Peace and Sleep

A Marshmellow By Any Other Name

2012-02-10T11:36:00.000-08:00

The shower drain, the picnic cups, my electric kettle, my kids’ barrettes, hair elastics, and toothbrushes, the earphones in my ear and the music player they are attached to, my glasses, my broom, and my cell phone receiver.

I am preparing our guest room for Caijun and her son, Lingyang, who are coming to live with us from Beiijing for three weeks and I keep tripping over things made in China.

Our dish drain, the Connect Four game the kids were playing, my computer, my daughter’s American Girl doll and my other daughter's cheaper knockoff of an American Girl doll.

Caijun and Lingyang are coming to study and learn English. They’ve been to New Haven, where an uncle teaches at Yale, and to Florida. Their email says they are fine with yogurt for breakfast. As I clean, I realize I’m talking to Caijun and Lingyang in Spanish in my head. That’s where I automatically go when I think outside of English and, unfortunately, it’s the only other language I have.

Soap bottle, sponges, dustpan, stereo. My warm coat that says “Daughters of the Liberation” on the label. The box of picnic forks and spoons. Not my chopsticks, those are made in the U.S.A. in Sumter County, Georgia.

I am scrubbing the bathroom and thinking of all my stereotypes. I am hoping they will not mind that we only have one bathroom, or that we can be a little noisy in the mornings. I’m wondering where my assumptions come from, what movies or books or observations are coming together. I have been to Beijing once, for the U.N. World Conference on Women. I helped teach two classes, one on self-defense and one on flirting (that one, I just taught by accident when the instructor failed to show up). It rained the whole time, and I ate delicious eggplant, and I remember everything being very close together and cold and there were a lot of police officers.

My camera. My sneakers. The pen I was writing with. The plastic of my bank card. The picture book I am putting away.

When I get to the train station to pick them up, I restrain myself from yelling out, “Hola!” Eventually, we find each other. We exchange smiles, a few words. When we get to the house, I make them tea, show them where the bathroom is, and leave them to get settled.

I wake the next morning to find Caijun sweeping our living room. I had swept the day she arrived, but the pile she has collected is embarrassingly large and full of unindentifable fluff that I missed on my first round. We smile at each other. I scurry out of the house.

Later that night, we are looking at pictures. It turns out that Caijun was a volunteer at the World Conference on Women when I was in Beiijing. That night we all make pizza for dinner, my father at the helm. As Lingyang puts flour on his hand, he smiles. “I know this,” he says. Every culture seems to have some dish where you shape dough and put some stuff in it. We all throw the dough around without hitting the floor until it works and then add the toppings and everyone retreats to doing their own things until dinner is ready.

More guests arrive. It is B., who used to take care of Plum when she was a baby and has come now to dinner with her husband and their 6-week old baby. B. immigrated from Guatemala and is still involved in a legal case to avoid deportation. She has been studying English in the six years she has been in the States, but together we speak Spanish. We sit down, all 9 of us, with our 3 languages, and many stories.

The politics and economics do not, of course, disappear. Lingyang and his mother pay us money to stay with us and I used to pay Berta every week to take care of my daughter while I went to work at a desk. All the choices we’ve made, had, and didn’t have sit with us at the table tonight. We pass food, we nod and smile at each other, and watch the beautiful sleeping baby.

After dinner, we roast marshmallows on shishkabob skewers over the fire in the fireplace. We discuss the word for marshmallow in English, Chinese, and Spanish. Jason and B.'s husband talk work, where they have some overlap. B.’s baby wakes, is passed around and her cutenesss admired until she’s had enough and then B. takes her and puts her back to sleep. It’s peaceful here for a moment in the firelight, with our sticky fingers and bellies full. There’s a lull, a break from all the navigation, anxieties, and negotiation. Then the baby wakes again and B. and her family go back out into the night, Caijun and Lingyang return to their room, and I grab a sponge to wipe the marshmallow off the living room table.

Losing It

2011-12-28T10:35:00.000-08:00

My kids have each seen me cry once, they say. It’s not that I rarely cry; I cry all the time. I seem wired to cry at everything from an injustice I read about in the newspaper to a sappy romantic comedy. I cry when I hurt myself. I cry when other people hurt themselves. I cry when I see people being very brave. I cry when I think about my girls becoming teenagers and discovering human pettiness. I cry when I think about them learning the details of human history, our capability for genocide, enslavement, and cruelty. I cry when I think about dying. I’m good in a crisis, able to think and take charge and do what needs to be done. But as soon as it’s over, I break down and wail.

And I’m not necessarily a dainty quiet crier either. Sometimes there’s the single subtle tear when making up with my partner or with a friend, but more often I’m given to the gut-wrenching full-body sobs that makes my nose all stuffy and my eyes all red. Given all that, it’s odd that my kids have so rarely seen those tears.

It’s partly, as I tell them, that I like to cry in private, since it usually feels like a private thing. It’s also probably, in large part, because I feel strongly that it’s not my kids’ job to take care of me. Maybe when I’m older and they are older and I’m sick, but not yet anyway. Of course I want them to be considerate, which they mostly are, and responsible, and thoughtful for how their behavior affects others. I also want them to have that temporary freedom of thinking that basically their grown-ups have this ship on course. Perhaps this is because most of the kids I grew up with on the commune grew up taking care of their parents in some way or another and it has left us with a funny overdeveloped sense of responsibility and at the same time insecurity about the world. It is certainly possible that the current state of world affairs engenders this feeling of insecurity and over-responsibility and it has nothing to do with how we grew up. But either way, I like for these kids to focus on other things and not feel like they have to take care of me. This is true, I think, particularly because they are girls and so will be encouraged by society around them and many people in particular to take on a more caretaker role. I want them to get the message that they don’t have to hug someone because that person is sad or wants them to or tell them they love them if they don’t feel like it at that moment.

The time Luna saw me cry was a couple of years ago. We were walking down our stairs and I fell and twisted my knee. It was that sharp, twisting kind of hurt and for a little while I couldn’t get up so I sat there and cried. My knee is fine, but Luna still talks about it to this day.

The time Plum saw me cry was last week. It was during the holidays and my mother and I had a big fight, a rare enough thing that it left aftershocks. Later, as we were lying on the couch looking at a book, Plum said, “Mama, I never saw you cry before.”

“Really?," I asked. "How was it for you? What did you think?”

“It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad,” she said. “It just was.”

I see Plum and Luna cry at least every week, if not every other day. Like their mama, they are serious criers. They cry over mess-ups on their drawings, a snatched doll, a treat withheld, toothpaste on their pajamas, a stubbed toe, a dead butterfly and for such a myriad of other small and large reasons that I could not begin to list them all. Jason and I regularly remind them and our selves that crying is totally fine. It doesn’t mean that anyone has to try to fix it or change his or her own behavior. It doesn’t get you anything different, but it can feel if not good than at least necessary. Sometimes, if it's taking over, it's good to do it in a quiet private space.

To Plum at least, my crying was no different. I was upset so I cried and then I was done and I was okay. She didn’t expect that she had to do anything about it or that it meant more than it was. In that, at least, I’d taught her well. Since it looks like she’s going to be a life-long crier, like I am, it’s a good lesson to learn.

Occupy Christmas

2011-12-14T09:11:00.000-08:00

Sometime around mid-November, without any provocation on our part, our kids start a campaign to become like the Joneses. Not the Rosenswags, the Joneses. There’s no "Happy Holidays," no “Festival of Lights,” no “Kwanzmaskah” for them; it’s all Christmas, all the time. They long to adorn our front yard in mad energy-gobbling holiday lights, to get a 7-foot-tall Christmas tree you can see from the window, and to craft elaborate Christmas decorations out of recycled tin. They get up early each morning to make cards with pictures of trees and Santa. They squirrel away pieces of chalk and write “MERRY CHRISTMAS” in all caps on the sidewalk. Luna changes her braces' elastics to red and green and is only wearing red and green hair ties. Plum, who was happy to inform the other kids in Bridge-Kindergarten that Santa isn’t real, has this elaborate rationalization:

“Even though Santa isn’t real and is just a person dressed up, the guy who dresses up and rides the sleigh and has reindeer is STILL going to come down my chimney and give me presents.”

I’m not opposed to Christmas. In fact, I like it better than some other grown-ups I know and I can belt "Jingle Bells" with the best of them. But it’s not me. Growing up on a hippie anarchist commune and then moving to what seemed to me to be stiflingly normal Berkeley, CA, it would never have occurred to me to want, much less ask for, a tree. Or holiday lights. Or even, really, presents. We spent Christmas with close family friends, who had the whole 9 yards—grandparents and presents and a big tree, eggnog and bacon and stockings. I loved it and I loved that I got to be part of it without having to pose that it was my tradition. For Hanukkah, we visited the downstairs neighbors who had latkes and could pronounce the Hebrew words correctly.

I’ve tried to break this gently to my children, but their steadfastness in owning Christmas is startling; it may not be me, but it’s them and it’s their father, who grew up with Lutheran and Catholic relatives and the whole shebang. We have tried a comprised version, with a potted blue spruce that lives in the yard most of the year and comes in from the cold mid-December. We put their hard-worked decorations on it, a few ornaments passed down from their father’s grandparents, some white lights, and a tinfoil star on top. This year, the kids stopped stumbling over calling it a “solstice tree” and call it what it is. Thanks to their fathers’ relatives, there will be a reasonable but not horrifying amount of presents.

We will spend Christmas morning with the same family friends I have for the last forty years, drinking eggnog and rummaging through stockings. We will negotiate, we will sing, but for me, it will always be as if I’m looking in on someone else’s strange and lovely ritual. It’s not that I want them to exchange all their Christmas fanaticism for Hannukah fanaticism or any other holiday extravaganza. It’s not that I want to “own” Christmas or create my own hippie version of the ritual, for the ritual seems to work just fine. It’s more than I am bewildered by my children’s sense of belonging; that they think of all the holiday wrappings and lights as their thing.

My first identity, once I got one, around 6 or 7 when we moved from the commune to the city, was as an outsider. More than being a girl, a kid, a Jew, a European-American, a sister, or a daughter, I was an outsider and that was a good, if not always pleasurable, place to be. Even in hippie Berkeley, I never felt among my people. I wore pillowcases to school. I’d seen more naked bodies before I was five than most people see in a lifetime. Enough said.

My parents talked, argued, and discussed everything. Nothing, as far as I could tell from listening in, was simple or static. Everything contained its critique. Some of the commune kids I grew up with went far the other way, becoming cheerleaders and joining sororities to prove that they could belong as well as anybody. I understood their motivation but also understood that the advantages of outsider identity outweighed the disadvantages. We had a sense of curiosity, of awareness, and, at the base, a sense of empathy and compassion for the minority, the dissenter, the others that were outsiders in one way or another. There were disadvantages, including loneliness and a lack of good presents in December, but that made sense. Nothing without sacrifice. As Frederick Douglass taught us, “No struggle, no progress.”

Last night I came home late and saw our blue spruce sparkling with white lights through the window. It disoriented me. Could that home be mine, with that tree that could be seen from the window? Was it advertising our allegiance to the majority over the minority, to the insider over the outsider, to the many over the few? Would my children really learn compassion, empathy, and critical discourse if they grew up with that tree? Then I thought of my partner, Jason, one of the most hands-down compassionate people I know. Growing up working-class in rural Washington State, an artist among football players, he says he too always identified with the underdog, the weirdo, and the person alone in the corner. Of course he did. Don’t most of us? My children will struggle, because we all do. They will feel other and excluded, as we all do sometimes. And they will feel included and connected in a way that is different than I do. But the question is not what they will feel but what they will make of that feeling and what they will do with it.

I realized that is one of the wonderful outcomes of spending time in the Occupy movement, and seeing so many others there as well. It reminded me that we, at least 99 percent of us, are on the side of the little one, on the side of fairness, and the rights of each of us to feel included. Our sense of compassion and empathy can come as much from our sense of belonging to a larger humanity as it can from our sense of otherness. For the sake of my Christmas-loving children, for the sake of all of us, it has to.

Occupations, Pillow-fights, and Preoccupations

2011-10-26T13:35:00.000-07:00

Last night at 7:30pm in downtown Oakland, police were throwing rounds of tear gas and sound grenades at people who were protesting wealth inequity by occupying the downtown plaza. Adults and children, friends and strangers, fled, covering their faces and helping each other as best they could. At the same moment, just a few miles away, Luna and Plum, along with their friends and family, were hurling pillows at each other, wild and laughing. Plum was turning five and what she’d most wanted was a “no rules/grown-ups stay out of it” pillowfight.

We had been planning on spending the night at Occupy Oakland next weekend, and were considering organizing a campout the way the families had successfully done in Liberty Plaza at Occupy Wall Street in New York. Plum and Luna had clearly accepted the premise of Occupy Wall Street and had made their own logo for the kids brigade: A “Sharing is Caring” sign with a little green frog going “ribbit.” Not sure what the frog had to do with anything, but it looked good.

We had gone out to the Occupy San Francisco protests, where they were the only kids, but had fun holding up signs and being honked at and yelled at by the cars driving by. They’d hung out at Occupy Oakland, where they hadn’t had fun, because they couldn’t find the drawing stuff and there was no music when they were there. Plum had been particularly irritated that we had to go down there instead of the people with the money just knowing that they had to share it. “Why do we have to share if they won’t?” she wanted to know.

Then she had another good question: “What if they won’t listen to us and still won’t share?” We talked about the importance of getting friends to do things with you, of asking grown-ups for help, of using your head, your voice, and your feet (marching when necessary, walking away when necessary) to get what you needed and stay safe at the same time. We talked about how sometimes, if nothing worked, you had to keep at it, and try again.

After the fifth round of tear gas last night, most of the protesters had either been arrested or had limped away. They vowed to return in the morning. The police cleared out the tents, toys (including the drawing stuff), and signs left in the plaza, put up a fence around it, and left it surrounded by officers.

At our house, the pillow fight ended when Plum said it was time, and we ate cake and said our goodbyes. After she hugged her friends goodbye, she closed the door and unsuccessfully fought back tears. “What’s wrong?,” I asked. “I really didn’t want my people to leave,” she said, her tears turning to heart-broken sobs.

On my phone, I looked at the live video of my Occupy Oakland neighbors downtown. A cloud of teargas hung in the air. People gathered the injured and shuffled away, arms around each other. “Neither did I,” I told Plum, holding her in my arms. Neither did I.

Out of the Mouths of Art Critics

2011-09-26T21:32:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, our family went to go see a show of children’s art at MOCHA, Oakland’s children’s art museum. Only, the show wasn’t at the museum. It had been cancelled just two weeks before the opening. Although MOCHA had done exhibits by children living in wartime Iraq and Bosnia, the board had decided at the last minute that this art, pictures drawn by Palestinian children who were living in Gaza during Israel’s three-week invasion in winter of 2008, was too “traumatic” for children to witness. So the exhibit was being held in a found-at-the-last-minute unnamed space around the corner.

In the car on the way over, we talked briefly about the kids who made the art and what their lives might be like. The kids were interested in the important things—how old were the kids? Were there more girls or boys? Plum wanted to know why the pictures weren’t at the museum anymore. She wanted to know what the museum was scared of.

When we got there, we had to wade through a very large crowd to actually see the art. The drawings—pencils, oils, and watercolors—were mounted on plain black paper. Some of them showed soldiers pointing guns at people, some of them showed tanks crushing people and broken buildings. Some showed flowers and sunny skies. Plum was particularly interested in one that showed the sun and the trees and the birds crying. Luna stared at a pencil drawing of a girl behind bars.

Afterwards, we ate tortillas with chocolate stencils and made hand prints to send back to the kids in Gaza. When we got back home, I asked Luna what she’d thought of the art. This is her response:
“I noticed that some kids drew what they saw around them with guns and stuff and some kids drew the way they wanted the world to be, with things like peace. I think if I was a kid there, looking out the window and seeing those things, I would do some of each. I would draw some pictures of people being hurt and some pictures of what it would be like if it was better.”

One woman, Faith Metlzer, of San Francisco Voice for Israel, had said she was glad the art wasn’t being shown at the museum. She told a local paper that she was worried “how the exhibit would have affected Jewish children in Oakland.” I can’t speak for any of the other Jewish children of Oakland, of course, but mine—known to burst into tears at the sight of a dead spider and prone to waking up in the night terrified of pirates—are just fine. More than fine, really. The world as it is, seen through the eyes of children, is interesting and sad and upsetting but much less scary than the unknown and prohibited.

That night, after getting her pajamas on, Plum came to find me.

“You know why I think people with guns won’t kill me?” she asked.

“Why?” I asked her.

“Well, if people had guns, and since they do, they won’t shoot me because they know that it would hurt my feelings. So they’ll just leave me alone.”

“Good thinking,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said and took my arm and brought me to her room where I sat in the dark listening to her breathing as she fell asleep.

What I Didn't Do Tonight

2011-09-16T20:42:00.000-07:00

Tonight, I failed to let my kids fail, and I failed to send them off to a school where they didn't speak the language so they could succeed despite all odds, and I failed to talk to them about Troy Davis and the death penalty, though he, and it, were very much on my mind. I did nothing that I could then turn into an article about my grand experience parenting alongside the pedestrian. I did nothing that proved I was right after all. We were each a bit tired, each a little bit sick, each a bit more than a bit overworked and caught in the pedestrian work dramas of our days: the paint job that needed to be repainted and the boss who wouldn't share power, and the kid who voted for a different class name and the one who cut in line. Tonight we were the background to someone else's story of bravery and triumph; we were the extras, the faces in the crowd who then went home, stumbled into our pajamas, thankful for mattresses, clean-enough sheets, blankets, pillows, a roof, walls, a bed.

Martin Luther King and the Fourth of July

2011-07-02T11:01:00.000-07:00

Happy Martin Luther King Day. Yes, I know it’s the Fourth of July weekend, but it’s pretty much always Martin Luther King Day in our house. We live right off Martin Luther King Junior Way and every time we see his picture on the sign on the street (which is almost every day), Luna launches into a song from her school (“Oh, the dream…the dream of Martin Luther King….”) and Plum gets excited that she can “read” the street sign and we launch into a major discussion. Also, there’s a mural with his picture down by the park and the junior high down the street is named after him. His photograph is on t-shirts and books. He was clearly famous for something and he was killed before he got old, and Plum is trying very very hard to figure out what all that’s about. For example, this weekend Plum wants to know if Martin Luther King liked fireworks.

There are many theories of anti-bias education and a lot of research on when to introduce what ideas, but for both my kids, what they learned about Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks at their thoughtful progressive preschools got lost in translation (Berkeley schools seem to save Malcolm X until 2nd grade and Angela Davis until junior high).

Take this conversation with Luna and her best friend, when they were four:

“If we were alive a long time ago when Martin Luther King was alive, I would have to sit at the back of the bus.”

“And I wouldn’t be allowed to sit with you.”

“But I like the back of the bus best.”

“Me too. But in the old days, people didn’t like to sit there.”

“So they shot Martin Luther King and he fell off the balcony.”

“He should have held on. They should have had a rail.”

“He died.”

“I already know that.”

“So we should sit on the back of the bus because he couldn’t.”

This whole conversation is taking place in a car, by the way, not on a bus. We ride the bus when we can, sometimes weekly, sometimes less. It doesn’t run as often as it used to and the fares keep going up. I wanted to jump into this conversation and talk about how now bus riding itself is a civil rights issue and one thing that some middle-class white people started doing when they started integrating the buses was to stop riding the buses (see public schools, gentrification, and white flight) and now a lot of those buses are losing funding. I wanted to jump in and talk about the details change but some of the issues remain the same, to talk about what’s ancient history and what’s happening today, but the girls had already moved on and were talking about how scared they were of dogs.

Here are some of Plum’s questions from last week:

“Was Martin Luther King alive before there were people?”

“Did Martin Luther King help make the world?”

“No, I mean did he help make the trees and plants and stuff?”

“Why not?”

“Why did people think he was so great just because he was good at cleaning up? I’m good at cleaning up too!”

After each answer, she’d be quiet for a moment. “Nobody talk. I’m trying to think about it.” Then she’d ask her next set of questions:

“Were guns real when we were stars?”

“Did the person who shot Martin Luther King have a gun?”

“Why would they kill him?”

“What does not knowing ‘right from wrong’ mean?”

With preschool kids, it’s fine to talk about Martin Luther King, but it seems it’s even better to focus on making it even more personal and more concrete—schools that start with kids making their own skin color out of playdough for example, or seeing images of what people look like all over the country and all over the world so they have some context for the idea of color.

Most importantly, all the research says, kids are most affected by what’s being talked about and played out at home. There is a lot of good information out there, though less than you’d think, aimed at actually teaching grown-ups how to talk to kids at various ages about bias openly and pro-actively. Crossroads is one good resource. The main trick, I’m finding, is less what I say than how open I am to the conversation. What do my kids see? What do they want to know about? What assumptions are they already making?

As caretakers, we constantly balance the desire for our kids to be confident and know they can “do anything” if they work hard enough, with the important awareness that there are systematic and institutional biases out there that will try to stand in their way and in the way of others that they care about. We want to balance them knowing just how much injustice and inequity is out there with the belief that they can change it. This long weekend, our family is going to visit friends in the country. We’ll walk out to the beach, read stories, cook together and celebrate our independence and interdependence, and probably light some sparklers for Martin Luther King.

How to Really Raise Happy Grown-ups

2011-06-15T11:14:00.000-07:00

Recently, Lori Gottleib warned us that “our obsession with our kids’ happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods.” Is there really evidence that parents trying “too hard” to make their children happy are actually making their children unhappy? Now, I’m all for a little more detachment and a lot less helicoptering in the general parenting world, but I don’t think those parents who are like white on rice on their kids are keeping those kids from being happy. The culprit is a little larger than that: the whole notion that if we just parent them right, our kids will grow into happy adults even while they are surrounded by inequity, injustice, exploitation, and climate disintegration.

When Luna was born, attachment parenting was all the rage. As I’d managed to avoid every parenting book and article on the planet, as well as many other actual parents, I’d never heard of it. I went back to work at six weeks, bringing Luna with me. Most of the time I just practiced exhaustion parenting, which consisted of doing whatever was easiest and was often indistinguishable from doing the only thing that seemed possible. Around me, everyone seemed to have found a parenting religion. Parents were practicing “evacuation communication” where the baby never wore diapers, or carrying their baby everywhere, so the baby’s feet didn’t touch the ground. Other parents we knew were having their six-month-olds “cry it out” for up to 30 minutes at time or following Magda Gerber’s RIE philosophy of body awareness and adamantly arguing against “tummy time.” By the time Plum was born, it was all about teaching your small child resilience, letting life knock her around and then reminding her that all that hurt and anger was just “a feeling,” and making sure she didn’t eat too much soy.

Most of these kids we knew, born around when Luna was, are now eight years old. They are all quite different from each other, of course, but there’s no way you could pick, by observation, which one was raised by which philosophy. With the exception perhaps of those with the totally obsequies or oblivious parents, these kids are coming fully into themselves, with distinct quirks and comforts. The one who slept in his parents bed till he was five and nursed till he was four isn’t either more confident or more tentative than the one whose parents stopped breastfeeding at nine months and were strict about the “cry it out” method at six months.

This is perhaps what therapists call an example of the “good enough” parenting model. Basically as long as you were clearly loved and allowed to develop without too much interference, even if your parents messed up a lot and were either over- or underprotective, you’re alright. Of course, it’s too early to know how Luna and her peers will turn out and how closely we’ll be able to trace their neurosis to our early parenting decisions, but my guess is the sometimes uncomfortable truth that parents only have so much influence, especially if they only focus on their children. I believe in the "happy enough" model. I'd like my kids to grow up to feel focused and do work that is meaningful for them and for the world. I'd like them to feel like their lives are important and useful and yes, I'd love it if they experience some sense of equanimity mixed with those precious moments of pure, raw joy. But I don't want them to be blithely ignorantly happy adults.

Your parenting can not make your kid a happy grown-up. But if you’re doing a good enough job, chances are it’s not your parenting that is going to make your kid unhappy either. It’s life. Even back in Siddhartha’s time, way before the onslaught of parenting books and helicopter parents, he came upon life’s (and every teenager’s) first noble truth: life is suffering. I don’t think he thought this because his mother was overprotective. I think kids know instinctively that if things aren’t okay out there in the world, and they’re not, that they can’t really feel safe and secure. If you really want to raise the chances of your kid having a happier life, you need to focus on making the world a happier place. I like the idea of starting with expanding our communities by figuring out a way to work against local economic and racial inequity and exploitation. Kids have that inherent sense that things should be fair and can tell if we’re working to make them more fair. They’ll reflect either the sense of entitlement or the sense of equity that their grown-ups model. In a way it’s a relief. Our parenting gets a break, but our conduct in the rest of the world gets more scrutiny. We are not responsible for our children’s happiness, but we are responsible for the whole world’s.

Are You Available?

2011-06-08T11:54:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite things my older child learned in preschool was, when she needed help, to put her hand on my shoulder (or hip, or wherever she could reach) and ask me if “I was available.” This served two lovely purposes, the primary one being that the gentle asking, as opposed to the panicked demanding of my assistance, required me to stop and think about the question. Was I available or not. I had to make a choice and be clear about it. In our old system, I would either help her but being cranky about it because I really wanted to be doing something else, or not help her but feel guilty about it and so say repeatedly “just a second” while she asked over and over again until one of us had a meltdown. When she asked me if I was available, it reminded me I had a choice and could be clear about it. I could think about whether I had the time and attention for what she needed help with and if so, help her with more equanimity than I would have otherwise.

My children are trained pretty well to ask me like this now, mostly because they like how well it works. My partner has also found he gets better results if he asks first. But since most people in the world will not ask you if you’re available before they launch in to interrupt whatever you thought you were doing, you need to ask your own self about your availability. I find this a lot harder. When someone on the street asks me for something, when something happens at work that seems to demand my attention, when something happens that throws me, often I deal with but am grumpy or don’t deal with it but without making a conscious decision not to deal with it. Asking myself if I’m available makes me feel less cornered and more in control over the decision of what happens in that moment. I remind myself that there’s always some element of choice in what I’m doing.

Sometimes, I ask myself and find I am available. I’ve had enough sleep or the sun is shining. Then, I tend to enjoy conversation with strangers, pick up things that fall down, and hope that the moment leads to something new. Sometimes, I’m really not available. I’m using that moment to just transition from one moment to a completely different moment and this current moment is just in my way. In those moments, I just have to deal and get through it. There are too many of those moments in my busy life. Enough moments like that in a day and the day has gone by too fast, without any new memory being made. Enough days like that, and the week has gone by, then the month, then life. The comic actor Geoff Hoyle asked, “What happened to the twenty years between the time I was 18 and 25 and the one year between 30 and 60?” The reason life seems to speed up as we get older is that we have more and more moments when we’re not available for that moment.

For the last nine years, I have begun most workday mornings sitting in silence with my coworkers for fifteen minutes. We begin the sitting with the ringing of the meditation bell and then we ring it again when we are finished. If I’m not in the mood to sit, a whole day passes in those fifteen minutes. I feel myself getting older and I panic that if I sit one more minute, I’ll die of either boredom or old age.

When my daughter was first born, I craved these first minutes of silence with an addict’s intensity. It was probably the only time of the day that I was awake but not paying attention to someone else or running around. After a while, though, I started to find the morning mediation close to unbearable. I had too much to do. I’d finally gotten everyone out of the house and to their various locations and now I wanted to get down to business. The last thing I wanted to do was to sit silently for fifteen excruciating minutes.

Unfortunately, sitting regularly for nine years has not made me a noticeably better person or even a happier person. I don’t feel calmer, though I’m not a big fan of calm so that probably has something to do with it. I tend not to have any brilliant thoughts while I sit. I am only nominally better at letting my thoughts come and go than when I started. The thoughts still feel real; they still feel urgent.

What I do get is one nice moment when I first open my eyes and everything feels fresh and clear for the first moment I look around. It comes down to that, fifteen minutes of sitting equals one nice moment of looking around. For that moment, I’m more available.

That one nice moment of looking around is what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “living in the present moment” and I call being available. It’s a lovely place to visit regularly, but I can’t imagine living there. It seems antithetical to our human ability to think critically, analyze based on past experience, and make projections. Realistically, we can’t always take in the fresh and unique information of a particular moment, respond to it freshly, and still integrate it with our previous experience. We need some downtime, some not “present moment” time so that when it’s important to us, we can be available. The problem is, because we spend so much time not available, we often miss the important moments. Later, I realize that the particular moment when my kid was telling me something while I was running around, or when the person on the street was asking for help, was an important moment and not just an interruption. Given that life is almost all interruptions in what we thought was important, how can we more often be conscious of our availability? How can we be more clear, and communicate it more directly to others, and ourselves whether we’re present?

I think the way to be more available and to be more aware of our availability is, perhaps counterintuitively, to have more routine and tradition in our lives. We know that the more healthy habits we have, the less we have to think about them, and the more time we have for enjoying the moments we have. Right now, my life, and that of many people I know in there, is full of juggling decisions. Nothing is clear—how to balance work and family, where I should send my kid to school, how to best help others, what to prioritize at work, and how to get the world going in more sustainable/less-violent and exploitive direction.

There’s no way to try and be available for all of this at once and no moment set aside for dealing with one thing—everything comes at us at once. The only way to remember to check in is to routinize it. Make it part of your wake-up routine, set your phone to go off every hour, or use something you see often (the sight of your computer coming on, or the car door, or your front door) as a little reminder. Practicing at these moments, even if they’re calm ones, will help you remember to check your availability in the less calm moments, the ones that you are now just holding your breath and trying to get through. If you don’t mind looking foolish, you can always do what I do: close your eyes, breathe, and imagine some small child daughter tapping you on the shoulder and asking you if you’re free. You can always say no.

If Wishes Were Horses...

2011-06-02T13:41:00.000-07:00

my kids would ride very different kinds of horses.

This past weekend we walked to a lagoon on a trail full of foxglove, poison hemlock, golden poppies, and tons of fluffy dandelions. The girls had to stop every two feet and blow the little dandelion fairies into the air, closing their eyes, and wishing hard. Sometimes, I blew with them.

"Can I tell you my wish," Plum asked? I explained to them that mothers were exempt from the no-telling-your-wishes-or-they-won't-come-true rule. "I bet I'm wishing the same thing you're wishing," Luna said.

I bent down so I could hear them.

"I wish that everyone could have a peaceful place to live," Luna whispered. "I especially wish that people in Haiti and Japan could all have homes again."

Then, Plum leaned in:
"I wish I could wear really fancy shoes every day."

Oh loves, I wish both of those of things too.

Plum's Weekly Questions

2011-05-28T18:09:00.000-07:00

Is Chicken Satay made from chickens?

Are guns real?

How do guns kill people?

How do you make a gun?

Is 100 real?

Is jail real?

If you saw a Tyrannosaurus Rex would you pet it?

Am I good?

When you get older do you want to be a girl or a boy or mixed?

The Slug on the Sidewalk: Listening, Judgement, and Action

2011-05-19T16:54:00.000-07:00

I am working on a book with Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh called Fidelity: How to Create Loving Relationships That Last. It’s an 150 page book, but I’ll give you the secret here in just a couple lines, because I know you’re busy and this advice works equally well for parenting: If you want to make your relationship work, look deeply into yourself first and be honest about your own suffering and prejudices. Then, instead of just seeing your own reflected image in your partner, you’ll be able to listen to and see him or her more fully. You probably already know this advice, at least intellectually. It’s the corollary of the over-used and often patently false break-up line, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

I believe strongly in snap judgments, critical thinking, and sweeping generalities, so personally I find this advice to be somewhat annoying. Given the way human brains have been set up to discern and edit, listening without judgment is impossible. Meditation helps, at least while you’re meditating. Sitting still, it’s easy to see the thoughts come and go without getting to swept in them. But as soon as you’re done, it’s back to functioning, also known as judgment. In ten years of working with Thich Nhat Hanh, I still haven’t figured out how to be mindful and also function with the level of quick reflexes and intensity my life requires. I think Thich Nhat Hanh would say then I should slow down but I don’t have any desire for more slowness.

But I am working on listening without immediately acting on the judgment that occurs. It’s useful to acknowledge the judgments I’m making all the time. Then I can see where they come from. Sometimes, I look and decide I’m right on; this or that person or idea is a wanker. Other times, I realize all my righteousness is coming from my own fear or anger or craving and I’m deeply embarrassed.

With friends, I find it easy to step back. With my partner, I have seventeen years of practice, and it’s gotten easier. But when it comes to my children, I find deep listening to be difficult. Perhaps this is because I’ve known them since I could listen to them without words, and now they’re full of words that often distract me from what they’re feeling. Partly this is because I also have my own childhood experiences that color how I see theirs. Listening to them is a lot harder than taking care of them, coordinating for them, and showering them with affection. It’s because when I listen, I feel like I have to DO something about it.

This morning, Luna wanted to throw a slug in the city compost bucket. Usually, she gets ten cents for ever slug she throws in, and five cents for every snail. But this morning, we were late to school, and she there wasn’t time. It wasn’t fair, she said. She loved that slug and it might get smooshed if we just left it there on the sidewalk. She continued to chant “It’s not fair” over and over again, for the first six minutes of the car ride. After a few minutes of this, I informed her she could keep going, but I’d heard that she didn’t think it was fair and now I was going to listen to the radio. She continued for another minute or two, enjoying the sound of her own complaint.

Recently, all the parents of second graders at Luna’s school were called in for a meeting about our children. We sat there listening to all the pyschologists introduce themselves and talk about the social and emotional development of our eight-year-olds, their needs and their growing development of hierarchies. Finally, a parent anxiously burst out with what many of us were thinking, “But why are we here?” What did we do? Before we could listen to anything, we needed to know: Are we in trouble? Did we do something wrong?

We get upset because our child is crying because we feel we have to fix it and we can’t. Or we get upset because something similar happened to us and we have the same feeling, but we weren’t able to take care of it for ourselves and now here it is again in front of us. There is so little we can actually fix. I know this with little things, like the slug on the sidewalk. It’s harder with the big things that trigger my own memories and anxieties. Big or small, listening is still the biggest percentage of what we can actually do. After that, we can do the judging and figure out how to act.

And this is where I land. Because while listening might be the largest and hardest part, the judgment and action parts are still extremely important. As a child, all I wanted was for my mom to punch the gut of the kid who was bullying me. I still want this. When she listened deeply and “saw me” but didn’t do anything, and didn’t show me how to do it for myself, instead of feeling listened to, I felt helpless. I didn’t just want empathy, I wanted to be safe at school and in my own home. So I sometimes err on the other side, jumping on my horse and grabbing my sword before my children are finished telling their story. I’m working on the balance. Here’s my goal: Listen. Ask questions. Then, when necessary, throw them up on the horse, give them my sword, and a push in the right direction.

Of course, I’ll ride back-up, just in case.

A Coming of Age

2011-04-29T13:21:00.000-07:00

Luna is wondering what a bat mitvah is, since we’re going to one. I told her it’s a coming-of-age ceremony some religious Jewish have when girls turn twelve or thirteen. They learn to read Hebrew and they memorize part of a religious book. “Am I going to have one?” she asks. No, I tell her, because we’re not that kind of Jewish. Since I don’t want us to be the kind of Jewish that gets left out of all the good stuff, and because I am a firm believer in coming-of-age rituals, I reassure her she will get a ritual if she wants one. She does. “What is it going to be?” she asks.

I use my most worn line on her, “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” I say this to at least one of my children daily. It will probably be on my tombstone: “She crossed that bridge when she came to it.” That is, if we were the kind of people who do graves and tombstones, which I have a feeling we’re not.

But it did get me thinking about the ritual. I know it will not be a traditional Jewish ceremony and it will not be this new age “comprehensive, multi-media menarche kit, Coming of Age: From Bud to Flower.” That just makes me squeamy. It will probably not involve fasting, like the Apache ceremony, or scarification. Though a tattoo is an option. It will be something really hard, almost too hard, but not quite. Perhaps it will be getting her black belt in kung fu, if she continues. Luna has been doing kung fu since she was four and she’s really not that good at it. She doesn’t love it, and she doesn’t pay much attention in class, but I think it’s good for her to work out and know how to defend herself, so we soldier on. Sometimes, she admits to having fun there. Luna is strong, and loves hiking and swimming in rivers, but it’s hard to find physical activity that she likes to do in the city.

She begged me not to make her do soccer, or any sport where people throw balls at you. That seemed totally reasonable. But I recently had to ban reading at school, other than in the classroom, because she was reading for both snack and lunch recess at school, while the other kids played hide and seek around her. “Reading is good for you,” she pleaded. As a reading addict myself, I know the dark side, and so I was immune to her pleas. “So is big motor skill physical activity,” I told her. “Go out and play.”

The Rites of Passage Institute, which spends its time thinking about these things, recommends that families create their own rituals incorporating these elements:
• Contact with the natural environment: One or more days spent in nature, experiencing isolation, beauty and grandeur.
• Ordeal: A test of strength, self-discipline, and endurance: a fast, an all night vigil, a difficult task.
• Solitude: A complete physical withdrawal from the pressures of life.
• Public recognition: An "...announcement, ceremony or gathering with family and friends..." to acknowledge the person's new status.
• Symbolic representations: Some object that symbolizes the person's new status: a totem, ring, etc. 10

So ideally, for Luna’s coming-of age, she’ll spar with a few people in kung-fu, build a campfire by herself, dive into a river, climb a mountain, and recite some poems from memory. Then we’ll all have dinner around the campfire, since food tastes best that way anyway, and end with a ring and some s’mores, to ensure we’re keeping with tradition. It’s a lot to plan for, but now that it’s close to settled, I’ll put the plan away for a while. As for the details (getting the kung-fu folks on the mountain, what rock to dive off into what stretch of river), we’ll cross them off when we come to them.

Death and Nail Polish

2011-04-21T10:59:00.001-07:00

Another death-themed week in our house. Plum has stopped sucking her thumb at night in order to not chip the fancy nail polish she loves to wear (yes, we realize it’s an ethically dubious trade) and losing that familiar comfort has sent her into a round of major terror about dying. We try and talk about it in the light of day, as we’re getting ready for school in the morning or in the afternoon when we’re reading books, so that she doesn’t associate death and sleeping, but she still works herself up every evening.

It comes down to this: she doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t want Ausencio, who runs the taco truck down on Ashby Avenue, to die. She doesn’t want doctors to die, because then who will help fix her if she’s sick. And she doesn’t want really old people to die either. She doesn’t want to become “part of everything that exists” and she doesn’t want to be a tree or a flower because people cut down trees and pick flowers.

She also has a lot of questions. How does the body actually die? Can you die from “eating alcohol”? Can you die from smoking? Can you die when you’re a kid? From being sick?

I try and acknowledge that death can be scary and then ask that we shelve the discussion to the morning in favor of falling off to sleep dreaming of clouds or flowers or chocolate. But no matter what I say or how early we go to bed, she seems to have to go through the Elizabeth Kübler-Ross five stages of grief each evening. She starts with denial (“If I have to die then I don’t want to be a person”), then anger (“I wish babies died first!”), bargaining (“Can I be 500 years old when I die?”), depression (“I hate death and I hate everything”), and sometimes, just out of exhaustion, acceptance (“If I have to die then I want to be a flower snuggled around your flower, mama”). Then we go through the whole thing the next night.

During the day, Plum and I have spent some time on the buddhist allegory of the relationship of the wave to the ocean. To illustrate no-birth and no-death, we talk about how the wave rises and falls, but it’s made of the ocean that continues. We are like the wave, I tell her. “Yes,” she says, “but will I be able to see when I’m dead?”

In the bath, I’m trying to explain how when you’re dead, you don’t have to worry, because nothing can hurt you and Luna says, “Yeah, Plum, some people even kill themselves when they could be alive because they want to be dead.” Surprisingly, this makes Plum laugh.

At night, though, I’ve focused on the mostly-truthful broken record approach: “No matter what, I’ll always be with you and you’ll always be safe, even when you die.” Plum, however, wants to get specific. “Does that mean you’ll lie on the hard ground next to me. We’ll be really still and hold hands and then we’ll both die?” Then she gets into the details, “What if a bulldozer falls on our house and squishes my bed while you’re in the other room?” I try and tell her that we don’t know the details, we just know we’re in it together. I stroke her head and sing about horses and flowers and rivers. Mostly, eventually, this works and she falls asleep. In the morning, she wakes up cheerful, excited that her fancy nail polish is in intact.

Blind Playdates and Why Princesses are Hard for Grown-ups Too

2011-04-17T18:43:00.000-07:00

All weekend, I’ve been suffering the hangover of a “blind playdate” gone bad. On Saturday, Plum and I met with three other families we didn’t know because the girls would all be in school together next year. Plum was nervous, as she often is about meeting kids she doesn’t know. She’s sure they will think her hair “looks funny” and “too short,” although it curls around her neck and is longer than the hair of many of the girls we know. Her hair anxiety is a whole story in itself, as I’m sure she thinks its “funny” and “too short” because she doesn’t have the words to identify that her hair is seriously Jewish. It’s dark, thick, curly, large, and completely unruly-exactly like mine. It’s the kind of hair adults love but as a kid you just get is different than other kids and can’t be put back in a neat ballerina ponytail. She gets tired of the daily comments from strangers on the street.

So Plum was nervous, and as we drove up up up in the Berkeley hills, I began to get a little apprehensive as well. I sometimes wonder, whenever my kids are exposed to serious wealth, when they’ll start to be aware of it. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s usually like this, through a preschool connection. We reached the house, and were met by the daughter, in a fancy, twirly dress that spelled “Princess” in rhinestones. Plum saw the dress and shut down. She literally wouldn’t leave my side for the next two hours.

Now, I know that girls wearing princesses outfits are so ubiquitous that we’re not supposed to take it literally, but when the girl wearing it lives in a house that is 8 times the size of ours, and we arrive in our old car and jeans and she meets us in front of her personal elevator, it seems some adult might have been on the watch for the irony of the all. If only because, despite the graciousness of the parents and children we met, it left both of us feeling off for the rest of the day.

Peggy Orenstein’s wonderful Cinderella Ate My Daughter focuses on the subliminal and overt ways the princessy pink mafia messes with girls’ sense of their own intelligence and worth. But I also thinks it messes with both the child and the adults sense of democracy and of fairness. As Orenstein points out, there is really only room for one princess at a time. There’s a difference between wanting your daughter to feel “special” (and even that makes me squeamy), and wanting her to feel “more special” or “most special.” Kids at four tend to be literal, which is why many of them (like Plum though completely unlike Luna) are scared of masks at this age. A princess is literally someone who is part of a monarchy and gets to rule over other people not by virtue of talent or intelligence, but based on bloodline and heredity. How yucky is that? When Luna was little, her grandma came back from India with lots of sparkly dresses. We called them “prime minister dresses” in honor of Indira Gandhi. That worked fine for her, though Plum would have none of it.

We’re all for sparkles and have made peace with a pink-on-pink wardrobe, as long as she can run in those jeans, but have drawn our own line at princesses. When we come back from a kids birthday where the cakes says “Happy Birthday Princess,” we just get to explain earlier that just because someone says they are more special than you, it doesn’t make it so. A good lesson to learn, whether you’re blowing out the candles or overthrowing a monarchy.

Are Strangers Still Dangerous?

2011-03-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

I’ve talked with my daughters, age 4 and 8, about a lot of “dangerous” topics. They know about earthquakes, tsunamis, Israel-Palestine, self-defense, the mechanics of sex and the fluidity of gender, apartheid, racism, homophobia, a range of physical disabilities and mental illnesses, homelessness, and of course, their all time favorite, what happens when you die. It’s not that we have sit-downs and “serious conversations." As those of you who are parents know, these things just come up. Usually when you’re in the car or trying to do something else.

But one thing we haven’t talked about much is the idea of strangers and “stranger danger.” It’s partly that they’re still young enough that they’re not around strangers that often without one of us nearby but it’s also partly that there’s so much contradictory information about how to be around people we don’t know. The balance between politeness, openness, wariness, and self-defense is pretty wobbly, especially for women. This is true even for the adults I know. As girls, we’re still taught to be “nice” and I teach these, sometimes inadvertently to my girls—to answer questions, to look people in the eye, to speak when spoken to. They take martial arts and have been taught to run if someone tries to hurt them, to call out for help loudly and clearly, and to fight back if necessary. But there’s never been talk of who could possibly do the hurting. If asked, the four year old says, ‘A dragon or a monster.” The eight-year-old just shrugs.

Part of the reason I haven’t given them a clear “stranger policy” is that I think so much of how you respond to strangers is instinct, part of it is that I don’t like the idea of strangers and am constantly trying to turn everyone I meet into my community, and partly it’s that I don’t know if I’m totally clear on it.

When I was growing up, strangers were confusing. I’d spent the first six years of my life on a commune, where there was no such thing as a stranger and people coming down the road for the first time we’re likely to be greeted with naked hugs. Any of the “grown-ups” were considered to be the people you go to if you needed anything and the people who took care of you. Then we moved to the city. It seemed to be at a time of heightened stranger anxiety (as opposed to now, when there’s more environment-based anxiety), and I was constantly hearing stories of little girls pulled into cars with darkened windows. I would take the bus to school and run the three blocks home, sure that the car that was driving up the street was trying to kidnap me. Even inside our house wasn’t safe. My father told me it was no longer okay for me to sit on the laps of men who came over, even though they were family friends. Somehow, the way he said it made me think these guys were no longer ok. When we went back to the commune to visit, everything was as it was. Anyone who came down the road was almost as good as family. But in the city, watch out. People you didn’t know were as likely as not out to get you.

As a writer, strangers are my bread and butter, as well as my joy. I love talking to people I don’t know. I love the way, despite the patterns and parallels, people continue to surprise me. That is why I always return to New York—there are always strangers to talk to. It’s different in the Bay Area. There are less people on the street, less communal public spaces. From the sidewalk to the grocery store to the BART train, people are more protective of their personal space. This makes for more strangers and thus more danger. So what do I tell my kids? Perhaps just this, “Make less strangers.” And if anyone asks you to go anywhere alone or does anything you don’t like, yell NO and kick them in the personals.

Seat Belts, Vitamin C, and Health Insurance...

2011-03-24T10:49:00.000-07:00

I came home from work on this week’s rainy Tuesday to find a one-page letter from Healthy Families explaining that my children’s state-sponsored health insurance had been cancelled. By the end of next week, my two girls, ages 4 and 8, would no longer have health care. Apparently, we no longer meet the income eligibility requirements, though our income hasn’t changed from last year and, when I read the income requirements online, it looked like we were right in the middle.

My first move was to tear up the envelope (not the letter, just the envelope) and make a pained sighing sound while looking vainly up at the rainy sky. Then, I did what any self-respecting, tired, cranky, wet from the rain, and overworked yet practical mother would do: I made some tea, ate some chocolate, and took a bath.

My kids are, thankfully, basically healthy right now. After Plum was born, we spent some time in the hospital, then some more time in the hospital, then some time with specialists including a neurologist, a homeopath, a feldenkrais practitioner, and an orthopedist. It turned out in the end she was fine, but the whole experience left us with medical bills that took years to pay off, a strong distrust of the medical bureaucracies, and, thanks to an overzealous pediatrician, a note on Plum’s medical records, that she had “delayed development” even though it had turned out to be nothing. Since then, my kids had been on Healthy Families state-sponsored insurance, and I hadn’t thought more about it.

Now, though, I had to figure out how to get affordable health care for my kids and before the end of next week. Because of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), at least I knew I could get health insurance for Plum, despite her “pre-existing” condition. But could I get it soon enough? I called around and searched the web. There were affordable plans available, and, ACA meant that I was eligible for them, but the insurance companies took 7-10 days to send the paperwork and six weeks to process it. I called Healthy Families and was told that if I filled out all the paperwork to appeal the decision, they would extend the health care during the appeal process, though they couldn't tell me how long that would take.

So that’s where I am now, listening to the rain and filling out paperwork for the old insurance and the new in the hopes one will work out. I’m giving my kids vitamin C and some immune-boosting herbs in the hope they don’t get sick while we’re in limbo. I’m giving thanks for the ACA and the laws we do have that make it possible for my kids to have insurance at all and also wondering about the families that don’t know about the appeal process or run out of time to fill out all the paperwork.

This morning as I drove Luna to school, she asked why it was the law that we had to wear seat belts. I explained that driving without one could kill you and that public health law existed because it was better for everyone when people were healthy and thriving. I didn’t tell her about the health care mess, because, in light of what I’d just said to her, it didn’t make sense. I continue to wonder why we, as a country, don't what is sane and healthy and financially responsible and give all children automatic full-coverage health insurance from birth until age 18.

The Day I Stopped Wanting to Get Older

2011-03-22T14:06:00.000-07:00

Both my daughters, like many kids there age, are interested in being older. The biggest compliment you can give Plum, who is four-and-one-quarter, is to tell her she's acting like a five-year-old. Luna, who is eight, prefers to be told she seems like a teenager, but not, as she puts it, "like the the sassy kind." They have big dreams for what will happen when they’re older. Plum thinks that she’ll no longer suck her thumb and that she’ll be able to have yogurt for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Luna imagines being able to read for hours and hours at night, with no one telling her it’s time to turn out the light. For both of them, adulthood is impossible to imagine. They jump to the idea that one day they’ll be one-hundred-years-old and still, as they both “reassure” me, living with me.

I remember the day I didn’t want to get older any more. I was turning seventeen. Life was not great. I was insecure and shy. My step-mother was brutal, my father ineffectual, and my mom distracted. My best friend had recently left me for a new best friend. School was boring, except at lunch time, when it was terrifying.

But my body was strong and I loved it. I loved learning things and thinking I knew them all. I loved feeling “old for my age.” I loved the sense that the world was open in front of me and I was now old enough to take advantage of it. Every adventure, every destination seemed possible. It was the first time I no longer wanted eagerly for my birthday. I didn’t want to be older and I was turning older and from now, that was the way it was going to be. I wanted to do the things that being older allowed—move out, vote, get my own car, but I didn’t want to have to be older to do them. There it was. The older people I knew were lovely, but it was clear that they were not as engaged as the young people. They got tired. They needed their sleep. They were scared of heights.

My children think I have so many choices. That I “get to pick” the important things, like how much sugar they can have, what’s sick enough to warrant staying home, and when it’s time to go to bed. They see that as they get older, they get to make more choices and they have more responsibility. But the balance hasn’t tipped yet. The choices are still mostly fun. The responsibilities minor and made more pleasant by their novelty or the music played while we take care of them. They can not imagine this part of aging: where the responsibilities seem bigger than the choices. Where physical exhaustion does not end because someone picks you up and carries you to bed, tucking you in with a story.

I don’t idealize childhood. At times it’s confusing and terrifying and utterly without solace. But I do miss that part where getting older seemed the solution to everything. I miss the part of thinking I was only getting older because I was learning new things and because I wanted to be older so desperately.

Necessities in Times of Crisis

2011-03-15T11:39:00.000-07:00

In New York City on September 11, 2001, after the collapse of the twin towers but before we new if World War III was on its way, I huddled with friends in a west side apartment, watching the news and waiting for my sweetheart to walk the 70 blocks from where he was working, right near the towers, to where we were. I left the apartment only to make a quick trip to the corner store to buy water, cigarettes, peanuts, and chocolate. The little bodega was crowded with panicked folks stalking up on whatever they considered necessities, trying to get enough for themselves and their people but not wanting to hoard. Everyone had wan smiles. We were stricken and vulnerable, embarrassed, scared, and heartbroken. We didn’t know if we or our loved ones would survive the day. It seemed impossible that we had ever thought other things important.

I was reminded of just the edges of that feeling in these days following the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan. This morning I researched ways to help over there, and then went searching for potassium iodide and seaweed for my children, in case of a radiation fallout coming over here. Though the stores were all out of any radiation-reducing herbs and supplements due to the many bay area folks more quick to panic than I am, everyone was friendly, fragile, with recognizable wan smiles and tight voices. I was struck by the flimsiness of what I walked out with, blue tape to seal the windows and a brown bottle full of nettle extract. Capitalism has us so trained that consumption (both what we buy and what we eat) is the way out of any problem. As if these small talismans were any protection against the earth moving, a wall of water, and the collapse of steel and concrete. People in Japan consume more than 12 milligrams of healthy iodine a day, a 50-fold greater amount that those of us in the United States. On average, they eat more seaweed, exercise more, and have greater sense of family and community. I keep imagining all these healthy people washed away by something that makes these distinctions seem meaningless.

In the Bay Area, perhaps more than other places, it’s easy to be duped into thinking that healthy eating or regular yoga practice is something moral, some kind of karmic guarantee against poverty, misery, or death. It’s true that, barring all kinds of natural disasters and all random acts of violence, perhaps my daily kale habit will add a bit to my life. But a greater truth is this: We can affect our life’s quality but not it’s quantity; it’s length is almost completely out of our control. So I continue to pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living, drinking my nettles, taping the windows, and riding the waves of sadness and fear as they rise and fall.

Nothing is Certain But...

2011-03-11T21:42:00.000-08:00

A lot has happened in our small green house in the past two months—among other things, I got robbed, got in a bike accident, got pneumonia, got a new job, left the new job and went back to the old job, my sister moved in with us, and Jason’s appendix burst.

But of course some things remain the same, one of them being that Luna and Plum will find some new way to talk about death. Tonight, it is a variation on their latest theme, predicting when people will die.

“Is GGpa still alive?” Plum asks from her bed. Ggpa is Jason’s grandfather. He is 91 and still secretary of his rotary club.

“Yes,” I say.

“I hope he doesn’t die till he’s 100,” says Luna from the top bunk.

“Or 105.” says Plum. “Or never.”

“Everyone dies,” says Luna.

“I KNOW,” says Plum. People are constantly telling her things she already knows and it gets annoying. “Even Dexter and Serena are going to die.”

Serena is a kid in Plum’s preschool. She’s three. She and Plum have never played together outside of school, though she seems very nice. We’ve seen her brother Dexter exactly twice in our life, once during the first day of school orientation and once at a Mexican restauarant. He's five. Apparently, he’s made an impression on Plum.

“Serena and Dexter won’t die for a long time,” says Luna. “Probably 95 years for Serena and 90 years for Dexter, or maybe 94.”

“I think 96,” says Plum. “And Serena will live to even longer, maybe 98 more years.”

“Probably not 98,” says Luna.

They’re quiet for a moment, contemplating Serena’s demise.

“Who is going to die first, Luna, me or you?” Plum asks.

I hold my breath and will myself not to interrupt with a platitude.

“I don’t know, Plummy,” Luna admits. “We don’t know exactly all about when we’re going to die.”

And with that, they each turn towards the wall and go to sleep.

Cynthia, This Morning

2011-03-08T20:09:00.001-08:00

This morning, my friend Cynthia, who died a couple of months ago at 95, came to me while I drank my tea. I was writing about aging, and I think she thought she could tell me a thing or too. The first time I came to Cynthia's, I couldn't have been more than five years old, and I thought I was entering a whole magical world at the top of a cliff in the Carmel Highlands. I didn't have grandparents around or any other older people in our lives. My parents were jewish intellectual hippies fleeing new york city to get their hands dirty building utopia. Cynthia was an emissary from a whole different world, a traditional world, where children were left to run free outside and behaved themselves inside. There was a parrot in the garden, ducks in the pond, chickens and dogs and hundreds of wonderful trees and bushes to hide for hide and seek. There were tire swings and big wheel tricycles and secret paths to the beach. Inside, there was a well-used couch with a bin of comic books hidden behind it. From Mad Magazine and Archie and Sabrina, I learned that gas prices had gone through the roof and that teenagers didn’t say it directly when they liked someone. From Cynthia, I learned that the key to a long life was a banana and a glass of hot water with lemon every morning.

At Cynthia’s there was tea cozy with black tea, a set of playing cards, and a tin filled with oreo cookies that could be sneaked in the night without consequence—as long as you didn’t take the last ones. Cynthia was the kind of older woman I’d always hoped to meet but thought only existed in books: she was brisk but loving, practical and no-nonsense, yet a big lover of the nonsense of children and community and celebration. Her traditions were flawless—from Thanksgiving to Easter she knew what made a ritual work. We shared a belief in aloe vera for sunburns, an interest in baseball (mine was fleeting), and a very firm understanding that tradition grounded a person and that consistency was a necessary safe harbor amid the world’s chaos.

I emulate Cynthia where I can. I like my hot water with lemon and keep the comic book section well stocked. I try, with only sporadic success, to follow her "waste not, want not" credo. Cynthia liked to say, "It's a great life if you don't weaken." I do weaken, and weaken often, but it's still a great life and greater still for her having been in it.

Legal Limits

2010-12-12T10:31:00.000-08:00

Growing up on a commune and then surrounded by political activists in Berkeley, no one trusted the police or politicians. But--perhaps because this was the decade of Thurgood Marshall and the afterglow of the civil rights victories of the seventies--I somehow still got away with idolizing lawyers.

My first inkling that the law wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be came courtesy saccharine and red dye number 10. According to my parents, I couldn’t have candy that contained these things because these things were bad for you, causing all kinds of serious diseases in laboratory rats. (The use of the rats themselves posed another problem, but I was trying to figure out one thing at a time.)

I couldn’t understand. If these things were bad for you and it was a well-known scientific fact that they were bad for you, why were they available? Why were candy makers allowed to use these ingredients? Why was White Horse Liquors (the corner store that was the source of all my sugar) allowed to sell them? My father tried to explain that the laws didn’t cover everything. There were a lot of thing that people wanted to decide for themselves, such as whether to eat bright red candy and smoke unfiltered cigarettes.

I still didn’t get it. Why were we required to wear seat belts and helmets but allowed to eat unlimited amounts of junk food and give ourselves lung cancer? It wasn’t logical. Maybe people didn’t know how bad those things were for you. Was it really fair to let people hurt themselves and maybe even kill themselves out of ignorance? I thought the law was supposed to be looking out for us! My parents gently informed me I was wrong. Laws are decided for all kinds of reasons. Ideally they balanced the interests of the state vs. the interests of the individual, and the rights of the individual vs. the interests of the state. Seeing that I was already overwhelmed and disillusioned, they spared me further information about corporate lobbying interests and who really made the decisions.

If the law didn’t make sense, why did I have to follow it? This was the inspiration for my short-lived juvenile delinquent phase, which mostly involved stealing candy I wasn’t allowed to have and stuffing it in my overalls.

The second inkling that the law wasn’t what it was cracked up to be came when I was a young teenager. My father was in law school and had to do a mock trial. I was recruited to serve on the mock jury. It was at this point that I learned about criminal justice. Winning a trial had nothing to do with what was true or false, but only with what could be proved using the evidence allowable to the court. My father won the trial (along with my vote) but my image of the legal system as the place where rights were righted and wrongs were exposed was gone for good.

Well, mostly gone. I still find the law’s idea and reality fascinating. I keep coming back to it, considering and reconsidering law school, obsessively reading up and arguing cases in my head, and training my children, the teenagers I volunteer with, and my larger diverse friends and community to know their legal rights and use them. For each of us to know the law and how to use it is a powerful contradiction to the belief that many of us have, conscious or not, that decision-making is only for the elite. It’s no longer that I think of the law as anything close to ideal. It’s because I remember that those civil rights victories that first inspired me were created first in the streets and at the lunch counters, in theatres and books, in newspapers and on television, and only then in the courtrooms. I still believe that social justice requires legal justice. But I don’t count on the lawyers to make it happen. It will take all of us, lawyers, legislatures, protesters, and poets, to create the world we want.

Another Existential Moment?

2010-12-05T23:16:00.001-08:00

Plum,whispering: "Momma, can I tell you something?"

Me: "Sure, what?'

Plum, very seriously: "I felt something that was real that didn't feel real."

Me, after pausing to take this in. Was she feeling a false sense of happiness, fear, or hope?: "What was it, Plum?"

Plum, pointing to a flamingo flower with a rubbery red leaf: "That plant."

Jail or Yale

2010-12-05T23:13:00.000-08:00

A hundred years ago, I went to Berkeley High. Back then, there were three thousand kids and two academic tracks. They had names that tried to make them not seem so different, but I can’t remember what they were called, because they were mostly known as “Jail” or “Yale.” On one track, the teachers barely showed up, the kids barely showed up, and all the classed had names like Introduction to Geometry. On the other track, the kids worked hard, the teachers worked hard, and the classes had names like “Patterns in African Literature” and “Analyzing the English Novel.” You don’t have to be told which track was called which.

In the years since then, I’d heard Berkeley High had changed. Small schools had replaced tracks and the kids were more mixed together. The gay and lesbian student alliance actually had members. Instead of cringing whenever we drove past the school, I looked at it curiously and pointed it out to Luna, with a small bit of hope in my voice: “That’s where you might go to high school.”

Now that high school is long behind me, I like high school students. I enjoy their seriousness and intensity as well how they’re always completely taken off guard if they find out there’s something they don’t already know. My friends who have teenagers say that I might not be so enamored with them when they’re mine. But they’re not, so when a Berkeley High guidance counselor acquaintance asked me if I’d volunteer to help mentor some seniors trying to figure out next steps, I said yes. It sounded fun.

And, for the most part, it is fun. I liked the kid who told me he had some very serious theories about poetry, but couldn’t go into them right now. I liked “Eric,” who was failing out of his last year of school and didn’t believe there was any point in going to class, but got up before dawn each morning to practice an esoteric martial art known by only a few hundred people in the world.

I saw a few kids like Eric and was surprised by the school they described, a school that didn’t seem to notice if they were there or not. And then I saw a few kids like Gina, a senior who was so ambitious and seemed so supported by her teachers that she didn’t need a mentor, she just needed a PR agent.

I met Gina at a cafe. She was there when I arrived early, her hair neatly brushed, hands folded. I looked down at the little form of her “most satisfying” extracurricular activities. She plays violin in a few quartets and in competitions. She runs varsity track. She’s a straight A student, editor in chief of the student newspaper, and a teenage girl of color who wants to major in biomedical engineering.

There are a lot of arguments about whether Berkeley High’s system of small schools and “academic choice” leads to more actual choice for most children and more equity or just becomes tracking by another name. In fact, a whole chapter of Peter Sacks’ book, Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education is devoted to Berkeley High’s system. Sacks quotes Berkeley High School teacher Doug Powers as saying, “By the time the kids get to Berkeley High, the achievement gap between...’advantaged’ and ‘disadvantaged’ students is too intractable to solve.” The problem is that [the gap] starts in Kindergarten and continues through 12th grade,” he says.

When I asked Gina about her experience with people whose backgrounds were very different than hers, she told the story of a close friend, a math whiz, whose parents were stricter than Gina’s own. Gina goes to a school that is more multiracial and class diverse than almost any in the country. It was one of the few times in our meeting when she seemed naive. Yes, the problem starts early, but it doesn’t mean that high schools don’t have some responsibility for not just helping every student “reach their highest potential” as Powers says, but also in making sure the kids have significant and meaningful interaction with each other, in environments where it’s clear that each of them has something to teach the others. If we’re still living around here when they’re teenagers, I still imagine Luna and Plum will be at Berkeley High. I just don’t know which Berkeley High they’d be going to—the one Gina goes to or the one Eric does. Here’s hoping there’s another choice altogether.

Don't Hate on Middle Class Moms

2010-11-24T10:40:00.000-08:00

I had planned to write about how it’s time to stop all the hating on middle-class U.S. moms, but then I realized I agreed with a lot of the critiques and I got distracted by some of my own judgments. (Homework tutors! Professional lice combers! Prohibitively expensive school pictures!) Now I’m back. According to most of the stories I read in the past few months, U.S. middle-class mothers are perfectionist, stressed-out, over-attached yet strangely uninvolved, overly-ambitious helicopter parents, so concerned with damaging their kids that they won’t just let them be. From the The Wall Street Journal to Slate, people are pining for the good old days of the seventies, where everyone was more relaxed and there were no such things as helmets and back seat seatbelts.

The middle-class, as opposed to the poor, the working-class, and the rich, are always the easiest targets. After all, the subconscious thinking goes, the poor can’t help it and the rich don’t have to. But most U.S. kids still aren’t getting one healthy meal a day and so who cares if the woman next to you won’t let her son have candy till he’s twelve?

When I first became a parent, I swore on my new baby girl’s black curly hair, that I wouldn’t judge other parents. Not the ones on their phones while their children scream in pain, terror, or existential angst. Not the ones who feed their kids food that I didn’t get to try until I was in my twenties. Not the ones who dress themselves and their children in matching outfits. None of them. Of course that lasted until the first time I left the house.

I keep trying to remember where I want to focus. Not because parents don’t do awful things, they do. Really awful inexcusable things. But it seems the broader truth, or at least the more interesting and relevant one, is that parents don’t have enough resources to do what they need to do most effectively and without annoying or hurting other people. When I say we parents don’t have enough resources, I mean financial resources, services, and I also mean –for me the most important-- community resources, such as friends, family, and neighbors that have your back. Maybe parents were more relaxed back then, if they were, not because they weren’t watching their kids, but because someone else was. I can’t help but think that a lot of the investment and over-involvement of some parents is trying to make up for feeling that we all could use some more help. We feel that things won’t be okay if we don’t try and engineer every last detail. After all, most of us don’t feel the school, neighborhood, or doctor’s office is going to pick up the slack. When people get the help they need, then they can see—and begin putting their energy towards-- the bigger broader picture: that every kid needs and deserves the homework help, the doctor that listens, and the nutritious lunch.

Berkeley Parents Network is a listserve that offers the chance for parents in California’s East Bay to get anonymous advice, recommendations, suggestions, and support, most of it judgment-free. The weekly advice list has been going for 17 years and the question titles, in themselves, give a pretty good sense of what’s on parent’s minds on any given week. These are Berkeley parents, probably most of them in the broad range of middle class. Here, for your reading pleasure, is this week’s list of requests for advice. As you can see, they are, like all of us, are worried about the big and the petty, the personal and the political. Then, after you read it, take a minute by clicking here to tell your Representative to pass the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act and restore funding to food stamps.

Berkeley Parents Network: Advice Wanted
November 24, 2010

Bed wetting medicine
Buying gold coins or bars?
Chubbies Cars Garage Ramp
Dating - do I ask him out?
Droopy Eyelids
Fear of flying: is there help?
Getting rid of household pests
Giving Used Toys to Family in Need
Handwashing at Daycare
Help dressing 3 year old in warm clothes
How long until sex after vasectomy
How to get ex-husband to complete QDRO
How to find a 2 bedroom for less than $1100
How to Improve My Posture
How to keep shoes and socks on baby
Looking for Online Political Discussions
Loving and understanding alcoholic
My daughter's father: immature illiterate jealous
My kid freaks out
My Violent 5yr Old
Nanny wants to become a mother
Neighborhood crime
Once-wonderful relationship with my mom now kaput
Parent with disabilities - support and information
Resenting role as disciplinarian
Shirt chewing kindergartener
Socks
Working at Home with Nanny Challenges
11 month old has stopped sleeping
13 Month old pees through diaper
18 Month Old Throwing Objects at People
2 yo - failure to thrive/faltering growth?
3 1/2 year old boy not wanting to pee
9 year old's school / social problems

Early Existentialism

2010-11-23T22:29:00.001-08:00

Plum: What does it feel like when you feel nothing?

Me (after a pause): Well, what do you feel right now?

Plum (very calmly): I feel sad that I’m going to school. And I feel sad that I am staying there until three o clock.

Me: Oh. Do you feel anything else?

Plum: Yes, I feel happy that we’re going to have a special day with Ericka soon.

Me: We are?

Plum: Yes, we are.

Me: Okay. So feeling nothing means you wouldn’t feel any of those things. You wouldn’t feel anything else either. But the funny thing is that feeling nothing feels worse than feeling sad. A lot worse.

Plum (clearly done): Oh. Are we there yet?

Me (using a deep breath to keep myself from rambling on): Almost.

What the Dutch Have That We Don’t

2010-11-19T11:00:00.000-08:00

I’ll give you a hint; it’s not less ambitious women with killer cheekbones.

Jessica Olien is weighing in on Slate about why women in Holland seem to prefer to work part-time. Less than 10 percent of women are employed full-time, she finds, and 25 percent of adult women are not financially independent. Besides, she says, they just seem happier that way. Apparently, they all have time for long talks with friends in cafes, massages, and long bike rides on the free bicycles that are just leaning on pretty white fences throughout the country. It sounds so nice over there, doesn’t it?

But perhaps it’s the less financial need that makes these women less stressed than their North American counterparts, not simply the fact that they’re working part-time. All of us human beings want choice and time. I don’t know about her friends, but I am not ambitious just because that’s the fun part, I work hard and rush home to take care of my kids because it’s all mixed up: a desire to do work that feels meaningful to me, the pleasure of spending time with my family, the need to pay the bills, and the general sense of financial and social instability that comes from living in a country with no safety net.

My god sister Aminta had her son, Severin, at home in Amsterdam. He weighed ten pounds, and the midwife said he had the largest head she’d seen in a long time. No one was surprised or worried, though. The midwife had been over weekly to check on Sev’s size and position. She and Aminta had gone over and over what kind of birth Aminta wanted and what would happen afterwards. Severin was large, the midwife acknowledged, but certainly not the largest baby she’d delivered at home. After all, the Dutch are the tallest people in the world—with the men averaging over six feet and the women not far behind at five-feet-eight. Thirty percent of Dutch women have homebirths, so the midwives get a lot of experience.

After Severin’s birth, the state sent and paid for the equivalent of a post-partum doula for several weeks. This woman served as lactation consultant, marriage counselor, dishwasher, laundry doer, and general helper. If Aminta had been working before Severin’s birth, she would also have received the state-mandated 100-percent- paid four months maternity leave. That leave could be extended for another two months at the local social security office. (Paternity leave is only two state-mandated paid days.) If she’d gone back to work full-time, which many women don’t, she would have her choice of carefully-monitored state-sponsored day cares, in-home day cares, or babysitter situations. None of these would cost more than a small fraction of what they cost in the United States.

Of course, Holland isn’t the only country with great maternity benefits. But even within European social welfare states, their commitment to maternity care is one of the highest. A recent study found that the UK and Ireland have the lowest levels of statutory maternity pay in Western Europe. In contrast, Denmark and Norway have the highest level of maternity benefits, more than twice those in the UK. In a Harvard study of 168 countries , 163 have some form of state-mandated paid maternity leave. The five that don’t: The United States, Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland. Good maternity care doesn’t solve everything, but if it’s combined with a social consciousness and prosperity, and the ability for parents to relax because they know that financially and socially their country has their backs, then it makes for a pretty good start on life.

The majority of women I know work full time. Some of them work doing what they love, others do not. Some of them are fantastically successful by American standards. Others couldn’t care less what they do and just want to get home to the things they care about. All of them would prefer to work fewer hours. All of them, from the poorest to the richest, worry about money. Maybe I don’t have rich enough friends, to see what true Dutch relaxation looks like. But my sense is that in the United States, it doesn’t matter how much money you have, you never feel relaxed.

So I have to disagree with Jessica Olien’s conclusion. She says, “The problem for American women isn't just the amount of time we spend working; it is the notion that we need to be perfect at everything we do.” I don’t think “the problem,” if it can be swept up so generally, is a psychological one. I don’t think American women just need therapy to be happy with the fact that they can’t be perfect at what they do. Some of us could care less if we nailed the work presentation while hand-baking the cookies for the school bake sale. We just want to keep our jobs, find some way to enjoy them, keep our kids in good schools that challenge them, keep our healthcare, and keep the car from breaking down at the same time the pipe bursts in the bathroom. The majority of women are lower and middle-income women working their asses off because they have to. What they need is not an attitude adjustment but solid maternity benefits, full health benefits, and state investment in childcare and schools. Let’s start with that and we can get the cute free bicycles later.

A Good Manual

2010-11-16T21:44:00.000-08:00

From the time I was five until I was almost nine, I lived with my mother, my father, my baby sister my mother’s best friend and my father’s best friend—a couple—and their two daughters. Since from birth to age five I’d lived in a rural commune, our home of eight people (and nary a goat in sight) always felt uncrowded to me and even a bit lonely. I had a lot of time to myself, which for me meant a lot of time to read. The eldest daughter of the other family was two years older than me and had access to information about gender, sex, fashion, and social strategies I had no idea about. Lucky for me, since she wouldn’t always share this information directly, she also had good books.

One of the books I remember sneaking into her room and reading was called Period. The revised edition is still in print, but they’ve updated the illustrations so I have no way to verify that the illustrations were as blunt and crudely drawn as I remember. Mostly, I remember the book as a fairly straightforward, with a dash of seventies warm and fuzzy, introduction to menstruation. I looked at the book maybe three or four different times and then I was done.

When a year or so later, my mother brought up the details of “getting my period,” I told her I’d already read the book and didn’t have any questions. As a nurse midwife who often did exams in the sunroom, I think my mother would have relished a more detailed conversation.

From this I learned that, as a parent, it’s much better to have objective actual information lying around way before your kids are interested. By the time it’s relevant, it’s potentially embarrassing and not something they want to talk to their parents about. So my children have the very not-icky not-judgmental and biologically accurate It’s So Amazing: A Book About Eggs, Sperms, Birth, Babies, and Families by Robie Harris. There’s one for younger kids, It’s Not the Stork, and one for older kids, It’s Perfectly Normal, which we’ll probably leave hanging out starting next year.

This has worked out fine for issues about bodies and babies, but I realize I need this manual type book for the other issues that keep coming up in our house, namely (and this will not come as a surprise for any regular readers of Peace and Sleep) death. I don’t know if my children are particularly morbid. They seem quite cheerful most of the time. I’ve realized that it may be in part because haven’t experienced death and mourning around them on a regular basis, that they are so interested. Whatever the reason, death continues to be a daily topic and I’m getting tired of being the one providing answers to questions like, “Mom, are you and I going to die at the exact time or is one of us going to die first?” That was today’s we’re-all-cozy-and-just-out-of-the-bath-question.

There are a ton of books about death out there for children, books like I’ll Love You Forever and Where Are You: A Child’s Book About Loss. They might be helpful at some point, but right now I want a book that’s about death, not about loss. I want the equivalent of Period. –straightforward, direct, and unsentimental with just a dash of warm and fuzzy. After much rummaging in actual and virtual libraries, I may have found one. I plan on checking it out. If it seems ok, I’m going to sit down one nice warm sunny weekend morning and read it with my girls. I’ll let you know if it’s any good.

Planning Ahead

2010-11-07T14:13:00.000-08:00

Plum, the last week of October:

"Halloween and when I die are the two times I'm gonna be scared."

Technique

2010-10-22T14:44:00.000-07:00

Before I was a parent, I didn’t believe in technique. I didn’t read any books, consult any manuals, or visit any websites. I asked very few questions of the parents that I knew, not that I would have known what questions to ask. I wasn’t deliberately trying to block anything out; I just assumed parenting would have to happen by instinct. I was going to rely on my gut. My mother, who has been a midwife for forty years so she knows these things, says I was one of the least prepared of any of her U.S. clients.

But I have to say now, seven-and-a-half-years in, that having a few tried-and-true tricks has saved me from running away from home. Let me say at the onset, that these techniques haven’t prevented my children from falling apart, screaming at top volume, rolling their eyes at me, or embarrassing me in front of whole groups of people I desperately wanted to impress. But they have prevented many a melt down (mine, not the kids), and, most importantly, they’ve been very easy to remember and so a useful place to begin when I couldn’t think of anything else. These tools come from wherever I can find them. Some even come from books, though most have been picked up by watching someone else with their child, divine inspiration, or advice from a teacher or therapist.

When Luna was two and three, the trick that worked best, was to offer everything as if it was a choice: do you want to walk down the stairs frontward or backwards? Do you want to put on a jacket or a sweater? Do you want to say goodbye to the swing first or the slide? Each day was a like a three-dimensional multiple-choice exam.

This worked so well with Luna that I was shocked a few years later when Plum refused to play. “Do you want to put your jacket on yourself or would you like help?” I’d ask. “No jacket,” Plum would say. “Oh, you want a sweater?” I’d ask, feigning ignorance. “No sweater,” Plum would say.

So with Plum, I had to skip technique number one and move straight to technique number two, I had to move on to technique number two, the one that worked so well when Luna was five and six. This trick, called the “if/then” was a version of something that came from Sharon Ellison’s Taking the Power Struggle Out of Parenting (which, staying true to my pre-natal fashion, I didn’t read or listen to, but heard of and modified). Technique number two went like this, “If you don’t put your sweater on, we can’t walk to the park. If you do put your sweater on, we can walk to the park.” The key, as I found through trial and serious error, is both the calm voice and the lack of any other discussion. No negotiating, compromising, explaining, or begging. I’m a lawyer by birth, though not by profession, and so this is almost impossible for me. I am always negotiating and explaining and, if that fails, wheedling. But really it’s true, this trick only works if I ignore all of these things and just explain the if/then as if it’s a fact of nature, as true as blue skies, green grass, and evolution, and there’s not a thing I can do about it. For Plum, this trick works the best, though to give her credit, she will almost always yell “no” loudly while doing the thing I have asked her to do.

Now that Luna is seven and in full dramatic pre-pre-teenager mode a good bit of the time, I’ve learned what seems the most important trick of all. I had heard of it before, but didn’t even consciously try it until I saw it being done so well by a brilliant first grade teacher, a dog trainer, and a child therapist. It’s catching my child doing wonderful things and saying them out loud. In other words, remembering to always praise the behavior that we’re moving toward. It sounds a little mamby pamby, but it’s amazing. I don’t think, before seven, it was necessary in our family. It wasn’t until this year that I found myself saying critical things to Luna almost daily and hearing them come out of my mouth made me cringe. I wanted to stop, and I wanted her to stop doing whatever it was that was driving me crazy but we were stuck. Then, I tried this. Instead of asking her to stop screaming when I’m combing a big knot out of her hair, I’ll say, “Nice work being calm while I’m combing” before I get to the big knot, and then, somehow, the scream doesn’t come. Jason has started doing it too so it’s getting to be a little cultish around here, all the “I like how you just said that” and “It’s really helpful when you do that.” I know there’s whole books out there on the problems of praise and letting things be their own rewards, but for right now all the positive reinforcement is making our house very peaceful so I’m going to roll with it.

I still haven’t read a whole parenting book or gone to a single class. The tricks don’t always work. And they may not work particular child, or partner, or pet, because each of us is so uniquely weird and wired. But it’s worth trying.

Teeth and Money

2010-10-15T21:41:00.001-07:00

Because Jason and I don't have jobs that gives us family benefits, Luna and Plum have their health and dental insurance through Healthy Families, the state-funded program for children of “low and middle income” families. (Jason, alas, still does not have health insurance at all, despite the fact that he works daily with power tools, sharp blades, and tall ladders. But that’s another story.) So when the time came for Luna to see a dentist, I called the one dental office in the greater East Bay area that took our insurance. The office was far, not geared toward children, and the person who answered the phone seemed really really angry that I’d called. So instead Luna went to the lovely woman dentist, recommended by friends and strangers, who didn’t take our insurance.

Luna had a great first experience of getting her teeth cleaned. The comfortably shabby waiting room had old books and wooden toys. The receptionist, who appeared to have been there forever, smiled at children, and so did the hygienist, a large woman who had clearly seen it all. The doctor herself was thorough, calm, and took her time explaining the troubles we could expect down the road due to Luna’s tiny mouth and big teeth. We saved money by only going once a year, instead of the recommended twice. All told it was a painless and even pleasant experience.

But then it was Plums turn to go to the dentist and paying directly that much twice was not feasible so I did further research and found a dental office in San Francisco that would take our insurance. The whole visit was going to be free. So I made a non-rush hour appointment, bundled the kids in the car, talked Plum down from her near-certainty that the dentist was going to give her “shots and cavities,” and even found parking a few blocks away from the busy high-rise building.

Walking into the office, the first thing I noticed was the huge jumble of color and noise. Apparently, children of “low and middle income” families really appreciate neon green and pink and blaring television. The receptionist we saw was as politely efficient and friendly as someone working a drive-through restaurant window. We filled out a lot of forms. A lot. Ten pages later, the digital board on the wall that flipped through an ever-changing roster of doctors and patients’ names got to ours. This means we’d made into the inner level second waiting room, where another television blared and the kids on the floor peered out at the surrounding dental chairs. In each chair, a dentist or a hygienist briskly worked on a small child: counting, cleaning, and flossing. We took the x-rays; we went back to the waiting room. They called us again. After being cleaned and prepped, a nice woman dentist came by. She pointed out Luna’s four cavities on the x-rays and asked us to make an appointment to fill them. Unlike the other dentist, they talk about money up front. “You’ll want to seal those grown-up teeth,” she said. “That’s covered at 100 percent.” Then she got to the cavities. “Filling those will be covered 100 percent,” she said, “as long as you don’t want the non-mercury fillings.” Well, actually, we did want the non-mercury fillings. Mercury in Luna’s mouth made me squeamish. I thought they weren’t doing mercury in mouths anymore. “The non-mercury ones are only partially covered,” she said, “but you decide what you want.” She also told us that all the oddities in Luna’s mouth were “within the far range of normal,” and reiterated the other nice dentist’s recommendation that we see an orthodontist now. I asked her if she had any recommendations for a good orthodontist. “The orthodontist is definitely not covered,” she told us sadly, “so we don’t really have a relationship with any.” Then she looked at Plum’s mouth quickly, let the kids pick a plastic ring, and we were done.

We all walked out of there slightly dazed. The dentist had been very friendly and seemed knowledgeable, but she was also just very busy. Both waiting rooms were full the whole time we were there and kids came and went at a dizzying rate. I remembered going with a friend to an abortion clinic in New York City that had a very similar feel, the television blaring and the women with kids in tow being moved briskly in and out of the back rooms. At the time, and now, I thought about how people are fighting and lobbying so hard just to get people health care that we never get to talk about the quality of that care.

Barbara Ehrenreich said that the reason why, as a journalist, she never went undercover as a rich person, the way she had as a member of the working poor in Nickel and Dimed and then as member of the unemployed middle-class in Bait and Switch, was that she wouldn’t be able to pass. “The rich just look different,” she said. “Have you seen their teeth?”

The day after our visit, the dental receptionist calls. If we want the fillings without mercury in them, it will cost us $800 dollars. If we accept the silver ones with mercury, it will be free. “Just let us know,” she says lightly, “whatever you decide.” Then she tells me she has to go. Someone is waiting on the other line.

The Man Haircut

2010-10-06T11:10:00.000-07:00

Before

After

Plum hates her haircut. She looks in the mirror last night, after Jason has already snipped and swept up the thick black curls, and her face crumples. She thinks it’s a boy haircut. “I look like a man,” she wails. She does, in a way, but a very short, naked, cute man.

It doesn’t help that Plum brushes her hair the way Luna, with her straight hair, brushes hers. Plum furiously brushes away all the curls until she has turned her head into a big puff bull. Then we put sparkling pink barrettes in it to girl it up. Still, every time she catches a glimpse of herself, her eyes water. “All the kids at school will hate it and think I’m a boy,” she says. I make a note to find some pictures of Annie Lennox, Halle Barry, Audrey Hepburn.

In the morning, she wakes up, goes straight to the full-length mirror in our bedroom, and starts bawling. We apply more pink barrettes. “Will it grow longer while I’m at school?” she asks plaintively. “A little tiny bit,” I answer, “but hair grows very slowly”
Plum wants it down to her butt. Maybe by the time she’s eight, it will get there. I don’t tell her that curly hair has a particularly long painful growing out stage between short and long. She’ll learn it soon enough.

When we get to school, she goes right for the swing, as usual. “I like your haircut, Plum,” her teacher Charlie says. She looks right at him, not breaking her rhythm. “It’s not a haircut, Charlie,” she says. “It’s a trim. It helps your hair grow longer.”

Can We Just Not Talk About It?

2010-10-01T11:38:00.000-07:00

I was inspired by Susan Faludi's article on “feminism’s ritual matricide" to ask some of my fellow girl-raisers about the status of feminism at their house. Did they think their girl children experienced sexism and were aware of sexism? Did they talk about either sexism or feminism at home? In my small sample of Bay Area parents of daughters between the ages of four and fourteen, the most common answer to both questions was an emphatic “no.”

Many of the parents say that while their girls are aware of differences between the genders from very young, they don’t associate boys with being better or more preferential. In fact, there was a lot of noise made about the study that U.S. adopting parents prefer adopting girls. But there’s a big difference between what kind of child might be given a preference by a parent or a teacher and what a kid will be rewarded for growing up.

Echoing many of the respondents, one mom of a nine-year-old and a twelve-year-old said, “My girls know they can do anything. If anything, my daughters feel like they can do more than boys can.” But I persisted, “What about the fact that there have been no women presidents, and so few women senators? How do you explain that to them?” The mother shrugged. “That just proves my point. My girls wouldn’t want to be President or any of those jobs. They don’t buy in to that whole idea of what’s success or what’s powerful.” Hmm, so are girls are so “liberated” they don’t have to be President? So much for Luna’s big campaign.

It’s a complicated time for feminism, but the signs of that sexism is alive and well are hard to ignore. This week’s report from the Government Accounting Office reveals that women work more than they used to, it’s true, but for the first time they are the majority of the workforce. Still, women get paid less than men for doing the same work (an average of 81 cents to the dollar) and they still do the majority of the childcare and housework. And no surprise to those of us who have ever left work to take care of a sick kid, women who are mothers make even less per dollar than women who aren’t and significantly less than men who are fathers (who make the same as their non-parent counterparts).

To break it down on a more sartorial level, my latest forays to a junior high school graduation in Oakland and a nightclub in downtown New York City confirmed the same thing: women and teenager girls are going around dressed in tiny skirts they can’t sit in and heels they can’t walk in while the men they are with are dressed like shmoes in loose jeans and grimy t-shirts. Kids clothing catalogs come unsolicited to our house all the time and Luna devours them if I don’t recycle them fast enough. Despite the fact that these catalogs are aimed at parents of pre-pubescent children, every catalog is split into boys and girls sections. As an experiment, I took them apart and showed Luna just the pictures of the clothes, with no pictures of models wearing them. Half the time she picked the boys clothes as her favorites. But the part that upsets me is this: in every single catalog, the boys are always doing something in their pictures—riding bikes, riding skateboards, jumping, climbing hills, or flying airplanes. In all the pictures of girls, they’re sitting there, or standing there. In one picture, a girl is actually seen with her bike, but holding it, never riding it. (Some images here if you want to see for yourself. How could that not be teaching my daughters the subject/object lesson that boys do things while girls just pose. That doesn’t mean that advertisers are ignoring the “girl power” message we’re determined to give our children. As Peggy Orenstein informed me, Target is using the classic “Free to Be You and Me” to market tween clothes (sob) and “girl power” sells everything from phone service to perfume. But, her colleague points out, “You don’t get the feeling marketers believe in the power of girls, so much as they belive that their mothers believe it.” And therein lies the problem.

When I’ve asked similar questions about racism to parents raising children of color, every single parent answered yes to the first question (Did they think their child experienced and was aware of racism?) and about half answered yes to the second question: Did they talk about either racism at home? Maybe for many of us, we don’t want to bring up questions of current political and economic power imbalances because we don’t want our children to “know” about them. It’s heartbreaking to imagine the time your children finds out that there are people out there who, perhaps unconsciously, will think less of them because of their race or gender, or language, or disability, or any of the many other parts of their identity that are beyond their control. This is without even getting into the ways that plays out at the system-wide level.

The hope is that if our children don’t know about sexism or racism, they’ll act as if there isn’t any, which is a good thing, right? Right up to a point, I think. If your child is out there in the world at all, or even looking at pictures right at home, chances are they’re learning and absorbing the biases out there.
Louise Derman-Sparks, María Gutiérrez, and Carol Brunson Day of NAEYC (National Association for the Education of Young Children) say that not talking about these issues can unwittingly make children more vulnerable. In the should-be-required-reading pamphlet “Teaching Young Children to Resist Bias” they remind us, “Children do not learn bias from open, honest discussion of differences and the unfairness of bias. Rather it is through these methods that children develop antibias sensitivity and behavior.” In other words, talking about the fact that the bias is out there doesn’t create the bias and can in fact nurture children that can take on bias in the world. Who knows, it may just help nurture the next woman president.

We’re All Strangers Here

2010-09-23T14:39:00.000-07:00

I remember moving to the city and being amazed by the sheer amount of strangers I saw everyday. Every single day, I saw people I didn’t know, who were going about their own separate lives, completely unaware of me, my parents, and my whole world. I used to climb onto our roof and, inspired by Harriet the Spy, spend whole days writing down my observations on the people who walked past. One time, when I was about ten, my friend and I walked up a few blocks to the main street and started interviewing strangers about their lives, their favorite colors and foods, and their children. For this, I got in trouble. “You can’t go up and just talk to strangers you don’t know,” my dad said. “It’s not safe.”

At the same time, when old ladies asked me my name, I was encouraged to answer. I was supposed to say good morning if someone said it to me, and look people in the eye.

These were the days when it seemed everyone was terrified about kidnapping. We all were told stories about children offered candy and then dragged into cars. Either the adults didn’t know that the greatest harm to children usually comes from someone they know, or they didn’t believe it. I was scared, confused, and fascinated by the people we didn’t know, the homeless ones and the rich ones, the friendly ones and the glaring ones, the ones who talked to themselves and the ones who talked to everyone else. This was before cell phones and it seemed to me that people on the street spent a lot more time just looking at each other. Or maybe I just had that impression because I was a child, and people feel safer looking at children.

Plum is just now becoming aware of all those people. Each time we get in the car, she watches the people going by and says, “They don’t know wear we’re going, right?” No, I tell her, they don’t. The other day she leaning back, sucking on a throat drop that was giving her immense satisfaction and watching the purple flowers fall from the tree outside our window. Occasionally, people would walk past. After a gaggle of teenagers sauntered past, Plum sat up abruptly. “Those people don’t know what I have in my mouth,” she said. They don’t, I agreed. And we don’t know what they have in their mouths either.

The other day, she had her biggest revelation yet. Plum was holding my hand, staring at all the people rushing to their various jobs and appointments, when she said, “Mama! Those people don’t even know if you're my mom or if you're somebody else’s mom.” This one upset her slightly. There were people out there who might see me walking down the street and not immediately know I was Plum’s mom. Some of them might not even know I am a mother at all, but I decided not to tell her that part.

My reaction to all those strangers was, and still is, intense curiosity. I followed a pretty straight path from child spy to grown-up journalist. I wanted an excuse to study people I didn’t know and ask them a lot of questions. Plum is more belligerent. She laughs at the ignorance of those folks who walk blindly by, not knowing that she’s sucking on something yummy. She tells me that those people who don’t know where we’re going in the car are “cheaters” because they don’t know our plans. When Luna says, “I don’t think you know what ‘cheaters’ means.” Plum responds, “I do. It means they don’t know where we’re going so they lose and we win.” Based on her reaction to strangers, Plum’s career path seems a little less obvious. Pugilist? Thespian? I’m guessing it will be something where she can teach those strangers a thing or two.

Raise Your Hand If You Don't Want To Die

2010-09-18T15:11:00.000-07:00

Plum is putting on her pink sneakers for school, when she looks up cheerfully and says, “Raise your hand if you don’t want to die.”

We both raise our hands.

Perhaps it’s because I have often been terrified of death that my children continue to talk about it daily. They’re not being particularly morbid, just observant. We see dead things all the time— little creatures, mostly, dead spiders or dehydrated moths. Sometimes, we’re looking at fossils in a store or museum. Other times, someone is telling a story about a long –dead relative. Occasionally, we go to a memorial or a funeral. And then, this summer, on the curvy pass just down the road from our mountain cabin, a woman that I know drove too fast and too drunk at night and went over the cliff, dying instantly. She was a mother of two girls, a two-year-old and a five-year-old.

Her dying was not something I wanted to tell the girls. Although they didn’t know her, they knew that exact curve where she died and we drove past it every day. But a friend of Luna’s told Luna while they were swimming in the river and Luna told Plum.

At the time, they both seemed to take the news in stride. Plum said, “Aw, that’s sad” and was done. Luna wanted to know how fast she was going and why she didn’t stop and how much alcohol in your body is too much for driving. Then she too, seemed done.

But now back in the city, Luna is waking up at 2:30 in the morning panicked after a dream where I died and she was left all alone. She’s old enough to know it’s a dream, but also old enough to know that while most parents in this country don’t die when their kids are little, some do.

Plum is just down on death in general. She cries when I slap a mosquito, or when we see a picture of heron eating a shrimp. She wants to know why, when you die, “you don’t grow up again.” She wants to know how I know this.

Within all this, I try to reassure them as honestly and accurately as I can, that I’m going to be as live for as long as they need me. We talk about probability, chances, imagination, reality, and how we make so many of our decisions based on what will likely happen as opposed to what there’s a tiny tiny chance of happening.

And we talk about death, whenever we see it. Because my mother is a midwife, my kids are used to birth. They’ve seen babies get born. They’ve touched a placenta. They understand where a cervix is. They’ve seen photos and videos of births and have heard so many birth stories that, except for occasional times of playing midwife and baby, they tune them out. I wish death was this visible. Not more prevalent, just more seen. With more public mourning, more obvious and communal ritual, my kids and I would possibly get more used to the intense certainty of people dying. It wouldn’t be our private fear, our own daily negotiation. “Raise your hand if you’re going to die,” Plum could say. And we’d all raise our hands, nonchalantly, calmly, as if giving the answer to a teacher’s question.

How Do You Know?

2010-09-18T00:27:00.000-07:00

Plum is three-and-three-quarters and those quarters are precious to her. If she meets another three-year-old, she has to know if that child is “plain three,” “three-and-a-half” or “three-and-three-quarters.” It’s better if the other kid is younger. If the other kid is her same age or older, Plum immediately protests the “unfairness” of it. In our house, she’s always the youngest and so she feels a divinely-given right to be older than at least some people she knows. She likes constant affirmation that there are people littler than her. She is the “big sister” (never ever the mom) to all the dolls in the house and to Floyd-the-cat and to the many other inanimate objects (sticks, balls, grapefruits) that she wraps in blankets and takes care of every day.

Today, she wants to know the exact age of Serena, a girl in her preschool, whose birthday is next week. I tell her Serena is two-and-three-quarters. Quarters is as far as I go; there’s no smaller fractions in our lives at this point.

“Two-and-three quarters?” Plum says incredulously. “Is that even a number?”

“Yes,” I tell her. It is.

“But how do you know it’s a number?” she asks.

It’s a good question and one that I find myself often unable to articulately answer in any substantive way. I know that because people have told me that; it’s not like I’ve done any independent hands-on research into the subject. But telling her I know something is true because people have told me it’s true doesn’t really go with my constant telling her and Luna to figure things out for themselves and not just believe what other people tell them.

A little while later, driving home, we pass two girls, who look like they’re maybe ten or eleven, walking home. Plum wants to know where their mama is and I tell her that their mama is probably somewhere reachable if they need her but when you’re that age, sometimes you can walk home by yourself, with no mama.

“But how do you know?” she wants to know.

I don’t know how I know that ten is an ok age for a kid to walk home without a parent. It just seems right.

Now, thanks to Plum, the question of how I know things comes up at least several times a day. How do I know our car won’t crash? How do I know that koalas are real? How do I know that the turkey at the Little Farm won’t eat her shoes? I wish she would ask me an easy question, like how do I know stoves are hot, and I could answer her with a story based on my own experience, but she already knows about stoves. What she wants to know is how we’ve reached consensus on the other stuff and how we’ve made the parameters of consensual reality that she’s discovering is the world. I almost never come up with an answer that satisfies either of us.

Single-tasking

2010-09-16T14:56:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading the back and forth in various magazines, inspired by Jonathon Franzen’s book Freedom, about the envy women writers, both fiction and nonfiction, feel about their male colleagues. Not so much that they don’t think their colleagues deserve praise, but rather, how that praise seems so much easier for them to get. In the latest entry, here, Meghan O’Rouke does a nice job taking aim at unconscious bias and general dismissiveness.

I thought Freedom was a fine portrait of a white middle-class family going about their business, but not particularly deep or relevant to the life that I’ve been muddling through. I also found--stop here if you’re not finished reading it---that the killing off of the one character of color (a gorgeous young Indian woman who is somehow in love with an older white man) was both unoriginal at best and clueless about race (is that a kind way of saying “racist”?) at worst. But I’m more interested in how gender differences affect the work of writing itself, rather than the bias of the reviewers, which for better or worse I take for granted. I’m interested in what Liza Mundy talks about, excerpted here, about the difference in male and female ways of being working writers and what else they’re usually doing at the same time:

"In my experience, male reporters say something along the lines of ‘‘Bye, honey!’’ when they go out the door to the airport, while women reporters have to make 7,000 back-up plans involving not only spouses but also primary baby-sitters, secondary baby-sitters, pet-walking services and carpooling colleagues, just to make sure that while they are away, no child gets forgotten overnight at gymnastics practice. Women reporters take the earliest train trip to their reporting destination in the morning, and the latest possible train back, rather than spend an extra, leisurely night in a hotel room. Women reporters stuff breast pumps in their carry on bags and help with homework over the telephone."

I don’t remember being trained in doing a thousand things at once. I don’t remember being taken aside in school and taught how many things I was expected to keep track of while the boys were out on the field playing dodgeball. But here I find myself, looking around me and noticing that the men still seem to do mostly one thing: work. According to older women I know, men do a lot more caretaking and home helping then they used to. That's probably true, but they still seem to mostly only be able to do one thing at a time.

Is it just that it’s harder for women, for me, to write bigger books because we’re also busy working full time, taking care of small children, and handling various household matters? Writers have of course tackled this question before, with Ursula LeGuin and Toni Morrison both arguing that it’s helped, not hindered their writing, to be up to their elbows in orange juice, playdough, laundry and carpool lanes. LeGuin says this way of living has given her a sense of the circular rather than linear narrative. Morrison wrote that writing with small children helped her clarify her sense of urgency. I like the idea that all the swirl around me is a help, rather than a hinderance, but most days it doesn’t feel like it.

My good friend says this is nature, not nurture, that makes women feel like they can keep track of everything. She swears it's the thickness and more varied strands of women’s corpus callosum that has them up at night minds jumping all over the place. But apparently new magnetic images disprove that idea and either way, I’m distrustful of ending any discussion by reducing our differences to are brain stems. I look at my girls and want to be able to model artistic single-tasking. I want them to concentrate without caretaking. What is the trick? How do I practice it?

The Difference Between the Two

2010-09-12T20:56:00.001-07:00

Plum, in the car, coming back from the park: “I’m drunk, sweaty, and hot!”

Luna: “Do you know what drunk means? It means you drank too much beer or wine.”

Me: “Or you can also get drunk from other kinds of alcohol. And sometimes people just use it to mean they’re feeling muddleheaded, like they’re drunk on sun or love.”

Plum, loudly: “Well, I’m drunk on fish!”

Luna, looking concerned: “Mom, can I get drunk from eating a rotten grape?”

"Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear”

2010-09-09T22:06:00.000-07:00

This is the country mouse’s conclusion in Aesop’s city mouse/country mouse fable. A city mouse scoffs at the plainness of the country mouse’s lifestyle and tries to show him the high life in the city. When they are chased, and almost caught, by a dog, the country mouse makes this observation. We didn’t have much bacon in the weeks we were just in the mountains, but on returning to the city, I did notice some differences:

Food
In the country, all food seems to be for sharing. Extra dinner is always made, because who knows who might stop by. Everyone’s garden a farmer market, where you can reap the benefit of a bumper crop of cucumbers or tomatoes. And because people are understandably proud of whatever they’ve made, no one seems to eat without looking around to see who might want a bite of whatever delicious homemade thing they’re eating.

In the city, I make two lunches each evening, one for each kid, while all across the city, 40 other parents whose kids are in the same classes as my two are making lunches for their kids. Given everyone’s allergies and the specifics of everyone’s particular tastes, there is a strict no sharing policy applied to these lunches at both schools. It seems a ridiculous waste of 39 parents time and energy, when a big pot of beans and rice would serve all of them with less time, waste, and cost, but my suggestion to collective the lunch process, either informally among friends or at the school level, has been met with apathy and eye-rolling.

Strangers
Strangers don’t exist in the same way in the country. Of course there are people you don’t know, but they tend to introduce themselves. They tend to know someone you know and they usually have some food to share (see above). In the city, you spend so much of your time around strangers, acting as if they’re not there or at least not interesting. You have your conversations with your friends surrounded by others and you leave these others to their bubble with the unspoken assumption that they will leave you to yours. Perhaps, in the city, you’ll begin chatting with someone in line or at the park. Perhaps not. You’re never obligated to, especially if you have a cell phone or a pair of sunglasses to keep you separated.

Clothing and cleanliness
I always overpack for the mountains. Knowing the only way to do laundry is by hand; I figure I should have enough clothes that I’ll need to do it only occasionally. But the thing I can never fully believe when I’m packing is how little I change and how little I mind the dirt. After all, it’s clean country dirt, not greasy, not gray, not full of who knows what chemicals. No matter how much I pack, I always end up wearing my bathing suit, a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt if I get cold. These clothes are always caked with dirt but they never actually look dirty until I see them back in the city.

Work
In the country, there seems to be a lot more work related to just living—there are more dishes to wash, more clothes to wash, plants to tend to, wood to chop, fruit to can, lanterns to light, bears to scare away, and decks to shore up. Luckily, we have no electricity so we’re not distracted by email or phones and so have a lot more time to do the work that needs to be done. When I’m in the city, I think that when I get to the mountains I’ll have so much time to write. After all, I’ll have nothing to do! No work that I need to go to, no kids to gather up and send to school. But then I get there and with all the taking care of life and the gardening, swimming, cooking, eating, cleaning, socializing, and mosquito bite itching, there’s barely anytime for doing nothing. I think that when I get back to the city, where I have a dishwasher and a washing machine and the kids have school to be at during the day and I have an office to do stuff in, I’ll get so much more writing done.

City or country, it’s not that I prefer one location to the other. I like the extremes, prefer them both to the suburbs or the small town. Each time I transform from country mouse to city mouse and then back again, I try and take something with me. Communal meals in the city, a little cabin where I can write in the mountains. An open salon night on our city where strangers can stop in and a fashion show in the country, where I can use up half the clothes I never wear there. My compass points to community and beauty and I’ll take it wherever I can find it.

Worries, Big and Small

2010-09-07T21:32:00.000-07:00

Luna Swimming Into the Unknown

Luna worries. She worries about the door being closed all the way, about people dying or not picking her up on time. She worries about which plants are poisonous and which ones aren’t, litter on the streets, and people fighting. She’s not scared of monsters, pirates, or dragons. For the most part, she worries about real things that might actually happen. We’ve just come back from five weeks in the mountains. We stay in a small cabin with no electricity and bears outside. The river is cold and full of rapids that Luna loves to swim in. We’re far off the grid and the worries seem to fade there, though they do try and sneak in sometimes as night. But now we’re back in the city and the worries were waiting for her.

Luna’s strong and smart, and the worries don’t always win. They don’t keep her from going to school and enjoying it or from making friends and playing with them. They don’t keep her from loving swimming, climbing, and cooking. But they keep her from enjoying herself as much as she could and sometimes they keep her up at night.

Last night she asks me if there is such thing as a “worrying disease” and if she has it.

This is a hard question. I don’t know what she means by disease, but for adults, we seem to talk about anxiety as something diagnosable and manageable. Not necessarily curable, but livable with by some combination of therapy and possibly drugs. Anxiety, the doctors say, is genetic. It runs in a family, like depression. Luna comes from a long line of worriers and I too stay up all night sometimes worrying about death.

There’s a lot to worry about it. I know that worrying doesn’t “help” and it doesn’t seem necessarily “healthy” but it certainly seems natural. I can see why worry evolved in us human beings—to help us distinguish between safe and poisonous plants and to help us figure out a way to avoid saber-tooth tigers. And I can see why worry continues. We have very real health care concerns, financial concerns, and worries about oil spills, homelessness, disappearing glaciers, and so on. Our brains take time to figure out what kind of worrying is necessary for our safety, what kind might spur us to new inventions or righteous action, and what kind of worrying just gives us wrinkles. Bobbie McFerrin sang “Don’t worry, be happy” at my high school graduation and I jumped off the stage and danced but even then I had the sense it was too simplistic a prescription. I’m just not sure that worrying is something wrong with us that needs fixing. It seems instead to be linked on some deep level to critical thinking. Of course, it depends on what you’re spending your time worrying about.

I’m thinking about how to distill all this for Luna and also not get into a whole conversation at bedtime. “I don’t think it’s a disease, exactly” I say. “We all worry, some more than others. The trick is to figure out when a worry is just bullying us and when it’s something real.”

“Does that mean you think it’s kind of a disease?” Luna asks. And then, she says, her voice quavering, “Can it kill you? Is worrying a disease you can die from?”
“You absolutely can not die from worrying,” I reassure her. I say this firmly and categorically. I tell her worrying evolved to keep her safe and the only thing that worrying can do is get in the way of her enjoying herself and sleeping well.

Of course, I would like Luna to worry less, and “be happy” more. If there was a magic pill with no side effects that would make her lose all her “unnecessary” worries, I’d want her to have it. But only if this magic pill would allow her to let go of those worries without losing her growing ability to see the world clearly, in all its inequality and uncertainty, all its unbearable ugliness and all its unbearable beauty.

The Payoff

2010-06-29T08:13:00.000-07:00

This morning the kids sleep in until 8am and then I hear Plum say,

"Luna, can I come in your bed?"

"Sure, you don't even have to ask."

"I know, I just wanted to. Sorry I didn't say please."

"That's ok, come on up. What book do you want me to read?"

Ahhh.....

The Bank Account

2010-06-27T20:58:00.001-07:00

Luna spent last week at Slide Ranch, a teaching farm in the Marin Headlands perched above the pacific ocean and surrounded by soft fog. It's an amazing place, full of curious baby goats, thick pillowy sheep, and proud chickens. In the summer, it's also full of 5-8 years olds, mostly from nearby Mill Valley or Tiburon. Luna was definitely the only kid from Oakland and one of the few kids on a scholarship, but really she only seemed to notice the goats. She sat with them, milked them, brushed them, fed them, and woke up and fell asleep talking about them.*

Back home this morning, she looks up from gluing and says, "Mom, what's a bank account?"

Deciding to forgo a longer discussion of financial regulation and the particular recent scandals, I explain to her that a bank is a place that holds money for people and keeps track of it for them, and that an account is what keeps track of your particular money and keeps it separate from someone else's.

When I was about her age, the local bank still came into the classroom, with free piggie banks and check ledgers for all. Radical hippies though my parents were, they dutifully took me down to the neighborhood branch of Wells Fargo and helped me open up my $2 dollar savings. Wells Fargo seems a bit too busy to do that now.

Luna keeps gluing, without comment.

"Why?" I ask her.

"Because Ellen**, from camp, told me she has four thousand dollars in her bank account."

I take a breath. I leave the room. I make a face in the bathroom mirror. Return.

"Really?" I asked. "Four thousand dollars? Maybe she meant four dollars and made a mistake."

"No," says Luna, "she told us a lot of times. It was definitely four thousand."

Luna has $3.37 in her piggy bank last she checked. That has always seemed like a lot. She doesn't get any from us for doing chores, and she doesn't have the kind of grandparents that send her any, but the tooth fairy occasionally comes through and she does have money in an education fund for when she turns 18. She's seven now. What would she even spend money on if she had it?

"Maybe Ellen's parents are saving it for her for when she grows up," I suggested. "Did you ask her how she got the money?"

"No, Mom," Luna says, moving on to her next gluing project, "because I didn't know what a bank account was."

*To see how far we've come on the goat thing, see this post from two (!) years ago.

**Ellen is a pseudonym for another seven-year-old. Her name has been changed to protect her bank account.

Jose Saramago

2010-06-23T22:37:00.000-07:00

"Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are."
— José Saramago (Blindness)

Touching Dead People

2010-06-05T15:10:00.000-07:00

Age and death are daily topics in our house, covering the spider who seems to have dehydrated in the corner, the meal worms Luna has as pets, world events, and our own family’s mortality. Luna has known two people who have died, her great grandma Bobbie, who was 93, and our friend Catherine, who was 60. From those two experiences she’s learned that when you die, you have two choices: to be compost with the worms or to be ashes. She says she’s personally leaning toward being ashes.

Luna has also seems to have accepted my somewhat vague explanation that when you die your cells become part of “everything that exits”—the air, the soil, the water, the flowers, and the earth.

Of course Luna has passed on all this vast knowledge of death to Plum, who is mostly concerned with if she is little or big. Luna knows the answer to this one. “I wish you would live to 100, Plum, but you’re probably only going to live until 92, so you’re still little because 3 1/2 isn’t even close to 92.”

This is in the car, where all important conversations take place. Plum thinks about the future laid out before her. “If you’re old,” she says. “And you get sick, then you die.”

My own discomfort around death causes me to pipe in from the front, with my standard line. “Yes, but you’re still part of everything that exists,” I say brightly.

“Yes, Plum” says Luna wisely. “You become part of the dirt. So when you’re digging in the dirt and playing, you’re touching dead people. There are probably dead people on you hands right now.

“Oh,” says Plum. “I like digging.”

Shame on You

2010-06-04T12:02:00.000-07:00

The other day I went into San Francisco to protest everything falling apart. I’d had enough of oil spills and flotillas. I went with my father, who does this regularly. When we got there, someone handed my father a green sign. He waved it around. Some people came to protest the protesters. They had their own barricade. There was a lot of chanting and competitive flag waving. The protesters and the protesting-the-protesters protesters turned to each other and shouted, “Shame on you! Shame on you!” This continued for a while, each side trying to make their “you” more emphatic than the other, and drowning out the speaker who was saying something about international waters and human rights.

Once at 3 in the morning on the L train in Manhattan, I saw two drunk women make fun of a passed-out homeless guy whose pants had come undone. Infuriated by their laughter, I turned to them and said, “Shame on you.” They looked at me, completely unfazed, and said, “No, shame on you.” “No, shame on you,” I repeated, as Jason pulled me off the train by my arm. It was our stop. The whole way home I was angry. I wanted to stay on the train, yelling the same thing for hours.

A Can of Worms or A Can of Tomatoes?

2010-05-28T18:03:00.000-07:00

I just read Harriet Fasenfest's forthcoming book A Householder's Guide to the Universe where she basically argues that householding—gardening, canning, curing, and cleaning are political acts. And of course she’s right to a certain extent. I get the argument—books like hers and Jean Railla’s Get Crafty argue that by being self-sustainable and not consuming corporate culture you’re creating a different more life-sustaining model. By making dinner from you own garden and curtains from your old dresses you are teaching your children important lessons about the environment and the stewardship of the earth, you get to eat well and look fabulous, it’s healthier, cooler, and cheaper than the alternative and... it just isn’t for me.

I have my herb box and my small picking garden, but I’m ok getting most of my local/organic/seasonal food from the farmers market, the farm box, or even the grocery store. I’m ok not knitting or quilting. It doesn’t make me less radical, it just means I’m not particularly handy or good at sitting still. I’m fine if there are parents out there who want to teach my kid how to knit, sew, and bake (actually, the baking we’ve got pretty well covered—we’re head-to-toe in flour at least once a week It’s not really my politics, either. It’s true that this is partly because I have girls and these skills aren’t the hands-on ones we focus on. Jason, with my somewhat clumsy assistance, teaches them carpentry, including furniture and birdhouse making, and a little light plumbing and electrical.

But it’s not just the gender ghetto the home ec skills fall into, it’s that I’m much more interested in conversations with other parents about what we teach our children about the world outside of our homes. Rather than setting up our own gray water system (which I’m not opposed to if someone wants to help me), I’d rather take them for a walk to the our water shed and follow the source from stream to tap and talk about why the toxins from what we put into our air and streams end up in our drinking water.

In a ten-minute conversation while getting her shoes on for school, Luna has questions about immigration and why we’re boycotting Arizona, apartheid in South Africa, violent and nonviolent struggle, and Israel-Palestine, the wall around the West Bank, and freedom of movement. It’s not that I think kids can handle every detail of everything; growing up in the eighties, I was the kid who had regular nightmares about nuclear war. But I think they are aware and interested in the world outside them in a way that does them credit. One of the most interesting parts of being a parent is figuring out how to talk to kids about these political issues.

Railla says, “Being a grown up is... eating well, having a home that suits your needs, a hobby or two that you enjoy, friends and family that care for you and a sense of belonging to the world.” To me, that sounds more like the definition of being a middle-class American than being a grown-up. A large part of “belonging to the world” is being aware of the hard parts in the world—including death, violence, and oppression and figuring out your response to them. Fasenfest is more directly engaged in the politics of what Railla calls “the New Domesticity.” She has some very smart and clear observations such as “if the earth is sick, we all are sick and no amount of market manipulation will change that” and “nature and capitalism...have always been unhappy bedfellows,” which is putting it mildly. But at the same time, she says with, with not a hint of irony, “Like a freshly baked pie, a clean home says things are right with the world.” What??? Things are not right with the world and cleaning your house won’t lessen the famine in the Sudan one single bit.

When people say it’s “inappropriate” to talk to kids about larger global politics, about death, about the consequences of the catastrophic oil spill in the gulf, what they’re really saying is that it makes them, the adults, uncomfortable. We will have to teach our children that the world is run by very different rules than we may have in our individual homes. We will have to, at some point, help them with the understanding that right now some eat while others starve, some poison the oceans without punishment while others spend their time making compost. We will also have to talk to them about why, in the face of this, we still hope, love, and work to make things better. Dealing with discomfort and disagreement is one of the best things we can teach our children.

Of course you can always have these conversations while canning tomatoes.

Nice-olated

2010-05-21T13:42:00.000-07:00

Advantages of the New House

1. Streets with more flowers than garbage
2. Waking up to birds instead of car alarms
3. Kids can cross streets by themselves
4. We can walk to more than just a liquor store.
5. A front yard to lie down in
6. An outside cat

Disadvantages of the New House

1. As a neighbor-friend says, we’re nice-olated. It’s hard to critique the nice-ness of everything but it is off-putting. Where’s the funk? Where’s the edge? Where’s the forced public interaction? Where are the creative juices running in the street?
2. Quiet. It’s so quiet that at night I dream I’ve been kidnapped and taken to an empty desert valley. I can hear the kids roll over in their beds and mumble to themselves. I can hear Jason’s low and whistling breath.
3. We moved here in part because we wanted to live in a neighborhood that felt like a neighborhood and a community that felt like a community. But perhaps that’s the secret of more middle-class neighborhoods—no one talks to each other because no one needs to. Perhaps they don’t need to. But we do. We don’t know anybody (except for neighbor-friend mentioned in number 3 who is too busy to come home except for brief flashes at odd hours)!
4. We’re in an odd vortex of an old neighborhood where the old people are moving on and it’s not clear who is moving in. There are empty storefronts, a closing post-office, a struggling movie theater. The plants are happy. The people befuddled.
5. Our lives have not moved with us. Yet. We are like snails whose slimy trails stretch back to our old neighborhood. We’re slowly gathering things around us—schools, friends, places to meet—but they’re not there yet.

Reasons Why Luna Loves Us, In Order of Importance

2010-05-07T12:24:00.000-07:00

According to the card she gave me and her papa for Parents Day:

1. We make her dinner
2. We got her a bunk bed
3. We care for her
4. We take her to school

May There Always Be Cupcakes

2010-05-07T11:14:00.000-07:00

Great Grandpa Victor (90) and Plum (3)

Plum Nails the Working Mom’s Conundrum

2010-04-28T08:26:00.000-07:00

We’re on our way to see Sylvia, a body worker who has been helping Plum with the last traces of some early physical difficulties.

“Does Sylvia have a kid?” Plum asks.

“Yes,” I say. “She’s a momma. I think her daughter is four.”

“She’s not a momma.” Plum says. indignant. “She’s a worker.”

“She’s still a momma even when she’s not with her kid. Just like I’m still your momma when I’m at my work.”

She thinks about that.

“Oh,” she finally says. “Can I come to your work again and see you being a momma there?”

Baby Steps

2010-04-25T21:02:00.000-07:00

Today, Luna and Plum walked home for the first time by themselves in our new neighborhood. Of course, we were only 3 1/2 blocks away, but that included crossing two quiet streets and turning a corner. They were completely thrilled by the process.

When I was Luna's age, I used to walk the seven city blocks home from school on what was then called Grove street, now called Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. They were busy blocks, with pretty constant cars and a store with a gumball machine about half the way there. I enjoyed walking by myself but the walk seemed really long. I was a lone adventurer and kept my eyes wide open. Though I never had a coin for the gumball machine, I was always thrilled to get there and know my journey was half-done.

This Moment

2010-04-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

Sunlight coming through the window
though not quite reaching me.
The bell of a cat let outside for the first time.
Two three-year-old girls miraculously both sleeping at the same time and in the other room.
A cup of mint tea and a deep-orange murcott, round and pocked.

And Roque Dalton:
I believe that...my veins don't end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love, little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.

Dreams and Control

2010-04-21T14:47:00.000-07:00

Parenting is so much about control—losing it, letting it go, trying to hang on to some semblance of it. At the same time, moving from infant hood to childhood to adulthood is also a lot about control—finding it (of your body, your bowels, your urge to lie down on the floor and scream the house down), exploring it, and figuring out how much you have of it over yourself (what time you go to bed, what you eat, what you can do with your time) and over others (unfortunately, not much at all). So it’s no wonder a lot of parenting is figuring out how to avoid the power struggles and how to let our kids have their awesome and fierce power while also setting clear boundaries and limits. I thought this article in Slate was interesting, about how kids aren’t so much interested in the reason and rationale, as much as just in knowing where the boundaries are.

At my kids current ages (3 and 7)and temperaments (emotional and analytical respectively), there aren’t too many issues around control. We know each other pretty well and have figured out which things are the most important to the other. Though of course it changes all the time, for now I’d say those things are: for Luna: time and space to read without people bothering her; for Plum: time to snuggle and more time to snuggle, with some singing mixed in; for Jason: people sitting down and eating together, for me: people treating each other respectfully and letting me take a shower in peace with the door actually closed. As long as these things happen, we all get along pretty well.

So all of my deeper questions and struggles with control happen in my dreams. Before I had children, I had driving dreams, in which I always went around the same mountain curve and spun out of control. Many of these dreams had me soaring above mountain ridges and coming down safely on the other side (see, at least subconsciously I do get that losing control can be a wonderfully liberating thing!). But all the dreams were slightly nervewracking as I tried to steer my car out of the air and back onto the curvy road.

Since I’ve had children, I dream about drowning. Sometimes I am holding a child in a bathtub, and she keeps slipping out from my grasp and under the water. Other times, I am fishing my children out of the ocean and the tide keeps pulling them in. Sometimes, we are all in the river swimming, and I feel something against my leg. It is a child in a net or a bag and I fish her out.

I love swimming and I love driving country roads. Both give me a sense of freedom that I rarely have in the city. But I have also almost drown and almost run off the road. My dreams are my battleground, where I work out our family’s continually shifting balance between freedom, control, safety, and joy.

The Armoreds

2010-04-19T15:42:00.000-07:00

Outside of school, Luna and Plum live in a pretty solidly all-girl universe, except for their father and their “little brother” (Floyd the cat), but lately they are getting an education in boy socialization. First, we went over to a new friends house to hang out with her and her four nephews, ages one to nine. Luna and Plum stood, open-mouthed as the boys wrestled each other full-force to the ground, crashed their trucks into a tree, and pulverized a lemon with a baseball bat. “Mama,” Plum whispered to me, pointing to the lemon-smashing situation, “what is that boy doing?”
“He’s playing,” I answered. “That’s how he likes to play.” Plum was too surprised to answer. Luna eventually found her way into a game of ball, organizing the boys into taking turns. Plum pretty much stayed by my side until the end of the evening, when everyone else finally slumped in chairs, exhausted. Then, she walked on the table and loudly sang “All Honor to the Pharaoh.”
Also, we’ve been hanging out with their one and only lovely cousin Jacobi. Jacobi is just three months older than Plum and a sensitive artistic genius. From the age of two, he could sit and look at books or draw for hours, creating the most amazing animals, all recognizable and more or less anatomically correct. He didn’t like running, or yelling, or fighting, or even much physical play in general. Compared to him, my girls seemed brutish and burly.
Then, this past fall, he started preschool and drank the “boy” kool-aid. The last time we saw him, everything he touched needed to be killed. He still loves reading, but now all the animals in the “ocean wonders” book need to be destroyed and murdered. He still draws amazing animals, but now they’re all covered in blood.
The last time we saw Jacobi, he had just discovered and become fascinated with knights, who he calls “the armoreds.” His discovery coincided with Plum’s strong and visceral fear of knights. She hates them in books, even cartoon versions, covers her eyes if we see a picture of one, and when her grandmother unknowingly sent her a bag of knights as a present, she burst into sustained and loud crying.
Yesterday, Jacobi came over with a book on the Knights of the Round Table. Torn between her love of her cousin and her fear of knights, Plum sat next to us as we read the book. Then, we brought out the bag of knights from her grandmother, and she and Jacobi spread them out in the grass. Jacobi had a few of them stabbing each other through immediately, but we also talked about their outfits, the emblems on their shields, and their funny box helmets. In deference to Plum, Jacobi made some of them nice knights, who preferred to spear kiwi fruit rather than each other. In deference to Jacobi, Plum said she wasn’t scared of knights anymore, at least not all of them. It was nice out there in the backyard, some of the knights engaged in guerillas warfare in the grass while others attempted to work it out with each other in the fruit bowl, the gaping gender divide still bridgeable for a little while, the sun still bright into the early evening.

 

Career Aspirations

2010-04-16T14:58:00.000-07:00

Luna knows exactly what she wants to be when she grows up, a famous baker. She would like to be self-taught and has absolutely no interest in cooking school. “If I go to school for baking, they’ll talk a lot and want me to remember a lot of things and I won’t be able to spend my time just baking.” She would like to specialize in scones. I try to think of other famous bakers, so that she can read about their lives, but none come to mind, besides Betty Crocker, who wasn’t a real person but just an invention of General Mills. There is Mrs. Fields, of Mrs. Fields Cookies. Debbi Fields was not only real she was local, from Oakland, California no less. Her inspirational biography from TV.com includes the following:

“At the age of 20, Debbi was a young housewife with no business experience. Yet, she had a dream, a recipe, and a passion for sharing her chocolate chip cookies. She managed to do what most people considered impossible. She convinced a bank to finance a business concept which had never before been proven and which appeared on the surface to have little likelihood of success.” She now lives in Memphis, Tenessee, having raised five daughters, written a couple of cookbooks, and sat on a number of corporate boards.

Maybe this will inspire Luna, though I’m hoping Luna doesn’t go quite so corporate with her scone baking operation. I’m hoping she’ll stick with creating high-quality scones from local and organic ingredients. Maybe she will settle for local fame.

Luna has some secondary career aspirations. She would also like to be a singer, but not a famous one. She would like to sing on a stage, though not a large stage. She’s not sure about if she wants people to listen to her singing because that is too embarrassing. Perhaps she’ll be a sewer instead, she says. A famous sewer.

Finally, Luna likes to read, so she’s considering being a teacher. She thinks this one over for a while. “I don’t think I want to be the main teacher,” she says, “Because then you have to buy all the books and all the supplies.” She is quite for a while, until she comes up with a solution—she’ll be an assistant teacher. “Then I can just read to the kids.”

I’m glad she’s got it figured out. Perhaps now she can help Plum, who wants to be a drummer and a princess, get a little more serious about her own career goals.

And The Mom of the Year Award Goes To...

2010-03-24T11:19:00.000-07:00

Every Tuesday before work, I volunteer in Luna’s school, listening to the kids read one-on-one. This Tuesday, on the way to school, Luna is practicing her spelling words. “I think if there was a spelling contest in my class, I would win.” She thinks about it for a minute. “Maybe if there was a spelling contest of all the first grades in the world, I would win.”

I mumble something about there always being people better or worse than you at anything, and so you compete mostly against your self. She ignores that. “I wouldn’t win if there was a reading contest, though,” she says. “Sarah would win and I would come in second.” I try again; expounding on how there is talent and trying and sometimes trying hard beats out talent. Some things comes easily for her, I continue, like reading and spelling, and some things require her to try harder, like the monkey bars and martial arts. She continues to ignore me. “I wouldn’t win a math contest, though. Last time we did math problems my teacher had to help me with almost all the answers.”

I finally hit on something coherent. “I bet if there was a being Luna contest you would win,” I say.

She laughs. “Yeah.” She thinks for a minute, “If there was a being a momma contest...”

I’m waiting, smiling.

“...you wouldn’t win, though. I think Henry’s mom would win.”

Henry’s mom! Henry’s never-smiling-at-me, not-working mom who waits patiently every day from 2:45pm on at the school for when the kids get out at 3pm so she can walk him home? Ouch. Thanks to Luna, I'll never forget what some parents with less critical children might not learn till later; you can’t get your sense of self-worth and self-confidence from your kids.

Askance at Alice

2010-03-17T15:12:00.000-07:00

My friend Liza’s blog on Alice in Wonderland got me thinking about my kids and my relationship to movies.

Given that we live in the Bay Area, we can't help but have friends that are more hardcore than we are on a number of parenting issues--there are the no sugar friends, the no dairy products-meat-or-wheat friends, the no-pink-for-my-girls-or-swords-for-my-boys friends, the no-plastic, rubber, silicone or things-with-batteries friends, and many many other variations of things that people are categorically against that I've never even thought about.

But when it comes to movies/videos/television and the-like, not to mention 3-D, we're pretty rigid. That doesn’t mean my kids live movie-free. They love Totoro and Singing in the Rain, The Point, and School House Rock and even Kung Fu Panda, but they’re pretty much barred from most movies and all movies of books we’ve read and loved.

Luna, who is plenty fearful of some things, finds no book scary. She’s read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Percy Jackson’s The Lightening Thief, in which a son sees his mother’s head ripped off, and then gone right to sleep. Her mind can pretty easily block out the details. In movies, it’s impossible to block out the details. She can be scared by things in a Dora cartoon she saw at a friends house or a dog that goes to a vet hospital in Flash. Once she sees a character on the screen, that’s who that character is no matter what.

I am wary of anything that innundates all my child's senses so there's very little room for processing and digesting, not to mention critical thinking. Because of that, I’m not taking them to see Alice in Wonderland. Luna has read the book and has her own image of Alice. Plum’s heard the book read and is really only interested in the parts with animals in them. In the reading, the subtleties of 19th century implications of race are lost to them (as are the not-so-subtleties of C.S. Lewis’ Christianity).. Luna skips over the parts she doesn’t understand. In the Alice movie, the whiteness and uberwhiteness hits you over the head .

I’m not sold on the “feminism” of female movie characters. If there’s a bold blond girl in the movie, that’s ok, but there’s a better bolder girl in Luna’s mind and she doesn’t necessarily look or act like Mia Wasikowska, but maybe a little more like Luna. Maybe my heart has been broken by one-to-many bad adoptions of my favorite books, but for now, at least until their first kiss and their favorite literary characters have lodged themselves firmly and irrevocably in their minds, they’ll be slogging through the strange but fascinating twists of tongue of Lewis Carroll, Norton Juster, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Madeleine L'engle and others, and skipping the literary adaptions.

Gender Bender

2010-03-10T11:14:00.000-08:00

For International Women's Month, Luna's homework was for us to interview her about gender. When asked if there were things "girls could do that boys couldn't" she didn't say "have babies" which was what I thought my practical seven-year-old would say. Instead she said, "keep secrets" and "be responsible." When it came to what boys could do that girls couldn't, she was stumped. "Can you think of anything, mama?" she asked. I settled for the anatomical lesson the interview seemed to assume, "Have penises?" I suggested. She wrote that down and went off to read.

I think the only way to "teach" gender variance is to show it to kids up close with actual people, because otherwise you can talk all the talk you want, kids are going to believe what they see with their own eyes and what most of them see is a world very clearly split into boys and girls. I've read them "10,000 Dresses"the children's book about a boy who loves dresses and they both know all the words to "William Wants a Doll" but they still separate even the rocks they find into boy and girl rocks. Plum's preschool teacher, says that by 3 all the kids are self-separating themselves by gender long before they have any sense of separation by race or ethnicity.

At Luna's school, there are a few gender variant kids. The mom of one sent a letter to parents at the beginning of the year, giving them a heads up about her kid, Cole, who by 5 very clearly dressed and "acted" like a girl. She suggested that if our kids asked if Cole was a boy or a girl, we could say he was a boy but a "girl in his heart." Which is sweet, but a little confusing for kids since is it in our hearts or our pants that gender lies? Or some combination.

The odd thing about what is called "gender variance" is it still seems to only work one way. There are girls in Luna's class who wear baseball caps and jeans everyday and love sci fi and kickball but they're not considered "gender variant." It's only the boys in dresses that seem to cause the stir and the label.

Is this because male is still the norm? ItWhat designates a girl being gender variant at this age, as opposed to a tom boy? Is it just self-identification? I've got very mixed feelings about the whole self-identification of gender. There's been so much discussion about how complicated this is with race, i.e. you can't just identify as "black" because you feel "black in your heart." Why is gender any different?

Of course, just because they're considered the norm doesn't mean than boys have it easier when it comes to gender-variance. When they "break the rules" and wear dresses or even wear pink or sparkles, the backlash seems strong and swift. There's one mini metrosexual in Luna's class. In his skinny jeans and top hats, long hair and fancy shirts, he seems to get away with dressing up while still being one of the boys.

This Morning's First Tear

2010-03-05T14:38:00.000-08:00

Plum, age 3 1/4, while eating yogurt in her pajamas at 10am: Is it a school day?
Me, while eating the blueberries Plum has systematically taken out of the yogurt: No.
Plum: Good.
Me: Are you liking school these days?
Plum: No.
Me: Why not?
Plum: I just don't really like it.
Me: I'm sorry.
Plum: You don't have to say sorry, Mama. It doesn't hurt.

Today's Temptations

2010-03-04T23:02:00.000-08:00

Disturbed by the seeming ceaseless stream of dollars going out and the relatively small stream of money coming in, I resolved today would be my own personal buy-nothing day. I don't normally think I would need to make a point of it, after all I don't think of myself as someone who buys a lot of things--I don't have a TV, an iphone, a remotely new car, or even a raincoat. Still, between housing, childcare, groceries, books, and who knows what, money has been leaving our bank account at an alarming rate and I figured it's time to put a stop to it. Should be easy, I thought; I was going to work, going home, going to kung fu, not passing much on my way.
Well, the temptations weren't expensive, but they were many and varied. I considered buying and almost bought today:

*A book of Greek myths for Luna
*Two handmade soap dispensers
*tomato paste, cumin, mustard, and red wine vinegar
*a hairbrush
*a vegetable grater
*a raincoat
*sparring equipment
* a new cellphone that emits lower radiation than the one I have

of these only the first two seriously tempted me. I returned to the soap dispensers again and again. I had a million rationalizations. They'll help me buy bulk soap. They were made by local artists. They're cheap.

In the end, I let them go. I didn't actually need anything. Clearly I need more of these days.

But if the soap dispensers haunt my dreams, I'm getting them tomorrow.

Structure Tag Shoes

2010-03-03T11:26:00.000-08:00

It’s the standard weekday morning operation, with all four of us trying to get alert, fed, groomed, and out of the house in an hour. Luna is standing in front of her shoes, unmoving. “What day is it?” she asks. “Wednesday,” I say. “Oh," she says, "then I don’t need to wear my sneakers. I need to wear them on Thursdays and Fridays for structure tag."

“Is structure tag part of sports?” I ask.
No, she tells me, it’s recess.
Then why only Thursdays and Fridays?
“Because Annika doesn’t like to play structure tag and I still like to play with her,” she says. “So I’ve worked a deal with her where I play mousie with her Monday to Wednesday and then play structure tag with the other kids on Thursday and Friday.”

She put on her rainboots and got her jacket on. “Though I might still play mousie with her some Thursdays,” she added,“because mousie is fun too.”

Aside from what this says about Luna’s far-superior-to-mine organizational abilities, I am only slightly surprised that she is already so fully in the world of most of the women I know, placing friendships at the center of her well-being and spending a huge amount of time negotiating and nurturing them. Even Plum, at 3, is either happy or miserable at preschool depending on whether her closest friend there shows up. When I think of the inevitable heartbreaks in my girls’ future, it is the twist and turns of friendship breakups that I would love to protect them from most.

Boy Things, Bedspreads, and Death

2010-02-28T11:22:00.000-08:00

Here are cliff notes of a few of the things I've meant to write about while I've been swept away by other things.

Boy Things

I insist my girls learn to skateboard, do martial arts, and carpentry, even if they don’t have any interest or aptitude. But once they know these things they can chose whether to pursue them or not. They’ve already got math and science around them and other stereotypical boy things—football, guns, and trucks--they can take or leave as they’d like (of course I admit I'd rather they left them).

I grew up in the seventies, post-official women’s liberation, but not post-actual. And as a child surrounded by women and girls, I had some pretty clear notions of what were boy things and that they were off limits. No one told me I couldn’t do them, but I could look around me and see who was doing what, and who knew how to do what and it was pretty clear. I want my girls to know there is no mystery to these things, or at least no more mystery than there is to the stereotypical girls things, like dress-up and dancing, that they approach with a strange mixture of caution and curiosity. Of course this requires that I actually get on the skateboard, take out my power drill, and return to my own martial arts training--after all if Jason is the one that teaches them all these things it sort of ruins the point. And so far, I have to admit, boy things are fun. Especially skate boarding.

Bed Spreads

Between practicing my skateboard turns and my birdhouse making, I realized the kids needed bedding and so, braving my fear and fascination, I went to Target. I don't actually go to Target enough to be able to go there alone, however, and I soon found myself absolutely frozen in the bedding aisle, thinking my kids well-being and happiness rests on them having a matching bedspread and pillow.

As a kid, I didn’t know about having rooms that looked “put together” but when I found out about it, playing at Jennifer Lee's house in 4th grade, I thought about incredibly lucky she was to have something that looked out of a magazine. Maybe it's better that I was very clear early on that my own life had absolutely nothing in common with any magazines sold in public places. But standing in the back corner of Target's second floor, the bright flourescent lights glinting off the plastic wrapped around the garish flower and polkadot bedspreads, I felt desperate. I was in the girls section. There was a boys section, with racecars on the bed spread, but there was no androgynous, neutral, or transgender section. The designs were ugly, but they weren’t so ugly that they didn’t pull me in. My kids would love them. They would be thrilled and perhaps even more thrilled about going to bed. But could I stand going in there and tucking them under those gigantic polyester daisies? I am embarrased to say how much will power it took to get me out of the bedding section and out the door without the bedspreads.

Of course as soon as I was out of the flourescent lights, and the glass doors were firmly closed behind me, I felt nothing but relief. All the power of the place was shut inside the doors. Outside the sun was shining brightly and I knew my children were healthy and happy, sleeping innocently enough under their oversize lumpy comforters and their stained grayish purple duvet covers with the clashing yellow and red pillow cases.

Death

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Jason’s grandma, Bobbie DeAntonis died. She was exactly how I'd always imagined the perfect grandmother--funny, and witty, and somehow glamorous but also absolutely clear about how much she loved her family and wasn't afraid to say it. She was 83. I was going to write about death and how I want my kids to have access to more communal experiences of it, as in Bali where kids are often as memorials and cremations, so that death is not always so other and hushed. Is there a way to get kids to really be comfortable with death without just getting them messed up. What can they really process? Plum is clear that “when you die you can see your skeleton” and that you die “when you’re really really old.” But Luna has a more nuanced view—she knows when you die you get a choice of being “ashes or compost” and that while she used to think that she would die three years before Plum because she is three years older, now she knows it’s not exact and, as she puts it, in Haiti’s earthquake even “a child died who was only twelve.” They are sad about Bobbie, but also because they weren't there it feels mostly abstract to them. Luna is mostly interested in whether Grandpa cried and whether Jason cried. How long, how loud, and where. We agree to go visit her grave in May and let the other questions come then.

Why I Want to Get Plum a Drum Set

2010-02-11T21:30:00.000-08:00

Because she is currently using our sheep.

Preschool Rant

2010-02-10T16:07:00.000-08:00

Plum and Luna with Blue Bear, who is taken care of for free
even though he never contributes one dime

Of all the systems and contraptions that have evolved to deal with the fact that the United States government encourages procreation but doesn't help take care of those babies once they're born, one of the most convoluted systems (besides health care!) has got to be preschool.

Yesterday, a woman told me that between her two children, she’d spent $80,000 on preschool. Preschool! This is a solidly middle-class pretty thrifty woman; both she and her husband work out of necessity. Her kids go to a diverse public school in an ok but not great neighborhood. They drive an old car and she doesn’t often buy new clothes. They stick to a strict food budget.

Almost everyone I know who has preschool age kids, and who sends them to preschool, spends most of their money, besides housing, on childcare. We certainly do. There is no universal preschool in California, although there free preschool for all in Georgia, Florida, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Illinois. In fact, in 2006, California voters definitely rejected a voter initiative that would have made preschool for four-year-olds a constitutional right. If you don’t qualify for Headstart, which is $22,000 for a family of four, you pay. The $22,000 is a set number, regardless of what state you live in, which is odd, considering standards of living differ. For example, if you make 22,000 in Oakland, you need to make 29,000 in New York City and only 13,000 in Montgomery, Alabama to have that same standard of living. (You can compare your own income and cost of living in various locations at http://www.bestplaces.net/. It will basically remind you what you already know—coastal cities are scary expensive.).

There are cheaper preschools. Many of them are called daycares, which means they are run out of someone’s home, and they seem to mostly be for younger preschool children, those between 1 and 3. There’s also the co-op option to keep costs down. Being the communal sort, this seemed like my perfect option. A co-op shares the work, the kids are happy, and the parents share the resources. I tried three different small co-ops with Plum, but most of them don’t account for working parent hours and those that do are basically standard large preschools with a lot of parent involvement. I thought I’d found one that was the perfect balance, but it fell apart because of parent personality differences.

The large preschool co-ops don’t feel much different than other preschools with involved parents. There’s a hired “professional” and then parents take shifts to help out and make snack. It’s somewhat cheaper than a non-co-op preschool, but not as much as I though. If you want childcare in the afternoon as well, tuition at popular co-ops in the Bay Area range between 700 and 1100 a month.

Universal Preschool has been in France since 1881 and since 1958 in Italy. 100 percent of French children go to preschool, and 92 percent in Italy, mostly in public programs. There’s free preschool in Costa Rica, and, not surprisingly, is taken for granted in Finland and Sweden, among other countries. Here in the U.S., there’s little chance it seems of it getting off the ground. President Obama has pledged to spend $10 billion more a year on "zero to five" education and his 2010 budget proposes $2 billion toward that commitment. But there’s huge resistance to Universal Preschool in the United States. Most of it comes from conservative groups that believe children don’t belong in school, they belong with their mamas, until age 5 and that if they should be in school, their parents should pay for it. Which works out okay if their mamas or other grown-ups can afford to stay home with them and don’t go crazy in the process.

Originally, I had grand visions for my kids’ preschool experience. It would be flexible, include hot organic lunches, have parents in the classroom everyday, and have goats and chickens in a big back yard. I haven’t found it and have settled for something that works okay and costs an insane amount. Universal preschool wouldn’t solve this problem as well as say, flexible cooperative work environments, neighborhood/community living, and socialized medicine, but it sure seems a lot better than where we are now.

The Joy of Food

2010-02-05T15:12:00.000-08:00

The one food I won't eat.

I don’t have any friends that eat the way I do. They pick and nibble, they contemplate a bite. I fill my plate and devour what’s in front of me, with little thought or emotion beside pleasure. The green lentil, the dark red cranberry, the sun yellow mango; salad’s especially interest me, I get giddy with all the texture, color, and flavor. But I’ll take it all (except mushrooms). Each bite seems a celebration of how utterly lucky I am to live in this climate with such variety available.

Plum couldn’t care less about food. She eats a few obligatory bites while staring at the cat or singing a few rounds of “O Hannukah,” her favorite secular year-round song. If pressed, she’ll push some food around her plate. If there’s soy sauce, mayonaise, or ketchup, she’ll dip something in it. Now can she be done?

But Luna eats like I do, with a hundred percent of her attention and pleasure. Give her a bowl of sautéed onions, a side of red pepper and cucumbers, a plate of black beans or tortellini, and she’ll eat with both hands, head down, not looking up until her plate is empty and then only pausing to ask for seconds or thirds, or fourths. If there are baked goods, muffins or scones, everything else ceases to exist. She could talk for hours comparing the muffins we make at home to those at Pete’s (her favorite cafe) to those at the bakery down the street.

Because of Luna, we bake. We put on aprons, roll up our sleeves, and get serious. Plum is our egg-breaker and Luna the measurer. We’ll try anything—apple pies and lemon tarts, sweet potato muffins and oatmeal cookies—with varied success. Plum loves the texture of it, her hands covered in butter. Luna likes the science of it, the liquid turning to batter and then of course, the satisfaction of eating and analyzing the final result. I love the ritual of it, the warmth of the kitchen, and the tradition of bringing some of whatever we make to the family or the guys who live in the cottage in the back. Jason, who grew up with baked goods, just loves the way they taste.

I didn’t grow up baking. I don’t think either of my parents baked a single thing, though they both cooked, with varying degrees of gusto. My father, a genius cook, throws his whole body into the project, emptying every bottle of sauce and cleaning out every questionable vegetable from the fridge. My mom would find one dish that she loved and she'd make it every night for months—peanut noodles, crock pot chicken, or kale beet salad—each would be repeated and repeated until she found the next dish.

But baking was something that we didn’t do. Did Jews bake? If so, no one told us. I remember buying toll house chocolate chips from the store as a teenager and following the recipe on the back, truly amazed when cookies came out of the oven.

Maybe one reason I bake now, besides that it brings my family such joy, is because it involves my family in the creation of our food. We don’t have a big enough garden to grow our own fruits and vegetables. Buying produce at the farmer market, or even getting it from the CSA is fun, but it doesn’t give us the visceral sense of how food is made. Baking is one of the best ways for my kids to get their hands in the making of our food. When they have their hands in our food, they get the full pleasure of it, without any sense of guilt or obligation. For me, that’s healthy eating.

Kitten Redux

2010-02-04T09:46:00.000-08:00

Yes, I realize this isn't a kitten.

At lunch, a friend wants to know how it’s going with Floyd and I tell her we’ve reached a detente. He gets the attic, I get my room, and we share the rest of the house. “Do you love him yet,” she wants to know. Love him? The question throws me off guard. “He’s a cat!” I have to think carefully before continuing. I’m talking to a true cat lover, with three cats at home. “I like him,” I say. But even that sometimes, honestly, feels like a stretch. The cute cat things he does—twisting and turning after invisible dust fairies, leaping up at the door to see who is coming, chasing the broom, lounging on the doll chairs—these things may make me smile but they don’t fill my heart with joy. Mostly, I like that he makes other people who I love happy. I like that he doesn’t take too much work.

My friend cocks her head and looks at me. I can tell she’s trying to decide if I lack some fundamental gene. “Could you love any animal?” She asks hopefully. “Could you love a goat?” A goat! I imagine those sweet goat eyes, the soft ears, the goaty smell, the nuzzley noses. “I could love a goat,” I say with relief. “I have loved goats in the past and could definitely love a goat again. I’d be happy to love a goat.”

She’s relieved. Our friendship saved. We return to our lunch.

Money

2010-01-20T13:00:00.000-08:00

Luna rarely asks for material things. It’s not that she doesn’t want things; she comes up with elaborate plans for machines she wants to make, parties she wants to have, and foods she wants to cook. But when it comes to “things,” I’m not sure she would know what to ask for. When she was three, we took her to Santa Cruz Beach boardwalk. All the children we passed were noshing on ice cream or french fries or some other carnival treat, and I braced myself for a request that didn’t come.

So when she had her first lesson about the emotional intensity of money today, it wasn’t pretty. Luna had seen a minature toy fairy at her friend Amalia’s house and asked me to buy to her one. I said it didn’t seem like the kind of thing I would buy—since it wasn’t either something she needed or something I was excited for her to have, but that she was welcome to buy it with her own money. Her own money consists of the coins that she’s scavenged and put in her piggy bank, plus the five dollars her grandmother sent her for her fifth birthday that she hadn’t spent yet. So she poured out her piggy bank and we went over how to count quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. After a half hour of serious counting concentration, she looked up elated. She had four dollars and thirty six cents!

Off we went to the fairy store, also known as the used clothing store down the street. I asked her if she wanted to bring her dollars, just in case the fairy cost more than $4.36. “Oh, it won’t cost more, “ she reassured me, so excited she kept shaking her money container, “it will probably cost about twenty cents. Or maybe just one cent.”

The fairies, strangely disturbing white creatures with too bright eyes, fabric wings and a cloth hook, were six dollars. Plus tax. Luna stared and stared at them. I offered to lend Luna the difference, and she could pay me back from her “dollars.” She shook her head. She didn’t want one if they were going to cost that much, but she really wanted to spend her money that she’d worked so hard to count “I have to buy something” she said, with that manic look in her eye familiar to most North Americans. We looked around at the other options. A fifteen dollar stuffed animal. A junky plastic jewelry. I suggested we consider the freaky fairy again. Luna was adamanat.” If I spent all that money, all I’d have is that fairy and what would I even do with that fairy?” It was a wonderful insight; most of the junk that’s available for children to buy is just to have in your home and sit there. There was nothing in this store to build with or garden with or paint with or to work with in any way.

Luna shoulders slumped. Her eyes filled with tears. “Mama,” she whispered, “why is everything so expensive?” I realized we should have gone to Salvation Army. Less fairies, but cheaper than the used clothing store.

Just when all hope was lost and the tears were flowing, I thought of the used bookstore across the street. We ran through the rain and in the old cardboard boxes in front of the store, found two old kids movies on VHS. One was $1 and one was $3, rock-bottom prices since no one but us has a VCR anymore. With tax, Luna’s purchases came to $4.39. They waived the last 3 cents and gave her a receipt. She put it in the piggy bank, where the money used to be. She carried the videos proudly all the way home and said that even though they were hers, really truly hers because she bought them with her own money, she’d let us watch them with her tonight.

Things I'll Miss About Oakland When We Move

2010-01-18T14:27:00.000-08:00

The Fog

The view from the deck this morning.

The fog is our snow, making everything momentarily mysterious and beautiful.

Fros and Dreds

Folks sport all kinds of halos here: dark puffy semetic curls, clouds of kinky yellow, and deep black sunsets, sometimes with a streak of pink. Oakland is full of kids with these crowns, red, black, brown, and white toppings sitting proud and loud on all kinds of heads. Then there are the dreds, long dreds, curlique dreds, spikey short dreds, down to the floor dreds one day and bald the next. Perhaps the fro isn’t far behind.

Cars

Oakland cars ride down low or bumped up high, some sporting proud the old blue license plates that declare they are original Oakland. Oakland cars thump a base like a heart beat and everything vibrates, from the playground swings to the palm trees.

The Freeway

The noodled tangled maze anchors the city but keeps it unwalkable. There’s no strolling a mile down MacArthur without crisscrossing it twice. Sure there are railroad tracks; the trains are our lighthouses, the deep wail of their horns cutting through the fog. But it’s the freeway, and which side of it you live on, that lets you and everyone else know where you stand.

The Lake

From up close, the smell of the goose poop is overpowering, and plastic bags, condoms and beer cans collect around the concrete edge of the water. Lichen and sludge thicken the water, so cars and cadavers could easily hide underneath. But from just a little further away, from the window of a car, a plane, or a nearby apartment building, the lake sparkles and shines. The water is a welcoming blue green and the blur of white goose feathers a celebration. From this view, the lake is the “jewel” of Oakland they put on the old postcards and the hills above it are the stalwart matrons, protecting our fair city and discouraging the entrance of any unworthy suitor.

Gardening

2010-01-16T14:59:00.001-08:00

Plum and Luna gardening

and what are they planting?

Pacifiers of course.

Oh, and a raspberry bush on top.

Come next summer, will it grow pacifiers that taste like raspberries or berries that taste like rubber?

Of Leaves and Children Left

2010-01-09T13:29:00.000-08:00

Our clean front steps

Last night the girls spent the night at grandmas and I was amazed when I woke up and it was morning, six full hours of sleep later. I like going away from my children, but I don’t like being here when they’re gone. The house is too accustomed to them, my rhythms too attuned. Everything looks forlorn; the stool in the bathroom is shoved to the side, the toys abandoned and somehow already gathering dust. Even Floyd seems at a loss, giving himself a “time out” in the corner of the kitchen and refusing to eat. When they’re gone, there seems to be nothing in the house, but them.
Then, when I’m out in the world, a whole world that not only doesn’t revolve around them but doesn’t seem to require their assistance, I’m shocked by how less excited everyone is to see me than at home. I don’t need the full-run into my arms hugs that I get at home, along with a rushed and garbled report on everything that’s happened since I last was there, but no one even smiles. Is this why we have children, so someone will smile at us? Then, when they’re teenagers, are we completely out-of-luck.
Okay, I convince myself I don’t need anyone to smile at me. After all, I am a well-focused lean fighting machine. In my 24 hours of time before the girls return, I have a lot of things to write, organize, create, and clean. But first, I run off to bikram yoga, which is Jason’s idea of hell, like stretching your hamstrings in an unairconditioned New York Subway car in the height of summer. He suggests if I just want to exercise and be warm for a while, I could just sweep the leaves on our front steps for an hour and he’ll make me a cup of warm tea. But I go anyway, leaving till later are continuing larger discussion about why people don’t just do more physical labor instead of paying someone else to do it while they go sweat miserably in their gym or yoga class. In this case, it’s Jason who sweeps the leaves, and doesn’t get paid, but gets to rock out on his headphones and be with the knowledge of his superior karma.

I Hate My Kitten

2010-01-06T16:15:00.001-08:00

Plum and Floyd

I can say this here because my children won’t see it, because it would break their hearts, but it’s true. I resent his smell, his presence underfoot in our small house, and most completely his nocturnal nature. At this point, after nearing the end of six basically sleepless years, there is no creature I want to see licking my toes at 4:45 in the morning, I don’t care how green eyed and furry.

Jason wonders if it’s cultural or genetic. I was raised briefly with outside animals, chickens and goats, but never anything that comes inside. None of my family members own pets, not even fish. It’s not that we dislike them or would ever be actively mean to a domesticated animal, it’s just that they seem very far away, another species even, and we’re all pretty human and environment focused. I’m not completely heartless; I love wild animals. Brown bears are gorgeous. I’d be excited to swim with the dolphins. I could watch siamangs for hours, and imagine I would love to sit with one and share a banana. Baby pandas make me cry. I love seeing birds, as long as they’re flying far above me. But animals don’t seem to belong in human houses and whenever I see them, of any kind, I cringe.

We ended up with Floyd, the orange five-month old kitten who is the object of my wrath, the usual way. A combination of parental guilt and child persistence. Luna’s best friend moved out. A therapist we saw once thought it might be good for Luna’s anxiety. Plum seemed scared of cats and while I didn’t want one, I didn’t want her to be afraid of them. Jason grew up with cats and loves them. And then a mama kitten had a litter on our front stairs. And I thought, really, how hard could it be? It’s a cat, not a newborn with colic or a rocket ship that needs fixing.

Well, having a kitten isn’t that hard, but it’s insidious. Floyd’s as good a kitten as they come, patiently letting Plum twirl him around for endless rounds of “O Hannukah” and submitting himself to Luna’s pyschoanalysis (“Floyd is starting to get more comfortable with us because he feels like we really love him but he’s still a little nervous sometimes.”). He doesn’t intentionally bite or scratch and he’s relaxed, for a cat, with new people and situations. He’s really all we could ask for. But he’s still a cat, with cat smells and cat needs and he seems to be most cat like in the middle of the night, when he wants to purr loudly right on top of me. We try closing our door, but we already have the kids door closed and want to be able to hear them at night. Also, he meows so loudly if he’s not in our room that I’m sure the next door neighbors can hear him.

Swearing at him, alas, seems to have no effect. Once, he ate my breakfast from my bag as I was rushing out the door. Seeing nibbled napkin and egg, I yelled, “Fuck you, Floyd.” Of course, Luna and Plum started crying, “Mama, he’s only a kitten.” I apologized to them both, and to Floyd, and slinked off to work in all my ogre-ness.

I look at this orange and white creature, dancing in Luna or Plum’s arms, and I think, wow, he’s going to be around for 18 years, give or take, whether I like it or not. I think that about my children too, but generally it seems like a short period of time when I look at the girls and forever when I look at Floyd. Still, I’m resigned to the fact that Floyd is, in all likelihood, here to stay. We’ve even given him Jason’s last name, DeAntonis, so Jason isn’t the only boy in the family and the end of his patriarchal line (though given that Floyd has been fixed, it’s not much consolation). We make our peace, me and Floyd. We’re moving his set-up to the attic tonight so he’ll have a further away place to be at night. I imagine, in time, growing used to him, maybe even feeling fondly toward him, especially once he’s learned to leave me alone at night. Love, though, that’s a different matter. For now at least I continue to reserve it for humans and wild things.

With My Children By My Side

2009-12-27T15:25:00.000-08:00

Plum woke up with first light and called for me. When I came into the room, I nuzzled her curls that smelled like wet cat. She said, her voice thick with sleep and snot and the sadness of a dream, “Did you say you were going to work today?”
“No,” I said, “I’m staying with you.” With that, she let herself return to a fragile sleep until the light was too bright to ignore. Then we got up together and went into the kitchen to greet the day.
There are moments, like this morning, when it is enough to be with my children in the beauty of the gray light, with the waves crashing and foaming white, the vultures soaring as graceful as hawks, and the sky layered with dark clouds, bright blue, and fog.
And there are moments in each day, no matter how beautiful the sky or sweet-smelling the girls, when it is not enough and I long to escape and have only my words and my work. I want to move and talk fast, without waiting for anyone to catch up. I want to follow my own urgency without being swayed by a need for a snack, a nap, or a bandaid.
According to many surveys of working mothers, we’re all striving for balance, but I don’t want balance. I don’t want moderation and I most definitely don’t want compartmentalization. Instead of an hour for getting kids to school and then a few hours for work, and then ten minutes for snuggling before dinner and bedtime, I’d like all sorts of kids running in and out, playing over in one corner of the field, while I’m writing and organizing in another, but I can look up and see them whenever I need to and they can come over whenever they nee to. I just want us to follow our own rhythms enough to discover what they are.
Is this what some criticize when they say women “want it all?” It’s hard to imagine anyone honestly wanting less than it all. It doesn’t seem any more selfish than wanting “balance.” How twisted to live in a culture where work and children are such separate spheres we pretend one doesn’t exist when we enter the other.
Before I had kids, I knew I didn’t want to narrow my worldview and begin to believe that my children were more important than any other parents’ children in the world. When I went back to work six weeks after Luna and two months after Plum, the thought of focusing all my time specifically on these two amazing beings, among all the beings out there, seemed a rare privilege, rather than a selfless sacrifice. Taking care of my children continues to be both supremely satisfying and also limiting for me precisely because it is such a narrowly circumscribed circle. Within it, I nourish myself and them without much distinction, we talk and question the world. Then, renewed I am eager to go out into world and affect it, ideally with my children by my side…or at least across the field.

hibernation

2009-12-26T15:42:00.000-08:00

Outside rain and dark gray clouds, it could be five in the morning or at night. I'm going to make a dinosaur book with nephew Jacobi and let Plum sleep, then make noodles and turkey soup and go back to sleep and wait for clarity. Would it be so wrong to sleep for days? Perhaps a night, a day, and a night again? A night without coughs, or crying children, or meowing cats. Heat and the sound of the waves. I've been trying to think my way to what's next but now I'm giving up on thought.

Solstice

2009-12-21T16:58:00.000-08:00

This winter solstice, we are in the snow, surrounded by redwoods, singing and dancing in the early darkness. Luna put on her pajamas at 2pm and was determined to stay in them for the rest of the day as part of her commitment to being warm and cozy, our winter solstice family tradition. We'll drink hot something and talk about the earth tilting away from the sun here in the northern hemisphere and how in the upper reaches of Alaska there is no light today and how our friends Sarah and Alia who live in New Zealand will stay up later and wake up earlier becuase today is their shortest night. Such relief to have a winter holiday I believe in without reserve. And though I can't feel the earth's tilt, I can picture it in a way I can't picture a person being the one and only son of god. The darkness of the night is indisputable. The need for friends, warm food, and light elemental. The orange circles the grapefruit in the makeshift solar system we've created on the kitchen floor and I know that, starting tomorrow, each day will be a little longer and a little lighter.

Being There

2009-12-17T13:52:00.000-08:00

My compromise for the winter holiday season is to do everything, even though I believe, spiritually and scientifically, in none of it -- with the exception of winter solstice and my birthday. This is because I can't bear to miss out on anything. I really can't. I've diagnosed the problem and the problematic side effects; I'm always rushing late to something and leaving early to get to the next thing and not actually experiencing the thing itself. Plus, I really want to look "put together" occasionally, but the hazard of being everywhere is somewhere in that process, my shirt always gets stained and my hair falls out of its hairstyle and my coat matches nothing but my underwear. It's not a material greed; I don't need to have it all, I just want to be at it all.

You'd think, as the Senior Editor at a Buddhist publisher, I would have learned something about just being in the present moment. But after all this time, I don't really believe that the present moment is a place I can hang out that along except for special occasions.

I can't seem to stop myself. It's gotten to the point where I actually do a little dance and celebrate when I manage to either not do something or to put it off to another time when it doesn't conflict with seven other things. This need to experience everything even if only a drop of it, is, according to common sense and the man I live with, why I don't sit still and write enough. I keep jumping up to look around and make sure I haven't missed something outside the window.

Take tonight for example. Hannukah at our house is the plan. Just family and a couple of friends. But would it really be too much to add a last-minute dash up to Tilden park to take the kids on the merry go round after dinner? And could I take the older one to the Nutcracker after the littler one falls asleep. Also, maybe after work and before I make dinner, I can make some candles out of beeswax, one for everybody.

Looking Jewish

2009-12-16T09:28:00.001-08:00

Luna, the other day, told me she didn’t think her fourth grade buddy, Claire, was Jewish because she didn’t “look” Jewish. For some reason, these conversations always happen when I’m driving. Perhaps this is good, because I can just tighten my hands on the steering wheel and breathe for a moment while avoiding the UPS truck, before I answer. The down side is I usually still end up getting so absorbed I miss my exit.

I asked her what looking Jewish was. She said thin and light skinned with dark curly hair. Basically, describing me. Perhaps this is because she has pointed out a number of times during the past week, I’m 100 percent Jewish while she is half. Sometimes she says this means I am lucky, other times she says it means I am unlucky, because I would have been killed if I lived in “ancient times.” This comes up twice a year, when someone comes into her class to talk about Hannukah and when someone comes in to talk about Passover. I rattled off the name of all the blond, straight-haired Jews we know (about 3). Also, the blond curly haired Jews and the dark-skinned, straight dark haired Jews, which added up to a pretty significant number.

Whenever Luna throws out one of her sweeping observations, I usually counter with the exceptions, but I don’t know if it works. For example, when she told me all black women were loud, after an interaction with our, notably loud, next door neighbor, I rattled off all the relatively quiet black women we knew, she insisted they were actually very loud (including my stepmother, who spends 80 percent of the time when we’re with her silently reading books and the other 20 percent sleeping) and all the loud white men we knew. Eventually, she settled on saying that not all black women were loud, but the ones that she knew that were loud were very loud.

With the Jews, it got a little harder. Maybe all Jewish people don’t look alike now, she conceded, but they must have in “ancient times,” because how else would they have known who to fight, in the case of Hannukah, or who to make slaves, in the case of Passover, or who to round-up and kill, in the case of the Second World War. She had a point. We talked about Jews in each of these places often looking like the other people in these places, but having different customs, and different beliefs. This didn’t go over well. How would people know they had those different beliefs or different customs if they didn’t tell them? And what is Jewish anyway, is it a religion? If so, what do they believe and since, we don’t believe it, does that make us not Jewish. I know these are not new questions, but they are new to Luna, and currently unresolved by me. I don’t believe in the Jewish God as he is laid out in any of the texts and am horrified, angered, and heart-broken by what Israel has done to Palestine and the Palestinians, and yet, am happy to light the hannukah lights, and even sing “baruch atah adonai” while lighting them, with my Swiss-Dutch-Italian guy and our wacky “half jewish looking” children singing along.

Sleep. Writing. The Inauguration.

2008-11-12T13:50:00.000-08:00

I wonder if I would find it easier to finish this novel if I'd had a decent night's sleep. I wonder if it's too late to get Plum to sleep through the night. She has no interest in money (given the current economic conditions in my house, this is a good thing), so I can't pay her, she's immune to pleas and tears, and she's too young to be bribed by chocolate. Because I have a five year old, I know (hope/pray) that one day soon she will stop waking up at 5am, but I don't know if I can wait until that day. Also, even if she sleeps, I've become so habituated from almost 6 years of being awake at night I don't know how I'd ever go back.

Does the world look differently through the eyes of the well-slept? Are the streets shinier, the flowers brighter? Is it like when I put in my contacts, only sparklier?

On a different note. I, apparently along with every other person who voted for Obama, would like to go to the inauguration. But when I wrote my plea to Senator Feinstein, going into detail on the last time I was at an inauguration in DC (protesting Bush's occupation in 2000) and how I'd dragged my children to snowy Nevada to charm some actual Republicans, all I got back was an autoresponder telling me I was a sucker and that the tickets were all spoken for. I'd grab my ball gown and just go anyway, staying with my good friends Xan and Cheranne and their lovely son Kai (who by the way, wouldn't be able to adopt if they lived in they lived in Arkansas), but I'd rather this be the first time I was actually invited to a DC official event instead of just protesting one.

From the Battle in Seattle to the White House

2008-11-07T13:14:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about the large-scale successful community organizing that I've done and what made it successful. I keep coming back to the similarities between the 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization and Barack Obama's election on Tuesday. While the differences were the two are obvious--one was an example of large scale direct action protest against the powers-that-be, the other was a centrally-organized disciplined movement to get a particular person in a traditional position of power--the similarities are also striking.

In both cases, there was a recognition of the need for people to be given responsibility to organize and lead direct action. In Seattle, we were "affinity groups" who made our own plans, and also trained other affinity groups were using the same language and information. In the Obama campaign, individuals could organize fundraisers using the site, make calls and knock on doors alone or with a group, get trained, and make personal decisions about if and where to travel to a swing state and what to do there. There were roles for lawyers, writers, artists, and children. Similarly, though no one could call the Battle in Seattle "centralized," information on what to do and how to do it was readily available. Communication centers operated 24/7 where people could get trained in everything from legal observing and emergency medical assistance to how to bolt cutting.

Equally important, the stated goal in each case was both specific and broad-able to be summed up in a single sentence: "Stop the WTO" and "Obama = Change." This allowed for the broadest possible coalition building, the Teamsters and Turtles alliance in Seattle, and the broad coalition of labor, young activists and progressives, African-Americans, Latinos, women, working, and middle-class people who propelled Obama's victory on Tuesday.

What that broad victory means is that of course, when it comes to the details, folks are going to be disappointed. Many of us were likely voting for very different things that we each called "Obama." Andas I learned from Seattle, that's ok. This moment is just this moment, this amazing beautiful triumphant moment. It can not be replicated exactly. It can only be savored, learned from, and then tucked inside for the next battle.

Waking Up. "The Gears of the Universe Have Shifted."

2008-11-06T12:01:00.000-08:00

Woke up Wednesday morning at Circus Circus Hotel in Reno. After working at the precincts until 7pm, we'd come home and watched Obama's victory speech and then fell asleep in front of the tv. It's 5AM and Luna is awake, staring at me. She whispers, "Obama really won!" and then goes back to sleep.

The first moment I can remember when hope and history rhyme. All the organizing and writing work that I have done my whole life to this point has been to put brakes on abuses of power and to ensure there was some written record of people's resistance. Obama's victory is a true victory, the closest I have ever come to seeing the world that I inhabit reflected in the White House. I am dazed, fragile, elated, and awed. And I also continue to believe that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Today, tomorrow, this week, I want only to celebrate what we have done. I don't want to hear the naysayers, I don't want to yet try and influence decisions. I only want to walk around this city and feel what it is like knowing that I voted along with the 70 million Americans of every color, gender, age, sexual orientation, and physical ability. We will not be able to fix all the destruction that has been wrought in the past decades, but we can at least contain it and move towards creating a culture, a country, that truly supports its people. Next week, I promise to roll up my sleeves and begin the work again. Today, just breathing feels like celebration.

Tell me your thoughts, reactions, emotions today.

Tiny Changes at the Last Minute

2008-09-17T14:38:00.000-07:00

I am at the sink, washing the dishes, my shirt wet wear my belly is up against the lip of the sink, looking out at the scraggly black crows that roost on the neighbors roof and thinking life is harder than it needs to be here, in this city, this country, this neighborhood.

In an effort to change our planet’s destructive course, I am trying to make tiny changes at the last minute. For example, this week, I tried to not add any more plastic to our house. None. I just wanted to go for a week without buying plastic. That seemed relatively easy. We don’t buy much plastic to start out with. But it proved impossible. I needed batteries, the batteries only came in a container with a hard plastic cover. We needed groceries. I had brought our own cloth bags for putting the groceries in but forgot to bring my own plastic bags to put the bulk items in. Not buy oatmeal, or not buy it in bulk and buy the more expensive tin made out of other non-renewable resources, or just use a freakin new plastic bag already. Then there’s the problem of yogurt. All the yogurt seems to come in plastic containers, of which we already have 10,000 of at home. My lovely friend Maria makes her own yogurt, which solves this problem. However, I still haven’t figured out how to take a shower every morning and get out of the house with a one year old and a five year old by 8:15 so I’m figuring yogurt making might be beyond me.

As I said, I know this is a little thing, something most people don’t have the time or resources to worry over, but it infuriates me that I can’t even do this one thing. I tried a week without a cell phone. That worked fine, except that I spent too much of the time worried that something happened to one of my kids and no one could reach me to tell me about it. I am working really hard (so far unsucessfully) on figuring out how to get Plum to doctor’s appointments in San Rafael, Luna to school in Oakland, and me to work in Berkeley without driving so much.

Sometimes it seems like the tiny changes don’t work. Like I just need to throw the whole urban life out the window and start over somewhere else. Preferably in a country with health care. Other times that seems like giving up, and I feel obligated to keep slogging through.

The Horror, The Horror

2008-09-10T13:11:00.000-07:00

Today's repulsive low point can be summed up by my Google search:

"killing maggots by flushing down the toilet, effective?"

Just be glad I'm too nauseated to post a picture.

Good Kids, Bad Kids, and Sarah Palin

2008-09-09T21:56:00.000-07:00

It's hard for me to even write the name because I'm going from obsession to overdose on Sarah Palin, with not much in between. Everywhere I go, it's what people are talking about and everyone seems to see in her their own version of their worst nightmare. Plum's physical therapist, Anat, from Israel, is reminded of Hitler. For another friend, watching the crowd cheer for Palin was like watching a lynch mob. For me, watching her was reminiscent of the worst parts of junior high, combined with memories ofa summer when I got lost in Italy and ended up stuck in a monastery in Tuscany with the meanest prettiest sorority girls the state of Georgia had to offer. Probably the only helpful thing my mother told me during junior high was that, no matter what happened, the rest of my life wouldn't be like junior high school. And it better not be. So I'm sending Obama the money I was saving for Luna's braces (her dentist had told me I better start now), driving to Nevada during election weekend to drive voters to the polls, phone banking, fundraising, and looking for more effective ideas. We might have to outbad the baddies. It was the only thing that worked in junior high and, despite what my mother said, things haven't changed as much as I was hoping they had.

Oh, the good kids bad kids thing is a different story. It will have to wait until the next post. Once I get all worked up about Palin, I can't switch gears as easily as I thought I could.

My-Kind-of-Jewish Day Camp

2008-08-27T22:34:00.000-07:00

It’s the end of summer and for many other parents that we know their summers seemed to involve some kind of learn about/celebrate your heritage summer camp. We have friends who sent their girls to a two week camp designed for Japanese-American kids to learn about their Japanese heritage. The kids learn how to make sushi, write their name in Japanese, wear a kimono, and make daruma dolls, where you color in one eye when you make a wish and another when it comes true. Two of our friends went so far as to start their own multicultural summer camp, becoming the only Jamaican-Canadians in upper Illinois, that we know of anyway. Another friend sent her daughter to Camp Kee Tov, where they learn Hebrew songs, celebrate sabbath on Friday night and learn the meaning of ruach, which is apparently something like team spirit.

I went to Camp Kee Tov when I was ten and I remember little except waiting for the bus with my friend Ericka, tie-dying our t-shirts, and singing “The Cutest Guy I Ever Saw,” along with some songs about the Israelites. I also remember that our “bunk” was called The Flying Zions, a name that horrifies me now given the Israeli-imposed apartheid in Palestine. I’m surprised my parents, who couldn’t tell a ruach from a roach, sent me. But I can understand the appeal of sending your kid to some place to learn about their cultural history. Too bad it’s so difficult to separate nationalism/propaganda from cultural appreciation.

I started thinking about what kind of camp Luna and Plum would go to if there was a camp that was going to give them insight and training into their particular parents culture. Both my parents are the fleeing-immigrant most-of –the-family-dead kind of Jewish. My dad’s family was from Germany and my mom’s from Russia and Poland, but the traditions they passed on weren’t the speaking Hebrew and lighting candles kind. Day One of the summer camp would have to be devoted to the skill of arguing. Prizes would be given for the longest running argument, the best argument, the most outrageous argument, and other obscure categories. Besides verbal skills, body language would be taught, including eye rolls, lip pursing, and, for advanced students, the dismissive glance.

Day Two would be making food for at least 30, even if you only have a table of four. Making sure there is enough food is a very serious part of my family’s cultural background. We pack for emergencies, which means if we’re going to the park for a couple of hours we bring enough food so that we’re covered if we can’t get home for a week. Day Two Electives could include “Overpacking a Bag,” “The Intricacies of Olive Oil,” and Rice: How Much is Too Much.

Day’s Three through Five aren’t set yet, but would likely include Worrying at Both the Individual and World-Wide Scale, “Passing, Pretending, and Other Ways of Getting By,” and “Male Answering Syndrome: Not Just for Men Anymore!” The details will get worked out closer to the time. Historically, my family doesn’t plan too much.

Of course, if they spend a week at my family’s day camp, they’ll have to spend a week at Jason’s family’s as well. It will make a nice contrast. While my family’s day camp will be held somewhere in the desert, Jason’s family camp would have to be in some icy mountains. Descended from Swiss-Danish stock on his mother’s side and English/Italian on his father’s, the Northern European side seems to have won out, culturally speaking. Since Jason’s family actually knows how to make a lot of things, their summer camp would involve more traditional camp activities: animal petting and perhaps shearing , weaving, and some time spent framing a barn. Evenings might be devoted to the art of communicating without saying anything or even moving your face too much. Table manners will be encouraged and plate sharing discouraged. But as at their other camp, they’ll be plenty of food. As befits the grandchildren of a former Dairy Princess, cheese will play a central role.

My children will likely return from their two weeks of cultural-heritage appreciation slightly dazed. Their may be some challenges reconciling all their new skills in their daily lives. When to burst into impassioned tears and when to throw out an icy stare? What to have for a snack, tofu or fodue? But isn’t that what many kids have to do anyway? Navigate conflicting cultural expectations , figure out what works when, and figure out, somewhere in the middle of it all, what fits right for them.

The Fortuitous Arrival of the Cat Lady

2008-07-09T11:45:00.000-07:00

We’ve upgraded from Buzzy the fly to stray kittens, at least temporarily as only a cold-hearted mofo wouldn’t feed the mother and five babies (Cow-cow, Mousey, Ice, Jasmine, and Bip) who made their home on our lower yard last week.

It was all fine and good for a day or so. They stayed outside, let us pet them, and didn’t make any noise. Luna was getting over being terrified of them and Plum was learning not to step on their tails. But then my dad arrived for dinner with ominous stories of kittens overrunning the block and killing all the birds. Action needed to be taken.

I foolishly thought I could find some kind of service that would come to our house, spay them, and then cart them off to be adopted by loving families. After all, they were cute, stray instead of feral, and mewed contentedly when patted by small children. No such luck. Apparently, March to September is kitten season and every shelter is overrun with kittens. East Bay SPCA had in bold letters on its website: “Due to the overwhelming number of cats and kittens in our care at this time, we are not accepting cats into our program.” I felt like a hyper soccer mom trying to get my kids into a good preschool. Berkeley Animal Rescue referred me to Oakland Animal Rescue which referred me to the Feral Cat Hotline, despite the fact that these guys aren’t feral. They told me to continue as is, not spay them until they were weaned, and to give them a call next week.

Meanwhile, back at home, the cats had become the neighborhood kids’ full-time occupation: feeding the cats, running after the cats, standing at the window, pointing to the cats and shouting. At eight in the morning, the girls in their pajamas and the neighbor kids—DJ, his cousin DJ, Darineesha, and LaRon, were out playing with the kittens. LaRon had already talked to his mom and grandma about adopting one. They all were excited to spend the day “cat-sitting” while we were at work. I sat down on the stairs. Between the kittens and the ants, I was overrrun.

Just then, a nice middle-aged lady in a pink shirt and a long white pony tail started walking up our stairs. It was clear, even before I saw that she was carrying a tidy little bag of cat food, that she was our Fairy Cat Lady. She lived down the street, she said, and she’d noticed the arrival of the kittens. She offered her phone number and said she would come next week and take all the cats to be spayed. The mama cat rubbed against her leg and Mousey jumped over her shoe.We could adopt one or two if we wanted, she said, and she would make sure to find homes for the rest. She gave the mama one last pet, and then, before I could ask her name, she was gone.
Thank you anonymous Fairy Cat Lady. You’ll be hearing from me soon.

Power Ants

2008-07-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

I woke this morning to a kitchen covered in ants. A thick black line of them roped their way around the kitchen window, down past the clean dishes, and over to the electric kettle. As soon as I wiped them away, the reappeared, a second army of them, immediately taking the place of their fallen colleagues. The ants were emblematic of the general messiness of the house this morning. The balance between complete chaos and semi-order had tipped decidedly, and not in my favor. It was at this moment, when I was contemplating lying on the floor and crying (except that the floor was too dirty) that Luna looked up at me and said, “Mom, I love our house.”

“You do?” I asked hopefully. “Why?”

She smiled. “Because this is Ant Town and ants are one of my power animals.”

Rain

2008-07-06T21:25:00.000-07:00

If you get any sleep tonight, dream of rain; we need it so.

Buzzy, The Perfect Pet

2008-06-24T10:36:00.000-07:00

The downstairs neighbors are allergic to cats, dogs require walking, fish die, Jason kiboshed my idea of getting a goat, and roosters are illegal in Oakland so up until this weekend our house had been (blissfully) petless. But now that's all changed. This past weekend, Luna and Plum adopted Buzzy, a fly on our window. Luna named him (her?) and she and Plum spent at least twenty minutes watching Buzzy stand on our bedroom window and rub his tiny hands. Plum, at eighteen months, said excitedly, "Buzzy eating!" Perhaps he was.

When it became clear that Buzzy needed to be "taken for a walk" we opened the window and Buzzy flew out. A few hours later, we went out to the deck and look who was there, Buzzy! (or, most likely, some relative of Buzzy's indistinguishable to the human eye). Buzzy doesn't require a special diet, doesn't need us to accompany him on walks, never will need to go to the vet, rarely wakes us up at night, requires no additional cleaning up, and seems to come and go at will, but we can always find him again. He's a renewable resource and the perfect pet, although we have had to make a new rule: all pets, including Buzzy, are to live outside.

Luna vs. Ms. Kerber

2008-06-22T22:30:00.000-07:00

Ms. Kerber is a very nice woman who teaches at Luna's preschool. She isn't one of Luna's teachers, but she teaches in the room next door so each morning on the way to class we say, "Good Morning, Ms. Kerber" and when I pick her up, I say, "See you tomorrow, Ms. Kerber" or some variation. That's about the extent of our relationship, with occasional five minute conversations here and there.

But Luna wants to know who I love more, her and Jason and Plum or Ms. Kerber. I think this supposed to be an easy question, a way for Luna to hear how much I love her and our family, but it just doesn't feel right to tell Luna I love her more than I love Ms. Kerber. It's not just that if Ms. Kerber was my daughter, and she is somebody's daughter, I'd love her more, and I don't want to give a platitude about loving everybody in the world, because while that's true on some level, that level of generality isn't really what Luna's asking about. It's mostly that it doesn't feel right to give her the idea that love is measurable that way, as if you could fill up a measuring cup and see if you had 8 ounces or 12. Also, given that I have two daughters, measuring love at all seems like it would just be the beginning of a tar pit I don't want to fall into. So, after some hemming and hawing, I came up with an all-purpose answer that I'm pretty happy with.

"Luna," I said, "There is no one in the world, not a single person, that I love more than you. And there's not a single person I love more than papa and Plum."

That seemed to work, since I think that really, that's all she wanted to know. Now, if she comes back and asks if there's anyone in the world I love more than Ms. Kerber, I might as well just dive right into the tar.

Impermanence Part 2: The Love Exception

2008-06-22T22:20:00.001-07:00

Driving home from school, Luna says to me, apropos of nothing discernable to the human eye or ear, "Mama, you know I won't always love you."

Despite the blood gushing from the gun wound straight to the heart, I manage to ask, somewhat calmly, just to make sure I heard right, "You won't or you will?"

"I won't," she says, picking her nose.

"Why not?"

"Because, remember how you told me nothing is permanent? So love isn't permanent either."

I breathe and check the rear view mirror for traffic. "Well, actually, I say, love is an exception. I will always love you but that love may change shape, just as you change shape. You know how you grow and change? Well, my love grows and changes, but it's always there."

"Even if you're dead?" she asks.

"Yes, even if I'm dead. Because just as nothing's permanent, everything is permanent, even as it changes shape, it doesn't dissapear. Remember, how we talked about compost?" Compost comes up a lot in our house. "Food changes to compost changes to dirt changes to something different growing."

"Okay," she says. "So nothing is permanent but love. Can we get a snack now?"

What's Running Through My Mind at 3AM

2008-05-18T21:12:00.000-07:00

When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.
--Adam Kokesh, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Winter Soldier on the Hill

Should Goat Milking Be Required?

2008-04-27T22:17:00.000-07:00

Growing up, my mother used to say that the only thing she wanted for me was for me "to be happy." This was infuriating it that it was so blatantly false. It's not that she didn't really truly just want me to be happy, but she also had very specific and immutable ideas about what should and could cause said happiness. Gymnastics, playing the piano, singing, getting a lot of sleep, and resting a lot--all of these things seemed to figure large in her sense of happiness but not, unfortunately, in mine. I rarely wanted to sleep. I was unexceptional at gymnastics and worse than that on the piano. Apparently, I sang off-key. The two things I was good at were not that impressive--reading and arguing--didn't seem to figure in her happiness plan.

And yet yesterday, at the fabulous Slide Ranch, Luna had absolutely no interest in milking Fiona the white goat and I really considered how to force her. After pleading, cajoling, and begging didn't work, I gave up. All the impatient parents with their thrilled-to-be-goat-milking children were about to push us over anyhow, and I couldn't imagine how to truly force her to do it and what a horrible parent I would be. But I truly felt and still feel (even after sadly parting from Fiona) that she'll be happier if she's milked a goat. Milking a goat was one of the greater pleasures of my childhood at Black Bear and the smell, sound, and feel of the goats is imprinted somewhere deep inside me. In me, but not in her.

This reminded me that I have not just milking goats but a whole set of ideas in my head, many I'm not fully conscioius of, of what are the requisite ingredients for happiness and that pre-being a parent, I'd resolved not to push them onto my yet unborn children. Of course now that they're here, it's a bit harder. I'm willing to remind myself that she is a completely different person than me, with her own quite separate requirements for happiness, but I'm not giving up. Perhaps next year, we'll try again, if Fiona will still have us.

I hella sorta love oakland

2008-04-12T21:34:00.000-07:00

everyone loves the "I hella love oakland" t-shirts, at least I do, but oakland itself, I have to say, I've been feeling not quite so fine about. I have loved oakland, and I want to love it again, but the burning winnebago in front of my house (bringing with it two fire trucks, five police cars, two electrical lines, and one scorched lawn) is making it hard. That and the whole school thing (see previous post) and the whole murder rate thing. and that no matter how many times I call and try to fix it myself and offer to work with my neighbors to put it up, there's no street light on my block.
And lake merrit is beautiful if you don't mind gazillion droplets of goose poop. I've dated enough people with "potential" that I know potential isn't enough. Come on' Oakland, start working for my love.

snot glorious snot

2008-04-12T21:32:00.000-07:00

every time I think I might be able to think, I get sunk in snot--currently the neon green coming out of Plum's nose and eyes, yes eyes, and keeping us up at night. there's got to be more to life than snot, but sometimes I just can't see it.

interbeing and impermanence

2008-04-06T21:08:00.000-07:00

just come from putting the girls to sleep. Especially at night, they both act as if they'd happily be reabsorbed into my body, back into the womb where they could go everywhere I go and as Luna says "never have to not be with you." Yikes. Is there any gentle way to explain caustrophobia?

I'm trying every way I can to get them to understand interbeing--that they already are part of me whereever they are and where I go, just as I'm part of them. Plum just looks at me and laughs and says, "no," the way she does to anything, regardless of her level of agreement. Luna says, "I know Mama, but I still want to be where you are."

the other conversation we're having over and over again is about permanence. Luna wants to know--is this pen permanent? Is lemon juice permanent? Is almond butter permanent? After about a thousand of these questions, I got a bit tired and so explained to her that nothing is permanent but change--we all decay, change, become something else, like the compost in our bin that used to be our food and will soon be our flowers. she likes this idea, that even Sharpies don't last forever, and it also means she can get new clothes one day soon because hers will disintegrate.

we don't need no education

2008-04-02T20:59:00.001-07:00

my shift key is sticking, so excuse the occasional lack of caps. Now that Plum is officially ok, at least for now, I can put a little attention on the fact that Luna is about to enter school--you know that place where all the socialization and trauma happens. Oh, and maybe some book learning. due to the nature of the times, our lives, and her preschool she's already way more socialized than I ever was. Now that she's learned to read everything in sight (billboards, milk cartons), even having no TV in the house doesn't do much to keep her from absorbing millions of brand names a day. (Mom, that says "Ipod." Mom, why is this milk called "Clover"?) I mean, my god, she's even gone with a friend to Princesses on Ice, something I didn't even know about until, oh, this year.

still, she's been in a loving montessori classroom for the past 3 years, where they use a peace rose when they need to work things out and "trouble isn't real" as Luna likes to say. elementary school seems different, real different. In elementary school, trouble is real. at least that's how I remember it, and I went to the hippiest berkeley public schools my parents could find.

given that we live in Oakland, a city whose reality and "potential" seem to be in direct opposition to each other, we have limited choices. there are about 8 "good" regular public schools, which you either have to live in that neighborhood for or can try to get into by lottery. Even these schools have serious problems, like all Oakland schools are in receivership so there's no local decision making and also they all have to follow something called Open Court, which seems to mean dulling the kids so much that they perform ok on standardized tests. we didn't get in anyway. then there are public charter schools, one of which we really liked and she got into (another lottery), and private schools, one of which she got into and they offered us enough financial aid that we can even consider it.

Neither has goats, a big mud puddle, open classrooms, or even live music, which makes it hard for me to think of sending my daughter there for the next 9 years (and then Plum for 9 years as well, some of those, thankfully, overlapping). but they do have some different advantages. to be gone into next post so that I can hopefully get some random stranger feedback but now alas a baby wakes and I'm off.

Talking Politics in a Politically Illiterate Country

2008-02-08T13:41:00.000-08:00

This week I was having lunch with a dear friend. It was "Super Tuesday" and, as we hadn't seen each other in a while, I asked her who she was going to vote for. She was undecided she said, and we proceeded to talk about politics for a while, ultimately disagreeing on some things. It was so nice to talk politics with someone who disagrees with me (even though are differences are, by national and probably even local standards, quite slight). Especially to talk politics with someone thoughtful, knowledgable, and confident who disagrees with me.

This reminded me of a different lunch a few weeks ago, when I tried to talk politics with someone else. This was a man I've known for four years or so, in a semi-professional context. He's a good guy, lives in Walnut Creek, super active in the rotary, bring prosthestic hands to people around the world, raising money for kids in Vietnam to have necessary ear and eye operations, etc.

When I asked him what he thought of the current crop of Presidential wannabees, he said he didn't think we should talk about it. When I encouraged him more, we got into a discussion about the merits (or lack thereof in his opinion) of public education, national healthcare ("a disasterous idea" he thought), and the role of government. We didn't end up convincing each other, or even really listening very well to each other, but still, I was glad to talk. Which brings me to my point: why do so many people hate to talk politics with anyone (especially friends, family members, colleagues) who disagrees with them? How the hell are people going to change their minds if they don't even talk to each other? And isn't this why we have a society that treats politics like a celebrity reality television show as opposed to a society where people talk politics in the grocery lines, on the bus, at the coffee shops, at the daycare, or at work?

The Mother Daughter Project

2008-01-25T21:02:00.000-08:00

Sunday, I'm meeting with ten other mothers to talk about creating our own mother-daughter community, based on The Mother-Daughter Project
book, which I will hopefully have finished by then. I love the idea in theory--getting together with other mommas and daughters and creating a connection now for our girls and our selves. Especially since I can see trouble brewing on the horizon, already Luna and I seem to bring out the teenager in each other. I had a serious mother-daughter connection growing up on a commune and those other daughters and other mothers are still hands down some of the people I am closest to in the world. So why am I a little hesitant/nervous? I guess because I wish it was all tied together--with similar politics and creating a larger community that included changing the world for ourselves, our daughters, and the rest of our familes and loved ones. As usual, I want it all.

Oh, and Plum slept through the night for the first time in a year last night! And of course I wake up at 5, convinced something terrrible has happened, check her warmth breath, and then can't go back to sleep. Sigh.

Kindergarten in Costa Rica, anyone?

2008-01-24T21:30:00.000-08:00

"The Cloud Forest School, locally known as the Centro de Educación Creativa, is a bilingual school located in the tropical cloud forest of Monteverde, Costa Rica.

Cloud Forest School students feel a keen sense of responsibility as stewards of the forest. They are aware of the fragility as well as the biological significance of the cloud forest. In school, they study landscape, biodiversity, and conservation in many different ways and teachers incorporate the physical surroundings into every facet of the bilingual curriculum from science to art to math.

The campus is located on 106 acres of cloud forest, which was purchased from the Nature Conservancy, with the help of donations from friends and foundations. The property consists of pristine forest and pastureland, the latter of which is slated for reforestation by our students, staff and volunteers. The living laboratory of the land surrounding the school is as vital an educational environment as its classroom buildings.

In garden plots maintained by each grade and on trails that wind through the forest, classes embark on journeys of exploration and discovery. There are few school settings where children so completely integrate experience, observation and formal learning into their lives.

http://www.cloudforestschool.org/

Health Care and Education, or: Capitalism as I Feel It

2008-01-13T10:54:00.000-08:00

There's not been much time as I got swallowed up by the institutions of health care and education, two critical aspects of a society you'd think even the most fanatical capitalist wouldn't want to leave to the free market. Because if you do, as we do, what you get is an inefficient and impersonal health care system that misdiagnoses an x-ray, leaves you terrified, than after a month tells you its all fine, and charges you 16,000 dollars.

You also get a school system like Oakland, which requires thousands of families to enter a lottery for the few spaces in the few schools that aren't a total mess. Even the most die-hard public education fans are hard pressed to want to entrust their children to a system where every second of the school dayhas been proscribed by George Bush in the interest of increasing test scors and the "selling point" the school tries to convince you with is that most of the families are "new poor" as opposed to the dreaded "entrenched poor" that makes up the bulk of the public school students. Oh, the other selling point: the "punishment" spot faces a tree.

diagnosis and disease

2007-12-12T17:41:00.000-08:00

Plum has bilaterial coxa valga, according to the x-ray that the technician took of her hips because the pediatrician thought she might have hip dysplasia. Bilaterial xoca valga is linked to cerebral palsy, which she may or may not have, to be determined by more tests and exams (neurologist, orthopedist, physical therapist) and by time will tell. I wonder how all this information helps me and her and if it's time to just take her into the woods and see what the redwoods have to say about all this.