It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Speaking while voiceless

The worst part is the feeling of the strain, the empty weight of impotence in your throat.  Your mouth opens again – if you try harder, someone will hear, someone will help.

Most of us know that dream, the one in which you are in mortal danger, trying to scream for help, or in protest, or simply to speak to explain, yet no sound emerges – you are voiceless.

The real-life analogue is less dramatic than the scenarios spun by the horror-writer of the subconscious, but no less disempowering.  And waking up is more difficult.

The disconnect between the instructions we receive and the realities we face rob each of us of our voice – of our right to be heard, to speak, to share, to be understood.

As children we are told, “Speak up so I can hear you,” but also “Don’t be so loud.”  Those of us who are introverted get told, “Get out of your shell, socialize more,” but we often find ourselves faced with confused looks that fade into disinterest when we attempt to reach out, to offer our opinions, because no one really wants to hear the in-depth explanation.  “Vote,” we are told.  “Your voice matters.”  So we cast our ballots.  And nothing changes.  “Be yourself.  Be authentic.”  But, the subtext implies, “Make sure your authentic self isn’t too different from the culturally accepted norm.”

I was hushed in the delivery room.  In labor with my first child, my voice crying out in the primal vocalization of mothers throughout species and millennia, I was hushed.  “You’ll upset the other patients,” I was told.  The natural cry of my body wasn’t acceptable. 

I gritted my teeth, silenced my voice, and retracted the authenticity of my moans.

Women were institutionalized for libido.  The very term hysteria derives from the notion that madness in women is connected to the womb.

When I was small, I made stew from my plastic alphabet letters.  Not soup, which I guess would have made sense in the greater social context, but stew.  I liked stew better.  It never occurred to me that to make soup, or WORDS, with the letters would have been more “normal.”  There were toys, and I was playing.  This moment of random play somehow became family shorthand for “Christy is different.”

I posted a painting of nude faeries.  This simple act – to me, an artistic experiment in pen and watercolor without first sketching in pencil – prompted familial concerns that I was mentally unstable. 

I deleted the painting from my Facebook page, agreeing to censor myself rather than enter into conflict or cause concern to those I love.

Emily Dickinson wrote it well, “Much madness is divinest sense, to a discerning eye.  Much sense the starkest madness, ‘tis the majority.”

A good friend once described me as having a perspective that is “rotated slightly from that of the collective norm.”

We all hold individual perspectives – rotated, spun, warped, askew, inside-out.  Yet there is a pretense that everyone agrees on certain things, that there is a collective consensus on matters of morality, social acceptability, even esthetics.

At the same time, we acknowledge the ills in our society – racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, able-ism, income disparity, relationship dysfunction. 

I submit that those ills are born of the tacit collusion to conform.  The only people who have ever effected real change to society’s sicknesses have been those who speak the truth of their individual experience, those who stand up and paint, write, speak, sculpt, protest, sing, or research from the basis of their unique thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.

Avoiding subject matter that strikes at the viscera buried beneath our collective comfort isn’t sanity, it is mass denial.

A keystone of this pretense of majority standards is one unspoken, yet persistent, rule: “Only those who are famous, dead, or otherwise special may break with the group.  Anyone else who acts as an individual or rebels against homogeny is disturbed.”

It takes courage to stand up and declare oneself “special” enough to break with the flock.  It’s hard not to bend under the shame of the implicit hubris of daring to declare individuality.  For those of us who love our families and friends, there is the added burden of knowing that our individual truths touch on and stem from the experiences of those we love.

Every personal essay I write risks exposing those I love to pain or embarrassment.  Visual art that acknowledges human (or hominoid) anatomy or that pokes into dark or uncertain places of the psyche may break through the comfort zones of my loved ones.

I’m not famous, dead (yet), or particularly talented.  And that is why I write and paint.  I use the “voice” of art in hopes that my doing so will give others some sort of permission to share their own truths.

Sometimes that truth comes about by accident.  My “shocking” painting wasn’t intended as social protest.  The off-scale genitalia resulted from poor technique rather than any sort of fixation.  I hadn’t painted a male nude before, and as an exercise in reducing my perfectionist tendencies, I have been experimenting with sketching in pen rather than pencil and forcing myself to share my imperfect work.

But, I’m going to file this particular imperfection under “Serendipitous Greater Meaning.”  That screwed up painting and its aftermath made me think deeper about what I do and what responsibility art bears.

Only through displaying our individual perspectives and flaws can we ever change the collective norm.

Note: I recognize that my use of the word “voice” is, in itself, a form of ableism.  Word choice and metaphor also need to be examined.  At the moment, it is the metaphor that is lodged in my brain, but I welcome conversation around that and suggestions.

Into the Wild Places -- A poem for my daughters

Don’t teach my daughters to fear.
Show them instead how to go into the wild places
the forests and deserts
the labyrinths of concrete, asphalt
the frost, flame, and famine of their own
bodies,
minds,
hearts.
Let them leave long blue hairs on lovers’ beds.
Let them carve paths in the mosaic cobblestones of foreign cities and drink too much beer in a smoky polyglot hubub.
Let them shorten their skirts, tattoo their breasts, and raise their voices in the throb of human music.
Let them dig with their minds, unearthing the truths buried in statistics.
Let them weave solutions of fact, fury, and compassion.
Let them fuck joyfully – when, how, who they choose.
Don’t tell them the fire burns.
Show them how to leap the flames, to sear doubt and a good steak.
Don’t tell them their petals char to dirt in the heat.
Show them steel is forged in the inferno and that eternal roses bloom from iron.
Don’t warn them the trees are high and the branches frail.
Let them climb above the birds, skin their knees, and learn to fall.
Don’t ask them to cross their ankles,
wash their hands,
tie their shoes,
shave their legs,
pretty their faces,
trim their waists.
Let them roll in the mud, eat too much cake, drink more than they should, curse and laugh from their curving bellies, and dance without grace.
Don’t ask them to leash themselves to your fears.
Show them instead how to go into the wild places.

No Closets in Davis -- My Coming Out

“What’s that on your arm?  Have you been bar-coded or prison tattooed?”

My oldest daughter was hanging out on my couch before biking across town to her dad’s house, and we were doing the post-last-day-of-school debrief.  She looked at her arm and chuckled, explaining that since she didn’t buy a yearbook, a friend had signed her arm, which, she said, was better than her forehead.

“What’s it say?”

“#GAYVASIAN2014.  That’s what he put in everyone’s yearbook.  He’s gay and very, very proud of it.”  She grinned and laughed the sort of amused, partially delighted laugh she has over any of her friends’ enthusiasms.  “He and another kid go around asking people, ‘Why are you straight?’” She laughed again, “There are no closets in Davis!”

“Well,” I bantered.  “Why <i>are</i> you straight?”  We’ve long since had the ‘you can be attracted to boys or girls, everyone is unique’ discussion.

She waved her arm in my direction and raised an eyebrow.  “Pot.  Kettle.  Why are <i>you</i> straight?”

“Well, actually, I think I identify more as flexible than straight.”  I don’t even know if she caught it; the conversation drifted back to whose phone numbers she’d gotten preparatory to getting together over the summer.  In the grand scheme of talks, it wasn’t a big deal.

Except it was.

For all that we have raised our kids to be accepting of everyone (as long as they aren’t assholes), this was the first time (as far as I know) that either their dad or I had ever given any of our kids any indication that they have a parent (me) who doesn’t fit in the heteronormative, monogamous box.

Most people who know me at all, even through social media, know me as a staunch LGBT ally.  A straight one.  From the outside, my closet looks like a tidy bedroom.  No secrets, no variation from the expected.  Didn’t date much before marriage, but only dated men.  Married to one man for 17 years, recently separated, I look like an educated, middle class, middle-aged, straight, white, cis-woman – maybe with a creative streak, maybe slightly quirky, but nothing unexpected or “out there.”

My closet is quite livable.  It’s spacious, nicely furnished, has a fridge and a mini-bar.  Hiding in it produces precious little pain or inconvenience to me, and my world isn’t terribly different inside the closet than it would be outside.

But I’m increasingly confronted with the realization that remaining in that closet is both untrue to me and a betrayal of those around me.  I have friends and loved ones for whom “coming out of the closet” has been a necessary leap of courage and has come at a cost.  I have three children, and while they all give every indication, as I did at their age, of fitting into society’s boxes, I wonder about the cost to them when they find, as I did, some portion of themselves that doesn’t match with the models they’ve been shown.

It’s been easy for me to keep parts of myself hidden.  I justify it by telling myself that my life is none of anyone else’s business, that I don’t want people using what they know about me to speculate about my decisions or relationships.  But, that is, to a certain degree, bullshit.  Those who would speculate and gossip about me have probably already done so.

And there is a larger responsibility at play. While I don’t owe everyone the details of everything I think or do, I think there is a certain societal obligation to show up as one’s authentic self.  By not doing so, by presenting only the pieces of ourselves that we think are acceptable to the majority, we make it harder for each individual to step out of his or her own closet.

Think about it.  If each of us revealed more of the things we keep hidden – our differences, our quirks, our secret shames – what would be left to fear or hide?

The only way to make it so that there are truly “No closets in Davis” (or San Francisco, Topeka, Juneau, etc.) is to normalize our differences, to celebrate the many ways of being.

I grew up in a loving, supportive, and fairly liberal family.  There wasn’t much in the way of gender stereotyping – my sister and I had Tonka trucks as well as dolls, we learned to shoot as well as sew.  No one ever overtly said that any one way of being was superior, but assumptions trickled through as they do in most families.  “When you start bringing home boys….”  “When you get married…”  “When you have kids…”

In my family, you married one person of the opposite gender – for life.  The few divorces in the extended family were mentioned obliquely or not referenced at all.  If anyone in my family didn’t fit squarely into the heterosexual box, I never knew about it.  None of this was touted as the “right” way; there just wasn’t another way that was ever shown or discussed.

By the time I got to college (I was a late bloomer), it was pretty clear to me that I was mostly attracted to people with boy parts.  I felt relief.  My life would be easy.  Conventional.  No need to rock any societal boats.  I could crusade for others from the security held by a member of the privileged majority.

Except.

Every so often, I’d catch myself looking at another woman’s breasts or legs or lips.  I’d be drawn to a friend, find myself fantasizing.  And then it would pass – or so I told myself.  If by pass, I meant the feeling would be ruthlessly squashed back into the corner of my mind from which it had leaked.

At the same time, navigating the emotional complexities of dating within a fairly narrow group of friends, I found myself repeatedly battling strong feelings for more than one person at a time. 

This wasn’t just a potentially problematic side of myself – it was completely unacceptable.  I’d been raised on fairytales and romantic stories.  And as I was the product of eight years of Catholic school, the whole relationship/attraction road was pockmarked with potholes that dropped straight to Hell anyway.  Everything I knew was clear on this point.  While it was fine for some people – not me because I was straight, of course – but some people to be attracted to or love someone of the same sex, having feelings for more than one person was just wrong.  In my head, that capacity – to love and be attracted deeply to more than one person at a time – made me a bad person regardless of whether I acted upon it.

I folded, squashed, and pounded these errant desires into submission, never realizing that I was packing away parts of myself, that by denying how I love, I was inhibiting my ability to love, to connect, to show up and be present as my full self.

Accepting that I can be attracted to individuals regardless of sex or gender (yes, those are two distinct things) and that I am capable of connecting with and loving multiple people in multiple ways has, rather than breaking me, made me better able to form friendships, be confident in my daily life, and open myself more fully to the people I love.

That’s the problem with closets.  When we hide – from others or from ourselves – the things that we fear will be unacceptable to others, we deny our essence, and we limit the gifts we could give.  Also, by hiding the things we fear, the things that make us different, we contribute to the other-ization of those traits.

Human beings aren’t homogenous.  We aren’t tidily layered in all the same flavors.  We don’t fit in boxes or on distinct points along a line.  We’re a messy, lovely, kaleidoscopic jumble flowing along a vast spectrum.

In the last few years I’ve done enough research to learn that there are not only labels for my ways of being – pan-sexual, polyamorous – but there are lots of people like me, and a fair bit of research to suggest that, especially for a cis-gendered woman, the ways in which I am attracted and love are biologically quite normal.

I don’t much like labels, and there are nuances to both terms that don’t always fit me, but they are as good a step out of a closet as any.  I’ve shied away from publicly owning them until now because I worried that people would latch onto the words and see every one of my actions through the filter of the labels.  And, that may happen.  But if it does, that is the choice of the people seeing me.  My actions are my choice and my reasons for my choices remain private, mine.  However, who I am, how I show up – well, that is part of my obligation to society, to my family, and to myself.

So, I’m throwing out a challenge.  Whatever your closet: you live in a family of vegetarians but sneak out for a burger; you’re an atheist who accompanies your family to church because it’s the thing to do; you let your young kids watch action movies but tell them not to talk about it with their friends; you’re an intuitive or artist among scientists and trying desperately to seem rational…whatever your closet, think about how hiding inside it prevents those you love from knowing the entire you, think about how remaining in your closet may inadvertently be causing others to stay in theirs.

What would happen if there really were no closets in Davis…or Omaha, or Seattle, or Madrid, or…

[Note: I’m deliberately not defining terms in this essay.  If you are unfamiliar with a word I’ve used or don’t understand the distinctions, and especially if you call me friend, ask.  I’ll be more than happy to explain and discuss – outside the closet!]

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.

 

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?

 

Guest Post: Mother's Day Thoughts

When I first started writing this blog, it didn't have much of a purpose other than to get the things trapped inside my head some oxygen.  It literally began because "It seemed like a good idea at the time."  However, over the past half-decade or so, an embryonic glimmer of a purpose has begun to unfold.  I've found that I often write to try to give space to the things many of us may feel, but may feel are not "appropriate," not "shiny," or just not "what we are supposed to feel."  As I've wandered down this path toward my own more real self, I find that I want to make that journey a little less shadowy and rocky for others.  I have no idea if I'm having any impact.  Some days, I get excited if a post gets more than 10 reads.  But, I'll keep plugging away, and if some phrase makes a difference somewhere, great.  If not, at least the thoughts have taken a breath or two.

Along those lines, I'm pleased to present a guest post by a dear friend, Eden Myers.  Eden and I were talking yesterday about Mother's Day and about our conflicted feelings around this and similar holidays.  And, underneath it all, we both suspect we aren't alone. So here is Eden's post on Mother's Day...

Now that Mother's Day is over, and safely behind us one more year, I want to take the opportunity to say something. 

Keep it to yourself.  Leave me out of it. 

This is not to take anything away from those who appreciate it, and see it as an opportunity to express how genuinely blessed they are, either as a mother or by their mother.  To quote one woman close to me, "Mother's Day is a time to reflect on how lucky I am to be a mother and how blessed I have been with the children I have."

Some of us just don't feel that way. 

There may be a reason.  Maybe we aren't mothers; maybe it just never happened for us.  Maybe for lack of trying, or lack of interest.  Maybe, bitterly, despite a great deal of time and money spent trying.  Maybe we quit trying after we lost heart along with pregnancy after pregnancy.  Maybe we just lost interest along the way.

Or maybe some of us are mothers, and we still feel like outsiders.  The experience didn't go for us the way it did for everyone else.  We lost our mothers, or our children. Or we had bad mothers and cry to ourselves alone with fear that we will do the same to our children. 

A friend recently said of holidays in general, 
 

   " I generally don't like holidays, as most of them simply end up being a great place for me to feel like a defective outsider. I hate all the expectations... I hate how it becomes a form of culturally enforced minimization and denial of the aspects of our experience that don't fit the bright, shiny, celebratory model.... I hate how all this creates a spiral that just makes it worse and worse each year for anyone who has negative experiences or relationships which tie into the holidays."


Hear, hear.

And here's what'll really feel like a left turn to most people reading this: Some of us haven't got any particular reason for feeling separate from this particular holiday.  I have a perfectly good family.  A perfect one, no, but I have them and they- they don't really have me.   I never felt like I belonged, even in my own family, even though I love them and they love me.  So this day is not the celebration for me it is for everyone else.  I am not sure this makes me defective.  DIfferent, certainly.  But defective?  I'm just at a different place on the bell curve.  It's the way it's supposed to be for me.

And I think that's true for a lot of women out there.  We're just at a different place along the bell curve; we fit into one of the categories above, or some other one that makes us feel like saying,

Keep it.  It's just not for me. 

And keep this.  Pull it out and read it early every May, and keep it in mind as you go about your celebrations.  Thanks for understanding.  Or at least not making a big deal out of it if you don't.

11 Weeks

Note: It isn't often that I share poetry publicly, so please be gentle.  This emerged from a "failed" long run yesterday in which I wound up with an incapacitating IT band strain and had to quit two miles short of my goal.  But the events started me thinking about the effects of time, not just on our bodies, but how we see ourselves and our challenges.

 

 

The first two miles pound out in creaking joints and calves of jelly.

Gratitude for the gift of a red light, stretching at the signal with the feigned impatience

of a real athlete

The old woman in the body sheds the imagined decades with the miles, each stride kicking off the dust of time.

By the time I cross from the downtown realm of the elderly, my chronological age and I are one again.

Sweat drips between my breasts, on my right, the apartment where my virginity and I parted ways – two decades ago, now.  Woman grown, wife, mother, my head turns and I see the girl holding naked hands with her lover on the brown couch, afraid to ask,

“What does this mean?”

She never asked, and the question is gone, answer blown off in the miles behind.

Over the freeway, decades falling away into light steps that blow across the asphalt pass with the frail feathers of almond and cherry.

Mile four and nearly twenty again – twenty, but for the two undergraduates sprinting by, knees reaching nearly to their upright breasts, feet kissing the ground like fairy metronomes.

The audiobook plugged into my cortex speaks of shame, compassion, and messages.  I dig from my brain thoughts of love for the nymphs leaving me with the blowing pollen and for my own body – stronger in its scars than that of the girl who never asked and never received.

Loss doesn’t care if we risk.  But, reward won’t come uninvited. 

Six miles and only bicycles and shadowy cows spreckle the landscape.  The unwelcome tension of a bladder pushed, prodded, stretched, and squashed by three pregnancies knocks against the present mind.

Tap.  Tap.  A bush over there. 

Too scanty

Tap.  Tap.  Trees?

Not shielded from the path.

Time and body converge.  The twenty year old would have risked a rupture.  I weigh the balance.

The British voice from my phone notes my slowing pace.  Judgmental bastard.  The female voice would have understood.  Phone app gent doesn’t get it.  He could just whip it out at that olive tree over there, relieve that tapping tension, and be on his merry old way, no one the wiser.

“12.2 minutes per mile.  Average pace 11 minutes 4 seconds per mile.”

Plummy prick.  Leave me alone.

Spring sky sits empty, cloud-free and bird unburdened.  They rustle and whistle from the olive trees and long grasses, crossing over the audiobook’s words:

Shame

Resilience

Trap

Connection

Vulnerability

Trust

Can one feel shame about being ashamed?  The pressure beneath the belt of my waist-pack leads me off the path of philosophy and behind a clump of fallen branches and low-hanging trees.

Crouching knees, bare ass, and fears of wet socks trump the esoteric.

A car shoots past, then a male cyclist.

I pretend to tie my shoe and make myself invisible.  A grey haired woman on a bicycle looks my way a just long enough for the rays of judgment to scorch my hair and shoulders.  I think the tree above me is a fig – leaves not yet unfurled.

I pull my underwear and shorts about me as I stand – one smooth motion, I think.  Until the invisible key locks my right knee.

Lurch.  Stagger.  Adjust waistbands in time for the next bicycle wheel to crest the hill.  I flex my leg a few times.  Ten miles.  Okay, I’m on the Golden Gate Bridge, says the part of the brain tracking the marathon course map.  11 weeks.

I try to feel salt winds on my face but have to skip down onto the gravel shoulder as a car sails round the bend.

The 42 year old knee doesn’t like this game of chicken.  Tendons that had adjusted to the stretch and contract of an even pace are rebelling against the break, the squat, and the pavement chopped like toffee.

Mother shame, says the audiobook.  Caregiver shame.  Body image shame.

Is there shame in a middle-aged woman, slogging alone down a country road?

“Oh, that’s why you have such killer legs,” said a friend meeting me around the bend of a trail.

I have killer legs, I tell them, as the knee screams and the ankle whines in sympathy.  Not even 11 miles.

The knee doesn’t care.  We compromise.  You can walk to the next bend, I say.

I cheat, picking up the pace before the road curves away.  Small betrayals don’t go unnoticed.  Unkept promises return until fulfilled.

12 miles – Off the bridge, into Sea Cliff.  Rolling hills, says my mind to the flat fields and orchards around me.

Invisible gremlins are at work on my knee with an ice-pick.  Stop.

Can’t stop.  Not even half way.

Walk.

Walking.  A truck passes.  A minivan with pressed children’s faces.  An elderly sedan.

How stupid you look, trudging along the crumbled edge of the road – blatantly not running in your fluorescent gear and purple shoes.

That is the voice of shame – not from magazines or enemies, but from the imagined places where whispers of past follies hide.

Fingers twitch at the microphone of my headset.  So easy to call.  My husband would ride up, a knight upon a silver minivan.

Follow the road.  It’s the miles that count.

Pace: 17 minutes per mile.  Average pace: 12 minutes 24 seconds.

It’s the miles.  Just do the miles.  It doesn’t matter how fast.

The run shuffles off into the lurching jog of a zombie with places to go.  Half a mile, I tell myself.  I manage about 200 yards.

Breath floats in and out with the ease of the whispering dewy grasses.  Lungs and left leg could go for miles.

Sinister persists.  I am betrayed by the right.

13 miles

14

Walking now, I’ll run up the overpass, I think.

Four strides and a whimper.  Toy cars buzz below.  Downhill will be better.

Fire and ice shoot across my knee.  The wrinkled, square face of the balding man pedaling up the hill sees the weakness.  His gnarled legs push past me in silent disdain.

Fingers press the microphone. 

“I’m not going to make it the full way.  Can you get me at the AM/PM when you come through?”  Shadows hide behind the question.  Bibbed runners pass in my head, dreaded letters paint in ghost ink next to my name in the marathon lists

D

N

F

Did. Not. Finish.

Purple vetch laces the hillside at our feet.  Girls cluster like flowers blowing at the summit’s edge.  One looks at my clothes and laughs, “Did you run here?”

“Well.  Most of the way.  But my knee gave out.”

Something passes below the laugh.  “Oh.  I thought you were going to say ‘Just kidding.’ You really ran?”

We stand at the top of the spring world.  Knee flexes.  “Yes, but I overdid it a bit today.  I think the answer is not to be 42.”

They laugh as only 13 can, free of the imaginary ailments of middle age – aches, and rent, and taxes.

“She’s training for a marathon,” my daughter tells her friends.

Goats dance on a distant hill.  A toddler staggers with purpose among the purple.

“Today didn’t work, but I can do it.  I have 11 weeks.”

 

 

 

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.

 

 

More Than Infinity

It feels like a travesty to write anything and a sacrilege not to.  I have three healthy children, asleep (or mostly asleep) beneath mounds of covers and stuffed animals.  In Newtown, Conn., there are 26 empty beds, with 20 sets of stuffed animals whose children will never cuddle them again.  I know people who have lost children to disease, accident, and even violence.  The same thought penetrates every time – those of us whose children live and laugh, or those of us who have never had children of our own, have no place from which to speak.  Except, possibly from the place of our darkest fears.

I didn’t run the mile and a half from my desk to my children’s school yesterday morning.  I wanted to.  But, I watched the reports throughout the day, fragments of confusion scrolling past in 140 characters or less, rumor mixed with official news, and I contented myself with hugging my three a little harder when I saw them.

This world of ours has become weirdly connected, and with that connection, has turned into the family reunion where everyone imbibes a little too much.  I’ve seen yesterday’s tragic shooting blamed on: lack of gun control, lack of mental health services, violent video games, exploitive media, lack of prayer in schools, lack of armed school security guards, and possibly everything in between.

Every author of every post means well and is, I’m sure, absolutely convinced that if we fixed this one thing, this one cause, the violence would stop.  There would be no more.

The blame hurts almost as much as the news of the tragedy itself.  Life is too complicated, too fragile, to narrow these events down to a single cause, a single fix.  We don’t even know all of the facts surrounding the events of yesterday’s shooting.  We may never know.  The media didn’t even report the correct identity of the shooter for hours.

The ugly, horrific, unendurable truth, is that the line between control and evil is much finer than we want to believe.  Responsible people own guns and use them responsibly.  People walk around every day with significant mental illnesses that remain under good regulation.  Seemingly “sane” people suddenly behave with complete unpredictability.  Kids, teens, and adults role-play violence daily.  Small children pick up sticks and yell “Bang! Bang!”  Teenagers play violent video games and sing in church choirs.  Kids watch movies and television shows with violent scenes, yet refrain from acting out that violence.  Adults, decent, kind, loving adults play the same games, watch the same movies, and even express anger with words of violence.  Yet, most never act upon these shadow impulses.

We blame because we fear.  The fear we refuse to express is that it could be our child or loved one in the news – as the victim or as the shooter.  We don’t know why many of these things happen.  We don’t know why one ostracized teen goes on to found a major technology company and another becomes a mass murderer.  We want a cause. We want something we can fix, something we can control.

I’m not saying that our society is beyond redemption.  I’m not saying that nothing can or should be changed.  I happen to be an excellent shot, a daughter and granddaughter of hunters, who believes in the necessity of guns for protection against predators or for seeking food, but who also believes that we need better regulation of gun purchases, and that guns designed to take human life belong only in the hands of law enforcement and military.  I have friends and family who are mental health professionals and friends and family with mental illnesses.  I do believe that mental health care in our country is insufficient.  I am married to a gamer; my children watch action movies.  I abhor the violence in some of Mike’s games, but I don’t believe that either he or my children are unable to distinguish between fantasy and real life.  I believe in a higher power, but I don’t believe that prayer has any business being imposed upon others.  I also don’t believe in a deity who would refuse to protect children over a matter of legislation – that’s insane.  I attended a high school where violence was a matter of course.  A police presence on campus did nothing to deter the knife and fist fights.  I want my children safe, but not at the expense of learning in an armed camp.

In the end, there is no easy fix, no one policy, person, or thing to blame.  I’m not even sure there is any good way to pray for the lives that have been lost and ripped apart.  Those wounds won’t heal, not really.  All that we can do, in the end, is to ache for those who have lost, and love more deeply those who remain.

Yesterday, as I pushed Sierra on the rope swing at school, the swing twisted, spinning her body within inches of the tree.  I flinched, and she saw it.  “Were you afraid I would hit the tree, Mommy?” she grinned.

“Yes.”

“Well, I have to die someday, you know.”  She laughed and swung harder, matter-of-fact and joyful.

“True…but I’d prefer it not to be until you are bigger.”

“You mean older?”

I thought of all of the children who will never outgrow their next pair of shoes, who will never get older.  “Yes.  Much older.”

When we tuck Sierra in at night, we each say the same phrase.  “I love you more than infinity.”

Blame doesn’t work.  Politics don’t work.  All that we can do is to love our children and each other – more than infinity.

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.”

 

The Naked Self

Listening to music sung by a friend this morning started me thinking about creativity.  As children, unless we’re squashed mentally and emotionally, creativity comes naturally.  It’s like running around naked.  Rocks are jewels, the world is a canvas, every rhyming word is fodder for a song, and shirts, pants, and underwear are optional.

Yet, as we grow older, fall from Eden, and find the shame in our nakedness, we also begin to clothe our creativity.  We cover it in structure, form, criticism, and conformity.  Think back through adulthood – when was the last time you (independent of a small child) broke out that cool box of 64 Crayolas?  You know, the one with the sharpener in the back.  When did you last make up a song to hum to yourself, even though you can’t carry a tune?  When did you last grab a pencil and paper and just scrawl whatever your hand wanted – words, pictures, doodles, obscene cartoons?

Creativity gets compartmentalized, assigned to art class, music lessons, writing seminars, or the theater.  In our adult world, we assume that creativity is given only to “artists.”  How often have you said, “I’m just not creative,” or “I wish I were a creative person so that I could do that.”?  I know I’ve heard it more times than I can count.  Yet, assuming that creativity is limited only to those we classify as artists or eccentrics is akin to deciding that only movie stars, nude models, and strippers have bodies.

I don’t think it is a coincidence, this simultaneous constriction and repression of our creative and physical selves.  Creativity is a nakedness of the soul.  We can filter how we present ourselves in our everyday lives, put on social costumes, but when we are truly creative, we can no longer hide the things that distinguish us from others.  When we create and share our creations, we are totally exposed – everything that we are is out there for the world to see and to judge.

That’s where the damage lies in this concealment and conformity that we impose upon our creative souls and upon our bodies.  We fear judgment and we clothe ourselves in it.  And, in doing so, we teach the next generation to loathe both their bodies and their individuality.  Think back – when have you heard these: “Put on some clothes; you’re too old to run around the house in your underwear.”  “That’s a pretty picture, but the sky is blue, not orange.” How many of us have been taught to color inside the lines, or grew up listening to the adults in our lives criticize their own bodies and those of others?

My own upbringing was wonderfully supportive of creativity.  I had more paints, crayons, and modeling clay than any 50 children could want.  Music lessons, journals, easels, you name it.  Comfort with one’s own body was another story.  Most of my ancestors hail from the British Isles.  When your spiritual ancestors are Knox and Calvin, appreciation of the human form isn’t exactly hard-wired into the familial structure.

As I reached adulthood, I made a few abortive attempts to become comfortable in my body, but those quickly fell victim to a combination of insecurity, fashion magazines, and motherhood.  I learned to clothe my body in ways that expressed whoever I was being at the time – to hide any bulges, knobby knees, to minimize my linebacker shoulders.  And, as I reached adulthood, as I fell into the roles of professional and mother, I put away my creativity.  Any outbursts of crafting were carefully and appropriately directed toward projects for the home or my children.  Grownups don’t draw and paint – unless they are artists.  They don’t play instruments – unless they are musicians.  They don’t write – unless they are authors.  Grownups don’t reveal their souls or their bodies.  They wrap themselves in convention, in small talk, in business suits, in politics, in book clubs.

In 2008, in the downslope of my 30s, I realized something.  I can’t be a grownup.  Covering up and burying the parts of myself that make me unique was killing me.  I broke out a journal.  I began to write and then to blog.  I got my easel and oil paints down from the attic. And, about the time I began this blog and first submitted essays for national consumption, I began to run.  I decided to enjoy my body.  To clothe it in ways that make me happy.  And the more I learned to appreciate my body and to become comfortable in it, the more my creative side thrived.

Self-revelation is terrifying and exhilarating.  And yet, I can’t help wondering if we make too big a deal about it.  What are we hiding, exactly?  When we refuse to paint because “I’m not artistic,” or we decline to sing along for fear that someone will hear us and judge, when we agonize in a dressing room and finally put that gorgeous bikini back on the rack, what are we saying about our humanity?  What are we telling ourselves and the world about our gifts, our potential?  And how much are we denying others permission to share of themselves?

One of my proudest moments as a mother came a couple of weeks ago.  I have a 13 year old daughter.  My family history is not rife with examples of secure, confident, healthy adolescence.  I had assumed anxiety, body issues, and insecurity to be part of the territory.  So, it was with great joy one evening during family banter that I heard these words come out of my daughter’s mouth.  “I like my body.”

I wanted to bronze that sentence and give it to her and to every other person on the planet as a gift.  When we like our bodies, when we like ourselves, when we like the creative impulses, the quirks, and the out-of-the-box-ness that make us unique, we are capable of greatness.

We all have the same number of chromosomes. And within those chromosomes we have an amazing array of unique genetic coding.  We are all alike, and we are all absolutely unique.

Nakedness, of body or of soul, takes tremendous courage.  And yet, perhaps, if more of us practiced revealing ourselves, sharing ourselves, less courage would be needed.

So, here you go, I’ll take the plunge.  Not perfect, not a celebrity, not an artist, not “special” – just human.

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?

 

Maternal Conflict

I’m Mothers’ Day conflicted.  Well, actually, I’m conflicted and confused about mothering and discussions of motherhood, in general.  Mother, mothering, motherhood – such loaded words for a biologic process aimed at species survival.  It seems as though this generation of parents and non-parents has managed to attach such a monumental pile of baggage to the parenting, and particularly mothering, concept that it is amazing that the whole institution doesn’t just collapse in dusty, mismanaged exhaustion.  Yet, here I am, adding my own superfluous two cents.

We have become as conflicted about the role of mothers and what constitutes a good mother in modern society as we are about our own mothers.  Freud and friends would have had a field day. 

Time magazine recently managed to turn what was supposed to be an article discussing a particular parenting style (attachment parenting) into yet another breastfeeding battleground with a deliberately provocative cover.  Now, I’m all for provocation, so long as it is productive.  But, how many times can we circle around the breast?  As a veterinarian, I find all the hype about breastfeeding to be simultaneously inane and sensationalist.  Humans are mammals.  Some mammals nurse more successfully (I use this in the nutritional and biological sense, not to assign value.) than others.  Some require nutritional replacement.  Let’s move on.

I’m sitting here sipping tea at my computer on Mothers’ Day morning, with a totally self-indulgent day of painting and food planned.  Yet, I can’t help identifying with many of the points writer Anne Lamott makes in this recent Salon.com essay titled “Why I Hate Mothers’ Day.”  She’s right – on the face of it, it is weird and morally suspect to have holidays that essentially elevate parents above non-parents.  As much as I love the special hugs, handmade cards, and school-crafted gifts from my kids on this day, receiving them feels awkward – as though I’m tacitly agreeing payment of some debt.   Animals reproduce all the time; it’s hardly a medal-worthy process.  And as much as I appreciate the upbringing my parents gave me, and as much as I thank them for said upbringing, I’ve never felt that children owe any debt of gratitude toward their parents.  Especially in the modern age of birth control, the decision to have children is a conscious one, and the burden of responsibility falls upon those who make the choice.  My kids don’t owe me.  They didn’t ask to be born.  Mike and I are the ones who owe them the best upbringing we can provide.

A friend recently emailed me a link to an article on “difficult mothers.”  It was part of a larger conversation, not an indictment – I think.  The article makes some valuable points on relationships, bonding, and security, but part of it left me feeling twitchy.  For the record, I feel the same (or maybe the polar opposite) twitchiness when I read things or hear discussions about the glories of motherhood, the “natural wisdom” of mothers, etc.  Yes, parents have a huge impact on their children; there is certainly enough research to prove that one statement.  However, most of us are not demons, and precious few are saints.  Discussions – overt or implied – of good vs bad parenting leave me feeling oppressed and discouraged, regardless of where I land in the balance of the discussion.  The fact is, none of us gets a manual.  (I’m still quite irritated with Kaiser about that.  A manual would have been far more useful than a plastic diaper bag covered with purple bunnies.)  None of us knows what we are doing until the end, and maybe not even then, so how can we, as individuals or as a society, pretend to have some sort of empirical scale for parenting?  Breast, bottle, attachment, Ferber, working mother, stay-at-home, two-parent, single-parent, same-sex parents, private school, public school, day care, processed foods, whole foods – these things are all just words, and yet we throw them at each other like snowballs packed with the sharp rocks of judgment.

Enough.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all of us: parents, former parents, non-parents would just come out and admit that we don’t have a freaking clue what we are doing on this rock and that we just make the choices that seem best to us at the time?  How hard would that be?

We don’t, of course.  Because admitting that there is no one “right” way means admitting the thing that we fear the most.  We have no control beyond that which we possess over our own choices.  Those of us who have chosen children realize deep in the scariest, dankest corners of our hearts that we have absolutely no control over what happens to our children or who they become.  There is no choice that will protect us from the thing we most fear – loss.

I can’t contemplate Mothers’ Day without thinking of the mothers I know who have lost children or the people I know who have lost their mothers.  These are the fears that I know I fight when I lock into judgments about good and bad families.  And yet, these losses that are almost too much for the mind to view head-on teach us the key point.  Loss happens, and it doesn’t care what parenting methods, lifestyles, or philosophies we choose.  Loss doesn’t care whether we bring our mother flowers on the second Sunday in May, or call her on a Friday evening.  Loss levels the playing field; it doesn’t care whether we are “good” or “bad.”

In the end, we are each responsible for living up to and embracing our own choices.  We don’t need special days to celebrate those choices, but if the day gives us a talisman to focus, well, who am I to say whether that is right or wrong?  There isn’t any special magic that gestated in my womb along with any of my children.  Mothering hasn’t given me superpowers or eternal wisdom, damnit anyway.  It is one of the experiences of my life, and like any other experience, it brings to me only what I am willing to put in and what I am willing to learn.

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.