest on the UC Davis Quad this weekend.  In video shot before her ‘apology’, you can see the Chancellor roll her eyes as a student speaks.  Words mean nothing, Chancellor.  Courage means everything.  And you have none.  You, and any of your like-minded colleagues, must go.  Californians want our universities back.  Our children deserve better.

The video below was posted on YouTube by Capital Public Radio:

 

 

Failure as Fertilizer

Your child is a failure.  My children are failures.  You are a failure.  I am a failure.

Ok, don’t start throwing things yet.  Our society vastly underrates the value of failure.  We all fail.  Most of us fail daily: at school, at work, in art, in the kitchen, at play, and in our relationships.  We are all failures.  We need our failures.

Just as Edison needed his myriad ways not to make a light-bulb in order to achieve success, we need our failures in order to learn.  We need our failures in order to learn what doesn’t work and by extension what does.  We need our failures in order to learn how to problem solve.  We need our failures in order to learn to adapt.  We need our failures in order to learn to persist.  We need our failures in order to grow.

Sunday was diorama drama day in our house.  As part of a 4^th grade book report, Aidan was making a diorama depicting the California Gold Rush.  His original plan had involved making a figure of a miner panning for gold out of modeling clay.  Now, while I did buy him some of the little pine trees (they were adorable; how could I resist?), we do not generally allow our kids to have pre-fab presentation kits.  You want to build something?  You find the materials and you build it.  You want an animal?  Make one – needle-felt it, sculpt it, whatever.  Do it yourself.

Aidan had drawn a miner with a pickaxe in the background, painted the riverbed, and figured out how to affix the trees.  Now he was ready for his figurine. 

Scene 1: Clay blob.  The modeling clay was too wobbly to support a kneeling figurine.

Scene 2: Wire skeleton.  He decided that his guy needed a skeleton.  So, Aidan went to the garage, found the reel of fencing wire, borrowed the wire cutters and got to work.  He bent the wire pieces into the shapes of kneeling legs, a torso, arms, and head.  He then pressed the clay muscle and bones onto the skeleton.

Scene 3: Tears.  Of the words parents hate to hear coming from a work area, “THIS IS STUPID!” has to top the list.  The miner (which I actually thought was much better than anything I could have done at that age) was not to scale.  He dwarfed the pine trees; ok, they looked like weeds.  Mike and I tried the “the trees are in the distance” approach, but Aidan wasn’t buying it. 

I take back my earlier statement.  Where school projects are concerned, there is another set of words that I dread even more than the above.  “Several (yes, my nine-year old talks like this) other people have turned in their dioramas already.  And they were PERFECT!  Mine looks HORRIBLE!” Hugging my son and growling under my breath, I told Aidan, “Well, I don’t think it’s bad, but it’s your project, so do what you need to to make it look the way you want” and went back to my office.

 

Scene 4: Facebook status update. 

A plaintive plea to other grade school parents: please, please don't do your child's projects for them. Don't even "help" substantially. Help them figure out how they want to do it. Let them struggle a bit. Help them problem solve, but don't do the construction. It isn't fair to those children whose "mean" parents feel that school projects are for children to do. My kid should not have to compare his work to that of 30, 40, or 50 year olds. Thank you. That is all.

Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the other “perfect” dioramas, so I have no idea what, if any, parental input they received.  However, I have seen plenty of school projects over the years that were not completed solely, primarily, or perhaps even in part by children.  As a parent, the clean-edged, polished display that is obviously beyond the capability of an elementary school child makes me grit my teeth.  It’s hard enough raising kids with perfectionist tendencies without knowing that they are comparing their efforts to work that was not done by their peers.

But, there is another aspect to parental project participation that makes me sad.  The children whose parents “help” by doing all or most of the cutting, gluing, design, etc. are losing out.  They are being denied the gift of failure.

We all need to screw up.  We need to plan something and watch it fall down or crumble to bits.  We need to make a figurine that isn’t to scale.  We need to put forth an effort that was less than our best and face the consequences – even if those consequences are a bad report or a failed grade.  We need the gift of our mistakes – they are the fertilizer of our lives.  (Don’t make me use the obvious excrement metaphor.)

How many of us have crossed the waters of adulthood without foundering?  Speaking personally, I have: been fired from my first professional job; lost a house; been laid-off another job, hurt and been hurt by the ones I love; and made more mistakes than I care to contemplate.  But, each failure has made me stronger, braver, more creative, and more loving. 

How have I been able to grow from my failures?  I have a memory of cross-country skiing with my family.  I must have been about ten years old – about Aidan’s age.  Descending hills on narrow skis that are longer than you are tall is tricky at any age, and given that I had trouble walking without falling down, my rear was no stranger to the snow.  Halfway down one hill, I took a particularly spectacular tumble.  I was on the steep edge of the hillside, legs twisted, skis pointed in opposite directions and one pole out of reach downhill. 

I was cold, wet, bruised of butt and of ego, and my legs ached.  In tears, I asked my parents to come pull me up.  They came and stood near me, but didn’t extend a hand.

“Help me up!”

My dad handed me my wayward pole.

“I can’t get up.  Help me.”

“You can do it yourself.  Get your skis straightened out and pointed across the hill.”

“I can’t do it.  I need help.”

“You’re big enough to do it yourself. You know how.”

“I can’t.  I’ll fall.”  I pushed myself halfway up and slid partway down the hill, skis still in a knot.

“You aren’t trying.  Get your skis straight and parallel.  Use your poles.”

“I need help.”

“Someday you’ll fall and we won’t be around to help you up.  You need to learn to do it yourself.”

 

Later, there was hot chocolate, and I’m sure that in my mind at the time, that was the only thing that redeemed my parents from utter cruelty.  But, as an adult, I don’t remember the hot cocoa.  I only remember the gift of that last sentence.  As a parent, I now know the struggles that my parents didn’t show me as they stood there.  I know how hard it was for them to let me try, and fail, and not rescue me.

I wrote a guest blog last week about “saving” others.  One of the points I made was that rescuing diminishes the rescued.  Every time we refuse to let someone fail or to dig themselves out of failure, we tell them that we believe them incompetent.

Sometimes I hear parents say that they don’t want their children to feel overwhelmed or bad about their mistakes.  I find myself sometimes arguing the opposite to teachers.  Please, please challenge my children.  Please push them.  Please call them on their sloppy work, on their failures.   Please tell them that they are better than that.  Please let them know that you believe that their best efforts, uneven edges and all, are the work you expect from them – and then let them know that you expect better next time.

Life doesn’t get easier as we get older.  The scary, frustrating, and challenging things that attack us from the outside and from within only get bigger and darker.  Like everything, overcoming adversity takes practice.  Facing failure is like the metaphor of the man lifting the calf every day from the moment of its birth.   Eventually, he is still able to lift the grown cow.  If we allow our children to cope in small ways with the frustrating and scary, perhaps, someday they will have the tools to lift the whole thing.

Circling back to school and teaching; this is the best description I have ever seen of the value of a teacher:

  

Why Dragons Don't Make Good Pets

playgroundsMichaelmas was last week.  For a more in-depth review of this somewhat obscure holiday and its meaning in the Waldorf schools, check out this post from last year.  Short version: on (or near) September 29, the feast of St. Michael, Waldorf schools host a Michaelmas pageant which tells the story of St. George and the Dragon.  At our school for the past two years – and much to the disgust of my children – St. George has tamed rather than, slain the dragon.  I think that my children are disappointed in the dragon for failing to live up to their expectation.  They prefer epic battles and generally feel that evil shouldn’t just roll over like a remorseful puppy.

St Michael and the Dragon -- Aidan Minamiji, age 9

Now, I haven’t talked to any of the faculty about this, so I don’t have any idea why the dragon has had a change of heart or why St. George is suddenly imitating Caesar Milan, but I know that my kids, at least, view the shift as part of a larger adult conspiracy to protect children from that which is scary and violent, and they aren’t happy about it.  And, I can’t say that I blame them…

Like I said, I don’t know anything about the circumstances of the school play, but I do know that elsewhere, there seems to be a trend toward protecting our children from things that are violent, unsettling, complicated, frightening, challenging, or dangerous.   Yet, strangely, while we are dumbing down fairytales so that the step-sisters turn nice in the sequel (Don’t get me started on Cinderella II), complaining about “darkness” in young adult literature, and making playgrounds so safe that they are one step up from padded cells for challenge-value, kids spend huge amounts of time indoors, playing first-person shooter games.  Huh?

I would submit that much of this child-protective movement speaks more to the fears of adults than it does to the risk of frightening children.  We all have different methods of coping with the fears that live deepest within us.  Certain fears also seem to make some of the biggest dragons: relationship/rejection, children, and status/finance issues tend to be such huge triggers that we aren’t even aware of the weird ways in which we face these dragons until the fire has scorched our eyebrows.  Continuing with our dragon metaphor, these are some of the methods I see (and have used, myself):

• Human Sacrifice – In the story, the villagers are offering up a maiden to the dragon in hopes of appeasing it when St. George rides in to the rescue.  This always seemed like a self-defeating plot point to me.  Who really thinks that one skinny girl is going to fill an entire dragon?  At best, it seems like she’d just be an appetizer for the village main-course.  Yet, we do this same thing every day.  And usually, the humans we sacrifice are ourselves.  Do any of these sound familiar?
  • “I’m going to give up my yoga classes; they’re taking too much time away from my family.” Translation: My spouse/partner doesn’t like me spending evenings out, and I’m afraid I will lose him/her, but I don’t want to discuss it.
  • “I’d like to have dinner, but I need to go on my child’s class trip.  She isn’t ready to be away from home yet.”  Translation: I am terrified that something may happen to my child if I am not there.  I am terrified that he/she may be frightened or homesick and need me.  I am terrified that he/she won’t need me.
  • “I can’t make the soccer game this weekend.  We have a big project at work and I can’t take the time away.” Translation: I need to be perceived as indispensible to the project.  I’m also afraid that I may not actually be necessary every minute.
  • Pitchforks, Torches, Mob – Sometimes, we tell ourselves that we aren’t afraid of the dragon, that we are angry, and righteous (or at least justified) in our anger.  We rally the village, stir up the countryside, and attack the dragon.  Unfortunately, since the attack is generally chaotic, and often not directed at the real problem, it usually fails and everyone limps home with battle scars.  For real world examples, think of “flame wars” in internet chat rooms; snarky, passive-aggressive social media status posts, the clique gossip that should have stayed in high school but somehow managed to cling to the heels of adulthood for many of us; workplace alliances and backstabbing – the list goes on.  No one wins – except the dragon.
  • Dragon Whisperer – This may be the trickiest fear-related coping mechanism to understand, probably because it seems the most sane.  Instead of running from or battling our dragons, we take them home, and train them.  Unfortunately, we often simply wind up nurturing the dragon, and in the safety of our homes, and with unlimited food, it grows fat and becomes all too real.  This brings me to the title of this post Dragons Don’t Make Good Pets.  Often, in trying to manage our fears, to prevent the circumstances that we most dread, we create those very circumstances.  Again, anything here sound familiar?
    • We fear that our spouse will stray.  Do we discuss our fears?  Do we bring the hidden insecurities out into the light?  Often no, we manage schedules, micromanage emotional interactions, even monitor our partner’s communications.  Why?  Because some part of us thinks that we can control the dragon.  And if we have control, the thing we fear won’t happen.  Well, we’ve all seen this made-for-TV movie…
    • We fear that our children won’t succeed in life.  Again, control becomes the means of coping with the dragon.  We arrange activities, sports, tutoring, lessons.  We check homework, draft schedules, and micromanage until two things happen:
      • Our children have no ability to discipline themselves.
      • Any joy they may have once taken in the task has been destroyed.
      • (For the record, I’m currently undergoing a reformation on this point.  My daughter and I have a pact this year – as long as she gives her schoolwork her best effort, I will give staying off her back my best effort.  So far so good, by all reports, she is much more focused in class.)
• We fear that harm may come to our children.  They may be physically injured.  They may experience rejection.  They may get their hearts broken.  They may face failure.  Guess what?  They will.  This is one of the hardest dragons to face: the knowledge that we cannot protect our children from life.  Nor should we.  I cringe every time I hear an adult say that they don’t want children to feel “disappointed” or to be “frightened” or to risk getting hurt.  If our children do not face these risks and learn to handle the fairly small wounds of childhood, what kind of adults will they become?
• Being St. George – This is the most difficult and most lonely way of handling the dragon.  And ultimately, I believe, is the only way that will work.  Gather the light from within and without, let that light of honesty, acceptance, and self-worth shine through oneself, and with one’s own strength and sword, ride out to face the dragon – seeing the beast for what it is, and slaying it (or, at least banishing it back to its cave.)

 

 

 

Inch by Inch

Inch by inch, row by row, someone bless these seeds I sow,

Someone warm them from below, till the rain comes tumblin’ down…

--“Garden Song” by David Mallett

 

There was no rain last night, just warm dusky skies that filled the leaves of the mulberry trees.  But as the last chords faded, I thought how perfect a metaphor this song was for raising children, and how perfect as the original song for a school that has grown over a quarter century from seedlings planted in the living room of a private home, to a school of over 200 students in preschool through eighth grade.

Back-to-School Night is always one of our family’s favorite events of the school year.  It’s a chance for the kids to run rampant through their play fields – no one timing their mile or waiting with a bell to call them back to class.  It’s an opportunity for parents and teachers to catch up with each other after the long void of summer, to eat and chat as laughter rings through the dusk.  It’s the first unofficial strings performance of the year, a casual prelude to the Winter Concert.  The agenda is generally informal, with a few announcements, pleas for volunteers, and some fiddle tunes.

   
Aidan (right) playing cello in public for the 1st time.                            DWS fiddlers.  Almond House in background.

Last night was different.  Last night we heard stories.  Those stories were a sort of genesis tale, showing us the roots of the educational fruit our families reap – showing us where we come from, and where we owe it to those who came before us to go.  For the 25^th Anniversary of Davis Waldorf School, several of the founding parents and teachers of the school took the microphone.

They told us of opening the school in the living room of a private home when arrangements to set up house in Davis as a school fell through.  We heard about the donation of the land where our school now sits, at the northwest corner of North Davis Farms, and the trepidation surrounding building on that land without knowing how the capital would be raised.

But, I think the best line was when our administrator, Kelly Brewer, quoted one of the founding teachers, Clifford Monks.  When the school was preparing to move to a permanent site, Mr. Monks stated, “To build a school is to build a community.”

3rd grade classroom last year.  Rammed earth wall in background.

It’s a Hallmark card sort of idea: quaint, but out of place in a world of scheduled play and “virtual communities.”  And, yet, to look around the school last night: at the tables of parents, grandparents, children, teachers, and friends spilling across the lawn; at the Almond house, a farmhouse donated to the school in the early years; at the rammed-earth classrooms, architectural phenomena in 1992, that have housed 19 years of children; at the new kindergarten wing, completed just in time for school last year; and at all of the faces, so familiar, faces that have pulled weeds, moved fences, painted, cleaned, driven on innumerable field trips, baked, crafted, and worked, worked, worked to make something magical for our children – well, I buy it.

It’s hard to see growth when you’re in the middle.  Children sprout up by magic for family that see them only on holidays; to parents who feed, clothe, and nag, those same children often seem to be in a constant state of regression.  Sometimes the only things seeming to grow in a garden are the weeds.  Progress often feels like “one step forward, two steps back.”  For parents who have stretched budgets to cover private school, sometimes the requests for volunteers overwhelm – ‘You want me to do another thing? –Is this really necessary?  -- Can’t someone else do it? – Are all of our committees, meetings, and projects really getting anywhere?

Our eighth graders are nomads this fall; the portable building housing the eighth grade classroom caught fire on Labor Day.  Classes started one day later.  Until their new classroom arrives, the peripatetic eighth grade has divided their lesson time between the rooms of classes away on field trips and our new multi-purpose room, intended as a dedicated space for music and eurythmy classes, plays, and special events.  It would be easy to become frustrated or bitter – new buildings, a new basketball court, and no eighth grade classroom?  But, this is temporary.  A brand new room will be arriving soon, and besides, we know where we came from – we began in a living room.

Epilogue:

I’m not much of one for meditation or signs – I have trouble getting my brain to shut up even at my most peaceful, and my cynicism tends to take over in moments that are meant to be profound.  But, this week, I sat through a guided mediation at a fall equinox event.  The group leader gave us images of walking along a forest path, looking at the brilliantly colored leaves, the flowing stream.  “Bend down and pick up a leaf,” she said.  “Look at your leaf; what color is it?”  Mine was scarlet.  “There is a message on it; just for you.  What does it say?”

My leaf said, “Wait.” 

It’s hard to see progress from the middle.  In any endeavor: a work of art, raising children, building a school, planting a garden, sometimes all we can do is wait.  Wait, and trust that our seeds are being kept safe and warm until the rain.  Wait, and trust that we are moving forward – inch by inch.

 

 

 

 

 

And finally, because who can resist either John Denver or Muppets...

 

Letting Mama Bear Hibernate

For all that popular culture and literature like to extol the protective instincts of the “Mama Bear,” the mother who will move Heaven and Hell for her child, I think my greatest parenting joy comes from the moments when I can let my maternal bear hibernate in her cave and watch my children fight their own battles – whether their foes come from without or from within.

No one ever told me how vividly the memories of my own school days would stick to my brain, and to my soul.  As a kid, I assumed that adults had their brains wiped somewhere in their 20s.  That was the only logical explanation for the obtuse refusal of the grownups to fix or to even understand the social catastrophes of my life.  Nothing else could explain why my parents seemed so insouciant about the fact that everyone hated me, that so-and-so had stolen my best friend, and that it was obvious that the whole class was laughing at me.  And nothing but a mind-wipe could possibly render parents clueless enough to suggest that their socially awkward daughter stand up for a classmate who was truly being bullied.

I was committed to evading the amnesia of adulthood.  I would remember my childhood so that I could make sure that my kids never had to deal with pain, discomfort, humiliation, or unpopularity.  I would have the magic words to fix everything for them, to make schoolwork easy and classmates congenial.

Ok, so I’m not sure where I was planning to get the magic wand, but plans forged in adolescence aren’t always heavy on concrete details.  Still, it was with a jolt of betrayal toward the 13-year-old within, that I heard the adult line come out of my own mouth when my kids began to come home with the same litany of complaints and angst.

Did I immediately telephone the teacher that my daughter accused of “favoring the popular kids?”  No.  Ignoring the ‘how-could-you’s’ of my interior teenager, I found myself commenting that teachers tended to focus on the students who put forth the best work as examples and on the students who need the most help, and that if she wanted the teacher’s attention, perhaps she could do more to make her work shine.  “Way to be supportive, Mom.”

When my kids complained that some children were teasing another child, did I call the school demanding intervention?  No.  I said to my own children, “Well, where were you?  Did you tell them that they were being mean?”  My comment quoting the maxim “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is that good men stand by and do nothing,” was met with eyerolls.

Those are the days when I question my non-interference policy, and I wonder if my children’s lives wouldn’t really be a bit easier if I were the sort of mom who regulated their social and academic interactions, who leapt to their defense rather than saying, “Well, maybe we should talk about ways you could handle that next time.”

I actually broke down and polled Caitlin and Aidan one day during a period of grammar school unrest (historians and sociologists should spend more time in elementary schools if they want to understand social upheaval).  “Would you prefer for me to talk to your teachers or to other parents when you’re having problems with other kids or in class, or do you want me and Dad to stay the heck out of it?”

“Stay the heck out of it!”  The response was horrified and unanimous.

Ok, good enough for me.  And yet, the Mama Bear sometimes growls in the back of her cave, lumbering toward the entrance.

Two things happened this week, small things, but enough to shove her back into hibernation for a while:

Sierra came home from school commenting that a couple of the boys from her class were teasing a friend of hers in aftercare.  “They told him he wasn’t saying his words right,” she said indignantly.  I steeled myself for the ‘teachable moment’ conversation, wondering if I was going to have to break my rule and intervene in the class social dynamic.   Before I could breathe, Sierra went on, “I told him that he should just ignore them and not play with them or talk around them if they were going to be mean.”

Oh.  “And did you say anything to them,” I asked.  Bigger and tougher kids than my 40 lb sprite have bowed to peer pressure before now. 

“I told them that people say their words their own way and that they shouldn’t pick on people about how they talk.”

Ok, then.  Loyalties and friendships of six-year-olds shift like clouds blown across the sky, so I’m not really worried that any of the parties involved will be scarred for life, or that some irretrievable social order is being set in 1^st grade.  But, Sierra wasn’t just telling me a story; she was telling me loud-and-clear that she could fight her own battles.

 

The second episode is a little more convoluted, and a little more subtle.  As referenced earlier, Caitlin struggles with the concepts of work and achievement.  Bright, creative, and reasonably talented in art, music, and academics, she’s used to things coming easily.  She’s never really had to struggle to achieve an acceptable level of competence, and being forced to put effort, discipline, or practice into a project annoys her.  Actually, it infuriates her.

As she  teachers (and parents) have begun to expect higher levels of effort in schoolwork, music, etc., Caitlin’s mature front has started to crack and we’ve seen some signs of adolescent victimhood.  Just as I was beginning to wonder if she really would find her own way out of this, and was considering breaking my only 2-week-old pact to not bug her about her work as long as she promised to put full effort into it, she made a comment that changed everything.  “Where is the poem book?  I’ve decided to memorize ‘If’.”  I’ll leave it to you to determine the connection.  Enjoy…

  

 

Beeswax Crayons and Recorders

At the beginning of this week, over on Facebook, I promised a back-to-school blog post.  Well, it’s now Friday, and I’ve been a little busy, well, getting the kids back to school.  This post may ramble somewhat as I ponder the evolution of that phrase in my own life.  Our kids have been in a Waldorf school long enough now that I no longer experience the  autumn new-erasers-and-Pee-chee-folders-so-sharp-they-cut-your-finger sensations that are the residue of my own education.

My kids mark the start of the school year with new or up-sized cellos, new rain pants and jackets, and the perennial ‘where did you put your sun-hat’ question.  It sounds weird to say that no, I don’t buy notebooks or pencil cases, that we don’t troll the Back-to-school ads for the best deal on reams of college rule paper.  “Their supplies are included in the tuition,” is the easy phrase.  And the explanation works well until someone asks: “which supplies?”  “Ummm, beeswax crayons and a recorder…”

By the time the kids reach the upper grades, I no longer feel compelled to defend our weird back-to-school routine.  Caitlin does have binders, pencils, and pens -- they just happen to be provided by the teacher.   And, no one who listens to her rattle off the conditions leading to the fall of the Roman Empire or watches her juggle fractions like beanbags is going to question her academic credentials.  Well, they can, but she’ll just quote Shakespeare at them.

And even Aidan, now in 4^th grade, can hold his own against any pedagogical inspection.  He multiplies double digit numbers in his head.  (I don’t know if that’s considered impressive or not, but I have a doctorate, and I can’t do it!)  And, though penmanship may be considered a dying art, his is truly art.  Perhaps he can find a job illuminating manuscripts with some monks…

However, it is in the 1^st and 2^nd grade years that parents find themselves stuttering and hedging at cocktail parties and family reunions.  As Sierra came home this week announcing that in her first days of 1^st grade they had practiced “drawing straight lines and wiggly lines” during Main Lesson, I wondered what some of the new parents in the class were feeling as their children made similar revelations.  I’m past the defensive evasion of the Waldorf parent.  I will say it aloud.  Yes, Sierra is six.  No, she can’t read.  No, we aren’t worried.  No, she doesn’t have any learning difficulty.  She will read when she is ready and that probably won’t be for another year or so, and that is just how it is meant to be.

Veteran Waldorf parents can translate “straight lines and wiggly lines.”  “Oh, so you’re doing form drawing,” my husband replied without missing a beat.  In 1^st grade, the symmetric, repeating forms give the children a feel for the shapes (lines and curves) that make our letters.  The form drawings also build a sense of symmetry and scale.  On a more esoteric level, the form drawings help the children to use and integrate both sides of the brain.  As the kids get older, the forms become more and more complex – by 4^th grade, the interlocking forms take on the shape and intricacy of Celtic knots.

“Great,” someone usually says about here “but what about reading?”  The kids will progress from the form block into the beginning of the alphabet blocks (side note: Not wooden blocks with painted letters.  Waldorf schools begin the day with a roughly two hour Main Lesson.  During that time period, one subject is focused on for a block of several weeks.)  Confident in their abilities to draw (what did you think writing was?) symmetrical lines and curves, the children will begin to use their ability to make letters.  The letters take on forms that represent the sounds in a way that makes sense to  the children.  A ‘D’ may be also drawn as a dragon; an 'S' becomes a swan.  As they progress through the year, 1^st graders learn not only how to draw and

recognize their letters, not only the sounds made by the letters, but also how those letters interact to form the sounds that we recognize as words.

 

 

Caitlin attended a parochial school for kindergarten and 1^st grade.  She began reading in kindergarten.  At the end of 1^st grade, she declared, “I hate reading.  Reading is stupid.”  I’m the daughter of a school librarian.  When we move, among the first things Mike and I unpack are the boxes (and boxes and boxes) of books.  Long story short: I cried, wrote a polite but irritated e-mail to the school principal, received a ‘this is how we do it; nothing is going to change’ response, and Caitlin switched schools.  Midway through 2^nd grade, she had inhaled the first 5 books of the Harry Potter series and never looked back.  The change?  Many of her classmates were still learning to read; there was no pressure to regurgitate the dry bones of plot points; and every lesson – from reading to math – contained a story.  Caitlin learned to love the story.

Children are individuals.  I do think some kids will learn best in a more traditional school setting.  Some learn by repetition, others by experience.  But the one thing I do know, and, looking back on it, have known since my own childhood – the age of reading onset does not determine the reader.  I picked up, and spontaneously read, The Cat in the Hat the Christmas before I turned four.  My younger sister, like Caitlin, rejected the notion of learning something “because you’re supposed to” and did not read fluently until she was eight or nine.  The title before both of our names  -- Dr.

The weird thing about parenting is that despite the volumes of books, magazine articles, lectures, and blog posts, there is no handbook.  This thing that humans have done for thousands of years is still entirely experimental.  Beyond some general guidelines such as: feed, water, clothe, clean occasionally, do not submerge for prolonged periods, do not leave near open flame, there is little about parenting that is hard and fast.  None of us has any way of knowing the value of the childhood we provide to our offspring.  Sometimes, we just have to trust the process and go with what feels right. 

Sierra (middle) with her 8th grade buddy.

For me, that ‘right’ feeling involves not hearing “I don’t want to go to school.”  It means shedding more than a couple of tears as I watch Sierra receive a red rose from her 8^th grade buddy as she makes her entrance into the school as a 1^st grader.  It means shedding another tear or two as I realize that next September, Caitlin (who is now never without a book) will hand a rose to some lucky 1^st grader and lead her new charge on a tour of a campus that has become a home.

Once upon a time, back-to-school meant, for me, the anxiety of purchasing the perfect supplies and outfits, the have-I-made-the –right-decision angst as I watched the classroom  swallow my kids, the worry about how other parents would view me, my family, our parenting, or even our car.  This week, back-to-school meant writing a newspaper article about the 25^th anniversary of a school my children love.  It meant reuniting with people I call friends after a summer apart.  It meant sewing placemats and crayon holders for the 1^st grade, organizing a camping trip for the 4^th, and critiquing an essay for the 7^th grader.  And, it meant hearing as I dropped my kids off in the morning, from Sierra, “You can drop us off here, Mommy.  I don’t need anyone to walk me to class.  I know my own way.”  Of course she does.  This is her  school.                                                

 

 

 

 

 

 

Circling Round

                                    Make new friends, but keep the old,

                                    One is silver and the other’s gold.

                                    A circle’s round; it has no end,

                                    That’s how long you’re going to be my friend.

 

Kindergarteners and parents circled the summer garden, hands joined and singing.  As we circled, the teachers tapped shoulders, and motioned for some to join them outside the circle.  We joined their chain, and coiled along behind.  As the last repetition drew to a close, the feet stopped.  Two circles had formed.  The inner circle held the younger children, now the “big kindergarteners,” who would remain in the sunlit rooms for another year, mentoring the 41/2 year olds who will seem so small in September.  The outer circle was formed by the children and parents who were moving on – to first grade, or to other schools.  Their year had come full circle.

“Good-bye, Sierra.  Good-bye, Sierra.  Good-bye, Sierra.  It’s time to say good-bye.”  The children sang and laughed, as one-by-one their friends were summoned to the teachers with their ritual dismissal song.  One-by-one, they hugged Teacher Karina and Teacher Kelly, accepted their small gifts and returned to the circle.  One-by-one, Little Ones (don’t call them dolls), the treasured small friends of the kindergarten, were placed in pouches, and also dismissed by name.  The Little Ones who had come for the first-years will return to Little-Land to spend the summer with Fairy Mother.  However, for the older children, their Little Ones will accompany them home, to support them in their new adventures.  Petal, Sierra’s Little One, had already gotten a head start on summer break and , like Stevenson’s “lazy little shadow,” “ had stayed at home behind [her] and was fast asleep in bed.” 

Nearly two years ago, Sierra was the smallest and youngest member of the Climbing Rose kindergarten.  Barely 41/2, she squeaked into the age cut-off.  A brand new kindergartener with a brand new teacher.  Yesterday, I cried as she walked with deceptive demureness toward her teachers then took a flying leap, anchoring herself to Karina’s lap.  My last kindergartener is now a first-grader, and her teacher, the teacher who has nurtured her with humor, discipline, and boundless love will be moving on to her own blessings.  Teacher Karina and Teacher Kelly will remain part of our circle, friends of gold, but Sierra has moved to the outer circle, on to the grades, to a teacher as yet unknown. 

In September, first graders are welcomed into the grades, the heart of the Waldorf curriculum, with the “rose ceremony.”  As they are greeted by the teacher who will carry them through the lower grades, each child is presented with a red rose by his or her “eighth-grade” buddy.  The eighth-graders, many of whom are Waldorf ‘lifers,’ will partner with their first graders throughout the year, leading by example, showing them the ways of the school, and giving them someone ‘cool’ to admire.  And, at the end of the year, the circle of the rose will be completed.

“That’s Bay’s class.  And Curtis’s class.”  Sierra, sitting on my thigh (and incidentally squashing my sciatic against the wood seat of the too-short chair), whispered as the seventh-grade recited their verse.  Something caught in my chest as they were dismissed, to “sit down as eighth graders.”

“Sissy’s class!”

I feel my destiny
My destiny finds me
I feel my star
My star finds me
I feel my goals in life
My goals in life are finding me
My soul and the great world are one

The sixth-grade’s song was familiar from their class play; their teacher had set to music one of Rudolph Steiner’s verses.  Yet, familiarity doesn’t prevent tears.  Sierra’s hair got very wet as I watched her sister’s class, suddenly no longer round-cheeked children, sing with the mingled poise and acute self-consciousness of adolescence and “sit down as seventh graders.”  It’s coming, the end of that circle, more quickly than I could wish.

“Zoe’s class!”  No, Sierra doesn’t have a sibling in fifth grade.  Her brother has a classmate with a sister in fifth (now sixth.)  But it went this way through the grades.  As the now fifth grade stood for the last time as fourth graders, Sierra proclaimed, “Tyson’s class.  Oh, and Nicole.  And Carpenter.  I know lots of people in that class."  By the time she said, “Aid-y’s class!” I was starting to get it.  The circle is a spiral, or maybe a Mobius strip. The close of her time in kindergarten isn’t kicking my child into an unknown world.  She is joining a larger circle, a circle in which she already sees herself as a link.  “I know everybody,” she said.  Not everybody, but she has found connections to each of the grades, and in doing so, has begun to picture herself in their place.  In the rhythm of the curriculum, the children find both predictability and adventure.  Last night, as we lingered around a picnic table with two other families, Caitlin explained her hatred of cauliflower, stemming oddly from a fifth grade botany lesson.  Tyson, the now-fifth-grade brother of one of Aidan’s best friends, broke his customary quiet to say, “I’m studying botany next year!” They make the connections, find the links, and draw upon each other to move from one point in the circle to the next.

Sierra’s hair was soaked by the time my son and his friends – when did they all get so tall and sturdy looking?—sat down “as fourth graders.”  They had completed their verse and song (in Hebrew!) with word and note perfection. And with grins and a surreptitious fist-pump or two, that class owned their new role.  They know exactly who and what they are.  Uncertainty and self-consciousness will come to them in a year or two as adolescence begins to shine its spotlight, but for now, they are nine years old and invincible.

“That’s Joey’s brother,” Sierra pointed at one of the eighth graders – the brother of one of Caitlin’s classmates and son of Caitlin’s teacher.  Each member of the graduating class was called up by full name.  Their years in the school were announced.  From the lifer with ten years behind her to Ricky (Joey’s brother) who joined the school this year, each has made his or her mark upon the school and has earned the right to stand before their younger peers as testament to the completion of the cycle.

And, then, the first graders were asked to join their buddies.  Sierra remained silent as the class she knows best – many of whom were the ‘big’ kindergarteners when she started school, and with whom she played and laughed – stepped forward to stand before their eighth graders.  I wish I had the words to the verse that the first-graders recited, but it began something like this: “When we were much smaller and you seemed so much taller…”  The first grade told in verse the tale of their year, from their first moments in that September rose ceremony.  And as they finished, each first grader turned and presented an eighth grader with a red rose. 

Scarlet roses clutched in their chubby hands, first graders enter their classroom for the first time beneath an arch of flowers held aloft by their parents.  They process beneath the stems and petals, are greeted with a handshake by their new teacher, and enter the classroom of chalk and wonder for the first time. 

Scarlet roses clutched in elegant and strong hands – hands that have learned to knit, to cook, to play recorder and string; hands that have drawn runes and written of the fall of Rome; hands that have joined in song, and dance – eighth graders depart their school beneath an arch of sunflowers lifted to a (finally!) summer sky by teachers and parents who must now stretch to raise the stems above the teenaged heads.  They bid farewell with a handshake to their first graders and to the school as they leave for a world of new wonders.

Epilogue:

Sierra was quiet as she watched her friends hand their roses to their buddies.  “Next year, that will be you; are you ready?” I whispered.  She shook her head.

As I pulled the covers to her chin last night, Sierra asked, “Will I get a rose tomorrow?”

“No, not tomorrow.  In September.  In three months.”

“I’m ready, Mommy.”

“I know you are.”

In September, Mike and I will watch as Sierra receives her rose and greets her teacher for the first time.  She doesn’t know who her “buddy” will be, but it’s a good bet that that eighth-grader will be known to her.  As spring morphs to summer, she will return that rose to the one who has shown her the way.  And, in that following fall, Caitlin will offer a rose to a child who seems impossibly small.  And the circle will continue.

Rap, River, and Rainbow

The calendar reminds me that we approach the season of chaos.  I’ve written before about the rhythm of the school year, particularly that of the Waldorf schools.  Though I’m not inherently a particularly structured person and my thoughts tend to jump from A to Q to 42, parenting has taught me to appreciate the value of structure and the discipline a framework provides.

Each of my children’s classes has had events or moments that bookended this school year.  The kindergarten began the year with their capes and swords of light, preparing to face the dragons of development.   They will close out the last week of school with a trip to the river, braving the chilly water and sailing wooden boats they have made with their own hands.  The third grade’s year has a more subtle rhythm: that of the season and of the harvest as they have tended their garden, learned to cook the food they have grown, watched the shearing of sheep, and learned to card and spin the wool.  (You haven’t lived until you’ve heard a 9 year old very seriously discuss fiber crimp while petting a sheep.)  But, even for them, the end of the year is a celebration, proof of their accomplishments – today, according to rumor, they will make cake and ice cream in cooking class.  And the sixth grade?  The sixth grade has completed the cycle with perfect symmetry.

In September, it was a rough and tumble class, pulsing with a fire of their own, that journeyed to Mt. Lassen to study geology.  In the fall, they were at the beginning of the metamorphosis of puberty, fluctuating wildly from child to teen at a moment’s notice.  Though they were a great and polite group of kids in the fall, there was, at times, an almost feral energy that mirrored the rugged mountains and geologic turbulence of the volcano.

We have just returned from another camping trip, closing the year with a visit to Cache Creek Canyon Regional Park.  Like the rounder hills of the Coastal Range, the children have matured.  Some of their rough edges have been worn away; the drama of their evolution has quieted.  Like the landscape, they are anything but static, yet rather than eruptions of steam, we saw the trickling cascades of miniature rock falls.  Meals and activities ran smoothly, even in the face of Wednesday’s rainstorm and subsequent flooding of a tent.  Changing the direction of the day was no longer (as Caitlin would say) like “herding cats with bagpipes.”

Were they perfect angels?  Don’t be silly; they’re 12 year olds.  There is still a wide range of maturity within the class and within each of the kids.  A few experiments in pyrotechnics still needed to be curtailed.  Two pairs of stray and sodden socks went unclaimed.  It was occasionally necessary to point out that rocks thrown into the river should be directed away from one’s classmates.  But something has shifted.

As a class, they have learned (thank you, Dr. Tan) to accept order as a natural part of things rather than a burden imposed by authority.  Their energy is (for now, at least) directed toward meeting challenges rather than resisting structure.  This will probably shift back in a year or two; eighth graders study rebellions for a reason.

Yet, on this trip, rather than whining about assignments, we saw focused work and rehearsals for their Talent program and “Zodiac Rap.”  Well, mostly focused – there were a few comments of “we don’t rap.”  But the talent performances were as engaging and as varied as the kids and showcased their uniqueness.   We saw a dance routine performed by a group of friends that almost always seems to function as a unit.  We were treated to an engaging storytelling set by a future Garrison Keillor or David Sedaris.  We saw a magic show accomplished with poise and panache despite an initial flub or two – and all the more impressive because of it.  A budding novelist gave a synopsis of her work-in-progress and displayed her fabulous illustrations to the delight of her classmates.  Forget American Idol: the song and acoustic guitar performance by one of the girls would put most of those wanna-bes to shame.  She even impressed the professional singer/songwriter that was the camp host.  And, of course, near and dear to my heart was the vocal/flute duet of “Rainbow Connection” sung by Caitlin and played by one of her friends.  Though they weren’t note perfect, I loved their performance for its sheer bravery: the flautist in question has only been playing for a year and I know for a fact that the music for the piece was only downloaded for her a couple of weeks ago, and to see my introvert daughter stand and sing solo in front of her class was a delight. 

They were all about bravery this trip, these kids.  Not the ‘I dare you’ sort of bravado, but a quieter ‘I can do this’ acceptance of challenge.  Tents were set up with minimal adult involvement.  Raps were written according to assignment and performed with a day of prep.  Even the least athletic joined in a volleyball game.  And currents were swum.

Our campground had an amenity one doesn’t expect in Yolo County – a beach, a real, sandy beach.  Bracketed by rapids above and below, our section of Cache Creek had a shallow, quiet bend near the beach, a moderate current one could cross to still water on the other bank, and a more intense current just downriver from the upper rapids.  Much of the trip was spent testing their strength, skill, and courage against the current.  A few of the stronger swimmers tried the crossing first, at the lower, slower current, adjusting their trajectory for the river’s flow.  Once the whole class had made the crossing, and a couple of the adults showed that even grownups could do it, they were off to a new challenge, swimming the slightly faster waters and even riding the current back to the slower waters.

The waters came from above as well as below.  On the second day of the trip, we were treated to a five hour deluge that resulted in one total failure of tent, and one failure of ground cloth (mine).  Yet, despite the clothing and sleeping bags spread on rocks and cars to dry, despite the hours in the tents in the morning, we heard few complaints, and if anyone said, “I want to go home,” they were well out of adult earshot.

Around 3:30, a rainbow arced over the hills to the east of us.  I yelled to my daughter, “Hey, Caitlin a rainbow!”  She looked up, shrugged, and focused her eyes on the net.  The child who said, “I can’t play volleyball.  I can’t do sports with balls.  I always get a bloody nose,” was ready to serve.  And, maybe, that was the real magic.

Plague and Cathedrals

Javelins and arrows, surcoats and swords, ropes and catapults, mud and mayhem – welcome to sixth grade in a Waldorf school.   In the fifth grade, Waldorf students explore the development of human enlightenment and culture through the study of ancient civilizations.  They typically begin the year in Mesopotamia and travel through India, Egypt, ending the year in Ancient Greece.  The pinnacle of the fifth grade year is the Pentathlon.  Modeled after the ancient Greek games, the Pentathlon emphasizes form, achievement, and reaching above oneself to perfect ‘beauty, grace, and style.’ 

If fifth grade is a stage of enlightenment, sixth is a year of contrasts.  Fifth graders mirror the “Golden Age” of Greece, inhabiting their own golden age between developmental changes.  According to Steiner’s philosophy of Anthroposophy, significant spiritual, mental, and physical changes manifest in the grade-school aged child at approximately three year intervals.  Note to future parents: this is a good reason not to space your children three years apart.  In our house, we are currently enduring simultaneous manifestations of the six year change (increasing independence coupled with commensurate rebellion), the nine year change (an awakening from the dream-self of the child into the frightening isolation of the real world – comes with shorter temper, smarter mouth, anxiety, and, in boys at least, an ever increasing delight in inappropriate language and humor), and the twelve year change.

My mother, a former sixth grade teacher, swears that regardless of physiological development, all kids hit puberty in the spring of sixth grade.  The twelve year change provides a sneak peek for both children and parents into the teen years.  Mentally, sixth graders seem to fluctuate from incredible independence, responsibility, and sharpness of wit to astounding forgetfulness, sloth, and sheer boneheadedness.  Caitlin – after 4 or 5 years of competent can-opener use and generally excellent cooking skills – last Monday morning “forgot that tin can lids are sharp.”  She has also ‘forgotten’ any number of other things this year: homework, a report, the location of myriad critical items, and how to clean her room.  Yet, she remembers how to argue.  There is no statement that can be made by a sibling or adult that Caitlin will not contradict.  Walking, however, is a bit iffy.  Like her mother, Caitlin has never been the most coordinated person, but the level of tripping and spilling has increased recently to toddler level.

These are the moments in which the parents of adolescents whimper and quietly bang our heads against walls.  And, these are the moments that make the study of the Middle Ages perfect for sixth graders.  The age that brought Europe the construction of the cathedrals and the code of chivalry also brought the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Black Plague.  Every time I open my mouth to harangue my formerly hyper-responsible child about her sudden and incomprehensible loss of brain-cells, I remember another adolescent accused of “spaciness”.  A discussion the other morning went something like this:

            Me: “Will you quit arguing.  This is how it is.”

            Caitlin: “I’m not arguing.  I’m protesting.”

            Me: hysterical laughter.

Thirty years ago, I was on the other end of the same debate.  Sorry, Mom.

Honor, courage, empire-building, empire collapse, centuries-long feats of masonry, bloody war, intolerance, intricate tapestry, and catastrophic epidemic: the Middle Ages were a distillation of the extremes of human nature.  Independence, intelligence, reason, rebellion, growth, hormones, moodiness, helpfulness: sixth grade is a distillation of the extremes of human development.

If the Pentathlon emphasized enlightenment in the form of beauty, grace, and style, the Medieval Games was something more primal.  Set deep in a dark forest rather than a sunlit stadium, these were challenges of courage, physicality, and individual achievement.  Though the ‘knights to be’ travelled in shires comprised of students from each school, and though a couple of the events such as scaling the wall and the tug-o-war were cooperative, the emphasis was less on competition or team than the efforts of the individual to overcome his or her dragons.  While remnants of the fifth-grade form lingered in the javelin toss, for the most part, these newly adolescent bodies were no longer capable of the innate coordination of youth.  Some of them are entering the arms-and –legs stage, moving through life like mutant octopi.  Some of them, particularly the girls, have experience a shift in center of balance. 

Rather than compete against one another in events that require precise form, the sixth graders faced challenges such as crossing a bridge of floating (and tipping) platforms, or scaling a rope ladder to a beam high among the trees and traversing a rope foot over foot.  In these events, the style was that of the individual.  Some struggled against the fear of heights, others ran the narrow rope, or clowned around, walking backward or hanging from the rope rails.  Some gave the deliberately impossible moat (a mud filled long jump pit) their best effort while others recognized the futility and wallowed in delighted porcine glory.

Yet, there is a reason sixth graders study the Roman Empire with its emphasis on military discipline and rule, and the Middle Ages with the code of chivalry.  As Peter Parker’s uncle says (Spiderman reference, pay attention), “With great power comes great responsibility.”  The churning forces within the twelve (or almost twelve) year old body require a structured channel for release.  Side note: sixth graders begin the year’s science studies with geology, exploring the fire that twists and shapes the earth’s crust.

Our current sixth grade has never been a passive class.  As a group, they are energetic, creative, intelligent, active, and contentious.  “Discipline” and “Teamwork” are words that have been muttered on occasion when the deficits of the class were raised.  “Manners” is another.  This year, the class has been blessed with a teacher possessed of quick wit, (slightly sarcastic) humor, and a strength of personality to match the kids’ own.  Without yelling, threats or Draconian rule, he has managed to instill discipline within the class simply by challenging them at every turn to produce their best, and to work together.

At the Medieval Games, each school presents a performance for the pleasure of the “King and Queen.”  Standard offerings include sword dances and recorder performances.  This year, our class produced something different.  Written and choreographed by Dr. Tan, and executed to the beat of his drum, the DWS 6^th grade presented “The Warrior’s Creed.”  In regimented order, they performed a martial-arts inspired set of movements accompanying a recitation of the knightly virtues.  They weren’t perfect; there were the slight asynchronies one would expect from a group of eleven and twelve year olds, but one thing was clear.  Each child understood the expectation of the drumbeat and of the orders of their leader.  And each child did his or her level best to meet the expectations of their teacher and of the group.

Next year, as they adapt to the turmoil of change within their own bodies and minds, our children will move out of the Dark Ages into the light of the Renaissance.  Re-naissance, a re-birth.  Entering their teens, our kids will go through their own renaissance, as they experience this re-birth into the beginnings of adulthood.

For now, however, they shift from the mayhem of a mud-fight to the reverence of a knighting ceremony: surcoats donned over clay-encrusted T-shirts, the perfect symbols of the tumult of early adolescence.

The Warrior's Creed (below)

Surcoats over mud.  Warriors kneeling to be knighted

Good Soil

In the Waldorf curriculum, 3^rd grade is a year-long metaphor.  Ask almost any Waldorf student to name their favorite grade, and they will say 3^rd.  3^rd graders learn to spin wool – transforming a chaotic net of fibers into orderly strands of yarn.  3^rd graders learn construction – building shelters, symbolic defenses against the storms of change.  They build a project for the school as well, an effort that channels their emerging, conflicted individual energies into a force for good –they provide.  They learn to cook – creating a whole from disparate parts.  And they garden – they become miniature farmers, tending the land, producing something from a kernel of nothingness, nurturing change rather than fighting it.  Through each of these tasks, they grow stronger, more confident, and more independent.

That last trait is the killer for parents.  Waldorf pedagogy references the “Nine Year Change.”  This developmental stage that often begins near the end of second grade, as a child turns eight (entering the 9^th year of life), reveals the awakening of the child as an individual.  Think back, when were you first aware of yourself as a distinct person – separate from parents, siblings, and friends?  When did the world of make-believe fade into the cold reality that tells each of us, “Guess what?  You’re on your own.”  This is the rough part of the Nine Year Change, that uncertainty as the child begins to perceive his or her own isolation.  For parents, the pain is intense – few things are harder than watching one’s child hurt or frightened and knowing that we can no longer kiss it away.  It is terrifying to wake up one morning and find that the sunny, wide-eyed, free-spirit in the next bedroom has become moody, rebellious, and downright insolent.  It’s hard to tell ourselves that the acting out is a quest for stability, that the boundaries they push are the very boundaries they are desperately seeking.  Our kids sense it, even if we have forgotten; those boundaries, the rules against which they chafe, are keeping them back from the abyss.

“The most important thing for you to remember is that in order to grow healthy crops, you need healthy soil.”  Our class just returned from 3 days and 2 nights at the wonderful Full Belly Farm in the Capay Valley.  The farm trip is integral to the 3^rd grade.  On the surface, the trip reinforces the lessons in gardening begun during the school year.  However, more importantly, it serves as a rite of passage.  For many of these children, the overnight trips of 3^rd grade represent their first experiences away from home.  And they work.  On the farm, the children play hard, running amok in the orchard, climbing trees and playing endless games of tag.  But they also work hard, harvesting produce that they eat with their meals, tending trees too small to defend themselves from choking weeds, caring for young animals, and packing the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) boxes that represent part of the livelihood of “their” farm. 

Each of these tasks reinforces the positive and necessary part of the Nine Year Change – independence and (if we nurture it right) responsibility.  Tending their gardens, cooking for their class and others in the school, spinning wool into yarn, building their snail bread oven, and building their shelter projects: each of these pieces of the curriculum have been small steps toward that independence.  And here, on the farm, they begin to see the connections between discipline and independence.  Throughout the year, 3^rd graders in Waldorf schools study the Old Testament, not as a religious text, but as a set of stories.  And each story reinforces the same lesson.  Without discipline, you cannot have freedom.  Moses (the subject of this class’s play) led the Israelites from Egypt, but their freedom was not without consequence and rule – Ten Commandments, anyone?  Lot’s wife lost her freedom, and became a giant salt block how?  By breaking the rules.  In the Old Testament, freedom comes with responsibility, boundaries exist and are challenged, but the willful ignorance or destruction of those boundaries has consequences.

Testing of boundaries reinforces security – is the fence still there?  The children learned at the farm that fences work two ways.  Yes, a fence keeps animals inside, confined to a specific pasture, yet the fence also keeps predators out.  On the trip, it was easy to watch the children test their own “fences.”  How strong is the fence?  How high?  Is the electricity turned on?  How far can I push without breaking through?  We could see this testing in the grin of a boy as his hand reached toward a forbidden knife.  “Is anyone watching?” the bright eyes said.  Yet, more importantly, the eyes were asking, “Is anyone going to stop me before I go too far?”  The need for boundaries was readily apparent on the face of a child “talking back” to an adult.  Beneath the defiance invariably lay a look of pleading, a look that said “I’m really not sure how to handle this, someone catch me, please.   Don’t let me get away with this.”

This is the delicate balance of parenting 3^rd graders – the imperceptible line between hand-holding and keeping arms outstretched to catch them when they fall.  They will fall.  They need to fall.  They need the black eyes, sprained limbs, burnt fingers, and bruised hearts.  The terrifying thing for adults is the realization that our children will be hurt, and that they need to be.  The non-fatal injuries show us our boundaries, and help shield us from future disaster.  If we never get into trouble, we never learn how to get out of it.

I sometimes joke, but truly believe, that parents undergo a Nine Year Change as well.  I think we must.  It is impossible to be present with these rapidly metamorphosing beings, to watch them push their way to the surface, to fight frost and sun, to blossom and wilt, and bear fruit without undergoing a transformation ourselves.  We must provide the healthy soil.  But, what we sometimes forget is that composting is a combustive, smelly process.  We have to let many of our old traditions lie fallow – our child may no longer want that goodbye kiss in the morning.  We have to churn our notions of protection and nurturing back into the soil – our kids no longer need us to hold their hands crossing the street, they need us to remind them to stop and watch for traffic.  We have to prune away the deadwood of our parenting – we cannot mend their squabbles for them anymore, we can only give them the tools to relate to others themselves.  And we have to constantly amend the soil, finding our own strengths and reevaluating our own independence.

By a fluke of scheduling, none of the other chaperones on the Full Belly Farm Trip were parents with whom I have spent a lot of time.  By default, as parents we tend to socialize most with the families of our children’s close friends – at least in the early years.  Now, as anyone who has read this blog should know, I am not by nature an extrovert.  Getting to know new people is not inherently joyful to me; it is exhausting.  But I learned something in that spring grass, around the “kitchen” set up beneath the walnut trees and in our rambles about the farm.  Regardless of our backgrounds, career trajectories, marital status, or lifestyle, many of us were on the same journey.  Perhaps it is age-related – maybe adults undergo some sort of sea-change in the years surrounding the dreaded 4-0.  Or perhaps it relates to the ages of our children, the glimpsed possibility that, as our children come into themselves, we will not forever be known as “so-and-so’s Mommy or Daddy.”  Whatever the reason, there seemed to be a common thread to our conversations, one of self-challenge and discovery, yet still tied into the underlying fears of parenting – how do I do this?  Am I doing it right?

Farming relies upon an intricate web of factors: skill, knowledge, discipline, work, and luck.  For every factor that the farmer can control -- soil amendments, crop rotation, time of planting – there are factors that are beyond control – weather, disease, market preferences.  Farmers know inherently something that is often forgotten by those of us tethered to our sidewalks and municipal plumbing: much of life is outside our control.  But, the most important thing we can provide is good soil.

Turn Loose

“Now if it starts to go to pot out there, just turn loose.  Turn loose of everything.  You’ll be fine.”  That was the sum of my pre-solo sail advice from my grandfather.  Turn loose of everything, and then regroup, that and, as he and my dad glanced over their shoulders at the empty gravel parking lot, “I guess you’d better wear a life jacket in case your mother gets back.”

I was ten.  The boat in question was an El Toro, a two-man (or one girl) dinghy.  The body of water was a man-made lake on the outskirts of Merced.  Lake Yosemite must create its own weather, for even on stagnant August days, winds can whip white caps in the middle of the lake.  My mother had driven Grandma to Mass, taking my little sister with her.  As the oldest daughter in a boy-deprived family, I got to stay “with the men.”  I had sailed before, but always with an adult crammed alongside the centre-board.  However, Dad and Grandpa, apparently tired of the boom-induced cranial lumps from my unpredictable jibes, had seized upon the absence of female interference to teach me to solo.

Shivering under the 90 degree sun in a damp bathing suit and clammy “Mae West” life preserver, I slid into the stern.  Lake water lapped at the bottoms of my thighs as I clutched the tiller and sheet.  “Ok, I’m ready.”  My knuckles were white.

“Turn loose.”  Over 30 years later it amazes me that Grandpa Bligh could give that advice with a straight face.  Ask anyone who knows me well to describe me in three adjectives, and chances are, “stubborn” will be one of them.  I am not good at letting go.  Ropes, people, relationships, ideas, jobs, paragraphs, clutter, bad habits – I hold on.  I come by my tenacity honestly.  He who said, “turn loose” was the master of pig-headedness.  Yet, he knew what all too often eludes me still.  Sometimes, it will all go to pot out there, and the only thing to do is to turn loose, to let go of everything, and to hope that once the waters still, you can regroup, pick up, and begin the voyage again.

“Why didn’t you let go?”  My riding instructor stared at me as I handed over the once white cotton lead rope of my sister’s horse.  Mud caked my boots and splattered my jeans, shirt, and hair.  The calluses along the palms of my hands flared red, soon to blister.  My legs felt like jelly and my shoulders as though giants had been tearing at my arms.  Waterskiing through a muddy pasture behind a runaway horse will do that to you.  Suzie shook her head in disgust.  “Come on, Chris, you know better than that.  The gate was locked.  She couldn’t have got away.  You’re gonna get hurt doing stuff like that.  You should have let go.”

I was older in that February pasture than I had been on the summer lake, 15 or 16, but no wiser.  I did know better: if you are holding something you can’t control, let go.  I knew the rule, but had not integrated the wisdom.  When Noel, my sister’s Morgan, pulled away from me in hopes of rejoining her pasture mates in their wind-whipped freedom, I clung to the rope, stubbornness telling me that my 100 lb body could stop a 1200 lb force of nature.  Logic, reason, and common sense died beneath the wheels of the tank that is my fear of loss and failure.

I’m not good at letting go.  Hold on a little longer.  Try something different.  Try one more time.  Say the right thing.  Just keep going.  Don’t give up. 

The last one is the kicker – no one wants to be a quitter, no one wants to give up if there is a chance, just a chance that it might work.  But, the reality, the one that my Grandfather, veteran of war and widowhood, and Suzie, with two divorces behind her, knew, is that sometimes it won’t work.  Sometimes the forces pushing against us or pulling us in our wake are more powerful than we.  Sometimes it is broken and can’t be fixed.  Sometimes it will go to hell, and then it is time to let go.

A few years ago, I went on a call to vaccinate a group of semi-feral ponies.  The stallion had recently encountered some barbed-wire, and while his lacerations looked superficial from a distance, I wanted a closer look.  He wore a halter, but no lead.  “You’re going to have a hard time catching him,” said the owner.

I looked at the pony, the halter and the size of the pasture.  “No problem.  I’ll go out there by myself, and once I have him by the halter, you can bring me the rope.”  Bull-shitting through a situation is a professional specialty.

Sure enough, the pony was curious enough to come say ‘hello.’  I scritched his neck, and slid my hand down, grabbing the halter.  Just as I called, “Ok…” my patient pulled away.  No problem – he was only about double my body weight.  I centered myself and jerked on the halter.  “Whoa.”  He stopped, then pulled again.  Same response from me.  Now, this is where I went wrong – in my head this was a horse.  For a normal horse, one or two failed attempts at misbehavior is usually enough to correct the behavior.  Not so for a pony stallion – ponies are short, and have much to prove.  He jerked back a third time, and took off running.

Enclosed pasture --  no problem, right?   After all, I learned my lesson 25 years ago, didn’t I?  Sadly, not so much.  My fingers remained clenched around the cheek piece of the halter, and unable to hold my ground, my feet trotted along with the pony.  As he broke into a canter, my brain finally returned from the sandy beaches of denial, looked at my feet which had turned into cartoon wheels and the speeding ground below, and said, “This looks bad.  Maybe you should let go.”  Oops.  The brain had apparently left its knowledge of physics beneath a palm tree.  My four-legged partner and I had been travelling at his speed, not mine.  As my fingers released the halter, my body fell victim to inertia.  My feet, unable to sustain their free-wheeling momentum alone, slowed, but my upper body continued to travel at pony-speed.  Like Wile E. Coyote plunging from a cliff, I had a split-second of “Uh-oh” before the ground rushed toward my face.

Back in the office, as I held an ice-pack to my knee (in a last ditch effort to ‘save face’ I had broken my fall with my left patella) and tried to make an incident report sound logical (How will you avoid this incident in the future?  Turn loose of the damn pony.), my technician Mel and a client stared at me and shook their heads.  “Why didn’t you just let go?”

The only answer I can give is that some of us need more lessons than others.  For some, through faith, reason, or emotional balance, letting go seems to come fairly easily.  The rest of us need the rope burns, the bruises, the heartache, and the spectacular failures to learn the balance between giving up and accepting the inevitable.  The house has been gone from us since September.  I have finally stopped planning projects or trying to drive too far up I-5.  The practice where I worked closed a week and a half ago.  I still run through cases in my head in the evenings, thinking, “When I get to work, I need to…”  “Kill your darlings,” goes the writing advice.  I am editing the first draft of the novel now, and bleeding just a little as I force the ink across any paragraph that doesn’t work, doesn’t contribute, or is trying to get away.

More things exist outside of my control than within it. 

“God grant me the serenity

 to accept the things I cannot change;

courage to change the things I can;

And wisdom to know the difference...”  Reinhold Niebuhr

And God grant me the ability to turn loose when it all goes to pot.  Oh, and can I have a life jacket, please? 

Parenting -- Roman Style, or Romulus, Remus, and a Report

Well, at least I’m not putting her in a basket to be raised by a she-wolf. 

If that line made you say, ‘huh?’ know that today’s blog post is brought to you by my sixth grader.  Two major projects have occupied the sixth grade at Davis Waldorf this month.  In class, they have been working on their annual play.  Performed to great acclaim in two showings yesterday, it was an epic depicting the founding of Rome, written by their teacher, Dr. Tan.  At home, the kids have been working on their European country reports, due today.  Or, most of them have been working.

Our parenting style, especially with Caitlin and school, consists of monitored space.  Rules exist, behavior will be monitored, homework will be checked, but within that framework, Mike and I are largely hands-off.  With Caitlin and school projects, this approach has been primarily at her request.  We check her homework and keep abreast of her assignments, but she has stated multiple times that if she needs help, she will ask for it.  Despite her tendency to procrastinate, this has historically worked well.  We have trusted her when she says, “I’m on it,” and she has delivered.

“Is she really that serious?” a friend asked after the play.  “She seems so serious and focused.  She did in last year’s play, too.” 

Last year, in Demeter and Persephone, Caitlin played Demeter, and her wrath upon the abduction of her daughter was fearsome.  This year, one of her roles was that of Amulius, the wicked great-uncle of Romulus and Remus.  Amulius usurps his brother’s throne, killing his nephews, exiling his brother, and sentencing his niece Rhea to what he presumes will be a lifetime of virginity in the service of Vesta.  Caitlin’s Amulius was calmly, coolly, and suavely evil, in the grand tradition of Voldemort and Darth Sidius.  As her father pointed out, it was her ‘dream role.’

Serious?  With Caitlin seriousness is unpredictable.  She can switch from blasé to impish and back  in a flash of dimples or arch of eyebrow.  Focused?  “Aye, there’s the rub,” to quote my daughter’s favorite playwright.  Where her interest engages, Caitlin’s focus is a laser.  Where she is reluctant, the beam scatters into a dappled patch of sunlight.

For her country report, Caitlin selected Greece.  This choice derived from her love for ancient mythologies.  The situation began to deteriorate almost as soon as she learned (from her evil mother) that her report needed to be a researched,  factual paper on the modern nation of Greece, and that she couldn’t merely write and draw everything she knows or thinks she knows about Greek mythology.  This was going to be work, and the focus dissipated immediately.

Caitlin’s teacher, among his many talents, is a gifted composer.  Prior to the play, he spoke of the importance of studying the Roman Empire in the sixth grade, and how the study of Rome is the study of one’s boundaries.  Exceeding our boundaries can lead to war and destruction, yet pushing the boundaries leads to creativity and expansion.  Welcome to the paradox of puberty, the paradox of life.  During the play, the girls sang Rudolf Steiner’s “Destiny Verse” to music composed by Dr. Tan:

The wishes of the soul are springing
The deeds of the will are thriving
The fruits of life are maturing

I feel my destiny
My destiny finds me
I feel my star
My star finds me
I feel my goals in life
My goals in life are finding me
My soul and the great world are one

Life grows more radiant about me
Life grows more challenging for me
Life grows more abundant within me.

Caitlin’s voice sang from the group, clear, strong and confident.  I wanted to kill her.  At that point (6:30 pm the night before her report was due), her will had led her to the deed of a report that was scarcely 2/3 completed.  Her goals in life appear to be reading whatever she chooses and driving her mother insane.  During the next 14 hours, life would grow more challenging for us both.

During the first class meeting of the year, the hot topic among the parents was the country report.  Various parents and Dr. Tan brainstormed strategies for keeping the kids on task with a challenging project.  I sat smugly silent in Caitlin’s desk, reveling in the fact that my daughter is an independent worker.  Ouch. 

Even then, the mice of uncertainty nibbled at my brain.  I came home with a raft of questions for Caitlin.  Do you need help setting up a work schedule?  Do you know how to look up the information you need?  I’ll take you to the library.  You know you can’t use Wikipedia, right?

No, Mom, I’ve got it.  Yes, Mom.  Ok.  I know, Mom, you’ve told me like a thousand times!

Mike and I didn’t leave her completely to her own devices.  We pushed her to “go work on your report” every weekend, and as part of her nightly homework.  But, we didn’t stand over her, or poke our heads into her room to check her progress.  She showed us her map, and her lists of flora and fauna.  I helped her a bit with figuring out the definition of culture, and navigating the internet.  We discovered that the BBC’s world site is a great resource.  Progress seemed to be occurring.

Yet, Caitlin’s continued insistence that nothing of interest had happened on the Aegean peninsula in the last thousand years was a hint that not all was well.  Mike and I knew that she was behind the schedule we would have liked, but the years have taught us that while Aidan will work to direction because he wants to please, pushing either of our girls provokes rebellion and reversal.  We stayed out of it.

Fast forward to Thursday.  Driving home after school through sheets of rain, I asked Catlin, “What do you have left to work on for your report?” 

“Well….I’ve done…” The silence, punctuated by raindrops and the fluttering of her murmuring lips and counting fingers, carried us a mile and a half.

“Caitlin!  What do you have left to do?”

“Mom.  I’m trying to figure that out!”  More silence, more fluttering.

“What do you mean you’re trying to figure it out?  Don’t you know?”  So much for calm parenting.  At the red light, I looked in the rear view mirror.  Each hand displayed an equal number of fingers.  “You’re only half way done?  Caitlin, it’s due tomorrow!”

“IknowIknowIKNOW!”  Pre-teen cool had begun to crack.

I drew three deep breaths.  “Go home and work.  If it isn’t done, you get to explain it to Dr. Tan.”

She went home.  She worked.  But by the time we needed to leave the house for the play, three sections remained unfinished.  Against my better judgment, I fell into lecture mode as I backed the car from the driveway.  By the time we reached the school, Caitlin’s face had slumped into sullen mode and her eyes were black.  I pulled her into a hug.  “I’m sorry.  I’m really frustrated with you, but I love you.”

“Nice motivational speech right before the play, Mom.”

“I know.  Go do your play.  I know you’ve got that down.”

And she did.  Lines, singing, evil twirling of sword, every bit down cold. 

Rhea placed her twin babies in a basket, sending them down the River Tiber.  The choices we make for the benefit of our children are not always easy.  “Should we ask Rick for an extension for Caitlin,” Mike asked me during the intermission. 

“No.  She knew what she was doing.  She chose to goof around.  She needs to deal with the consequences.”

And deal she did.  In one thing, I am very proud of my daughter.  I fully expected a 9:30 meltdown that night.  It never came.  When the chips were down, Caitlin knew the deal.  She had goofed, and she buckled down and dealt with it. 

The report was completed and turned in.  I won’t vouch for the content, and if it is inadequate, I hope to goodness that her teacher takes her to task.  But, the lesson has been learned.  Caitlin pushed the boundary of time too far, and I think she’s learned discipline far more thoroughly from this episode than she ever would have from our words alone.

And, I am pleased to report: her brother escaped the episode un-slain.

Madness. Sense. Expectations.

Much Madness is divinest Sense --

To a discerning Eye --

Much Sense -- the starkest Madness --

'Tis the Majority

In this, as All, prevail --

Assent -- and you are sane --

Demur -- you're straightway dangerous --

And handled with a Chain --

--Emily Dickinson

 

Shhh….I’m going to tell you a secret.   Try not to be too shocked.  Ok, are you ready?  Here it is: Our society has different expectations for women than for men.  Oh, goodness, are you okay?  I didn’t mean to just spring it on you like that.  I’m sorry.  I know what you’re thinking: ‘Really?  We haven’t figured it out by now?  Suffrage?  Women’s lib?’  No, sorry, the car has not pulled into the parking place.  The ignition hasn’t been turned off.  We’re not there yet.

I realize that you’re still reeling from the first blow, but sit down -- I have another one for you.  Art, of any kind, is a hobby, not a career.  Adults are supposed to have a practical plan, a secure career.  Then, in a well regulated fashion, they may indulge these dangerous whims.

The preceding paragraphs do have a unifying element – other than sarcasm.  Emily Dickinson had it right.  Humans take comfort in conformity.  We like the expected.  We label, identify, and categorize.  If we can label a thing, we must therefore know its nature, and thus, it is safe. 

Children are permitted to dream.  We tell our children, “You can grow up to be anything you want.”  We encourage them to ‘reach for the stars,’ to have heroes, to pursue their passions.  And, then we expect the dream to stop. 

Somewhere, 4^th, 5^th grade, perhaps, we begin to shift our children’s focus from the stars to more serious pursuits.  We no longer encourage them to believe that they can become astronauts, dancers, actors, painters, and star athletes.  After all, those shining spots in the firmament belong to a select few.  The rest of us toil in the earth.

We tell our girls, “You can have it all.  You can grow up to do anything a boy can do.”  We tell them the lie we want to believe.  While letting our daughters play with Barbies and discouraging them from joining the boys in their climbing, muddy war games, we tell them that they can compete with men on an equal footing – so long as they look pretty, and don’t act too pushy.  We tell them, “You can have a career, family, or both.  You are lucky.  Your generation can have whatever it wants.”  We don’t throw the switch until later, until a woman enters her 30s.  Then we begin the delicate (and not so delicate) probing into her reproductive plans.  I have yet to meet a childless woman over the age of 30 who has not been subjected to a battery of questions and comments regarding her lack of motherhood.  We tell our daughters that they can have a successful career and be good mothers.  At least, we tell them that until the baby crowns.  Once the sheets flood with amniotic fluid, the conversation shifts to the importance of maternal bonding, to the risks of working mothers to every facet of a child’s physical, emotional, and mental well-being. 

In the late 1980s-early90s, science was the career choice.  Those lucky enough to possess a decent aptitude for the sciences or for finance were assured the golden ticket – a safe, lucrative, permanent career.  Those who chose a liberal arts degree were guaranteed a position in food-services as a fried-potato engineer.  Being a good girl, and being blessed with an adequate, if only barely adequate, scientific mind, I chose the sensible path.  Writing was for dreamers, but veterinary medicine was a career.  Don’t get me wrong: I love animals, I love working with people, and I have been blessed to have a magnificently challenging and rewarding career for a number of years.  However, I have come to believe that while nothing worthwhile is easy, fighting to squish oneself into a shape that fits a mold is a sure sign that the mold is not the correct one.

Like the stepsisters in Cinderella, throughout vet school, I bound, stretched, and lopped off parts of myself in order to make the role of ‘vet student’ fit.  My stories and poems retreated from paper back into my skull while I memorized nerve pathways and formulae I have never used in practice.  Yet, like the blood seeping out of the glass slipper, the writer in my head had a way of oozing into my life.  Need a flyer?  I’ll write it.  Newsletter?  Ask Christy.  Educational handout?  I’m on it. 

When I began working in large animal medicine 10 years ago, the questions from clients said everything one needed to know about gender expectation.  “How long is this one going to last,” the ranch wife asked my technician after pointedly appraising me.  “Oh, is that the woman?  There’s no one else available?” was always my favorite telephone call.  “They sent you to pull that calf?”  The elderly dairyman wasn’t about to pull any punches.  As I proved myself willing to dig in, working through first one, then a second pregnancy, the gender comments diminished over the years.  Diminished, but didn’t evaporate completely.  

I think the award for all-time best I-can’t-believe-he-actually-said-that goes to a horse breeder of a certain age.  He and I were discussing an associate that had just started with the practice.  The man looked thoughtful after I assured him that the new doctor was a wonderful vet, and said, “Well, at least Tom hired a man this time.” (!)

Gender image is generally a bit more subtle than this.  I saw it most commonly when returning from maternity leave.  “Oh, we’re so glad to have you back!”  Then, in almost the same breath, “Wait.  Where’s your baby?”  Paradox: a veterinarian should be practicing; a new mother belonged with her baby.  The fact that both occupied the same body seemed to create a quandary.  Note that not one person ever asked my husband following the birth of any of our children, “why aren’t you with your baby?”

These sets of societal expectations have converged in my mind recently as I bid farewell to long term clients.  Naturally, the clients whose animals I have treated for so many years want to know where I will be going, what I will be doing once the practice closes.  My admission that I lack the resources to set out in practice for myself tends to be met with understanding nods.  Any delusions people once had about the wealth of veterinarians have cracked in the past year or two.  But the nods turn to looks of condescension or consternation when I explain that I have been freelance writing part time and intend to turn that into a full-time career.  Writing is an oddball ‘hobby’ for a vet, and it seems incomprehensible that someone would jettison a “practical” career for a risky venture like writing.  Then I say the magic words and relief sweeps across the other person’s face.  “Well, I’ve spent a huge chunk of my children’s lives on call and away from home, and as they get older, they probably deserve to have me around more.”  One sentence shifted me from flighty dreamer to good mother.

Madness: I am changing careers.  I am quitting private practice and starting a freelance writing business.  Sense: I am losing my job due to the economy, taking some time to be with my children, and doing some writing. 

Madness.  Sense.  I guess it all depends upon the discernment of one’s eye.  But, I know this:  the other day when Aidan said something about his future as a pro-football player, I opened my mouth to remark on the slim odds for becoming a professional athlete.  Then, I looked into a mirror.  My sensible path has turned out to be as much illusion as any dream.  I closed my mouth, smiled, and said, “That’s great, Bud!”

Solstice Shift -- Thoughts on the Davis Waldorf School Winter Concert

It happened again this year.  The metamorphosis occurs in a flash of light against pressed, white cotton, the dull gleam of black polyester, the light-swallowing glow of velvet, and sometimes denim.  They change in a quickening of mahogany and sinew, of nickel, brass, and uplifted voices.  Before the houselights dim, they are familiar, our children – boisterous larval forms of potential.

Something changes: not as they poke, giggle, and shuffle onto stage, not even perhaps in the glare of the footlights, as they wave with varying degrees of enthusiasm at smiling parents, or grin in self-conscious tolerance at the yells of a younger sibling, and as they correct each other with grins while taking their marks.  Something changes: at the uplifted finger of teacher, raised bow of conductor.  For the older children, we see it as they wrestled battered rental instruments into submission before their music stands.  The instruments change, too, in the borrowed glow of the stage.  My daughter’s rental cello, chipped and scratched by the erosion of years of students, with its colored tapes to mark finger position, and iffy bridge, gleamed against her black trousers.  With the older children, it changes with the first strike of a tuning note.

They shuffle in their seat as the prelude plays, yell to their friends as families wander in staggering herds to upright seats.  They slouch, slide, and sulk, tucking aggravating shirttails into submission and finger-combing hair mussed by contraband ball caps.  They giggle, whisper, and finger-shoot each other, run in packs to bathroom and drinking fountain.  Even the 7^th and 8^th graders playing the carols as the theater fills do not take this seriously.  They’ve been at this long enough to recognize an audience, and they don’t have one yet; they are background.  Then, the teacher hosting the evening takes his mike, low voice – the one that always has a grin behind it – carrying the room.  Restless grownups settle down, poising cameras and shooting one last whisper to a friend.  The first piece is introduced, and it’s on.

The same junior-high students whose pleasant holiday tunes accompanied the filling of the hall transform as their instructor raises her bow.  Around the semi-circle, bows meet strings, and in the breath before the first notes of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” sound, faces change.  The shift is in their faces; it is there, too, in the crook of elbow, arch of finger, but mainly in the face.  In the moment of performance, they are no longer children – no longer the rough, proto-people.  Idiosyncratic touches: Santa hats, ties, skater-inspired modifications to concert attire, Beatles haircuts, and varying posture slide into the union of purpose.  They are not children, they are performers, and in their faces, we glimpse the outlines of the people they will present to the world.

Something in this transformation is, I think, unique to their schooling.  The arts inform and infuse the daily curriculum of a Waldorf school.  Kindergarteners create “people-plays” from the stories teacher tells.  First graders begin playing wooden flutes in class, a year before they will perform on stage.  Lessons are acted as well as absorbed.  Complex songs and rounds are learned from early childhood on, and by fourth or fifth grade, Waldorf students argue as knowledgeably and casually about multi-part harmony as other kids do about movies and video games.  By the time they take the stage with their classmates in second grade, the performance grows from the child. 

I think this is the difference with this winter concert.  I remember the Christmas programs of my own youth, of the roles into which we had been jammed around Thanksgiving break, roles that fitted about as well as the polyester angel costumes and that, like the costumes, itched in all the wrong places.  It is this memory of awkward hesitation that cringes when my son refuses to tell me what his class will perform, or my daughter announces a few weeks before the concert that she finally has the music for the piece her class will play.  How can I help Aidan memorize his songs?  How will Caitlin be ready in time; she’s not the most devoted cellist.  Each year, I fret, bound by the shadows of my own stage frights, the memories of tolerant faces of pained grownups as instruments squeaked and lines were forgotten.  Each year, I forget what, by now, I know.  Aidan doesn’t need my help learning a song.  Caitlin will play whether she has the music for a year or a week.  This is what they do.  The words, the music, the performance comes from them; it flows outward, fitting each child.  They will have their share of rough rehearsals, of missed lines or missed notes.  They will display varying degrees of talent and enthusiasm, but, from earnest second grader through veteran teen, each will claim a spot on the stage without fear or irony.

The second grade teacher will kneel before her class, finger conducting and mouthing the words, but she will not carry the song.  Even for the younger children, when they open their mouths, the shuffling, muted shoves, and nose-wiping fade to the back.  They sing.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, the junior-high teachers needn’t worry about pranks or rebellion.  By sixth grade, art has become part of their physiology.  Whether they can carry a tune, regardless of level of home practice or private lesson, each face on stage says the same thing.  “Here I am.  This is what I do.”  And this is the gift that I hope my kids will take into the world: the ability to step onto the stage of humanity and to say, “Here I am.  This is what I do.”

NaNo 0.5

“If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”  --Max Ehrmann, “Desiderata”

Those lines hold one of the many reasons that poem occupies a large chunk of landscape on my hallway wall.  For someone who was never athletic – yes, I was the kid no one wanted on their kickball team – I am intensely competitive.  At physical therapy, I push against my own numbers; improvement is the only acceptable outcome.  When I missed the valedictorian spot in high school by three hundredths of a grade point, I railed at my mom for months for not letting me compete in Academic Decathlon which would have added an extra grade point to my average.  My narrow-minded parents had strangely thought that eight periods a day were enough for a high school senior.  I don’t like to fail, and there is a hard-edged, prickly, shadowy place within me that defines failure as anything other than being the best.

This is, of course, where reality crashes into ego.  “Best” is indefinable, and regardless of definition, my abilities at pretty much anything fall more into the range of “okay.”  Reality can really mess with one’s head.  For most of my life, the nagging of my ego turned things inside out – if I’m not the best, then I’m probably not any good at all.  I even managed to wrap a shroud of inadequacy around my ambitions.  It’s conceited, after all, to worry about being better than other people, and conceited isn’t nice, and I wanted to be the nicest person possible, and…

And round-and-round it goes.  I’m betting that I’m not the only person stuck on the merry-go-round of ambition and insecurity, and that is, one of the best things about the uncertainty of adulthood.  There are so many things that none of our schooling, lessons, training, or reading prepare us for, that the playing field is essentially level. 

At work, we joke that “it’s better to be lucky than good any day of the week.”  In a field where biology and fate trump knowledge and skill daily, one learns quickly to abandon ego, and simply to gratefully accept whatever tools come one’s way – if a brilliant insight comes from within, great; if someone else saves your patient, be happy that it was saved.

Parenting teaches me humility daily.  What makes a “good” parent?  Which philosophies, techniques, theories are best?  Not a clue.  What works with one kid one day may backfire with epic pyrotechnics with a sibling the next.

If I’m paying more attention to the world than to my own fears and pride, I realize that I only have to turn to the news to see how futile comparisons are.  “Expert” scientists – the best and brightest in each field—are contradicted by the work of their colleagues on a regular basis.  One critic’s great American novelist is another reader’s over-rated hack.  The financial crisis – well, regardless of politics and persuasion, we can pretty much all agree that those who were considered the luminaries of the world of money fell off a rather large cliff.

So, where was I going with all this?  Oh yeah, balance, and comparing myself to the person I want to be rather than to some external benchmark.  On a smaller, less grandiose level, today is November 15, the halfway point of NaNoWriMo.  If I compare myself with others, I may become vain or bitter. In the forums, there are writers who have already crossed the 50K word line, and there are others far behind my 27(something)K.  I haven’t read their work, and I have no way of comparing their words with my own.  So, I must be content with the fact that I’m right on track with the goal I set for myself at the beginning of the month.  Sometimes it is no bad thing to be happy with what is.

Here’s an excerpt.  But, you may only read it if you promise not to compare it with others!

Instead, Mr. Loupe’s face was serious, and old – that was the weirdest thing in this whole freaky afternoon.  Mr. Loupe was the youngest teacher at the school, just out of college.  Most of the time, he didn’t even look like a grownup.  But, when Sylvia mentioned the glowing cupboard, it was as though all of the light had been sucked from him as well.  Lines crossed his forehead and cheeks where none had been before, his eyes seemed to recede into his skull, and in the faded and flickering afternoon light, he appeared shrunken and stooped.  “I was afraid of that.  The Balance truly has gone, then.  And so,” He turned, as though speaking to an invisible presence in the room.  “And so, it is time then.  I was wrong.”

He gathered the children toward him and leaned forward.  “I had hoped that we had more time, that this would be unnecessary, that I could give you a better explanation.  But,” The wind banged louder against the window, and the whole room trembled.  “But, there is no time.  This is it.  Just remember,” and he raised his voice into the howling gale as the room darkened and threatened to fly apart around them, “everything you need, you have within you.  Sylvia, you have learned all that you need to know, but you will forget.  Listen to your brother and sister.  They remember what you have lost.  Richard, use your words.  Remember St. George.  Remember that you have been a knight of Michael.  Dylan, everything you believe is true.  Keep the stories within you.  And Dylan,” he seemed to fade before them, swallowed in a vortex of wind and darkness, “the cold is the key.”

The wind roared as the room pulsed, ready to fly apart.  “The floor is tilting,” Richard yelled.

“Don’t be stupid, the floor is always like this.”  Dylan tried to look scornful, but the dark pulled at her.  She grabbed for Sylvia’s hand.

“Richard’s right.  We’re sliding!  Hold on to something!”  Sylvia grabbed her brother and sister, searching the twisting room for a firm hold.  “Richard, grab that rod.”

The room bucked and tipped, pouring them toward the cupboard, now glowing again.  The cupboard mouth seemed to yawn wider, waiting to swallow them.  Richard thrust out a desperate arm, and his hand closed around a smooth, round, piece of wood.  It burned his hand and he almost let go, but clenched his fingers tighter, trying to stop their plummet.  The floor heaved again, and they fell, tumbling like grains of sand into the burning gold light.

What Color is Your Dragon?

Once upon a time, a dragon menaced the countryside.  The villagers cowered within their homes as the creature devoured the livestock and trampled the fields.  Soon, the country lay in ruins; the king sued the dragon for peace, only to learn that the dragon required the sacrifice of the princess.  A young man named George was chosen to champion the people.  For his prayers and piety, he was granted a golden cloak and a sword of light by St. Michael and was given the courage to slay the dragon.

Michaelmas, the feast of the archangel Michael, falls on September 29.  Fallen into obscurity since the 18^th century, Michaelmas is still used to delineate the fall term in British universities – and it is celebrated with full force in the Waldorf schools.  This slightly nutty preoccupation with rather obscure traditions is a hallmark of Waldorf education, but like most of the Waldorf traditions, has a purpose in marking the rhythm of the year, and the development of the child.

Michaelmas takes place at the beginning of the school year, as the children are gathering themselves to face the dragons of new challenges: new curriculum, new friends, and new projects.  It also falls in autumn, and it is no coincidence that a sword of light is wielded against the destroyer of crops and livestock.  Winter is coming, the days grow short, and soon we will be swallowed by the dark and the cold.

Though all of the grades celebrate Michaelmas, learning songs and watching the pageant, it is no coincidence that the grades in which the celebration of light and courage fall to those ages experiencing greatest change.  The second graders are the villagers, the princess, and St. George.  As they face the dragons of a scary world in which they are no longer certain that they believe in fairy tales or the magic of omnipotent adults (known in Waldorf philosophy as the nine-year change), they are given the courage to defeat the dragon before the entire school.  The sixth grade are a fearsome monster.  The hunger and unpredictability of the reptilian world of adolescence surges onto their horizon, and it is fitting that they should work together in lockstep beneath one skin as they are defeated or tamed by innocence.

The kindergarten has its own, gentler, and in some ways more meaningful, Michaelmas.  Kindergarteners make swords.  In the two-year kindergarten program, the older children, those who will brave the world of the grades next year, forge their own ‘swords of light’.  During the week in which they hear and enact the story of St. George and the Dragon and learn songs and verses extolling the virtues of right and bravery, all of the children dye their own golden cloaks and the second-years rasp, sand, polish, and paint their wooden swords.  These swords are stamped “by the blacksmith” with the symbol of each child, and are not seen as toys.  The children will wield their weapons against the dragons of imagination, but they leave school on Michaelmas-day announcing that their swords are to be used “only for the right./ Not for some silly quarrel or fight.”

Standing by the straw-mulched vegetable garden in Sierra’s kindergarten yard, holding my big girl’s hand, I was taken aback to realize that she, and several of her second-year friends, were struck with attacks of clinging insecurity just as they were to receive their golden capes.  As the teacher drew closer to our place on the ring, Sierra wrapped her arms tighter about my leg, her lip trembled, and she whispered, “I want Daddy.”  I couldn’t figure out what was wrong; Mike isn’t gone, away, or lost.  He was simply at work.  Sierra loves her teacher, and she had been babbling all week about her cape and sword.  Then, as I pondered my own dragons, it clicked.  Accepting the symbols of courage, binding oneself to the task of slaying the dragon is often harder than the act of facing the beast, itself.  And, I understood why the older children would receive their swords later, once the parents had left.  It is almost impossible to draw upon one’s own courage when given a hand, or a leg, to hold.

The dragons have been hungry in our countryside this year.  In the past twelve months, we have battled the dragons of disease, death, financial-difficulty, foreclosure, and injury.  My personal dragons generally have blanks to fill and official seals.  I have a deep-seated fear of authority which manifests as a complete inability to cope with officialdom.  I cower inside my hut of procrastination.  Earlier this spring, I received a fix-it ticket for expired tags on our pickup.  Did I mention that it has been a bad year?  We put the new tags on, and I promptly forgot about the ticket, and forgot to get it signed off.

Last week, the week of Michaelmas, the dragon knocked on our door.  I received a letter, forwarded from our old address, from the Superior Court of Sacramento.  Inside was notice that a warrant had been filed for my arrest.  I never even got detention in school!  The panic attack was immediate and violent – tears, hysteria, sobbing that we needed to just pay the $600 fine because going into court was not an option.  “I can’t go there!  I just can’t.”  As my children crawled, bewildered, into my lap, I realized the horrible example I was setting.  How can I ask them to brave their own monsters while I bar the door against my own?

The morning after I left my sobbing daughter in her golden cape clinging to her teacher’s hand, I walked into the courthouse and secured an appointment to appear in court.  I emerged uneaten, and by pickup time that afternoon, Sierra sang, swung her sword and swirled her cape with all her might.  My court date is today, and though Mike offered to come with me, I know that I must face this alone. I wonder if Sierra will let me borrow her cape.

What do your dragons look like?

Smoke, Fire, and Change

Scent ties to memory.  The campfire smoke will wash from my hair in another shower or two.  The memories will linger, blending with the smoke of other campfires, other marshmallows, other children’s voices, other tents rustling and pulsing with barely contained energy.  The smoke will fade; the memories will remain, tied with thousands of others to that smell.

Where there is smoke, there is fire.  Cliché, fine.  And mostly true, but fire exists without smoke.  Fire burns, but it also melts, cracks, ignites, and metamorphoses.  In the sixth grade in the Waldorf curriculum, our children study geology.  As the fires of change burn and erupt within them, they discover the shaping of the earth through fire.  For Waldorf schools in Northern California, this means a field trip to Mt. Lassen.  There were classes from one other Waldorf school and one Waldorf-inspired charter school besides ours on the mountain this week.

I wasn’t supposed to chaperone this trip.  I should have been working, set in my routine.  But, this has been a period of shifting for me as well.  Our move, the crack in my metacarpal bone -- the plates of our lives have jolted, reshaping the routine.  I was the working mother, the one who never had kids over for playdates, who never volunteered in the classroom, who rarely went on field trips.  My involvement with school came in bursts, projects that could be taken home, completed in my isolated schedule.  That has changed this fall.  This morning I looked at my husband.  “When was the last weekday that we had all of our children and no one else’s?”  “Monday.”  “No, last Wednesday.” “No. Wait.  That was the day we had…”  We finally realized that the answer was, ‘before school started.’  Years ago, when Caitlin was a baby, I attempted stay-at-home-motherhood.  I failed.  Trapped, bored, depressed, I felt completely inadequate – a failure.  But, the fires burn, the plates shift, the crust cracks.

This time around, things have changed.   I am surrounded by people living similar lives.  My children and their peers have progressed to stages of creativity, eloquence, and curiosity, making them entertaining companions.  And, admittedly, I have the luxury of knowing that my hand will heal, and that this phase of my life will pass into memory.

Though each of these moments with my kids – playdates, haircuts, watching small legs pumping the swing slung from the tree in the front yard – has meaning, the memories of this recent foray into the woods will linger long.  The sixth grade is, and always has been, a special class.  Even within a school of high-energy, bright children, these kids are well-known (notorious?).  I have heard them called a “challenging” class, with the tinge to the word that suggests an adversity in the challenge.  Challenging?  You bet.  Like the mountains in which we spent the last 48 hours, they are volatile, rugged, beautiful, and dangerous to take for granted.  And well worth the effort to explore.  This is a class of leaders; few in this group are docile, few are complacent, and few take anything at face value.

But this is more than a class.  Perhaps it is a result of the small class size, maybe it stems from their active and activity-based curriculum, or maybe it is just their nature, but these kids are family.  Even now, as the hormones begin to surge beneath the crust of childhood, my daughter and her classmates interact almost more as siblings than as friends.  The bonds, the rivalries, the name-calling, and the support against the outside all have the taint and glow of family.  Though the faces have shifted in the years that this group has been together, it is difficult in this class to tell the biologic siblings from the scholastic ones.

And yet, the dynamic is changing.  The make-believe games of a few years ago have shifted into “Truth or Dare” and “Would You Rather.”  On the second night of the trip, the dire phrase “spin the bottle” emanated from one of the larger tents.  (Further investigation revealed that the proposed game was “hug spin-the-bottle” because “the real kind is just gross.”)  Throughout the trip, the other chaperones and I watched these kids surge between childhood and adolescence – debating the merits of explicit vs. non-explicit downloads from iTunes one moment and finagling marshmallows for breakfast the next.  (If your child claims to have roasted marshmallows in the morning, it is a vicious lie; no responsible chaperones would permit that sort of thing!)  They are old enough to sleep in tents without an adult and young enough to need reminding to use the bathroom.  They set up tents with minimal supervision, yet can’t remember to wear shoes around the campsite.  They can hike up a steep trail of cinder and ash, but some are still confused about making (and packing!) their own sandwiches.  They are young enough to brave the frigid waters of a mountain lake, but old enough to panic at the scritch of a tent zipper while changing clothes.

Though many in this class have been together for years, this is their first year with this teacher.  Although the standard practice in Waldorf schools is for the teacher to matriculate through the grades with the children, through varying flukes of coincidence, this class has never been with the same teacher for more than two years.  Mike and I tease Caitlin that Voldemort wanted to teach her class, and so there is a curse.  It is a natural fit, though, for them to have a new teacher as they move into adolescence.  With this new expansion and turbulence of their minds and bodies, it is fitting, I think, for them to have a new guide, and one who can combine a love of the arts with the strong background in science that they need in order to make sense out of this chaotic world as they shuffle toward the edge of adulthood.  In their classroom prep for the Mt. Lassen trip, the kids learned the science behind the forces of magma beneath our feet, and then they created their own myths to explain the Pacific Ring of Fire.  From donuts to a god named Tim, we were treated to skits based on these myths on our first night camping near the base of a volcano.  There were no lectures while at the park.  We visited a museum and interpretive signs along the trails were pointed out, but the only school work was a daily entry into their “field journals.”  Geology will continue in the classroom, and the kids will bring to their studies the memories of their experiences – the smell of sulfur from the vents of Bumpass Hell, the crunch of the trail up Cinder Cone, and the smoke of the campfire.

Syncope

In music, syncope is a break in the rhythm, discordant notes that interrupt the monotony and provide interest or surprise.  These notes or phrases are musical non-sequiters.  Syncopation creates the underpinnings of musical forms such as jazz or rock.  In the right proportions, syncopation renders a musical composition more pleasing; it adds depth and emotion.  In excess, syncopation creates cacophony.  Ours has been a syncopated summer.

In the kids’ Waldorf schooling, we learn of the rhythms inherent to life: the rhythm of the day, of the seasons, of the year, of the growth of a child, animal, or plant.  As I’ve written before, we come to miss the consciousness of this rhythm during the summer.  At the beginning of summer, the break from structure is a rhythmic exhalation of its own – the release from schedule gives the sense of promise and possibility, the sense that anything can happen.  This sense is exhilarating at first – watch the kids on the playground in the last week of school, the energy and excitement that bursts from them.  However, like all freedoms, the freedom of summer soon overwhelms with unknowns.  How soon do your children begin to ask, “What are we going to do this summer?  Where are we going?”

This has been the summer of the great unknown.  Our rhythm, while seemingly chaotic, has possessed for years a monotony all its own.  Summer has been no exception: mom and dad work specific days; the kids attend camps, visit grandparents, watch too much TV, and complain about being bored.  Somewhere in August, we eke out a family road trip.

No summer camps.

Our older children decided that they really didn’t want to attend camp, to face a routine different from school, to build relationships with strangers, this year.  Perhaps sensing the oncoming storm, this May they were in hunker-down mode.  Even Aidan the outgoing and Caitlin the adventurous sought comfort in the familiar, the known.  Our bank account thanked them.  Though, as we face a more extreme end-of-summer-TV-detox than usual (thanks, Grandma!), I can’t help wondering if I should have pushed.

Bye-bye home.

In the last weeks of June, we received notice that the inevitable had come to pass.  Our home was foreclosed upon, and we spent from June through July searching for a rental.  Today is Monday, we move on Wednesday.  As of right now, we are officially squatters in the only home our children have ever known.

The sensible question to ask here, and the one, oddly, that no one has asked (at least not to our faces) is, “If you knew that you were in danger of losing your home, why are your kids in private school?”  Perhaps other people have simply been too kind, but rest assured, we have asked ourselves this question.  I think the answer lies in the meaning of home.  For many years, our home has been a house, a shelter, but despite our best efforts, not really a place of rest, solace, or community.  It is an old house, isolated, and requiring more maintenance, improvement, and care than we have time, energy, or money.  Every weed that springs through the gravel, every mouse that scurries across the counter reminds us of our failures.  Pulling into the driveway has been like pulling up to a giant billboard painted with the words, “YOU CAN’T DO THIS.”  On the other hand, Davis Waldorf School has provided our children, and by extension us, with the opportunity to say, “I can do this.  I can climb a tree, plant a garden, knit a hat, play an instrument, carve a pumpkin, and tie my shoes.  I can interact with other parents.  I can arrange playdates.  I can decorate for an auction.  I can participate in the school board.” As the responses to my pathetic ‘can anyone help us move’ e-mail have flooded in, I see how bleak our lives would have been if we had made the practical choice of moving the kids to the local school and trying to save the house.  The trauma for the children would have been greater, removing them from friends and a rhythm they call home to a vast unknown, and we may still have lost the house.  Regardless, our melody would have shifted to a dirge.  The comment made by almost all of our friends has been, “we’re so sorry for your situation, but we are so glad you are going to be close to us.”  Physical distance is real; ask anyone who has ever tried to maintain a long-distance relationship.  Proximity matters.  By moving to Davis, we are moving closer to the core of our lives.  We are gaining proximity to our friends and to ourselves.  We are going home.

Pop goes the hand!

My personal rhythm cracked this summer along with my fifth metacarpal on my left hand.  Lifting a horse’s hind leg in a maneuver performed thousands of times, I struggled with my reluctant patient, and my little finger was yanked sideways.  As two working hands are something of a requirement for a large animal veterinarian, I have been off work since mid-July.  I define my rhythm and myself through my work – the inevitable result of a life spent meeting goals and checking off boxes.  This summer I have learned to re-define success.  I miss my clients, my patients, and my co-workers, and I wonder what I have lost by being away.  I also wonder, a bit, if my nerve will suffer at all from this event.  Will I cringe the first time a horse moves suddenly?  Will I be less willing to take the chances that are a daily part of my job?  Working with horses is like flying a plane, doing surgery, or even driving a car – self-doubt is not an asset.

The greatest personal jolt this summer has been a positive one, and has come about through my writing.  (Ha!  You expected a cute little one-liner to break up the paragraphs there, didn’t you?  Wouldn’t be syncope if it was too predictable.)  I have spent the past year writing for this blog and for Blogcritics.org, and submitting pieces to web and print literary magazines.   And, collecting rejection letters for these same pieces.  When the final notices on the foreclosure were posted (yes, on our door), I told my husband, “I have to write about this.  It’s the only way I can deal with it.”  I wrote an essay and submitted it to a couple of publications.  To my shock, it was accepted – by Salon.com.  The publication of this essay in Salon led to a series for The Folsom Telegraph, and a couple of other writing opportunities have begun to poke their heads out of holes.

We move in two days.  School begins in just over a week.  Our lives will shift back into a breathing rhythm, but I hope, and I will work to ensure, that this rhythm is one of live, active breaths, not the snoring of a monotonous slumber.  I have learned to appreciate the value of the gasp, the interest of syncope.

Caitlin's Tree

It was her first friend at the new school.  Caitlin switched schools between first and second grade. 

Wait, that’s not quite accurate.  We yanked our oldest daughter from the ground of her elementary school, tore her from the soil into which she had been spreading roots over two years, and transplanted her to a new, and very different environment.  And we did it the day before she was to start second grade.  This was not a democratic parenting moment.  Our reasons for the school change were complicated, and due in no small part to our perception of inflexibility on the part of the administration of her previous school.  But, that’s no longer important; the old environment just wasn’t a good fit for Caitlin.  She drooped and faded, her attention was poor, and we spent a lot of time hearing “I don’t want to go to school.”  So, we decided to move her to sunnier ground.

At the time, our choice was not well-received by our little sapling.  She had friends, she knew the routine, she even liked her uniform. 

“But, you’ll get to do art all the time in the new school.”

“I can do art now.”

“Not like this; you really like art.”

“I’ll just do art at home.”

“There’s music.”

“I don’t like music.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I won’t like it there.” [To be fair, to this day, cello practice has been likened to POW torture, so she may have had a minor point.]

“You can climb trees!” Yes, this was my trump card.  Since we were dressing for an interview with her new teacher, I needed to hit Caitlin with everything I had.

“Trees?”  The dark cloud lightened by three degrees.

“Yeah, they let you climb them at recess.”

She found it when we stepped hand-in-clutching-hand from the car and walked across the play-yard lawn.  Yes, lawn.  The mulberry had a trunk that leant just enough distance between ground and lowest branch to give a challenge and was knobbly enough for footholds.  The branches fanned into multiple cradling V’s.  Caitlin looked at me.  “Go ahead; climb it.”

“I’ll get in trouble.”

“No, they want you to climb them.”

She touched the trunk, her small palm feeling the edges of the knots, a private handshake.  They hugged, and up she went.

Sixth grade waits for Caitlin this fall.  She’s grown into the ground of Davis Waldorf School, stretching her branches out through the school.  She’s the veteran now; she’s initiated two siblings into the mysteries of “Sissy’s school.”  We no longer hear “I don’t want to go to school, and she’s talking about continuing on to Sacramento Waldorf for high school.  She’s grown faster than her tree and made other friends.

And yet…

The winds shift.  Adolescence rushes our way.  Caitlin’s closest (human) friend has just embarked upon a journey of her own as she moves with her family to New York.  The tectonic shifts of puberty are shaking the social dynamic among the girls of her class.  A new teacher will guide the class through junior high.  And the tree…

Caitlin spends many of her free hours at school climbing trees or reading, or by preference, reading in a tree – in her tree.  You can find her there, face hidden by a book, screened by the veil of leaves.  Well, you could.  The school is undergoing its own growth this summer; construction begins soon on a much-needed administration building, and new kindergarten rooms.  Some of the trees are necessary sacrifices to the expansion.  Caitlin’s tree sits smack in the middle of the new building.

She said her goodbyes at the end of the school year, raising an eyebrow from her perch in the branches at my suggestion of a “Butterfly”—style tree-in protest.  No radical idealist, my daughter has a pragmatic mind.  However, we received some hopeful news this week.  The tree may yet be reprieved.  One tree was selected for an attempted transplant.  Caitlin’s tree.  If it survives the move, her tree will sit in the amphitheatre formed by the junior high classrooms; it too will move on to sixth grade.  Nothing is certain, but when we told Caitlin that her friend had a chance, a couple of quiet dimples replied.

Beauty, Grace, and Style

Purpose filled each countenance as they marched from the amphitheater, banners of their respective city-states floating jewels in the spring sun.  Sparta, Athens, Corinth, Delphi, and
Thebes:  each citizen knew why he or she had come – to participate, to offer one’s best effort to the gods.  The discus offered on an outstretched hand to the sky, javelin pointed toward the heavens, the intricate dance in the wrestler’s circle, the perfect form of a runner, the attempt at flight in the long jump: the elements of the pentathlon were as much art as sport, offerings of the best efforts of humanity.

Once upon a time, in an almost mythic past, athletics were art – examples of beauty, grace, and style offered to one’s deity of choice rather than efforts of extremism offered to the almighty dollar.  Considering that, with weekly examples of athletes behaving badly rampaging through the media, even the notion of sportsmanship seems quaint, it may be laughably naïve to plead a return to a standard of art in athletics.  Yet, our societal impulses regarding competition seem in dire need of an overhaul.  At one end of the spectrum, we have athletes justifying the use of illegal drugs because superhuman feats of strength and speed are expected of them.  Somehow, public demand for spectacle trumps ethics.  On this side, too, lies the hypercompetitive, cutthroat realm of youth sports.  We’ve all heard the horror stories: high-schoolers (or is it down to junior high now?) doping with steroids or cheating on exams to maintain eligibility, parents screaming abuse at coaches, referees, and kids, fights between adults on Little League playing fields.  At the opposite pole, we have trophies for 10^th place, medals for “participation”, elaborate graduations from pre-school and kindergarten, certificates for “best smile.”

What lessons are being taught to our future adults?  From my perspective, it seems that kids learn that money, power, and glory belong only to the strong, fast, and sneaky, and that for the rest of us, just showing up is good enough.  I’ll grant that some of the ideals of the ancient inhabitants of the Hellenic peninsula were less than, well, ideal.  Abandoning one’s infant to the elements for physical weakness has to be the ultimate example of horrific jock parenting.  But, bear with me for a minute, the point will come.

 Now, go back to the first paragraph, return to the sunlit hills and ancient oaks and pines.  Look closely at the athletes marching behind the banners of their city-states.  The faces are still slightly round, features not fully formed, faint hints of what they will become; most of the bodies are under 5 feet tall, some are lanky and awkward, some delicate and lithe, some plump.  None of the bodies are draped in linen, nor, for that matter, nude.  Jewel toned T-shirts are the uniforms donned by these warriors, these proud Hellenes-for-a-day.  Welcome to the Waldorf Schools Pentathlon for Northern California.

In the Waldorf curriculum, fifth grade academics focus on ancient civilizations.  Beginning in Mesopotamia, the children journey over the year throughout India, Persia, Egypt, and conclude their expedition in ancient Greece.  This journey trains the body even as the mind learns.  Games class in fifth grade is devoted to pentathlon training.  At Davis Waldorf School, our much-beloved games teacher Brian Wolfe worked tirelessly and thoroughly with the fifth grade, teaching them technique and form for each event, training their muscles and minds.  This coaching was thorough to the point that when Caitlin came home the afternoon prior to the event, she very seriously informed about her nutritional needs for the evening.  My daughter, who normally guards all school-related information with CIA approved security, went on to tell me exactly where they were going to go once they arrived at the host school in the morning, and what would happen at each point during the day.

In the Waldorf pentathlon, the children are assigned to city-states based on temperament.  Thus competitive kids compete against those of like mind, the more mellow against their peers.  The maternal cameras instinctively picked the kids from “our class” out of the T-shirted multitudes of each city-state.  On each of the familiar faces that day, I saw the same expression of resolve.  These kids were here to participate, and each intended to give it his or her best.  Watching one of Caitlin’s often flighty classmates take her position for the discus, I stopped mid-sentence, mid-breath.  Holding her disc aloft, the girl dropped to one knee in a position taken straight from Greek art.  “She’s beautiful; she could be on an urn,” I whispered to her mother.

“I know;she told me, ‘Mom, I know I’m not going to throw it the farthest, so I’m going to go for beauty, grace, and style.’”  That was the effort that each of our kids showed that day.  They may not have all been the fastest, the strongest, or the biggest, but they all went for beauty, grace, and style.  These attributes manifested in the perfectly positioned arms and upright heads of the runners, in the angle of the javelins, the extension of arm with disc, and they showed in smaller things, things unrelated to technique.  Beauty, grace, and style were present when one of Caitlin’s classmates fell at the beginning of his long race.  Not tripped, fell.  Total face plant.  Grace, you ask.  Yes.  Grace when he regained his footing and ran, catching all but the first two runners by the finish, though all had at least a 50 yard lead.  Beauty, grace, and style were shown by a boy, from another school, who stopped during his race to check a fallen runner.  Beauty grace and style came to the fore as the kids cheered each other on and wrapped consoling arms around the shoulders of those whose muscles had failed them.  I saw nothing but beauty, grace, and extraordinary style as I watched Caitlin run her quarter mile with perfect form, dead last, but never once faltering in her effort to catch the runners in front.

When the laurels were awarded to each city-state, wreaths were bestowed for first, second, and third place in each event, and two wreaths were given for beauty, grace, and style in that event.  From DWS, some of our kids placed in some events, some won laurels for beauty, grace, and style, but all of them left the temple of the gods standing straighter, shining in the sun, and knowing that they had accomplished what they came for.  For them, the winners were not only the big, strong and fast, and just showing up wasn’t nearly good enough.  They strived to please the gods.

Side note:  As a proud mom, I have to mention that Caitlin received a laurel for beauty, grace, and style in the 40 yard dash. 

Writing in Wonderland

The light from my headlamp bounced back from a pair of eyes.  My brain processed the data: close set orbs=eyes in front of head=predator, eyes approximately German Shepherd height from the ground=large predator.  The sky lightened slightly behind the silhouette; round head, short ears = cat.  Big cat.  Maybe the morning jog wasn’t such a good idea after all.  My feline friend and I reflected the light between us as we both wavered in indecision.  What is this thing?  Stand my ground?  Leave?  My head shifted to the left.  Uphill and slightly behind the first set of eyes, glowed a second pair.  Two cats.  Nice kitties.  I could see the headline now:  Veterinarian Eaten by Mountain Lions at Writers’ Workshop.  Darwin awards, here I come!

I had known that going to Tomales Bay would mean confronting some fears, but I hadn’t planned on those fears taking a physical form.  Flyers regarding the Tomales Bay Writers’ Workshops run through the UC Davis Extension had popped into my consciousness over the last couple of years.  Wow!  Five days of writing on the coast.  Maybe someday.  In the last year, I’ve made a promise to myself to embrace “someday” whenever possible.  On a whim, I downloaded the application.  Ten page manuscript.  Ok, one short story.  There was only one problem: while I had been working sporadically on a novel for the past four or five years, I hadn’t written a short story since college.  I stared at my journal; the pages stared back.  As I rolled the pen between my fingers, the memory of a long-distance train trip taken a couple of years ago surfaced.  I recalled the disembodied sensation of long hours in my sleeping compartment, the feeling that I was being carried along without my own volition.  What if someone had gotten on a train and left everything without consciously meaning to?  The story began to take shape.  Overcoming the first hurdle, I placed the story in a mailer and sent it off with the deposit.  “Don’t worry,” I reassured my husband.  “They’ll probably just laugh and say ‘sorry.’”  I still have the acceptance e-mail saved on my Blackberry.

Selecting the manuscript to submit for the workshop opened a new packet of insecurities.  The novel was about half way through a re-write, and I knew that it was time to get some feedback.  10-15 pages:  Should I just do another short story?  The author leading the workshop was a novelist; this would be a great opportunity to have a bit of the story critiqued.  It won’t make any sense as an excerpt.  Finally, I told the squirrels in my head to be quiet, and printed the pages and sealed them in the mailer.  Done.  Well, almost done.  While fairly naïve about the writing process, I am aware that writing critique exists on multiple levels.  Friends and family, while delightful, are nearly useless.  They are generally unable to separate the writer from the writing, and are completely uncritical.  The workshop would provide valuable insights and critique, but I did remember enough from my college days to be aware that the writing workshop is a pretty supportive space.  Writers are acutely aware of the fragility of the process and of the ego, and even criticisms tend to be softened a bit.  I needed someone who just didn’t care if my feelings were hurt.  I needed a professional.  Editors, agents, and publishers read thousands of manuscripts a year, and while I’m sure most are lovely people, I felt that I could count on one of this breed to be brutally honest.  I wrote the check for the publishing consultation and printed out chapter one with a mild sense of nausea.

The emotional stew that comprised the morning of my departure for Tomales Bay was far more terrifying than any feline encounter.  Anxiety, guilt, homesickness, inadequacy – you name it, it was there.  The month had been far from smooth already.  Due to a combination of work and personal commitments, I had been home one Sunday in the past 3 weekends, my father had had a heart-attack less than 10 days before, the previous weekend had involved an overnight campout with my daughter’s Girl Scout troop, and I had taken several extra on-call nights at work to cover for a vacationing colleague.  Then there was the expense.  Work has been slow this year.  What was I doing?  How could I justify spending money we don’t have so that I could spend five days away from my family, leaving my husband alone with the kids?  This was a ridiculous investment in a hobby that has, to date, provided no income whatsoever.  Between crying jags, I managed to finish packing and get on the road.  As I pulled out of the driveway, I had a sense that I was bidding something farewell.  I turned on the radio; thank God for NPR.

A couple of hours and a Swiss Milk Chocolate shake later, I felt better.  As my truck wound through the hills between Novato and the coast, I imagined a character in my next novel making her home in one of the barns that dotted the hillside.  ‘I can do this.’ Maybe if I repeated this mantra enough times, I would believe it.  As the car hit Highway 1, light fragmented on the blue waters of Tomales Bay.  I had never seen a place that looked so exactly like the pictures.  Tucked away on its hillside above Highway 1, The Marconi Conference Center is a world unto itself.  Historic buildings tuck with new friends among the redwoods.  The landscaping blends with the forest and is redolent with sage, rosemary, and lavender.  Deer, wild turkeys, ravens, and huge jackrabbits (oh, and large cats) populate the woods.  One of my classmates commented that he expected the rabbits to be wearing little vests, “and carrying pocket watches?” I asked.

            “Yeah, have I said that already?”

            He hadn’t.  But, it is that kind of place.  The workshops, too, are that kind of place.  From the moment one sets foot on the grounds, one is a writer.  The written word infuses everything.  The experience is by turns terrifying, exhilarating, frustrating, uplifting, and exhausting.  At first, I chalked the overwhelming sensations up to my distance from academia.  I hadn’t sat in any sort of  liberal arts class in over 15 years, let alone one that asked me to contribute.  Yet, the graduate students in my seminar seemed to feel the same way.  More than one person commented that the workshops were “intense.”  For five days, we existed in a space outside of the time and geography of the mundane.

            Ultimately, I believe my mantra to be true.  “I can do this.”  I went to Tomales Bay to see if I could write, to see if I could recognize successful writing, and to learn to do both better.  Lightning didn’t strike.  No one proclaimed my genius.  If I had a great epiphany, besides the minor revelation that I like oysters, it was that writing is something I must do.  I don’t do it as well as I would like, but better than I had feared.  More importantly, the path ahead is a bit clearer.  Oh, and the cats and I went our separate ways.

Transition

I have a confession to make.  I don’t like summer.  Certain summer things are good:  the smell of grilling steak, vacations (though I’d rather take those in the spring or fall), swimming.  Even beaches, to me, are not a summer thing; I’m a Northern Californian.  Beaches are for gasping at the threatening majesty of the ocean, for poking around tidepools and slipping on rocks, for freezing one’s feet and ankles.

Summer breaks the rhythm of the year.  It lumbers like a semi-truck laden with heat, mosquitoes and boredom into the circle of the calendar.  Days sprawl in stifling monotony with only the dim promise of a post-bedtime dusk. 

Those bloated days are slimming down now; sunrise lingers at the table for a second cup of coffee, sunset is edging toward dinner time.  Michaelmas will be here soon.

As that last sentence entered my head, the last few years of my children’s education crystallized.  Waldorf education emphasizes rhythm:  the rhythm of the year as it cycles through the seasons, the daily rhythm of simple routines, the alternating cycles of expressive and quiet time throughout the school day.  Rhythm follows the children throughout their days and years.  In the kindergarten, the children begin their morning in a circle, singing a greeting to nature.  In the grades, teachers move to the next grade with their classes, establishing a pattern of predictability, a constant rhythm.  Rhythm infuses the curriculum.  Children in the lower grades use copper rods and clapping to beat the rhythms of counting and addition patterns.  Music begins early and is treated as an essential part of learning, rather than as an “extra.”

Seasons and festivals are celebrated at predictable points throughout the year in ways that emphasize tradition, simplicity, beauty, and family.  Michaelmas, the feast of St. Michael marks the shortening of the days, the need for light and courage during dark times.  Halloween follows, with the beautiful traditions of the Protected Path – a fairytale journey for younger children, and the Perilous Path – a more challenging and fearsome quest for the older students.  The candles of the Advent Spiral brighten the dark of winter, as do classroom visits by Santa Lucia and St. Nicholas.  As spring approaches, excitement builds.  The third grade garden begins to peak, field trips and activities blossom with the campus flowers, and May Faire approaches.  And, then, we slide into summer, our daily rhythm disrupted once more.

For me, the challenge lies in bringing that sense of rhythm home for the summer.  With day camps and summer camps, visits to grandparents, vacations and work schedules, summer feels fragmented and uncertain.  In June we heave a sigh of relief, casting off the obligations and structure of the school year.  For a week or two we frolic in freedom; bedtimes are extended, TV rules are relaxed.  Then, like children after a birthday party or day at the fair, we begin to feel queasy and insecure.  Sleep deprived and heat exhausted, we lurch from one week to the next.

We are a couple week back into school now, and a sense of peace is settling about the house.  Clamoring demands to “watch a movie” have given way to the construction of living room forts.  Legos and handwork have reappeared from the cupboards.  Homework and bedtime have returned a sense of order to the week.  Soon we will face the dragons of meetings and over-commitment, but for now, our rhythm is steady.