Tape Flags and First Thoughts

2011 Reading Report Part 1

2012-01-01T11:04:00.001-05:00

It's January first, so I can tally up my 2011 reading. I expected to find that it had been pretty light this year--it feels like for most of December I didn't even have a book going. I told David, "I've read all the books!" I just haven't happened across anything that grabbed my attention.

Still, I read quite a bit: 230 books in all. Last year I read 201. Both of these numbers are down from all the other years since 2006, when I started my nifty little spreadsheet. I had been reading around 300 books a year. I guess I've been slacking off since Yehva learned to walk and began requiring constant supervision.

That 230 doesn't count 55 books I started and didn't finish. I sometimes write a very short comment about a book, just a few words, and I find it fun looking at my comments for the books I abandoned: "What a blowhard!" "Nothing new here." "Very interesting but a long article would have sufficed." "Piece of crap." "Such bad writing." "Remembered that I tried to read this before and hated it then, too." "Apparently I was not actually in the mood for a 600-page biography of Ronald Reagan."

I read a lot of genre fiction this year that I didn't give my highest grade to but that I flagged as "recommended"--which usually means, "You'd like it if you like that kind of thing." All of Anne Perry's William Monk mysteries fell into this category (and, yes, I read all 17 of them, in order, because I am like that), as well as Lisa Lutz's hilarious Spellman series, which I highly recommend if you need a frothy something for an afternoon at the beach or next to the fire.

There were also a couple of science fiction books in this category, though I didn't read a lot of sci-fi this year. David and I were talking the other day about the amount of mental energy it can take to get into a meaty science fiction novel, especially the kind where the author drops you into a universe and doesn't explain anything, just leaves you to figure it all out as you go along. The point of our conversation was that neither of us has had the mental energy lately. But I liked Greg Bear's Hull Zero Three, and David and I both liked James Corey's Leviathan Wakes. George R.R. Martin blurbed it as a "kickass space opera," and if there's one thing I like, it's a kickass space opera. I pretty much like anything with people living on icy asteroids in a colonized solar system or in big ships slowly traversing the vast reaches of space.

In non-fiction, I flagged a handful of books that didn't rise to greatness but that I thought were good reads, including Rapture Ready: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, which I found thoughtful and sympathetic and appreciated for its avoidance of the obvious cheap jokes; The End of the Obesity Epidemic, which was surprising in not being polemical but instead takes a careful and soberingly critical look at the biases and assumptions of all sides in the current debate. Not a great book to read if you're looking for someone to validate your own point of view (whatever that might be) but very thought-provoking. And Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture was the best book I've read on that topic.

Next I'll tackle the very short list of books I gave my highest rating to. But I slept late this morning and haven't fed the parrots yet, so it will have to wait awhile.

Misreading Masculinity

2011-11-11T10:25:00.000-05:00

I recently read the book Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture, by Thomas Newkirk. I've read a lot of the current boys-in-peril/misunderstood-boys literature, and this is surely the strongest of the ones I've read.

I don't have time to do a full write-up, and the book is already overdue at the library, so I just want to use this as a placeholder for a few of the quotes from the book that I flagged as I was reading. Here they are:

Why, then, is violent content in classical literature perceived as nonthreatening (even uplifting and humanizing), when the same violent conflict in more popular media is seen as provocative and dangerous? The answer may reside not in the representation of violence, but in the way the audience for that violence is imagined. The reader of classic literature, or someone who rented the incredibly violent movie Titus (a rendition of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus) would be assumed to be part of a nonviolent literate social class who would approach the film with the proper aesthetic distance. There would be no danger of suggestibility in these activities because they would be intelligently mediated by the reader or viewer. No such assumption is made about someone watching a much less graphically violent movie, such as one from the Lethal Weapon series. The nonelite group that chooses to watch the more popular version of violence is perceived as more susceptible to suggestion, less capable of keeping the proper distance, more volatile. All of which leads to the question, Is the issue really about violence, or is it about the social group (and age group) the violence appeals to? (p. 96)

*****

The [research] approach is circular, assuming what is presumes to prove. It is assumed that the children have nothing interesting to say about the visual stimulus--so they aren't asked. The film is treated not as a text that is interpreted by the child, not as something processed in any way. The child is presumed to have virtually no capacity to interpret, to resist or mediate.... In this huge body of work, students were rarely interviewed or allowed to discuss reactions or interpretations--because it was assumed they did not have real interpretations, only reactions to stimuli. (pp. 98-99)

*****

One final problem with traditional research on media violence needs to be noted. Few shows that contain violence are about only violence; most action movies also stress teamwork, loyalty, perseverance, ingenuity, problem solving, stoicism, athletic fitness, courage, and frequently patriotism. The action hero typically has to overcome adversity, failure, and sometimes discouragement at having to face a superior force. If 200,000 exposures to violence cause a person to be violent, does the same number of exposures to teamwork create an ethic of cooperation? Does 200,000 exposures to ingenuity create a desire to be ingenious? Why should one message--that of the acceptability of violence--be the sole effect of these shows when even cartoons are about much more than that? The alarmist claims about the effects of media violence rest on research that reduces complex narratives with multiple messages to simple "stimuli" that work automatically, like a carcinogen, at an unconscious level. Not only is the media narrative reduced; the young viewers too are reduced, to being unconscious reactors with no interpretive responses. (pp. 102-103)

So Long, and Thanks for All The Fish

2011-09-17T16:33:00.002-04:00

I have really wrestled with this post. When I'm not actually writing, I can feel it taking shape in my mind and it seems like it's all there, ready to write down. But when I sit down to write, I can't find my way into it. But I'm tired of carrying it around so I am going to finish it this time even if it doesn't come out right.

I have laid down my membership in my monthly meeting.

That's the short version, and there have been recent days when I thought about just plopping that onto my Facebook wall as a status update and getting it over with. But among the people who already know this, some have asked me to talk about why and how this happened, so I will now attempt the long version.

*stares out window, taps fingers on table for awhile*

The long version is hard.

I'm not interested in talking about any of the specific ways my Friends meeting has been hard for me, or laying out the various problems I see in contemporary unprogrammed Quakerism. I've been wrestling with both of those things for several years, and one of the nice things about finally making the break is that I don't have to keep thinking about them. It's quite a relief, honestly; an end to a long, hard struggle.

Besides, I could just as easily write a long thing about what I think works in Quakerism, and the many ways my monthly meeting is awesome--because it is. This is less a drama than a quiet breakup, like when those two nice people you thought would be together forever announce that they are divorcing but plan to remain friends.

It really does feel like a breakup. Like the breakups I've been through before, the final decision was less in response to a single event or problem and more a moment of clarity after a long period of trying really hard to fix things.

I think the breakup comes now because I have entered a period of lots of movement in my life. For most of the past year, I was feeling stuck and discouraged, wanting to make changes and not feeling able to. But in the last few months, suddently those changes have been not only possible, but easy and joyful. This is one of those changes, I think, a time of movement after being stuck for a long time: annoyed by the same things, hurt by the same things, frustrated by not finding answers to the same tired questions. I felt blocked with Quakerism, not able to find a way forward when something in me was straining at the leash. But I also felt trapped in Quakerism, unable to move away from it because I could not imagine that there was any other spiritual home for me. I assumed that liberal Quakerism was the best fit I would I find, that any other group of religious people would only be a worse fit.

But "she's the best I can hope for" is a bad reason to stay with someone. I have become optimistic about the possibility that there may actually be a spiritual community somewhere else that will serve me better in this new time in my life. There's a point during the ending of a relationship when you start to get excited about the possibilities that open up if the relationship ends. All the opportunities that have been forclosed by the success of that relationship open back up again.

I have been reminded, too, that it is better to be single than to stay in a bad relationship. I'm feeling willing to live with either of those options, open to the kind of changes that worshipping in a new way might bring me, and open to the possibility, too, that I'll wind up unchurched.

I don't quite know what my next step is. Laying down my membership has been a mental and emotional relief, and boy howdy has it cleared my calendar! I'm not sure if I should turn right around and head off to church on Sunday morning, or wait awhile before I start dating. Honestly, the search feels kind of exhausting: it's a lot of work to find your way into a community, and that's after the work of finding one you might want to be part of. I don't know if I'm ready to start yet. On the other hand, I feel eager to find out what's next, and may be too restless to sit around home too many Sundays in a row.

A small group of us began weekday morning worship at the meetinghouse two weeks ago, and I've been going every morning despite this decision. I don't feel quite sure about it; sometimes a clean break is best, for both parties. I've laid down all my responsiblities to the meeting, and maybe it will send a mixed message that I'm still worshipping there five mornings a week. But I don't have a strong feeling that it's wrong for me to be there, so I may wear that sword as long as I am able. It may help with the transition, or it may turn out to be too awkward, or it may ultimately prove to be something that is holding me back. But I like it and I think I'm going to keep doing it for now.

I plan to stay involved with FLGBTQC as well; everyone should plan to see me and the kids in Wisconsin next February for the midwinter gathering. I'm less sure about summer gatherings; we may not be able to afford the summer gathering without the generous stipend my monthly meeting gives to children who are attending. Time will tell.

This is not a bad thing, this breakup. It's a necessary thing. It feels right, like it is the answer to many painful questions I've been carrying for too long. Of course, I've traded those for a whole new set of questions, but I like these new ones.

As usual, our friend Walt Whitman has some words that speak to my condition. This is from section 46 of Song of Myself:

I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner table, library, exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far, it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,
Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth,
Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip,
And in due time you shall repay the same service to me,
For after we start we never lie by again.

***

Sit awhile dear son,
Here are bisuits to eat and here is milk to drink,
But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.

Taking the Plunge

2011-07-26T16:54:00.002-04:00

Today, Eric, who is ten, went down the water slide for the first time...and the second, third, fourth, and at least fifth times, too, because the water slide is awesome. His friend Alexander encouraged him to do it--and Eric was overheard telling Alexander, "Thank you for talking me into it." But he also told me, "I was really nervous, but then I thougth about Turnaround and I just decided to do it."

Turnaround is a cognitive-behavioral based anxiety program for children, and we've been using it for the last few months. Created by psychologists, it's an audio and workbook program with ten sessions. It's organized into a narrative about six kids with anxiety who go camping with their counselors. Each of the kids in the stories represents a certain form of anxiety: separation anxiety, perfectionism, panic attacks, general anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and social anxiety. Each of the ten sessions either educates the kids about their anxiety--what it is, where it came from, how common it is, or helps them learn to recognize and name their distorted thinking, or offers strategies for dealing with specific situations. Or, often, some combination of those things.

For instance, several early sessions focused on various forms of distorted thinkings--what the program calls "Wacky Thoughts," including all-or-nothing thinking, mind-reading, making predictions ("It will never work out"), and "Dark Shades," which lead you to look for "problems, dangers, and bad stuff."

The last two sessions, though, have been especially useful for both Eric and Carl: Day 7, "Madison's Crushed Hope," and Day 8, "Taking the Plunge"--which is the one Eric specifically thought of today when he was wanting to try the water slide.

"Madison's Crushed Hope" introduced the boys to the idea that when you are learning something new, there will inevitably be a period of time during which you will feel like you are failing at it. At this point, it's easy for anxious kids to bail out, to say, "I didn't want to do that anyway, it's dumb," or to otherwise avoid the situation. But, the program says, if you find a way to persevere, you will eventually get to a stage of feeling confident and encouraged by your progress.

In their workbooks, the boys were asked to think about things they were interested in learning or working on, and consider whether they'd experienced this. Both boys immediately were able to answer this. Eric said that he used to be in the "crushed hope" stage about handwriting, and about reading, but that he got past that to feeling encouraged about those two things. Carl recognized immediately that he's been struggling with crushed hope in his attempts to learn to ride a two-wheeled bike; in fact, just a few days before we listened to this session, he had said, "I don't think I want to learn to ride a two-wheeler." David and I immediately recognized what was going on--he was feeling discouraged and wished he could just give up. It was interesting to me that, once this phenomenon was pointed out to him, he could see it, too.

The last session we've listened to was number 8 (of 10), Taking the Plunge, which told the kids, among other things, that it can be important not to let yourself spend too much time thinking about something, but to just find a way to jump in and do it--otherwise you reinforce your anxiety, and it can get harder and harder to take action. That's what Eric was thinking of when he decided to try the waterslide. He said to me on the way home from the waterpark, "I took the plunge, Mom!"

He did. And he was immediately rewarded for it because going down the waterslide was fun. But he also told me that sometimes it's hard for him not to be able to do the things his friends can--to cimb as high in the tree, or jump into the pool. Or go down the waterslide. And now he can go down the waterslide, and this way that his anxiety keeps him from feeling fully at ease with his friends has been diminished.

I am really impressed with Turnaround. It's very well-produced; the voice actors, both adults and chlildren, are very good. The design of the packaging and workbook is very well done, and the content is excellent. This program takes cognitive-behavioral techniques and presents them in ways that make a lot of sense to the kids. There are also two CDs for parents that cover anxiety and CBT in more technical terms, and that also talk about how to be your child's ally, and how to remain connected with your child when their anxiety is wearing you out and making your family life harder.

My only quibble is one of the characters, Crank. Crank is a personification of the adrenal system, essentially, and is used to help kids understand the physical sensations that can accompany anxiety. My complaint about Crank is that he is personified as a samurai warrior, and the voice acting for his character edges a little too close to ethnic stereotype for me to feel entirely comfortable listening to him.

We got Turnaround because we thought Eric needed something, but we weren't sure he needed therapy or, honestly, that we could cope with a commitment to therapy given our other responsibilities. I had read a lot of books for parents of anxious kids, and they were helpful, but it was hard to put their information into practice because Eric resisted hearing things from me. Turnaround talks right to the kids, which has worked much better for us, and it also gives us a structure for talking about these issues when we're not right in the middle of a meltdown. When I ordered it, I thought of it as a thing we would try to see whether it would save us from needing to go ahead with therapy. So far, I think it's going to be enough for Eric.

There are 10 sessions in the program, and you can do a couple of them a week. We never manage that, we've been working through it much more slowly than that. But I expect that once we have finished all ten, we will simply go back and start listening to them again from the beginning, to help the lessons sink in.

I've been so impressed with the program that I've been recommending it left and right to other parents of anxious kids. I feel like I'm being able to give Eric and Carl tools, at the ages of 7 and 10, that I didn't have for dealing with my anxiety until I was almost 30, and it's giving our whole family a shared vocabulary for describing thoughts, emotions, and coping strategies.

And you can see for yourself, from Eric's experience with the waterslide, that he is really taking it in and putting it to use. It has been such a gift to our family.

An Unfailing Sufficiency: Up Late, Thinking About Whitman

2011-07-21T03:41:00.002-04:00

All this week, I've been waking up at some point during the night, and then I'm awake for an hour or so before I can go back to sleep. I recently read an article that said a lot of people do this and it is apparently normal, and that's probably where I got the idea. I'm getting a little tired of it, though--I like nights when I sleep straight through.

I do various things with my hour. Sometimes I read a book, if I've got one going, or watch a little TV. Or check my e-mail and write long notes to friends. But tonight, I'm thinking about Walt Whitman, which I'm sure is how many insomniacs spend their nights.

Specifically, I'm thinking about Walt Whitman, and me as a high school freshman reading him for the first time in American Literature. The Whitman poems we read in class--and we're talking about 1979, here, so my memory may be faulty--were the most schoolroom-ish of his poems. We read "O Captain, My Captain," probably because it was short and it rhymed and it had no sex in it. But it's a terrible introduction to Whitman, a weak example of his work and not at all typical. I'm sure we read When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed. And we read, I seem to remember, Starting from Paumanok, though looking at it again that seems unlikely, what with "sexual organs and acts" there in line 178. It was either "Starting from Paumanok," or one of the other boring ones.

Anyway, it wasn't a very auspicious introduction, yet somehow I fell in love. I think part of why I fell in love was my American Literature teacher, whom I did not, overall, care for, because he was dismissive of me, and he looked at my breasts a lot, and his idea of a final exam in literature was to have us memorize 100 titles and publication dates. But I seem to remember him reading aloud from Whitman in class, and reading well, and reading with passion. And I remember a poem I hadn't liked on the page becoming more alluring when I heard him read it.

Anyway, I bought a copy of Leaves of Grass at the bookstore in the mall.

I tell you, of all the things I've ever gotten rid of in my life, that first copy of Leaves of Grass is one of two I regret. It was just a cheap Signet edition, and I carried it around with me from 1979 until just a few years ago, so it was spine-broken and the pages were starting to come unglued. I had marked the poems I liked with paper clips, and they rusted and left marks. It was in terrible shape, and it made sense to let it go and get a nicer copy. But I shouldn't have done it.

Anyway, those paper clips would be an interesting glimpse into my teenage psyche. I was intimidated by the longer poems; they were just incomprehensible to me. But I loved, for instance, "I Saw In Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing," and I memorized it so well that I believe I can recite it to this day. It's short enough to just give it to you right here:

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it and
twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana
solitary in a wide in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.

I loved this poem for what it said about friendship, which of course was the most important thing in my life at 14 and 15 and 16. I liked it because I imagined Whitman saw that tree while taking a long solitary ramble, which was something I also did a lot of. I liked the sound of "rude, unbending, lusty." It was one of the first poems I ever read that seemed to me to be speaking my own thoughts.

Another little fragment I adored--and memorized, which was easy because it's only about 3 lines, was this:

O you, whom I often and silently come where you are that I may be with you;
As I walk by your side, or sit near you, or remain in the same room with you,
Little know you the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.

I believe that, more than once, as a young lesbian, I slipped a woman a note with this poem written in it as an act of seduction.

But the poem I loved best as a teenager and young adult is a longer poem called "To You," which distinguishes it not at all from a number of Whitman's poems that start in exactly that same way. Here it is.

By God, I loved that poem, and I still do. As a teenager, I felt that Whitman was speaking right to me, in all my adolescent insecurity, and his voice was tremendously reassuring:

There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you;
There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you;
No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you;
No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.

Nobody but Whitman was saying things like that to me, God knows. I loved its tallying of my gifts, its promises for the future.

But I also loved the egalitarianism of the poem:

Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all;
From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light;
But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light;
From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever.

It took me awhile, as a teenager, to parse that image, but once I got it, I loved it. Whitman was saying: Everybody gets a halo.

I loved Whitman's commitment to the male and the female in this poem. His relationship to the female is pretty complicated, and not always what we might wish it to be, but look at him here! I have spent my life listening to people say we can't use "he and she" in writing because it's ugly, but look how he builds it into the driving, building rhythm of these lines. Maybe you or I can't make it beautiful, but Whitman did:

Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard!
These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to you;
These immense meadows—these interminable rivers—you are immense and interminable as they;
These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution—you are he or she who is master or mistress over them,
Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.

And, finally, Whitman includes in this poem a notion that I love, the idea of sufficiency. We talk a lot these days about abundance, but Whitman doesn't so much. He likes to say that something will "prove sufficient." He simultaneously makes you extravagant promises--he sings the songs of the glory of none sooner than he sings the songs of the glory of you, after all--and reminds you of the imperfect body and world you live in: your unsteady eye, your drunkenness, your greed, your deform'd attitude, your premature death, all of these are mentioned in the poem as well.

But listen to the closing lines of the poem:

The hopples fall from your ankles—you find an unfailing sufficiency;
Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself;
Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted;
Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.

That's my Walt. "The means are provided, nothing is scanted." I find those to be about the most comforting words I've ever read.

I wonder how many hours in total I spent as a teenager declaiming this poem in the solitude of my room. I know that for a long time I had it memorized, too, and it is a great poem for reading, or reciting, aloud. It has a thundering rhythm. I remember reading a book that talked about Whitman being influenced by the cadences of the preachers of the Second Great Awakening, and this is surely an exhortation. I think you could deliver this poem as a sermon, punctuating your words with the book in your hand, like a preacher with a Bible.

I don't believe I've said anything about Whitman I haven't said before, and some of you have certainly heard me say it. I don't suppose I should expect to be original at three in the morning when what I really want is to be sleeping. But this is all something I like to revisit from time to time. I've been reading these poems for over 30 years now, and while a poem like "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing" is in some ways a trifle, "To You" has never let me down yet.

On Being Wrong

2011-05-04T11:05:00.003-04:00

This is the thing I thought I was going to write about yesterday. I ended up going off on the fragrance-free seating tangent becasue it was in worship that I was thinking about this, and it's related to why I was willing to join with my meeting in the fragrance-free seating experiment. It's about a thing that happened a long time ago.

I used to work security at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. The last year I worked, right before I got pregnant with Eric, I was an Assistant Coordinator, responsible for supervising a crew of about 8 women. There were three ACs, and two coordinators.

For years, women coming onto the land without paying had been a serious problem. One year I was told by one of the women who worked in the festival office that they estimated that maybe as many as 1 in 4 or 5 women on the land that year had come in without paying, based on things like how many dinners they were serving compared to ticket sales. But it was hard to keep women from doing it; there's hardly anything easier than strolling in through the woods.

Many women came in free by hiding in the back of friends' pickup trucks or RVs. When we arrived the week before the festival to start setting up security stations and training crew, we were told that the festival office had decided that we would now search every pickup truck and RV for hidden women as they came in the front gate. This had been decided after advance materials had been printed and after women had bought their tickets, and the five of us on the security coordinating team thought it was a terrible idea. We were sure that women who pulled up to the gate and heard for the first time there that their vehicles would be searched were going to be resistant, angry, and belligerant. We thought the festival was putting too much of a burden on us and our crews. This, we were sure, was going to be a disaster.

I don't remember whether this had already been planned, or was in response to our protests, but the organizers put together a small super-crew of women who had worked at the festival for a long time, mostly women from the office, who would be at the front gate on opening day and whose job it was to deal with all these RV and pickup truck drivers who were going to be so pissed off.

Except it never happened. With one or two exceptions (who turned out to be women with a clown-car's worth of friends stuffed into the RV's bathroom), women were happy to let the crew take a look in their vehicles. They were shocked and angry to learn that free-riding was such a problem. They were happy to do their part to keep it in check.

It's kind of a side note, but after the first couple of hours, we never found hidden women. Word had percolated back down the line of cars waiting to get in, and the free-riders cut the fence and walked in instead. But that is not germane to our story. What is germane to our story is that I was also working the front gate on opening day (I ended up having a brief, intense, and ill-fated fling with one of the women from the super-crew, in fact. Which is also not germane to the story but I like to mention it once in awhile because I like to crack the boring knit-pants-wearing suburban mom facade and remember how daring I used to be).

OK, so I was working the front gate on opening day, and in between flriting with Mocha, I noticed that my prediction about how the car-searching would go had been completely wrong. There were no protests. There were no shouting matches. There was no drama (until a few nights later when Mocha went off the deep end. "Why are you functionally monogamous these days, Su?" "Because the last woman I had a thing-on-the-side with was a psycho, thanks for asking.")

This was a life-changing thing. Not the bad fling with Mocha, but the realization that all my predictions about what was going to happen when we asked to search vehicles had been wrong. I had been really worked up about this, and I wasn't the only one. We thought it was going to be a trainwreck; instead it was the usual opening-day carnival, the blue sky, the sun beating down, the women already on the land calling, "Welcome home!" to the women arriving, the family-reunion atmosphere. There were so few problems that the woman who had been specially dispatched to deal with the trouble-makers was able to spend much of her afternoon flirting with me instead.

Anyway, this has stayed with me for going on eleven years now. Many times when a group is trying to make a decision and I think we're heading in the wrong direction, especially if I catch myself thinking of all the ways it is sure to go bad, I remind myself of that August afternoon at Michigan, and I consider the possiblity that I could, once again, be completely, absolutely, one-hundred-percent wrong.

Red Cedar's Experiment with Fragrance-Free Seating

2011-05-03T14:41:00.003-04:00

My Quaker meeting is working on accessibility issues related to fragrances, which some people (like me) have sensitivities to and which can also trigger or exacerbate migraines and asthma. It's been a surprisingly vexed conversation over the last six to nine months, and there are a lot of tender feelings. At our last business meeting, we talked about the issue for a long time, and I and at least two other people with sensitivities spoke. That was my first surprise: I hadn't realized I wasn't alone in this. It was so good to hear other people talk about having the same kinds of experiences I did, like being pulled out of worship to wonder if you'll have to move when a late-comer seems likely to sit near you. Or how hard it can be to address this issue in personal relationships. But how had I not known? Had I not been listening?

We clearly had other failures of communication as well. Toward the end of that conversation, one member said that this was the first time it had occurred to him that we were actually discussing a health issue. I guess he thought we'd been talking about preferences, or a more general wish to be environmental, to be as clean and toxin-free as possible. I was glad that people heard things that shifted their perspective, but I said to David later, "Where have we failed in talking about this if this is the first time people figured out it was about people's well-being?" It surprised me to learn that we had been, at least to some extent, talking past each other. No wonder feelings were hurt and progress was not made. I wonder if we have more clarity now and that will help us move forward.

Anyway, one thing we're experimenting with is designationg one-fourth of the meeting room as fragrance-free seating. This was a hard decision to make; it was actually minuted back in December and then held back from implementation because of strong concerns raised later. My concerns were pretty pragmatic: I'm not sure our meeting room is large enough for designated seating to be effective, and I was worried that people would think that FF seating solved the problem, so nothing more had to be thought about or done. I also was concerend about partial access--even if FF seating made worship accessible to me, what about the hallway, the library, the social hall, the classrooms?

Others' concerns were more spiritual; one Friend put it very well when he said he was not comfortable with having different Friends seated in different parts of the room, with setting off a separate group. Quakers have always been one body, he said, one community. He said it better; it was moving, and I thought he was not wrong. Another Friend was concerned that saying that only people who were FF could be in this seating area sent the message that some people were "pure" enough to be there and some people weren't.

We eventually decided to go ahead with FF seating, in a spirit of experimentation, and to discuss it again in about six months, after we've lived with it for awhile. This is not the only action we've taken. The Building & Grounds committee has been very pro-active, providing FF hand soap and informational signs in the bathrooms (I commended one member of the committee on the wording of the signs, and she looked at me funny and said, "Well, good. We got it from a link you sent us"). I'm attending a yearly meeting event at the meetinghouse this Saturday and was heartened to see that the organizers were asked to include a note about fragrance and accessibility at the Meetinghouse in their materials.

I sat in the FF seating for the first time on Sunday. I will say that, after one trial, it felt pretty crappy. On the one hand, it was the first time I've ever been in worship at the meetinghouse (which is 13 months old) and not had an exposure, so yay for that. On the other hand, for about the first 15 or 20 minutes (maybe not that long; maybe it just felt long), I was the only one in the FF seating. The other three-fourths of the meetinghouse was pretty well populated. I felt isolated and conspicuous; I also felt discouraged that there was not one other person in that room who had taken our conversations about fragrance so much to heart that they had stopped using scented products on Sunday mornings. It hurt my feelings. In my whole life, nobody but David and Scott, who are the two people besides my children who love me the most in all the world, has ever gone fragrance-free in support of my well-being. I don't know why. I do know that it would be like the best present I ever got times 10 if somebody did.

Eventually, two other women who are also sensitive to fragrances came in and sat in the FF seating with me, and I felt less alone and conspicuous but still set apart and visible in an uncomfortable way. We might as well have been wearing a sign saying THESE WOMEN HAVE CHEMICAL SENSITIVITIES! I had optimistically imagined myself camouflaged among some number of non-sensitive folks who were nonetheless fragrance-free. Alas, no. (One of the women's partners joined us at the rise of meeting; she'd been in another part of the meetinghouse during worship.)

That's just one day. I agreed to the experiment and I'll stick with it. It may get easier as I get used to it. Maybe we'll have a slow migration into FF seating as people experiment with unscented products, and it will get easier that way. It certainly seemed successful from the perspective of exposure and illness. Maybe even if I don't become emotionally comfortable sitting there I'll decide the trade-off is worth it; if I can't have both physical well-being and emotional comfort in worship, maybe physical well-being is the better part. Maybe it's good not to be too comfortable, and my discomfort will bear unexpected fruit. It remains to be seen.

This is not the blog post I sat down to write. Funny how that happens sometimes.

Book Report: Lego, A Love Story

2011-04-08T00:10:00.007-04:00

I read Lego: A Love Story the other day. It's one of those stunty journalistic books writers pitch to publishers: Jonathan Bender decided to spend a year learning to build with Lego and exploring the world of AFOLs, or Adult Fans of Lego, and somebody gave him an advance and a book contract to do it.

I found the book kind of annoying at times, even though I knew that was unfair. Bender and his wife were trying to conceive during the research for the book, so he hadn't had my experience of becoming a de facto Lego expert because the kids have dragged me, willy nilly, along with them. And he hadn't played with Lego since he was a kid. But even recognizing that I have been steeped in Lego for at least the last seven years and Bender has not, I could not keep myself from rolling my eyes sometimes at his ignorance. For instance, he thought someone was pulling his leg when they told him that Lego makes brick separators. Tyro!

And, I am sorry to say that Bender is not much of a writer. Competent, but pedestrian.

Still, the book was fun. I like reading about quirky subcultures, and AFOLs certainly qualify. I am amused by the kinds of things people get worked up over, like a turn-of-the century change in some of the standard colors that resulted in new bricks not perfectly matching old bricks; in particular, the new gray brick, which was perceived to have a bluish tinge, was much reviled. If you mention the color "bley" to an AFOL, they will know what you're talking about. And they'll probably have an opinion.

Other favorite controversies include the divide between purists, who believe in building only with genuine unmodified Lego pieces, and those who are willing to tinker to achieve their vision. Bender tells one story of a builder cutting a brick in half to get the right size, and there are some very spiffy custom minifig decals floating around out there. Here's a guide to customizing your own minifig, in case you're so inclined.

Possibly my favorite thing that AFOLs get worked up about is a recent Lego innovation in which the bags of pieces in large building sets are numbered, and the instructions suggest you open only one at a time and don't mix them. This is seen as patronizing, as reflecting a continuing tendency of the Lego company to pander to juveniles while ignoring adult fans (a toy company focusing on children! The nerve!). Some, at least, also see it as an unwarranted intrusion into the builder's process. "Who are they to tell me how I sort my bricks?" one AFOL is quoted as saying. Who indeed?

The book makes me really want to visit a Lego convention. I've thought for a long time of taking the kids to BrickWorld in Chicago to visit the exhibition halls, but after reading about Bender's experiences, I got a little itch to get a registration and experience the whole thing. They apparently do all kinds of fun contests, like "blind builds," where everyone has to build the same set while not being able to see the pieces, contests where people have to try to do something creative with a specific set, and "speed builds," which are exactly what they sound like. I was especially interested in the idea of "Building in the Bag," which is exactly what it says: building your Lego set without opening the plastic bag the pieces come in. Honestly, all the contests sounded like so much fun they made me want to organize a little mini-Lego convention for kids here in Lansing where we would do all these fun things (kids do not get Lego conventions. Lego conventions are for the big boys).

I read about the history of the Lego company, including its many ill-advised efforts to attract girls to the hobby by making things pink. And I learned all kinds of fancy AFOL jargon, like the "SNOT" building technique (Studs Not On Top), which results in a smooth finish.

I learned about the Toy and Plastic Brick Museum in Ohio, one man's labor of love in an old middle school, which isn't the Lego museum because he could never come to an agreement with the company about rights. But it's all Lego, baby, and I say: road trip!

At one point, Bender discusses Mega Bloks, the Canadian company that began to make Lego-compatible pieces after Lego's patent expired in 1988. Bender says that AFOLs are disdainful of Mega Bloks and won't use them, and that they're frustrated by trying to buy brick lots on, say, eBay, because casual users often let their Mega Bloks and Lego intermingle and then sell them all as Lego. Even after he's spent a year building (and dutifully purged his collection of Mega Bloks), Bender still sees this as simply a preference, or as a snobby in-group thing. "It's the Coke vs. Pepsi of the Lego world," he says.

He is wrong. I say he is wrong, David agrees, and Eric, when I told him what Bender said, vehemently said that he is wrong. I wonder how many AFOLs have written to Bender to tell him he is wrong? Probably hundreds. I'm tempted to drop him a note myself.

Mega Blok simply doesn't have Lego's quality control. We have never had a Lego set we couldn't build, but when we have made the occasional foray into the world of Mega Blok, we routinely came up against bricks that simply would not stay together the way the instructions claim they will. Even though Mega Blok sometimes has cool licenses (I think it was their Halo license that attracted Eric the last time), we decided not to buy any more. They're a little cheaper than Lego, but a lot crappier. Stick with the Danes, that's what we say.

I think that, although I almost never build on my own (I'm the brick-finding helper most of the time), I am an AFOL anyway. Because what Lego does for the kids who love it is amazing, and what the kids do with Lego is amazing. I find myself fearing and dreading what AFOLs call "the dark ages," the years between about 12 or 13, when kids lose interest in Lego, and the time when they (maybe) come back to it as adults. It's hard to imagine Eric, whose bedroom is practically a Lego museum, packing it all away. That will be a sad day and the end of an era. But, like the dutiful Lego mom I am, I'll keep the boxes. "For the grandkids," I'll say. But I'll be thinking, maybe for him, too.

An African American Parent's Guide to Discipline

2011-04-06T14:51:00.001-04:00

I just read Stickin' To, Watchin' Over, and Gettin' With: An African American Parent's Guide to Discipline. (There's no hyphen in African American here because there isn't one on the cover of the book.) I read it with great interest and a little nagging feeling of guilty voyeurism. Because I am not an African American parent.

And one of the interesting things about the book it that it was not written for me. I usually read books that I am part of the target audience for; even "generic" parenting books. Reading a book written by Black professionals for Black parents made the ways that other books tend to assume whiteness really stand out. I also found it kind of fun when the authors talked about Black people's stereotypes and perceptions of white parenting (that our children are out of control little apes--if I recall correctly, the word "apes" was actually used--and we are pushovers). Sometimes it hit a little close to home.

As the white mother of an African American child, I found the material about dealing with the different stages of a child's life, and figuring out developmentally appropriate ways to talk to them about racism very useful. Including the different standards of behavior that they might have to hold themselves to in order to avoid trouble ("I don't care if all your friends are doing it, if the police see a Black kid doing it they are not going to give you a second chance to explain"). There's a chapter on dealing with pre-teens, and then a chapter on navigating the challenges of letting kids become more responsible for themselves as they move into their teen years. All parents and their children have to figure out how to cope with increasing independence, but for Black parents and children, the stakes can be very high.

I also liked that the book addressed something most parenting books don't: figuring out how to productively address your own childhood baggage and the trauma you may carry so that your reactions to your children are healthy. "Many people should read this," I thought. There was a useful sidebar on ways to know if you're reacting from your own past baggage ("You get instantly furious about something and you don't know why; You find that you are willing to fight to the death over a small issue like which way the toilet paper should roll; You tell childhood stories way too much."). And there were some good ideas for how to get over that.

The book did a good job, I thought, of honoring the reasons why Black parents tend to parent differently than the mainstream middle-class white model, while at the same time asking Black parents to think about the ways they might use physical discipline (or choose not to). There's none of the blanket "spanking is bad and you are a bad person if you do it" kind of thing that other parenting books I've read tend toward, but there is a model here for being mindful rather than reactionary in disciplining children.

I'm a white mom. And I've read about a thousand books on transracial parenting. But this book specifically about Black parenting felt more useful to me in some ways, although I didn't love every bit of it. It was like eavesdropping on a conversation between people who have the experience of both being and raising Black children, and by listening I learned a lot. When I read books that are aimed at white parents raising children of color, there's often still a sense of distance, of talking about "them." This book was all about "us," and that immediacy made some things clearer to me.

Lego WeDo Review: Now that we've been using it awhile

2011-03-31T12:32:00.000-04:00

Carl, who was 6 at the time, got Lego WeDo for Christmas, and after our first experiments with it, I was very enthusiastic. Now that we've been using it for awhile, I have some reservations about it I'd like to mention.

Building the robots is still very fun, and the programming interface is bright and easy for Carl to use. The information is well-organized and very clear, for both me and him. But we have some consistent problems with our robots. I mentioned in my first review that WeDo uses standard Lego bricks for construction, rather than the girder-and-connector building style used in Lego Mindstorms robotics and Lego Technics. The top image at this page is of a Mindstorms robot that shows the girder building components. If you scroll down to the bottom of this page, you can see some images of WeDo robots for comparison.

The WeDo robots are very easy for Carl to build, and they look cute. The problem is that the standard Lego bricks just don't hold onto each other the way Mindstorms NXT girders do. So, under stress, they come apart. Our boat-on-a-stormy-sea WeDo robot, for instance, regularly beat itself to pieces. This is very frustrating for Carl.

Another problem we've bumped into is that many of the robots can really only do a single thing. We were spoiled when Carl chose the Dancing Birds robot as his first project; once you've built it, you can program the birds to spin in the same or opposite directions, at different speeds, for differing durations, and with different sounds. They can be made to speed up and slow down. Carl played around with programming his Dancing Birds robot for a long time over several days.

Alas, some of the other projects are less playable. One reason the boat kept beating itself to pieces was that it couldn't tolerate the speed of the motor being adjusted any higher than in the sample program; the other is that the Lego studs just weren't strong enough to hold the boat's stand to the baseplate when there was repetitive movement.

Today we built a giant that stands up and roars; once we built it and copied the sample program, we couldn't figure out anything else to do with it, except run the motor in reverse so it sat down again. You had to run the motor for a very specific amount of time or the giant either didn't stand all the way up or was flipped over by the lever controlling it. The rubber band connecting the motor pulley to the lever pulley came loose about half the time. We watched the giant stand up once; Carl experimented and found 12 different ways for the thing to go wrong; and 10 minutes later, he was done. His verdict? "Well, that was boring."

So, what do I think overall? There are still some good qualities to the program. The robots are designed to demonstrate the use of certain mechanics; for instance, our standing-up giant was raised by a lever that was driven by a worm gear. The software points out these things, and Carl finds them interesting. But if mechanics is the point, then perhaps some kits that introduce simple machines, either from Lego or elsewhere, would be more cost-effective. I know that a big part of what is most fun for Carl is experimenting with programming the robot to do different things; if too many of the robots are single-action, that's too many days he's walking away from the computer with the word "boring" on his lips. We still have a lot of robots to try out, so much will depend on the ratio of good ones to duds.

Lego says the WeDo kit is for kids 7 and up; Carl just turned seven last week, so he's at the young end of the range for it, and yet one of my thoughts is that this might be better for younger kids. Or maybe for 7-year-olds who haven't been fellow travelers for their older brothers' Mindstorms robots already.

My buying advice? If $180 isn't a lot of money for you and you have a 5, 6, or 7 year old who is really into robotics but not ready for Mindstorms, go for it. There is some fun to be had here, and some basics to learn. Otherwise, wait a couple of years until your kid can accompany you on some Mindstorms adventures; Mindstorms has been a much better investment.

I Have Surprisingly Strong Opinions About a Lot of Things. Here's One.

2011-03-22T20:40:00.002-04:00

Parenting leads to some unexpected places. For instance, I have surprisingly strong opinions about the theme music for children's TV shows. Here is one of the best: the theme for Dragon Hunters. It's by
The Cure, so you know it's good.

I also love the quirky little tune that starts Adventure Time, a quirky little show that I am pretty sure is not actually appropriate for children.

Another song I will stop and listen to every time? The Johnny Test theme. I love this song. The boy's best friend is a talkin' dog!

I also stop and listen every time the Max & Ruby theme comes on. Mostly so I can say in disgust, "Did someone get paid to write those lyrics?" To wit: "Max and Ruby. Ruby and Max. Max and Ruby. Ruby...and her little brother Max!" Aargh!

I do think there's a correlation between the theme song and the show; if I like the theme song, I probably also like the show, though the kids might not. Nobody is watching Adventure Time around here, for instance. On the other hand, if the theme song makes me want to stab my ears with chopsticks, the show will probably make me crazy (but one of the kids might well love it). Yehva was a big fan of Max & Ruby for awhile. I endured. I will always love what stark. raving. mad. mommy. had to say about certain children's shows.

[Update: I'm checking my links, and get to the Max & Ruby one. Eric says, "Why would you even listen to this? It's terrible. But it's not as bad as the Caillou one." I say, "I don't know the Caillou one," and start a youtube search. David says, "I guess it's unmemorable," and then, as the music starts, "Oh, God, no! It's horrible! Ah!"

Nel Noddings' Critical Lessons

2011-03-04T11:34:00.001-05:00

I've had mixed results keeping my new year's resolution to stop thinking so much about stuff and focus my reading on genre fiction. I've enjoyed The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway; The Hunger Games series (very violent, but I appreciated the author making it clear that the violence the characters were involved in had long-term consequences for them); Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear (I have loved generation ship stories ever since I read Ben Bova's Exiles Trilogy as a child); Jack Finney's Time and Again, which was recommended to me in the comments on my blog; and Feast of Souls and Wings of Wrath, by C. S. Friedman, the first two books in a trilogy about magic users who pay the cost of their magic use in lost moments of life.

That's SFF. In mysteries, I liked In The Woods a lot; I thought at first it was a bit over-written but then I got sucked in. I was wary because I don't like books in which children get hurt, but she never dwells on what happens to the children, so I was able to cope with it. I can't say what else I liked about it without spoilers, but I will say that it's a great example of an unreliable narrator--it's told in the first person by someone who isn't trustworthy. He tells you right up front that he lies, but more subtly he is also wrong about a lot of things, and so you have the challenge of reading between the lines of his interactions with people (this is where he is most often wrong about things) to try to figure out what is really going on.

I also liked the Liam Campbell series of mysteries by Dana Stabenow. I will not make any claims of greatness for these books (and when I tried to read another of Stabenow's series I was unimpressed). But they are competent mysteries that work for me because they hit what I am coming to understand is my mystery-series sweet spot: the mysteries are not necessarily easy to figure out, but they're easy to understand. At the end of the book, I know what happened. And there is a tortured, unfulfilled romance that stretches through more than one book (cf. Clare/Russ). Perhaps I should just cave in and start reading romance novels, but I choose instead to skirt around the edges of that genre, re-reading Jane Austen and Jane Eyre, and mysteries with a romance component.

But that's not what I came here to talk about. As with most resolutions, I have sometimes failed in keeping mine. Since January 1, for instance, I've read four books on economics, nine about education, and two on child development and children's issues, as well as a few on miscellaneous other topics. So, really, I've failed pretty spectacularly at the "stop thinking so much" part of the resolution, while doing pretty well at the "read more fun genre fiction" piece of it. A mixed bag.

Right now, I'm reading Nel Noddings' Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach, and am liking it. She wants us to encourage young people to apply critical thinking--which she defines very broadly--to all sorts of areas where we either don't attempt to educate them at all (parenting, homemaking), or where we want them to just listen to us and do what we say (the value of homework, the idea that everyone should always try to do their best).

The bulk of the book is chapters that take up specific topics: Learning and Self-Understanding; The Psychology of War; House and Home; Other People; Parenting; Animals and Nature; and so on. In her introduction, she identifies some of the kinds of questions we might encourage young people to ask, and I like her questions:

When and under what conditions do I do my best work? Is it possible that a problem, topic, or potential product might "speak" to us or somehow reveal itself? Is it sometimes morally acceptable and creatively productive to do less than my best work? What does it mean, anyway, to be educated? (pp 2-3)

and:

Today we insist that everyone (almost without exception) must study academic mathematics. Yet relatively few students will actually use this material in their adult lives. In contrast, all of us will make a home of some sort. Why, then, does homemaking not appear as a serious and sustained subject in our schools? Among the questions we [might] consider are these: What is a home? What does our house, room, or corner say about us? What attitude might we take toward our possessions? What organic habits do we acquire in our childhood homes? Is it possible (or desirable) to enjoy household tasks? What role does conversation play in contributing to the growth of partners or children? What does ignorance or ineptitude on these topics contribute to present societal conditions? Are there people who want to maintain these conditions? Can it be that your ignorance might serve my purpose? (p. 6)

I think I'm drawn to her approach because of my own experiences with gradually coming to think critically about received wisdom from my family and the schools I attended. Also because I hear parents and educators talk about wanting their children to have "critical thinking" skills, but having either a very narrow view of what that might mean (Noddings wants a very broad and deep definition of it), or assuming that it means that the children will come to agree with them.

I see this in some liberals I know, who believe that they have reached their political position through critical thinking, and so their efforts to practice critical thinking with young people look more like leading them down a path to a foregone conclusion. If that makes sense. I have had some teachers of my acquaintance describe things they've done in the classroom as "introducing critical thinking" that sounded more to me like "introducing a liberal point-of-view," and I think it's important for adults to make the distinction. Especially for those of us who see ourselves positioned in opposition to the mainstream or to the status quo, who might have to be extra-vigilant in remembering that not everyone who thinks deeply about a subject will reach the same conclusions.

I could go into a whole digression here about how I see us ("us" being me and my liberal friends; me and my fellow Quakers) engaging in persuasion and socialization that we fail to recognize as such. For instance, in my monthly meeting we regularly reinforce the idea that young people should go to college; that "name" colleges are important; that the kind of professional accomplishments that win awards and garner articles in the paper are worth celebrating publicly; and so on. I'd like to see us thinking more critically about how we engage with these things, and I'd like our young people to see us doing it. End of digression.

Noddings says, "Students need to believe that they should reflect, evaluate, and make authentic decisions. That means perhaps rejecting some of what the adult community advises them to do" (p. 99). I think that's hard for even the best-intentioned grown-ups to grasp.

Noddings goes on to say, "There are risks in conducting these discussions with teenagers.... The risk may be worth taking" (pp 100-101). Even though the thesis of her book is clearly that we should be raising these questions and having these conversations with young people, she invites us to consider: What are the risks? What are the trade-offs? Are they worth it?

Premature Curriculum Review: Home Science Adventures

2011-02-28T12:47:00.000-05:00

Last spring and this fall, the boys and I used a science curriculum from McRuffy Press. It's a scripted curriculum, meaning if you want you can just read off the page for the lessons, and comes with a kit that includes everything you need. We liked it pretty well; one of its weaknesses is that, like many elementary science curricula, it jumps around. One lesson you're doing bats, the next you're talking about electricity, and the one after that, classification. But the boys liked how hands-on it was, and I liked having everything in the box. The materials include games based on the lessons; the boys didn't care much for those and we mostly ended up skipping them.

When we finished the year's worth of McRuffy Press science we had, I considered buying another year's worth. But they only go through third grade in science, and the sample lessons looked both repetitive with what we'd already done, and kind of basic even for Carl, who's notionally a first-grader this year but who is a little advanced academically, I think.

I tried Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding. I loved the idea of it--a comprehensive elementary science curriculum that focuses on the underlying practices and concepts of science. It seemed well-structured and like kids would really understand not just specific science facts and concepts but some things about how science works. And I liked the price: just $24 for the book.

In practice, I found it unusable. It's the kind of science curriculum that "just uses objects you have around the house!" But I never have the objects. When I ended up going to three stores to find a certain kind of balloon for one lesson, I was about ready to give up. I am learning to accept about myself that I don't want to have a long planning time for our homeschooling, so a curriculum that required me to think a week or more ahead about what supplies we'd need, plus take the information in the book and figure out how to make a lesson out of it, was just too labor-intensive for me.

In addition, the book is poorly laid-out; there are no chapter headings, for instance, so it can be difficult to navigate to the lesson you're looking for, or tell when you're there.

I've been on an e-mail list for families using BFSU, and so I know that some people have made it work for them and love it. And the lessons we did manage to do went well. But I now admit that I want something more packaged and more structured; with such an up-front commitment in prep time, I found with BFSU that we were ending up not doing science because I hadn't found time for the planning.

When I happened across Home Science Adventures, I knew the boys would love it. It's all hands-on science activities, organized into six topics: light, insects, microscope explorations, astronomy, birds, and magnetism. You can buy individual topics or sets of three. It's designed to be used with multi-age groups of kids.

I wasn't sure, from the website, whether it would provide the kind of information about scientific methodologies or topic-spanning concepts that I also wanted the kids to be exposed to. But I decided to try it, on the strength of the boys' enthusiasm, with the thought that I could supplement it with additional readings if needed.

We bought a three-topic set: Light, Insects, and Microscope Adventures. It comes with one pocket microscope; I paid for two extras, because I am wise.

So far, we've done 3-5 lessons in each topic, and the boys are loving it. The lessons are brief and very much focus on the kids experimenting and thinking about what they find. They're encouraged to record and analyze data; Eric and I did a lesson in the Light topic today that asked him to analyze the chart of data he'd made and predict what would happen next. The Insect Lessons have been less "here is the life cycle of the honeybee" and more, "How do you classify these bugs? Which characteristics define an insect?" I loved that the first couple of lessons in Microscope Explorations taught about using the microscopes not by giving instructions but through experimentation: "OK, now do this. What happens?" The kids were invited to learn through experimentation that the image in the microscope is both reversed and upside-down, and to figure out that, although it says on the side that they magnify 30x, they really magnify about 22x.

So, the stuff I was hoping to expose the boys to, about how science is practiced, and about concepts like classification that transcend a single topic, seem to be worked in.

And, I must say, when they say everything you need is in the box, they mean it. They don't assume you have scotch tape; it's in the box. If you're going to need paper cups for a lesson, the paper cups are in the box. There's a packet of honey, a paper clip, and a spoon in there. The only things you're going to need that aren't included are an onion and a slice of bread, and I'm pretty sure if they could have figured out how to include those, they would have.

The website claims that the 43 lessons in our box will constitute a whole year's science if done once a week. While that's technically true, I suppose, we find that the individual lessons (contained on one double-sided piece of paper) are so short and engaging that we usually do 2-4 at a sitting. In addition, my boys love science, and are enjoying these kits, so much that I expect we'll do science more like 2-4 days a week. So this isn't a year's curriculum for us, I don't think. But I think it's going to be a very fun few months.

Belatedly Snow-Bound with John Greenleaf Whittier

2011-02-11T19:59:00.002-05:00

Last week, right before the big snowstorm, I wrote a blog post and posted it. While I was then proofing and editing it, I lost most of it in one of those computer things that happens, and I thought it was gone forever. But it turns out that the people who get e-mail notifications when I post something get the entire post as an e-mail message, so my friend Joann was able to send it to me. It's about ten days late, but here it is:

Everybody's getting all hunkered down for the blizzard, though we seem to still be on the first trailing edge of it; nothing too dramatic seems to have happened outside, snow-wise. I have kind of a holiday feeling, knowing we're going to be snugged into the house tomorrow. I don't know why this feels different from any ordinary day; the kids and I spent the day at home today, after all, for no good reason but that we had nowhere to go. But it does feel different.

I can't help thinking about John Greenleaf Whittier's poem Snow-Bound, which you might have heard of in school but probably haven't read. Does anybody read Whittier anymore? I recently did a little reading project on him in preparation to teach some of his poetry in Adult Religious Education at my Quaker meeting (Whittier was a Quaker), and was amused that even scholars who were interested enough to write a whole book about him don't claim he was a great poet. In fact, they are inclined to say, "Whittier was by no means a great poet," in so many words. Often more than once. They claim "competence," instead, or cultural significance, since he was such a popular poet in his day. Time was every schoolchild could recite "Blessings on thee, little man / barefoot boy with cheek of tan." Not so much anymore.

I find I could say a lot about Whittier, and Snow-Bound. I was just going to pop in to say that the poem is a nostalgic remembrance of being snowed-in with his family at Haverhill, the farm the Whittiers had lived on since at least 1647. He wrote Snow-Bound in 1866, when he was almost 60 years old, and as well as being about nostalgia for a lost boyhood, it also takes its place in a culture that was very conscious of the past slipping away. Technological changes were affecting the way people lived, their mobility, their family relations, and it was frightening. The central images of Snow-Bound are about the family gathered around the hearth:

Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
Content to let the north-wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost-line back with tropic heat;
And ever, when a louder blast
Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
The merrier up its roaring draught
The great throat of the chimney laughed;
The house-dog on his paws outspread
Laid to the fire his drowsy head,
The cat's dark silhouette on the wall
A couchant tiger's seemed to fall;
And, for the winter fireside meet,
Between the andirons' straddling feet,
The mug of cider simmered slow,
The apples sputtered in a row,
And, close at hand, the basket stood
With nuts from brown October's wood.

One of the technological changes taking place in the 19th Century was that stoves were replacing hearths as the primary way of heating homes. They were more efficient and more effective, but commentators feared the decay of family life, which had so often centered around the hearth in the evenings. Who can gather around a stove? And why would they have to, if the stove can make the whole room warm? Their homes heated by stoves, what could there be to keep families together? It's all sort of quaint and hilarious, but also familiar, if you read excerpts from some of these writings (and I'm sorry I don't have some for you; it's in my brain from some old piece of criticism I read a long time ago). It seems there is always something threatening to atomize the nuclear family. A few years ago I read a book about the Schoolroom Poets of the 19th and early 20th century (appropriately enough, the book is called Schoolroom Poets). One of the arguments of the book is that the notion that an educated child ought to be able to recite poetry by heart is one of the things that paved the way for free verse to become the dominant poetic form in the 20th century. Whittier was a prominent Schoolroom Poet, along with Lowell, Longfellow, and some other guys I don't remember right now. Their poetry was perfect for memorization: strongly rhythmical and tightly rhymed. No assonance for these boys, by golly! Here's Longfellow. Listen to the absolutely inflexible marching rhythm here; and is there any rhyme more pure than the single syllables he ends all these lines with?

Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
with large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
are strong as iron bands.

(Why do I know that? Does Laura's little sister Carrie Ingalls recite it at the school exhibition in whichever Little House book that is? Some book I read over and over as a child featured a character saying those first four lines nervously over and over. In any case, can't you just see some cute little 8-year-old standing by her desk reciting that?)

Anyway, I have often seen the rise of free verse attributed to Whitman, who pretty much invented it and showed what it could do (free verse does not have to have either rhyme or meter, though our former poet laureate Robert Pinsky argues in The Sounds of Poetry that the iambic pentameter is so fundamental to the poetic line in English that it permeates even free verse in unexpected ways. Still: free verse, no set rhyme or meter). But the author of Schoolroom Poets argues that the imposition of memorization on children created in the generation that came of age in the 20th century an association of strong rhyme and meter with immaturity. So poets and readers turned away from childish-seeming metrical verse, to something that seemed more mature, and more modern. Again, we get the theme of a time and a culture passing away, though this time it's a deliberate turning forward and away from the past, away from a poet like Whittier who is associated with childhood schoolrooms and who is a bridge to an even earlier time that looks ever more benighted to the modern sensibility. Hence, free verse.

Ten years ago, I wrote a good paper on Walt Whitman and thought about turning it into a master's thesis. But then I had a baby, and got kind of busy and didn't do that. Another reason I didn't do it is my advisor wanted me to do Whittier, too, and I just never loved Whittier. I should have listened to my advisor, though, because when I did some reading on Whittier for this ARE program, a kind of interesting guy emerged. The poetry is still pedestrian; the word "doggerel" wants to force itself upon one's consciousness as one reads. But Whittier the man: very interesting. His biographers believe he was celibate his whole life and died a virgin. And yet he had many flirtations with women, and was known for stringing them along and taking gifts from them, leading them to believe something might happen which never did. One biographer kept saying, "If he were a woman, they'd have called him a coquette." Look at this face: a flirt, really? A coquette? So hard to believe. And yet so they say. Whittier was also tirelessly politically active. He was an ardent abolitionist (in this, we modern Quakers can embrace him, whereas we have to bear our disappointment in our beloved Walt Whitman, he of the so-very-superior poetry and the distressingly retrograde opinions on abolition and equality between the races). Whittier was deeply involved in politics, often exerting a great deal of influence from behind the scenes; he worked tirelessly to elect abolitionist candidates and served in the legislature himself. Here's a broadside he wrote for the cause: Am I Not a Man and a Brother?

This is all probably much more than you ever wanted to know about John Greenleaf Whittier (though if you come to ARE at Red Cedar Friends Meeting on February 27 you will learn more! Or maybe you'll just hear all this again. But we'll read more of his poetry). But I will end by saying that sometimes, in his poems about Quakerism, he gets at something that rises above doggerel and feels like he is saying something I recognize, putting an experience into words. His poem The Meeting is about bringing a friend to Quaker worship; I like the friend's palpable relief when the silent worship ends, and his incredulous questions. "What part have you," his friend asks, "in these dull rites of drowsy-head?" "Dull rites of drowsy-head" indeed; who has not dozed during Quaker meeting?

I like Whittier's answer. It's long, but listen to this little excerpt. This is the very essence of Quaker worship, I think:

And so I find it well to come
For deeper rest to this still room,
For here the habit of the soul
Feels less the outer world's control;
The strength of mutual purpose pleads
More earnestly our common needs;
And from the silence multiplied
By these still forms on either side,
The world that time and sense have known
Falls off and leaves us God alone.

(note: I was being hyperbolic when I said "no assonance for these guys." The not-quite-rhyme of "come" and "room" is an example of slant, or half, rhyme. Which is not assonance, per se, since assonance depends on the vowel sounds, but is still not perfect rhyme, either.)

A Surprisingly Good Day

2011-02-11T18:26:00.001-05:00

It's really easy when you blog, or are posting on Facebook, to only mention the glorious moments. So in the interest of full disclosure, I'd like to mention that at 10:00 this morning, the boys and I were having such a dismal time that 1) I was ready to give up on homeschooling, and 2) we had retreated to three different rooms, where we were each weeping in solitary splendor.

I could not think how to salvage the situation. But after awhile I wandered into the hallway and said to the closed doors, "Um, guys, *sniff*, I'm going to go ahead and graph our Mystery Class data so we don't fall behind. Anybody who wants to come help, *snuffle*, can come help."

The boys wandered out to the living room, wiping their noses on their sleeves, and we transferred our sunrise/sunset data to the data sheets, calculated the photoperiods for each of the mystery sites, and charted them on our graph. We found and fixed a couple of our mistakes--calculating photoperiods is surprisingly tricky math--and were astonished that the site that got 24 hours of sunlight just a week ago got only a little more than 18 hours a week later! We checked and double-checked the numbers and that's what they said. I'll be curious to see where it is--the South Pole is still in full-time daylight this week. So it's someplace north of there.

Then we did an activity where you find other locations that are at your latitude and check their photoperiod. We did Sapporo, Japan; Florence, Italy; and Changchun, China; all of which we found by using the globe we got for Christmas. They all had photoperiods within a few minutes of ours. It was fun to see the boys figure out that photoperiod is all about latitude; they had previously thought that places with similar photoperiods must be close to us but now they get that they could be very far away.

Then we worked on this week's Lego Quest challenge. The challenge was to build something using 30 specific bricks, and we made a set for Yehva, so when she got home from preschool, she did it, too. I'd post pictures but the boys are excited that their creations might be on the website next week so I'll save it for then.

Doing fun stuff together got us feeling much less horrible, and the rest of the day went pretty well. Yehva and I had to run to the store at one point to buy eggs so we could make cupcakes, and I was reminded of why I am always running out of things: I simply cannot do the grocery shopping with Yehva. This is what it was like just running into a convenience store for one item:

Me: OK, Yev, just so you know, we're only buying eggs. We're not buying anything else.

Yehva: OK.

We enter the store.

Yehva: Mama, they have candy!

Me: I see.

Yehva: Can I have some?

Me: Not today. Today we are just buying eggs.

Yehva: But I'm hungry.

Me: We'll have lunch when we get home. And we're making cupcakes.

Yehva: Can we get donuts?

Me: No. We're just buying eggs. Another day we can get donuts.

Yehva: I want donuts.

Me: Donuts are certainly tasty.

Yehva, escalating: I want donuts!

Me: No donuts. We're just getting eggs.

Yehva: I see cookies.

Me: I see the cookies, too.

Yehva: I want some cookies.

Me: Sorry, we're just here for eggs.

Yehva stomps her foot: I want cookies!

Me: Not today.

Yehva picks up a package of bakery cupcakes: Can we get cupcakes?

Me: Yehva! We are buying eggs--and only eggs--so we can *make* cupcakes! We are not buying cupcakes!

Yehva: Then can I have some candy?

Public School Mom: It's a Whole New Skillset

2011-02-09T17:35:00.002-05:00

So, Yehva loves her 3-morning-a-week preschool so much that next year I'm thinking of sending her to one that meets five mornings a week, and I tend to assume we'll send her to kindergarten the year after that. Because she's just that extroverted! I've spent the last four years of my life as a homeschooling mom (and I'm only just starting to figure it out), and it has been a relief not to have to deal with schools. My friends have had to wrestle with teachers who wouldn't give their disabled kids reasonable accommodations, with math curricula that were poorly-designed and leaving their very bright children high and dry, with pointless homework that doesn't make sense. I have been happy not to have do these things. For one thing, I'm not very assertive with authority figures (David jokes that I'm "ruly," which is of course the opposite of "unruly"). I've been reading the blog at Coalition for Kid-Friendly Schools, and one of the moms there has been engaged in a protracted conversation with her kids' principal about the math curriculum the school uses--her daughters are at a Quaker elementary school that routinely feeds its graduates into the remedial math program at the local middle school.

I am following this mom's saga with the principal with great interest, because I simply can't see myself in that role. I'm much more the type to suck it up and then bitch to my friends. I have often thought that one reason we homeschool is that I am not assertive enough to be a good advocate for my children in the public schools.

And yet, there I was at 9:30 this morning, taking a tour of the public Montessori school a mile down the road, because one option for Yehva next year is to enter the pre-school there. It's close to our house, it might be a good option if she ends up in the public schools (likely because even the very reasonable tuition at the private Montessori schools around here would be a stretch for us), and their preschool program, while fee-based, is cheaper than the other Montessori schools near us.

The tour was very interesting. As you'd expect in an affluent suburb, the school itself is in good shape, clean and shiny and freshly painted. Every classroom we visited had computers in it; there's also a large computer lab. Instead of blackboards or whiteboards, the classrooms have "smartboards," which can display material from the teachers' computers or be worked at directly; apparently they're touch screens and also have special markers they can be written on with, though we didn't see one in action.

I appreciated the principal's honesty about the extent to which the school is "compromised" Montessori. "We're as Montessori as we can be given that, as a public school, we are not exempt from standardized testing or from meeting state curriculum guidelines." In other words, they're pretty darn Montessori for the 3-year-olds, but less and less so as the kids get older.

Still, I liked the 3rd and 4th grade classroom we visited. There were no desks in rows, though there were tables available for kids to work at. Kids were moving around freely, and engaged in a variety of activities around the room. I liked the atmosphere in the room much better than most classrooms I've been in.

While I know a couple of moms who have kids in the school and are very happy with it, I also know a couple who've had serious problems, in both cases with a teacher refusing accommodation for a disabled child. One of the families left the school because of it. So my anecdotal impression of the school is very mixed.

I'd be fretful about the overwhelming whiteness of the student body in any case, but this is Yehva we're talking about--she's the only AA kid in her preschool class, and if this keeps up, at some point she's going to notice. Is that a problem? I don't honestly know. I have a friend who is black and who lives in a predominately white area where her kids are often the only black kids in their classes and activities, and she's really shruggo about it; she sees it as just a fact of her kids' lives. But I think it's probably different if your parents and extended family are also black--Yehva's the only black kid at home, too. So one of the questions I have, if I'm going to be a School Mom as well as a homeschooling mom, is: Should I consider putting Yehva in one of the Lansing charter schools, or into Lansing Public Schools as a schools of choice student? Is that important enough to choose a half-hour commute over the one-mile stroll? Or to choose a struggling school district over one with a 97% graduation rate, that sends most graduates to college? Which does Yehva need more: half the kids in her classes to be black, or half the kids in her high school to be taking AP classes?

I don't know.

On the one hand, I've been pretty in touch lately with what we give up by homeschooling, things the schools offer that are a challenge to get at home, or in the homeschool community (somebody else to teach Eric Mindstorms would be very welcome, for instance. Both boys could use a bigger peer group, I think, despite their introversion. And it recently came to my attention that neither of my sons--who are almost 7 and almost 10--knows the alphabet song, a deficiency that can only be laid at my door). On the other hand: at this morning's tour, one of the moms asked how the school handled it if a kindergartner, say, was ready to move beyond kindergarten-level work. The principal threw around a lot of glittering phrases about "stretching" and "exploring," but the upshot of her response was that a kindergartner could not be allowed to do first-grade work, because then in first grade they'd have to do second-grade work, and in second grade they'd have to do third-grade work...and so on. And this would be just a big pain in the butt for everybody. "Of course, we do have a gifted education consultant available through the district," she said, but then she back-pedaled to make it clear that they'd only call on the consultant in extraordinary circumstances, if a kid was "really above...I mean really, really above...." In other words: probably not for your kid. This is just by way of saying that I am aware of the gaps and deficiencies of schools, as well.

I also came away not sure Montessori preschool is for Yehva. I love Montessori classrooms, with their orderly shelves of interesting things, and the kids sitting around at their little rugs doing their "works." But the PPK classroom we saw today didn't have what most preschools do: a texture table, an art area, a dress-up/pretend play area. I've read Maria Montessori, so I have a pretty good idea why this is (it's all about the purposeful work!). But I think those are some of the things Yehva likes best about preschool. I think she'd like the Montessori "works"--she loves manipulating things--but I also think she'd miss those other things.

Maybe school isn't the right thing for her at all. She's extroverted; she's also high energy. She rarely sits down. It may be that she will turn out to be a very bad fit for the classroom. Maybe we'd be better off homeschooling her and using our money to hire an athletic college student to spend a couple hours a day taking her snowboarding and waterskiing and rappelling, and teaching her to play baseball, basketball, soccer, and football (she wants to play football. She wants to play every sport she has ever seen anyone play, in person or on TV).

I wanted to love the public Montessori, because it's the path of least resistance for us: it's close, it's probably better than the traditional public schools in some ways that matter to me, if she goes there for preschool she's guaranteed a kindergarten slot, we'd have to pay for one more year of preschool but then it would be free. I liked it, at least some things about it. Enough to send Yehva there? I don't know. How much more would I have to love a different school to pay $6500/year in tuition? I don't know.

I might find out, though. I sent off an e-mail asking to set up a tour at one of the local private Montessori schools. (I also know parents of kids in this school. Some of them love it. Some of them don't. One pulled her daughter because she thought the school was pigeon-holing her daughter as a "troublemaker." Her daughter was 2. I talk to too many parents. It muddies the waters.) Anyway, I sent off the e-mail. "Practically any weekday morning is fine for me," I said, "except that we'll be out of town from February 16-22." I got a very prompt e-mail back saying that I'd been pencilled in for a tour on the morning of the 16th. *sigh*

One of my friends pulled her son out of elementary school last year and tried homeschooling. "There are too many choices," she complained to me not long after. "When he was in school, they made all these choices for me!" As someone who has spent hours reading up on math curricula on the internet, and hours reading up on science curricula, and hours reading up on Language Arts curricula--and this only after spending years going back and forth about whether to use curricula at all--I could sympathize. But I find that the decisions involved in sending a kid to school are just as hairy. I'm lucky, I suppose, to live in a place where there are really very few choices, or my head would explode. As it is, I think I'll go take half a Xanax and lie down with a cold cloth on my head until the palpitations stop.

Let Me Spell That Out For You

2011-01-31T14:05:00.000-05:00

So, when people talk to each other, there are at least two levels of communication going on. One is very direct: the words you're saying. But the other is implicit, and has to do with what the words imply, non-literal meanings that accrue because of cultural conventions or long usage. Linguists call this latter meaning "pragmatics," though I'm sure I've done a poor job of describing it.

So I'll give some examples. I have many to hand, because one of David's favorite things is to tease me by pretending he has no notion of pragmatics. So, for 17 years, I have almost-daily been subjected to little conversations like these:

Me: David, have you seen my shoes?

David: Many a time!

or

Me: David, I'd like a cup of tea.

David: And no wonder! Tea is both delicious and soothingly warm!

He likes to pretend he can only hear what I have literally said, so he doesn't know that "have you seen my shoes?" is a perfectly conventional construction meaning, "I cannot find my shoes. Do you know where they are right now?" Or that "I'd like a cup of tea" is more than a declarative statement about my appetite.

I'm thinking about this for a couple of reasons. One is that Eric is learning the difference between "statements" and "commands" in his Language Arts curriculum, and it's interesting to think about how often a statement can actually be a command ("I'm cold" can mean "turn the heat up," or "hand me that blanket"; "I'd like a cup of tea" can actually mean, "get me a cup of tea, please"; "I'm getting hungry" can mean, "please start cooking dinner.")

The other is that I've had several occasions recently to reflect on how very often people think they've said something, but they haven't. A couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail from an acquaintance about a conversation we'd had a few months ago. In the e-mail, she described herself as having been "very direct" in asking me to do something, and said that she felt I had just "blown her off." I apologized, because I am sorry I made her uncomfortable. But I remember the conversation, too, and at the time, I honestly did not realize she was asking me to take action. Why not? Because she phrased her request in the form of a factual statement. She didn't say, "Su, would you please?" or "Su, I'd like you to," or "Su, I wish you would..." Maybe I was a little too clueless ("Yes, I have seen your shoes many times! And admired their tasteful elegance!") but I was struck by her sense that she had been "very direct" with me when in fact she had not said a word about what she wanted me to do.

Another friend was telling me the other day about how hurt and offended she was by someone's failure to act in the face of her need. She had sent this person an e-mail saying that she was ill, and expected that the response would be an offer of help. But the offer of help did not come. Again, I noticed that she thought she had made a request, and that her request had been ignored, but she never said she needed help during her illness. Only that she was ill. And her friend took the information at face value: she was sorry to hear about the illness, but didn't realize she was being asked to help.

I wonder if that indirect form of making a request is partly cultural? Is it a form of Midwestern politeness and conflict-avoidance, or is it something that happens everywhere people talk to each other? Awhile ago, somebody on AskMetafilter described the difference between Ask vs. Guess Culture, and it resonated with a lot of people. I come from Guess Culture, for sure, but I think I've become an Ask Culture person because I like the clarity, and because, as the AskMetafilter comment said, Guess Culture behavior can seem passive-aggressive to me: you're mad at me because I didn't do something you didn't actually ask me to do? Really? It can feel like a set-up. (And realizing that you're disappointed because someone didn't do something they didn't know you wanted them to do can be both humbling and liberating.)

I wonder if another way to think about Ask vs. Guess is that people may have preferences about who they want to be mad: some people would rather be mad, and some people would rather somebody else be mad. If you'd rather be mad than have someone mad at you, you're going to make indirect statements instead of direct requests; you risk not getting what you want and need, but on the other hand, it's much less likely that the person will be upset with you. On the other hand, if you ask someone very directly, especially if your request might make them embarrassed or self-conscious or feel hurtful ("Can you please stop chewing with your mouth open?") they might be angry with you. I suppose there's a balance, a calculation people make, weighing how likely they are to end up in explicit conflict against how likely they are to get what they want.

That's all I've got. I've just been musing about this lately. I wonder if David's found my shoes and made my tea yet?

January Reading: Three Book Reports

2011-01-24T19:36:00.003-05:00

So, when the new year started, I was in a reading lull. I didn't have many books home from the library, and hardly any in my hold queue. I felt sort of tired of all the kinds of things I usually read, and like I'd just been thinking too much about too many things and needed to give my brain a break. So, I decided, I would devote my reading in the new year to genre fiction, and avoid reading anything else on certain worn-out topics, like politics, education, and parenting.

I have been half-successful. I've read some science fiction, including Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World, which I just finished this morning and was very impressed by. It's one of those books that seems only OK--good in the gonzo, perfect-action-man tradition of Spider Robinson's Callahan books, John Scalzi's Old Man's War series, and certain Heinlein. But then, about halfway in, the pieces start coming together in a very satisfying way, and it becomes a really good book, and you admire the author for having the patience to create a set-up 250 pages long. I was completely surprised by the twist around page 400, even though the twist suddenly made all these things that had nagged at me ("Why does he never talk about his parents?") make perfect sense. I picked up that something was off; I didn't figure out what it was. That's a good twist.

I have set aside The Gone-Away World for David, instead of putting it right into the library bag to be returned. Though, as I told him this morning, I'm not sure I want him to read it even though I am sure he'll like it. Because he is smarter than me in certain ways and he will figure out the twist in about 100 pages, and then I'll feel stupid.

Of course, I've forewarned him: he knows there's a twist. So he has an unfair advantage. In addition to the one where he's just smarter than me in certain ways, I mean.

But I have not been fully successful at focusing on genre fiction, because I have this reflex: if someone mentions a book in my hearing, or on a website or something, I order it from the library and read it. I think I have said before that it's a wonder my friends don't exploit this habit for their own amusement, sending me on wild goose chases after terrible novels and unreadable literary criticism and Tea Party memoirs and distasteful porn.

Anyway, I was on a website where some people were recommending books, and as a result I ended up reading two books about education and one about parenting this month. And now I will say a few things about these books.

School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School by Edward Humes.

Whitney High School in Cerritos, California, is one of the highest-ranked public high schools in America. 100% of its graduates go on to college, many of them in the Ivy League or at flagship schools in the California state university system. Edward Humes spent a year at the school interviewing teachers, parents, and students, in the interest of painting a picture of what high school is like at the kind of school that has a reputation so wide-spread that families move into the district from India and Japan in the hopes of enrolling their kids there.

I liked this book better than I expected to. Humes was less interested in an expose than in a description, so the book gives you a picture of what works in the school as well as what might make most of us cringe, like seventh graders pulling highly-caffeinated all-nighters before major tests, and parents who push kids into a very narrow range of options (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, conveniently abbreviated "HYP"; medicine, business, hard sciences) no matter what the kids' interests and aptitudes. Humes doesn't seem too interested in the big questions, but his book shows us what it takes to produce that student body, and invites us to wonder whether it's worth it. A pretty quick read; worth it if you're interested in that kind of thing. Not something I'd put on a list of "10 Books About Education You Must Read," were someone to ask me for such a list.

How to Walk to School: Blueprint for a Neighborhood Renaissance by Jacqueline Edelberg and Susan Kurland.

This book is about the transformation of a failing Chicago public elementary school into a model school, and it is written by one of the mothers who drove the transformation, and the principal of the school. One of the book's flaws is that is is annoyingly self-congratulatory; the group of mothers who joined together to try to improve their neighborhood school is referred to throughout as the "supermoms," for instance. It's a bit grating.

There is no doubt that these moms worked hard. They conceived of their plan while hanging out at the playground with their preschoolers; overwhelmed by the process of trying to find places for their kids in one of the decent public elementary schools (which might get 600 applications for 57 places), or in one of the private elementary schools in Chicago (which might also get an overwhelming number of applications, and then cost $20,000 per year to boot), they decided to see if they could do something about their neighborhood school. It was failing academically; the physical plant was dingy and in need of repair; the building itself was so posted over with KEEP OUT signs that it was intimidating just to approach it.

But they did. The met with the principal and got her permission to transform the place. They set a timeline of one year, just long enough to figure out if they could make it decent enough for their kids to start kindergarten in, and to show enough progress to get other parents to choose it over the magnet-school/private-school lottery. In the second half of one summer, they collected nearly a half-million dollars worth of donated materials and labor, with which they improved the building's exterior, painted the interior, made much-needed repairs, and transformed an unused room into the school's first-ever library.

Yay for them! They certainly deserve some kudos for their vision and hard work, these "supermoms," and I would offer them some except that they are so busy kudos-ing themselves that it would be redundant.

Well, and I won't offer them too many kudos because their story has a much deeper problem than a little too much self-satisfaction: a shocking level of cluelessness about social class issues.

These women achieve something that goes so far beyond ordinary class-cluelessness that I was staggered. I have a friend who is very passionately concerned about social class issues; I kept thinking to myself, "Jeanne must never read this book. You could practically murder Jeanne with this book, just slip it into her bedside to-be-read pile and wait for the inevitable aneurysm..." I honestly did not want to believe that people this unaware existed, but here they are, damned by their own words. No wonder people like Jeanne are so passionate about social class issues.

It starts when they conceive the project, and deliberately decide to proceed without seeking input from anyone outside their group. Their reasons are pragmatic, and make sense to a point: they want to hit the ground running and accomplish a lot very fast, and they're concerned that if they start convening neighborhood meetings and listening to other people's concerns, they'll get bogged down in discussion and controversy and accomplish nothing. I don't think they're necessarily wrong about that; I've been in community meetings myself where action was stalled by nay-sayers, or by competing and incompatible aspirations.

But that decision speaks to a kind of persistent assumption that the Supermoms know best. Unfortunately, they have a very narrow vision: they want to create a school that their kids, and the kids of other people like them, can attend. They are not asking questions about how to best serve a diverse neighborhood, for instance. They are self-congratulatory about things that would have troubled me, such as the high number of professional degrees among their group. It's not that professional degrees are bad; I'd just have been concerned about the insularity of the group. They don't seem to be. The authors crow about a moment when, needing a special permit for something, they are able to get it quickly because one of the group members, an urban planner, has contacts at the city. I'm having trouble making my point. I mean to say that they don't seem to notice that they're not a very representative group. If anything, they revel in the very things that privilege them. They describe what they did as a "blueprint," but don't seem to notice that they have a formidable array of resources that may not be easy for another group to come by. Their driving force is not, "This school is failing the neighborhood children; what can we do to make it better serve its community?"; rather, it's "I want to opt out of this insane magnet school/private school race; how can I make this school good enough for my child?"

Two more examples: At one point, the group is accused of "elitism" for wanting to hold an expensive fundraiser at what they describe as a "posh wine bar." It is very telling that the authors' response is a combination of befuddlement and missing the point: "How can we be elitist?" they ask. "We're working so hard on this fundraiser, working into the night!" And then they smugly claim that the complaints disappeared once the money started rolling in, $17,000 in one night. Yet again, the Supermoms know best! Astonishing.

The most telling moment, though, comes when the authors discuss the decline in enrollment among poor children and African-American children, once the school's turnaround begins to succeed. They are very troubled by this, and the long, introspective passage where they consider the moral and ethical issues involved in "fixing" a school and in the process turning it into a magnet for the upper-middle-class, and where they consider soberly whether there are things they could have done to improve the school while retaining and serving the kids who used to be its core population, is one of the highlights of the book.

Just kidding! Ha ha ha ha ha. They are, in fact, troubled by the decline in enrollment of Black and poor kids...because it becomes a fund-raising challenge. It turns out that both government entities and private foundations prefer to give money where it can help the underprivileged. The authors note without irony that nobody seems to want to give money to help kids who already have everything they need, so once the population of the school reaches a certain percentage of white and middle-class kids, it becomes much harder to get outside money. The lesson they learn: how to find corporate partners.

These moms really are dedicated, hard-working, and high-energy, and they forged a very productive partnership with their local failing school. I just wish they'd done it without making privileged white people look so completely clueless and self-involved.

[Full disclosure: By about halfway through the book, I found the authors so insufferably smug that I started skimming. So it is possible that somewhere in the second half is a section I missed in which they make all this right. If you read it, and find that part, send me an e-mail with the page numbers and I'll post a sheepish and apologetic update.]

Finally, I read The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris (though not the updated version linked there, the original one). The original was published in 1998, though I thought it was more recent than that--I remember some book whose premise was "parents actually have very little influence over their kids" making a big splash a few years ago. Whatever book that was, I ignored it, as I had ignored this one, until someone called it a must-read and I decided to give it a look.

Harris's premise is indeed that parents have very little influence over their children. She is a big fan of genetics, and she also believes that peers have more influence than parents. Some pieces of her argument are quite persuasive, and I'll talk about some of the points I found worthwhile in a minute. But I didn't trust her. Aristotle identified something called the "ethical appeal" in argument, which is the ways that a person signals that they can be trusted: carrying oneself with authority, for instance, or speaking calmly. I didn't buy Harris's ethical appeal. For one thing, she is too self-consciously radical. She likes to say, "Nobody else is brave enough to say this, but I am," as if early childhood researchers are going to form a mob, storm her house, and burn her at the stake as a heretic.

She also recycles the same examples over and over. Certain pairs of identical twins reared apart show up in chapter after chapter. It's tiresome to read; somebody should really have helped her edit this thing more effectively. But it also made me wonder to what extent she was relying on a handful of studies that supported her claims, and what she was ignoring. I found myself suspecting that if I were to check her sources, I might find that they didn't say what she said they did. I'm not invested enough to do that, but I just didn't trust her. Too axe-grindy.

An aside on the identical twins: she is especially enamored of these twins, reared apart, who, when they met as adults for the first time, had similar haircuts, glasses with rectangular frames, and sons named James. They were also both wearing blue shirts. This is all supposed to point to the mysterious genetic component of behavior, but I was skeptical. I found myself thinking about how similar men's haircuts are in general; how little variation there is in eyeglass fashion (practically everybody I know is wearing rectangular frames right now--because they're the only thing you can get). How common a name was "James" when their sons were born? I remember getting all excited one time because David and I met another couple named Dave and Sue; David laughed at me. He reminded me that "David" and "Susan" were the #1 baby names when we were born; there must be thousands and thousands of couples our age with our names. And, finally, blue has got to be one of the two most popular colors for men's shirts.

I'd have been more impressed if the raised-apart identical twins had shown up for their first meeting wearing Hawaiian shirts, with fresh Mohawks, John Lennon glasses, and sons named Hubert. You see what I mean? I don't think "blue shirt, son named James" rises much beyond coincidence.

Anyway.

What did I find convincing about Harris's argument? Well, she points out that cause and effect can be hard to untangle. A study finds that children who are spanked are more aggressive; does the spanking cause the aggression, or is it true that aggressive children are more likely to be spanked? She says that our pre-existing assumption that parents create their children's behavior leads us to assume the cause-effect arrow goes spanking----> aggression. But she doesn't think the research that has been done establishes that very well.

She also disputes the idea that parents have a character that can be summed up once for all their children: "She's a permissive parent," or, "He's very strict." Most parenting studies look at a cohort of children--a first-grade class, say--and correlate the kids' characteristics with how their parents treat them. But, Harris points out, most people have more than one child, and they are often different with different children. This is certainly true in my experience; I recently blogged about how different I am with Yehva than with the boys. But I was already learning from Eric, when he was my only child, how children create their parents. Harris suggests that if researchers looked at complete families they would find parents' behaviors and attitudes varying depending on their kids' temperaments and challenges.

Here, while I agree with her, I also feel a caution she doesn't seem to. If other researchers are guilty of making "the nurture assumption" and interpreting all their findings in that light, it seems to me that Harris sees children's inborn tendencies as extremely robust; she gives tremendous weight to "child-parent effects." She forgets to be as careful about cause and effect as she wants researchers to be.

I do think she is right that it is very difficult to separate parenting effects from the effects of peers (which she sees as extremely influential, though she says children self-select peers who reinforce their inborn tendencies: a child who tends toward delinquent behavior might be more likely to choose a peer group with similar tendencies) and the wider community. She says that parents do their parenting while embedded in the effects of the genes they have passed down, and in the community of people mostly like them they have chosen. Given all that, she thinks that there is little evidence that the very modest differences between what happens in two houses--an hour of TV vs. two hours per day; a slightly-higher tendency toward harsh discipline in one house, and so on--has much influence on what kids do or how they turn out. And thus, she says, out cultural tendency to praise or blame parents is unfair and misplaced.

Harris has some thought-provoking arguments; the book could have been better.

Premature Curriculum Review: Lego Mindstorms NXT Mayan Adventure

2011-01-20T11:57:00.004-05:00

One of the challenges for homeschooling parents trying to evaluate curriculum is that, whether at websites like homeschoolreviews.com or on people's own blogs, there is a tendency for moms to post reviews during the first few glowing days. So there are a lot of reviews that start, "I just got this in the mail and it looks great!" or, "We've been using this for two weeks and my kids love it!" It makes sense; everybody's enthusiasm is highest when things are new. But it's not all that helpful in terms of knowing how it really worked out. It's a nice treat when someone comes back a few months later to update their review, or someone who used a curriculum over a full year, or more, writes a detailed review.

I have resolved, myself, to try not to write about curriculum until we've really given it a shot.

And I am breaking that resolution now. Sorry.

One of Eric's Christmas presents was the Lego Mindstorms NXT: The Mayan Adventure homeschool pack, which includes the book and some extra parts you will need for some of the challenges. We haven't started it yet, but I read through it the other day and am--yes--very excited about it. We're going to work on it this afternoon, and I will certainly try to post more as we get into it.

The book sets up five robotics challenges in the context of a story about a boy with an NXT kit who goes on an archaeology expedition with his uncle. They find themselves at a pyramid that has, as one of its security features, tiny tunnels leading to hidden switches and doorways, designed to be navigated by trained spider monkeys. The team has no spider monkeys. But they do have an NXT kit! So the robots need to be designed to do the spider monkeys' jobs. For instance, the first challenge is to build and program a robot that can travel ten feet down an 10-foot tunnel, turn 90 degrees, travel 8 feet, turn 90 degrees again, travel 3 feet and press a switchplate, and then turn around and come back out again.

Each challenge is set up over four chapters: one that tells the story of the boy; one that I really like that uses a planning and design worksheet to think through the specific tasks the robot has to do and how they might be done, and what constraints exist (for instance, this first robot has to be pretty narrow to get around the corners, and it has to be able to turn, which means using two motors); and then one about building the robot, and one about programming and de-bugging it. I like that the chapters on building and programming present various options, like using either the optical sensor or the pressure sensor to tell the robot when it's reached a corner, and model a trial-and-error approach. For instance, the author writes that it took four tries for him to get his robot right, and he describes what he did for each try, what went wrong, and what he tried to fix it.

I don't know how much patience Eric will have with the design process part; he likes to jump into things. But I like the way the book is organized. We're going to take our first shot at it this afternoon; I'll let you know how it goes. If I can find the battery charger for my camera battery, maybe there will even be pictures of our robot.

UPDATE: This afternoon we read the first chapter of the story, and the chapter on the Design and Planning process. To my pleased surprise, Eric loved the Design and Planning part, which has pre-printed journal pages on which you name your robot, describe in a paragraph what it will do (he dictated to me), break its job into a numbered list of individual tasks, think about constraints ("it has to be small enough to turn the corners without bumping into the wall"), brainstorm ideas, and sketch robot ideas. He was really into it. He wants to try something different than the author; the author's robot turns around and goes forward out the tunnel, but Eric wants his robot to back up. He was also the one who then spotted the flaw in his plan: the robot will need a sensor on the back, then, to keep it from bumping the walls when going backwards, as well as one on the front. He still wants to try this plan even though it will make the robot a little bigger.

After we did that part, we took a few minutes and sorted all his Mindstorms pieces into their proper places in his storage bin, and then he was ready to stop for the day. He's excited to build and test his robot tomorrow, and to show his dad his Design and Planning journal this evening. Fun!

90 Minute Film Class

2011-01-20T02:17:00.001-05:00

Why am I up writing at 1:30 a.m.? Because last week I had a crown prep on Tooth 14, and it never stopped hurting but just kept getting worse and worse, so this morning I saw my dentist and he adjusted my temporary crown and then prescribed me a one-day course of steroids to reduce inflammation and help my nerve chill out. Steroids! Sleep not!

I have used the time wisely. I did some dishes, and then I watched a thing I've been meaning to watch for a few weeks, and now I'm going to write about it, and then I'm going to go lie down and stare, wide-eyed, into the darkness for awhile (steroids always make me feel like my eyelids are propped open with toothpicks), and then I'm going to get up again and make myself a cup of tea and watch an episode of Dollhouse via streaming Netflix, and then I'm going to lie down and stare wide-eyed into the dark again and just as I doze off Yehva is going to say, "Mama?" and I'm going to jerk awake and tuck her in again because she has kicked the covers off. And then I'm going to lie staring into the dark for awhile, and eventually I'll doze off but Yehva will need to be tucked in again, and I will repeat this two or three times and then just as the sky is beginning to get gray in the east, I will finally fall into a real sleep that will last until David pops his head in the door and says, "Su? Sweetie? It's 8:45. Don't you have an eye doctor appointment at 9?"

I've taken steroids before.

So, what did I watch?

Well, some guy named Plinkett makes video film reviews that are as long as movies themselves; his reviews of the Star Wars prequels run about 90 minutes each, in 3 30-minutes sections. There are actually two Plinketts: the real Plinkett, about whom we know very little except that he knows a lot about film and can talk about it in a very articulate and listen-able way; and the Plinkett Persona of the reviews, who speaks in a grating monotone that some people find off-putting, and lives in a filthy, dingy little house, where he seems to live on pizza rolls, Twinkies, and beer. Persona Plinkett is extremely profane; he has carnal relations with the aforementioned Twinkies, and with his cat; and he is a serial killer. Once or twice in each review, the camera accidentally reveals bones, or his latest victim tied up in the background. You can imagine that this is also very off-putting to some people; it's a kind of humor that offends, and some folks won't watch his reviews because of it. You can see people having a conversation about it over at MetaFilter earlier this month, when his review of Revenge of the Sith was released. You'll see the whole range of reactions there, from folks who won't watch him, to folks who think he's brilliant and those other folks are killjoys, to folks like me who'd prefer not to have the jarring little serial-killer moments but are willing to fast-forward through them because they're uncommon and brief and what he has to say about movies is knowledgeable, insightful, and educational.

If you were to watch his review of Sith, you would learn so much about why and how a film can be bad. He teaches you to recognize bad dialogue, and how it can ruin even a good actor. He explains why green screen work can take a viewer out of the world of the film even if it's technically very good, by dissecting the making of the scene where Obi-Wan Kenobi confronts General Grievous. He does a wicked comparison of Sith with Citizen Kane, which even he admits is unfair, but as he lays out similar scenes from the two movies side-by-side, in about five minutes he teaches you some ways that a film can be great, and some ways that a film can fail. The first half of the third section of the review, where he describes Lucas's habit of filming all dialogue scenes in the same two ways over and over, is brilliant and devastating. Characters either walk, slowly, no matter how urgent things are, because if they walk fast or run they'll get to the end of the studio's green screen space too quickly, or they walk to a couch and sit on it for the rest of the scene, except at the moments when one character stands, walks three steps away, and then turns back.

Perhaps you do not have children who love all things Star Wars, and have not been forced to watch these movies over and over. In that case, these reviews may not mean as much to you. Yet, truly, I say to you that it is worth suffering through the prequels in order to better appreciate Plinkett's reviews; he knows his stuff. Things you've sort of vaguely noticed, a sense of confusion you maybe had, or a feeling that you were watching a bad movie but couldn't quite put your finger on why it was bad: Plinkett will bring those things into sharp relief, give you a vocabulary for them, and show you things that, once seen, you will never un-see again. Really: I took a film course in college, and I swear I learned more from Plinkett's 90 minutes on Sith than I did earning 3 semester credits.

You have to be careful, though: I'm not kidding about not being able to un-see what is seen. (And I'm not just talking about the tasteless serial killer running joke--though the Sith review doesn't show us any victims, instead treating us to a Buffy-style hot ass-kicking babe who shows up at Plinkett's house with a battle axe to take revenge, which, hey, a big improvement.)

No, I mean: it's not always a good thing in your life to recognize badness. Here I will tell you a story that many people have heard before, but it so very illustrates what I'm talking about. Many years ago, before we had children, my good friends Adrianne and Carla invited me and some other friends to go camping on South Manitou Island. Camping on SMI is rugged. I think there's a cold-water standpipe, but otherwise there are no amenities. You hike, and hang out in the woods, and we took our kayaks over on the ferry with us. Overall it wasn't really my thing; I'm glad I went, but I like room-service type vacations, and I didn't stay as long as everybody else did.

Anyway, Carla's friend Kate also came, and she was a coffee connoisseur. I remember sitting by the fire one morning watching Kate grind her coffee and brew it in a French-press pot she had brought with her. Battery-powered coffee grinder (I'm pretty sure, though memory may be embellishing here) and French press on the no-amenities island. I suppose I wasn't as subtle with the eye-rolling as I might have been, because Kate decided to explain to me why she was willing to go to so much trouble to have a decent cup of coffee even when she hadn't showered in two days and had to haul the water half a mile and heat it over an open fire. It had to do with good coffee having texture, and more than one flavor tone, and layers, and she described all these things to me in detail. "Jeez," I said to myself, "what a pretentious snob."

The next day, on my way home, I stopped for lunch at a diner-type family restaurant, and I had coffee. Because I really liked coffee. I took one sip--I remember this sip, I will remember it always--and said to myself, "Gah! Kate was right! This coffee is terrible!"

Kate had taught me two things: how to recognize and appreciate good coffee, and how to recognize and depreciate the bad stuff. It's both a gift and a curse, because before my South Manitou Island coffee-appreciation seminar, I liked bad coffee just fine. Cheap coffee, easy to make, and you can get it anywhere. I was happy.

Now I have become a person who values good coffee so much that when I travel, I take my own beans, grinder, and coffee pot.*

Kate ejected me from my innocent coffee Eden.

This is my go-to story about this phenomenon, but I could give so many examples: books my friends devour gleefully that I can't get through because I'm too good at recognizing too many varieties of bad writing. Or how I recently noticed in a dialogue scene in an episode of Buffy that when a certain actor wasn't facing the camera full-on, his mouth wasn't moving even though the sound track was his voice speaking, and now I see that happening all the time. Or how, many years ago, David and I studied design and typography together. This means that, if we make a flyer for your event, it will look a lot better than most people's amateur flyers. It also means that we are always distracted by bad design on menus, and the signs on businesses, and crappy kerning in headlines and logos. In some ways, life was better when we just didn't see those things. Though critiquing the contrast, alignment, repetition, and proximity on the table tents does always give us something to talk about on date night.

So, on the one hand, I want to encourage you to watch a Plinkett review--perhaps especially his Sith review, if you're squeamish about the whole serial-killer thing, because there are no tied-up women in his basement in this one (though there is a thing with a cat that is not funny but at least is so obviously fake that, for me at least, it was also not disturbing--just eye-rolling). To me, two minutes of gross-out unfunny humor is a price worth paying for 90 minutes of really worthwhile insight into film, and if you're willing to risk it, and can put up with a lot of profanity (watching a few HBO shows over the last few years should perhaps be a prerequisite; it trains the ear), you will learn a lot, especially if you haven't had a film course or thought much about how movies are written, filmed, and edited. When you are watching a good movie, you may well find yourself appreciating the framing of shots, or the editing of key scenes, or the deft handling of expository dialogue, in a way you never have before.

On the other hand: if you have not thought about these things before, there are probably a whole lot of movies you have liked just fine that will now be ruined, to a greater or lesser extent, once you have learned to see this stuff. Sometimes, I think it can be argued, it is better just not to know. Only you can make this call.

==================

*And people make fun of me for it. But come to my room for coffee. Although, actually, right now neither Kate nor I drink coffee. She lost her taste for it during her last pregnancy, and I gave up caffeine a few months ago, and then a couple of weeks ago gave up even my morning decaf because of acid reflux issues. I'm so middle-aged. But I appreciated my coffee while I could. Now I drink many cups of decaf Lipton tea every day, and am actively resisting any efforts anyone might make to teach me to appreciate good tea. Decaf Lipton tastes good to me, it's cheap, and you can buy it anywhere. I'm not planning to mess with that any time soon.

Our Experiment In Structured Homeschooling

2011-01-14T12:47:00.003-05:00

I am sick today; bad headache, dizzy, a little sick to my stomach, and not at my best, brain-wise. I'm so distractible I just set an alarm to remind me to pick up Yehva from preschool at noon. So maybe it's not the best day to try to write something, but I've had this rattling around in my head for awhile, and a few people have actually asked me about why we're doing more structured homeschooling this year and how it's going, so I'll give it a try.

My kids are 9, 6, and 3, just to remind people. And with Eric, my oldest, especially, we haven't done very much organized academics. One reason is that he wasn't ready for it until just a little while ago. It's kind of a gift to have Carl, who is really into schooly stuff, because having a six-year-old who is not only ready for academic work but likes it has given me a picture of what that kind of six-year-old looks like. And Eric really wasn't it.

The other reason we haven't done structured homeschooling is that I really like radical unschooling and many of the people who practice it. I've spent a lot of time in discussions with radical unschoolers, and their deep respect for, and faith in, their children has inspired me, and shaped my parenting for the better. For a long time, I really wanted radical unschooling to be the way we lived our lives.

But we're not doing that right now. The boys and I are doing a pretty conventional assortment of schoolwork five mornings a week: reading, math, language arts, handwriting, science, a daily non-fiction read-aloud. We're adding history soon. I'm teaching Eric some piano basics, and if he likes it, will encourage him to take lessons with a real teacher.

So, the two questions I've gotten are: Why? and How's it going?

There are several reasons why. The first is that I was very sick for the better part of two years (finally better now, thanks for asking--almost back to normal!). Last year, I had really drifted into what RU parents call "unparenting," neither doing structured homeschooling nor creating the kind of enriched life an engaged unschooling parent strives for. I just didn't have the energy to do anything else; I couldn't stay awake for more than about five hours at a time, and even when I was awake, I was exhausted. It wore me out just to stand for five minutes to cook lunch, or to climb one flight of stairs, or to walk from one end of the house to the other.

The boys are both very introverted, so they were not at all unhappy to be left to their own devices. But I was unhappy; I wanted them to have more than that. And I couldn't give it to them. I knew that if things didn't improve, they would be better off in school than at home with a mom who was that sick.

The problem? Eric, at 9, couldn't read, couldn't do formal math, couldn't tell time. Although he is very bright and knows a lot, he was way behind grade level in every academic subject. Traditionally, I had pooh-poohed the idea that homeschoolers should pay attention to what the local schools are doing. "If I wanted my kids to do what school kids do," I would say, "I'd send them to school."

But, faced with the possibility that my kids would have to go to school, I simply could not imagine how Eric would make that transition. And I realized that my decision not to do formal academics limited our, and his, options. (Carl, on the other hand, would have no problem, academically, sliding right into a first-grade classroom. He's been doing phonics and math workbooks since he was 4. He likes that kind of thing.)

I'm finally doing better, and I expect the boys to keep homeschooling. But the future is not predictable. I could get sick again, or one of the kids could choose to go to school. I think we need that option to be available to us.

Another reason we're doing structured homeschooling is that I have decided to be honest about who I am. I like academics; I always have. (This is separate from liking school, which I didn't, until I got to college. At least after I grew out of the teacher's-pet elementary school years.) Perhaps the boys would, too, and I was denying them that chance. Also, I never really quite bought some of the RU arguments. "Kids pick up all the math they need by living their lives," people would say. "They learn fractions from measuring ingredients, geometry from laying out garden plots." Sure. But there's a big difference between being able to do the practical part of something, and understanding the concepts that underly it. I have always liked to understand the concepts, and I wanted my kids to have that, too. And finally: I'm a planner, and a checker-off of items on lists. I like knowing where we're at, where we're going, and what steps we have to take to get there. I like routines. This is how I've always been, and it's a challenge (though not impossible) to express that side of me in radical unschooling. I felt adrift.

Finally, the most important reason we're doing structured homeschooling is that I think Eric needs it right now. Carl likes it; that's a different thing. Carl is so cheerfully enthusiastic about everything, so generally easy-going, that I think he would do fine in school, fine with structured homeschooling, fine with unschooling.

Eric, though: Eric is easily frustrated, and he will not stick with something if it's frustrating him (there are exceptions; he can also get kind of fixated on finishing something and will bang his head against a wall even if it would probably be better to take a break and come back to it fresh. But for our purposes here: easily frustrated). And he doesn't like to try something unless he knows he'll be successful. He also has trouble with transitions, and he does not like new things. Our parrots see any new person or thing that comes through the door as a predator that might decide to eat them; Eric's outlook on life has a bit of that, as well.

I wanted to stretch Eric, expose him to new things, and give him the experience of sticking with something regularly, to see how that kind of sustained effort can be fruitful, to feel what it's like to be stuck and keep at it and then have the breakthrough. And he is having this experience, and he likes it.

I know that radical unschoolers will say that there's nothing I'm looking for (except possibly being on-track to go to school if needed) that we couldn't get some other way. And I'm sure they're right--or right, at least, that some other family could find a different way to get the same benefits. But this is what we're doing now.

How's it going? Not always perfectly. Eric had a rough time in November and December and was very resistant and rude to me. We took a long break, and then had a Serious Talk about his options. He told David, spontaneously, that he felt like he had gotten older during the break and would be more able to cooperate. He told me he was bored during the break and wanted to do more; he asked for my help, and he asked me to push him if he resisted me. Since we started up again, he's been into everything we've been doing. He likes his math, he's making big progress in reading, he loves anything science-y, especially if there's a messy experiment to do. We just started language arts, and Eric was surprised to discover he really likes learning about how sentences work and what their parts are. Carl is not sorry when we have a day off, but he simply loves everything. If I tend to talk about Eric more than about Carl, it's because I think about Eric more, because with Eric, there's always some problem I'm trying to solve. Carl? Not so much. I told some friends recently that if Carl were our only child, and didn't have siblings to sometimes annoy him to the point of explosion, people would hate me for the perfection of my life.

I find that we all like having a structure to the day--we start school work when David leaves for work, and it takes us between an hour and three hours depending on the day, how much we're trying to do, whether Yehva's at preschool or here, getting into things. I try to do something with the kids in the afternoon as well: work on Eric's Mindstorms or Carl's Lego WeDo robotics, build something with the snap circuits, bake something, play a board game. Carl, Eric, and I all seem to respond well to having a routine. The rest of the day goes better.

One of the best things that has happened is that Eric, especially, keeps discovering things he didn't know he could do. The other day, I asked him to try to read a paragraph in his science workbook; I wasn't sure he could do it, and normally would have read it aloud to him, but I decided to let him see how he could do. To his delight, he was able to read it, except for the unusually-spelled name of a scientist. Yesterday, his language arts curriculum asked him to write two sentences including adjectives. He has never done much writing--I think it falls into that category of things he can't try because he doesn't already know how to do them. I told him to give it a try, to not worry about spelling things correctly, just to do his best. He wrote two sentences about one of our parrots: "Vito is hapy He is red and green." He asked me to check his spelling of "red" and I helped him sound out "green." And he read Vito's name off the nameplate on his cage. But still!

He was astonished and thrilled. He simply had no idea he could write a sentence. He wanted to cut it out of his workbook and hang it on the wall (I should have just said yes, but my orderly mind said, "But we haven't done the other side of the page yet!" *sigh* I wonder where Eric gets his tendency to inflexibility?)

I know that there are other ways that all of this could be accomplished. But, given who we are and what we need and what we enjoy, I think this is right for us. Things will probably look different in six months, or next year, but for now we're getting a lot of good out of what we're doing. I'm not at all sorry we waited to do formal academics with Eric; he's bright, but he just wasn't ready. In the last six months, he has really "caught up" developmentally (and even surged ahead in some interesting ways). Now he's ready, and I think it's good.

That was a nice thing to do on a Saturday

2011-01-09T12:32:00.000-05:00

Yesterday my friend Kri and I went to our fiend Joann's with our quilts-in-progress. Kri and I are both beginners, but Joann has made many beautiful quilts, and she had offered to look at ours and help us move forward with them. We had a great time; I always like seeing the things people make, so there was a fair bit of just hanging out gazing at things in admiration. I like seeing people's different approaches, the ways they use color that I'd never think of, the wonderful ideas they have. I'm as structured in my quilting as in everything else I do; the quilts I've made have all been very symmetrical, repeating patterns. So I love to see crazy quilts, or quilts where the blocks aren't all the same, or quilts where someone launched the project without necessarily knowing what it was going to look like or what it was going to end up being. Other people's boldness inspires me.

I also have a tendency to think I have to figure everything out for myself, so it was good for me to reach out to someone more experienced. For one thing, Joann was undaunted by mistakes. She always knew right away what could be done to fix them, or how they could be worked around, or she'd say cheerfully, "That will work out in the quilting," or "oh, that will leave a little pucker, but that won't matter." If I didn't know better, I'd have suspected that this was not the first time she'd dealt with uneven seams, or blocks that didn't quite turn out the size they were supposed to.

Last year, I took my quilt top to Quaker meeting with me to show Joann, because things that were supposed to line up weren't lining up. Joann isn't the only quilter in meeting, so after worship I had a couple of really talented people looking on as I laid my quilt top out on one of the tables in the social hall. I was nervous. To my amazement, not one of them thought that it was a big problem that things weren't lining up; instead, these women who've created beautiful, perfect works of art all jumped in cheerfully suggesting various ways I might proceed to make a perfectly nice quilt-top in which things did not line up on purpose. And they treated this kind of mid-stream course change as a perfectly ordinary and expected thing.

It's not always like that; Kri and I have both had experiences in the past with more-experienced quilters being less than kind about our early efforts. So it was lovely yesterday to be with someone who seemed really happy with what we'd done, and who wanted us to continue with it, whatever the flaws that had crept in. I felt encouraged and appreciated, and inspired by admiring some of Joann's quilt-tops to imagine what I might be able to do someday, with enough practice.

My quilt-top isn't quite done; I need to put a border around it (not the border I planned; we decided we liked something else better). Joann has offered to come over during Yehva's nap one day to help with my quilt sandwich, and I might take her up on that, not only because I could use the help, but because it was so much fun doing this kind of work with friends.

They Build Things

2011-01-07T13:58:00.002-05:00

Back when I was in literary studies, we used to use the term "overdetermination" to mean that a text was making too much of something, asking us so excessively to believe something that we became inclined to believe the opposite. Shakespeare understood the notion; he wrote, "the lady doth protest too much," meaning that only someone in love would feel the need to say so very many times and in so very many ways that she was not in love.

It's also possible to overdetermine something in such a way that only one outcome is possible. So you get English grad students sitting around with a book written by someone twice as smart as they will ever be, sneering, "I don't know, I thought the climactic saber fight was a little overdetermined, you know what I mean?"

Sometimes I think we have overdetermined our children.

I come from families of men who work with their hands. My dad built the house I grew up in, literally; my brother has built a dune buggy from scratch, and a race car out of a car that had not previously been a race car. When my brother wanted a minibike as a kid, nobody bought him one. My dad and grandpa built him one out of old lawnmower motors and steel bars they had lying around, which they welded into a frame. My extended family on both sides is full of people who fix their own cars, and make their living repairing or maintaining machines or structures.

David is not that kind of guy, and wasn't raised by that kind of guy. His dad was a surveyor, but for recreation, he played competitive bridge. David was not raised to think it's a moral failing to hire someone to do a job you could just as well do yourself, like replacing an engine block or adding a porch to the front of the house or re-wiring the guest bathroom.

Still, David's a very smart guy, and an engineer in his way: he is a software engineer. So when we needed donor sperm to have our first two kids, we looked for somebody smart and with a logical mind. There weren't any software engineers in the catalog, but there was a guy who was a mechanical engineering graduate student with a 3.85 gpa. "Smart!" we said. "A logical thinker!" we said, and ordered three little vials.

Imagine our surprise when our firstborn turned out to be the kind of person who can make anything out of anything--put him in front of any material that can be manipulated in three dimensions, whether Lego, modeling clay, or leftover forks, and he'll build something amazing. All those three-dimensional-thinking and doing-stuff-with-your-hands genes are just a little overdetermined, I sometimes think. Like we doomed him to a career in engineering or the skilled trades, like we left him with not really all that many choices. "Maybe we should have chosen a sensitive poet," we joke sometimes.

It's not really like that, though--Carl seems to have gotten the ear-for-language genes that also run in my family; while Eric was amazing us at 4 with his fork sculptures, Carl was astonishing us with his observations and questions about language. Why was one word used, and not another? "I think you meant to say both, not all," he'll tell us. Or he'll point out that two lines in a picture book don't really quite rhyme.

And yet Carl is also a builder. I know that having Lego-obsessed boys is about as common as breathing, but both of my boys have the bug pretty bad, even so.

But many of my friends have heard me talk about this before. What has me thinking about it again is seeing how Yehva fits in. And she does. She loves to do Lego with the boys, and the other day produced something so cool I made the classic parenting blunder of saying, "That's really great! Did somebody help you with it?" (She was offended, as she should have been.) When we toured her preschool last fall, the director commented on Yehva's tendency to gravitate toward technology in every classroom or storage room we entered: the computer, the toy cash-register, the tool bench. It feels like a little spark I want to nurture in her, though really the boys are doing that job for me. I find myself glad she has them, and that they let her tag along sometimes when they've got a project going.

She's only three. Anything could happen. I'm just having fun watching it unfold.

Lego WeDo review

2011-01-06T16:54:00.003-05:00

So, Eric likes to make Lego Mindstorms robots. And Carl, who is 6, enjoys noodling around with them, too, but it's a little over his head. So, for Christmas, I got him a Lego WeDo robotics set. We finally got it out to mess around with yesterday (our computer was out of commission for over a week because of a hard drive failure, but we're up and running and measuring our storage in terabytes now, so it's all good). And we are thrilled with it.

WeDo comes with software; a collection of bricks, motors, and sensors in a reusable storage bin; and a big notebook full of information and instructions. There is also a set of four booklets, each with building instructions for three robots. I remember when we first got Mindstorms, how overwhelmed I felt--I just didn't know how to get started. WeDo, on the other hand, is made for schools, and I joked on Facebook yesterday that they're written like the subtext is, "Dear Elementary School Teacher, we realize it's possible that you just found out that in one hour you have to teach robotics to 27 second-graders, so we're going to make this easy on you." There are simple instructions and handy flowcharts about what to do first and what to do next. I love it.

The WeDo robots are powered by the computer's USB port, so they're always tethered; you're not going to be building a self-playing chess set or a robot that climbs a tree out of this thing. The building style is traditional brick based, so the things you make have that angular old-skool Lego look. (As opposed to Mindstorms, which uses a girder-and-connector style based on Lego Technics. I realize this will be technical blah blah for most of you. But I read a blog post about it recently and am trying to sound like I know more than I do.) But the things you build--two little birds that spin and dance, a sailboat that is tossed on a stormy sea, a clapping monkey--are very cute.

The programming interface is very bright and simple. WeDo has an icon-based graphical programming interface like Mindstorms, but much simplified (GeekDad has a screenshot here). Carl found it very easy to understand and use: you lay down a "start" block, then you can add blocks that run the motor, that play sounds, that act as a timer, and so on. You can have more than one program laid out on the screen at a time, and when you run a program, the block that is running lights up so you can easily connect what the robot is doing to what's in the program.

With Mindstorms, you have to write the program, compile it and download it to the robot's brick, and run it. If it doesn't work, you're back to the computer. It can make the de-bugging stage a bit lengthy. The WeDo interface makes trial-and-error quick and easy; you can write a program, run it, change it, find a bug, fix it, try something else, write a new program, and run it, all in about two minutes.

The trade-off, of course, is that the robots are very limited. You get a USB hub (kind of a little power brick), a motor, a tilt sensor, and a motion sensor. The designers have done a lot with a handful of gears and pulleys, but this is more like a tasty appetizer than a full robotics meal. With Mindstorms, there are a great many idea books, blogs, and websites, but not so with WeDo; at least not that I've found yet. I don't think it's leaked out of the schools market much. I'll be interested to see what Carl does when he's worked through the Activity Pack robots.

The WeDo activities are clearly designed to get kids thinking about how the gears, pulleys, and levers are operating. The interface for each activity starts with a short animated movie about the robot you're going to build, and then, before the building instructions, will say something like, "Our robot uses a motor to turn a small gear. The small gear turns a large gear, which operates a lever." I read it to Carl and he listens politely, but he really wants to get to the part where he can program the funny noises.

I paid an extra $50 or so for the Activity Pack, which has both building and programming instructions for a dozen projects, so the whole schmoo cost about $180, which is pricey (it's actually sold together as a "homeschool" pack now). I agree with some quibbles in GeekDad's review: if the computer didn't have dual monitors, I don't know how I'd have gotten out of the full-screen programming interface, and I still haven't quite figured out how saving programs and re-opening them works. The notebook could use a Quick Reference section; there was no easy way for me to look up how to save a program, for instance.

Still, I feel like we got our money's worth, and Carl has declared it the best Christmas present he ever got. The robots are simple to build and putting together programs is a snap. GeekDad says that you should consider whether you have younger relatives to hand it down to when deciding about the investment, and I admit I have already found myself wondering who among my homeschool pals might like to borrow it when Carl's done.

This is the second time I've bought something from Lego Education, and I've been pleased both times (the first time I got a set of Simple Machines activity kits), not least because of the little plastic bins everything comes in. Sometimes I browse the Lego Education catalog and think I could build my kids' whole curriculum out of it.

2010 Reading Report: The Highlights

2010-12-21T13:01:00.001-05:00

I knew I wasn't reading as much as usual in 2010. Since 2006, when I began keeping my little Excel spreadsheet, I've averaged 300 books a year (give or take 10-20). With 10 days left in the year, I've "only" read 195 in 2010.

Why? A few reasons, I think. For the first time in my life, I've had stretches of days when I just didn't feel like reading. I caught up on some TV shows I missed when they first aired, or re-watched some series David hadn't seen before (The Wire, Buffy/Angel). I did a lot of magazine reading. I'm a big fan of longform.org and GiveMeSomethingToRead, which combined with InstaPaper has kept my iPad pretty well-stocked with long essays, a form I love. I probably read at least a few book-equivalents worth of essays and articles.

I also just hit a dry spell. I've read so much on topics I'm interested in (education, parenting, homeschooling, politics, economics, adoption, religion) that the law of diminishing returns has hit me hard. My log for this year includes 67 books I started and didn't finish, and the second-most common comment on them is, "nothing new here." (The most common? Variations on "bad writing." A sampler: Crap writing; crap writing; hated writing style; desperately needed competent editor; writing so very bad; ow ow two pages in wanted to gouge out my eyes; couldn't stand author's "random" use of "quotations"; overwritten; tedious, annoying.) There are a lot of books I did finish on which I also commented, "nothing new here for me." Heh, I see that on a book about mountain climbing I wrote, "think I've sucked the juice out of the stranded-on-a-mountain genre."

Feeling like I've sucked the juice out of a lot of genres. And haven't yet happened upon the new thing to get interested in.

So, what did I read and like?

Well, I gave a "4"--my highest rating--to 29 books. 19 of them were re-reads: the Aubrey-Maturin novels; the Clare Fergusson/ Russ Van Alstyne mysteries by Julie Spencer-Fleming, which I re-read in anticipation of the newest book in the series coming out in October, though its publication has been pushed back to April; and The Preaching Life, by Barbara Taylor Brown.

Of those, I would call the Aubrey-Maturin novels great books. The others? More like "great if you like that kind of thing." Which I do.

The other books I rated highly included The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, which I've written about before, and Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love, which defied my expectations: I thought it was going to be a "nothing new here" adoption book, but it was excellent and thought-provoking. I wrote about it here and here.

I also gave a "4" to Connie Willis's two-volume novel, Blackout and All Clear. These two books are essentially a single 1100-page novel in Willis's time travelers universe, the same one that sent historians to the Black Plague in Doomsday Book and to Victorian England in To Say Nothing of the Dog. (That latter title is inspired by Jerome K. Jerome's 1889 book about boating on the Thames, Three Men in a Boat...To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is so very much worth a read on its own merits.)

Anyway: in Blackout and All Clear, historians from 2060 are stuck in London during the Blitz. The books could be tedious at that length--and some people certainly find them to be. This Amazon reviewer is not wrong:

Essentially, this book is a classic example of what happens when you have a good setting but a poor plot. The setting is fantastic - a bunch of time travelers lost in WWII with bombs falling all around them, but the plot is absolute rubbish. Take the following two lines, copy and paste them until you run out of space in one book, and then continue through the end of a second book:

"Gasp! We might have changed the space-time continuum!"

"Oops, oh, no. Everything is fine."

Intersperse with too many repeated cliffhangers involving chapter ends with historians nearly dying (Will They SURVIVE?) and some slapstick involving nobody being able to get ahold of each other, ever, and you've basically got Blackout and All Clear.

The first time this device is used, it's interesting and tense. The 47th time the historians wonder if they altered events (and they didn't) you just sort of roll your eyes and hope for more details about parachute bombs or V1 wrangling.

And yet I found these books compulsively readable--and so did David; there were a couple of days when we were both reading the same copy of All Clear, and we devoted our lives to distracting each other so we could steal it back. I will probably read them again someday. And I would highly recommend them to anyone who isn't intimidated by 1100 pages in two volumes and who "likes that sort of thing." Also, I need all of you to read it so you can be in the joke when David and I mention that we think Yehva is like Alf and Binnie Hodbin rolled into one.

I think those of us who love genre literature learn to embrace its flaws. Yes, we all know it's ridiculous that Data can not use contractions, and agree that the whole "Western in Space" thing was the worst idea Joss Whedon ever had. Yes, I can see why people find the digressions in Cryptonomicon to be a self-indulgent bore (really? two whole pages on how to eat Captain Crunch?). Yet we love these things anyway; sometimes, their flaws are part of what we love about them.

Blackout and All Clear are like that. Yes, Connie Willis went a little nuts, and maybe a strong editor could have helped her get this down to one hefty volume. Maybe we could have used two or three fewer trips around the "I'll take the train to where I think Mike is, but oh no, I just missed him, he's on his way to the theater to find Eileen, who was there until two minutes ago when she went to see if the relief ladies had a coat in her size" merry-go-round. But, as with Doomsday Book, I enjoyed the detailed immersion in the period, and was carried along very comfortably by the charms of the characters Willis populated the books with. If you like that sort of thing, you will really like these books.

I gave a "4" to Sara Zarr's Story of a Girl, which is, I suppose, obligatory for a book that won the National Book Award. I have written about Zarr before, here and here. I think I liked her better as a writer talking about writing than I did as simply a writer, but some of the flaws I see in her books come directly from her very well-thought-out and articulated ideas about what young adult novels should be doing, and how they should be treating their audience.

I'll stop there because this is long. But I might do a second post on books I flagged as "recommendable," books that didn't get my highest rating but that I thought might be worth mentioning to friends when they're looking for something to read.

Ruby Payne, A Framework for Understanding Poverty

2010-11-18T09:31:00.017-05:00

Over the last few years, I have found myself increasingly interested in issues of social class, perhaps especially as I have seen them playing out in my Quaker meeting. Because my reaction to any random thought or question I have is to read twenty or thirty books about it, I have, well, ready twenty or thirty or more books on social class in the last few years. One of the first I read was Ruby Payne's A Framework for Understanding Poverty, which I found very useful. Payne's premise, as I recall it, is that people from different social classes have different ways of seeing the world; of relating to authority, time, and money; and of solving problems.

When I read the book, I felt like all sorts of things that had confused and vexed me about my family of origin, about certain friends and lovers, about many of my students when I was teaching at the community college, became coherent and intelligible. Behaviors that seemed dysfunctional or mistaken came into focus as adaptive ways of dealing with challenges and conflict; choices that I simply could not understand or view without judgment were revealed in a context that helped me make sense of them. I found the book tremendously helpful, and it has stayed with me for a long time, which is really saying something. I read about 300 books a year, most of them non-fiction, and since most of them are only OK, I forget a lot. So when a book keeps feeling resonant to me after over the years, when it teaches me something or changes my mind in a way that stays with me, I pay attention to that.

However, since reading Framework I have become aware that Payne is not just an author but the head of a training network that goes into schools and leads faculty and staff in workshops based on her work, and that both her writing and her work in schools are very controversial. Many people see Payne as buying into and promoting a stereotyped but untrue view of poverty, and of encouraging educators to see poor students as deficient and in need of fixing. The strength of the opposition to her is in proportion with her influence: by one measure I recently saw cited, she and her trainers have been in over 70% of school districts in the United States. She is seen as having tremendous, but detrimental, influence.

I have found this very interesting. I read Framework as proposing a model which recognizes both the strengths and deficiencies of different class-based cultural norms. But others--who are certainly more familiar, overall, with Payne's work than I am--see it as promoting middle-class ways at the expense of poor children. What did I miss?

I can see a number of possibilities for our different views of the book. It's been a few years, maybe as many as five, since I read the book. It's possible that I was relatively new to thinking about social class and did not recognize problems that would jump out at me if I were to read it now. It's possible that I have overlooked, or forgotten, the book's weaknesses while remembering its strengths. It's possible that the book itself is not horrible, but the uses it's put to in schools are.

A year or so ago, I went looking for some of the critiques of Payne, and I found a number of writers on-line who criticized her without being concrete. The accusations were repeated again and again, as if they were simply true, but without specific reference to her work. Again and again, I saw her accused of not being an academic, not being a Ph.D, [edited: my mistake. Payne actually is a Ph.D., so clearly whatever people actually have said about her, it's not this.] not giving enough attention or respect to the work of scholars who study education and social class. Now, God knows I am as big a fan of the peer-reviewed journal article as anybody, but it was very interesting to me to see people who set themselves up as experts on classism wielding their academic credentials like a sword and shield.

Yesterday, my friend Jeanne, who does a lot of reading, writing, thinking, and educating about social class (she blogs, along with others, at Class Action) linked to this very critical article about Payne. And I said pretty much what I just wrote here, a bit more briefly:

It's interesting to me how critical people are of Payne's in-school training, which I don't know much about, because that book was so helpful to me. Maybe I read it wrong, but what I took away from it felt like a better understanding of both strengths and deficits of the different ways people from different social classes communicate and solve problems. It made sense of some things about my family, about some of my friends and lovers, and it felt like it challenged me (a middle/upper-middle class person with a lot of education) to be more resilient and accepting when people communicate in ways that challenge me.

But what I hear over and over is that the book and training are used in schools as a way to encourage working-class and poor kids to adapt to middle-class ways of doing things, something I think ought not to be undertaken uncritically--what about training middle-class teachers, bosses, co-workers to accept more than one style of dealing with conflict, or with authority, for instance? So that the work of bridging a gap isn't always piled on the shoulders of people who are already swimming upstream.

You'll notice what I wrote isn't even remotely a defense of Payne's work. But the author of piece, Paul Gorski, responded and told me, in so many words, that--well, I'll show you. He said:

Su -- you may, indeed, have felt that Payne's book helped you better understand ways people from different social classes communicate and solve problems. The question is, did she help you understand accurately. A lot of people connect with what she says because we're already socialized into the deficit model. But just the way you put your own point demonstrates one of the serious liabilities of Payne's work and mainstream thinking on poverty in general. There is no "way" poor people communicate and solve problems. The range of ways poor people do that is exactly the same as the range of ways wealthy people do it. So if it helped you with what you say it helped you with, then it appears as though it only cemented simplifications and stereotypes.

One review of Payne's work found literally hundreds of examples of misinformation in it -- points she makes that directly contradict decades of research. So you might feel that she helped you better understand something, but that doesn't mean your understanding is accurate even if you could relate it to experiences with this or that person from your life... This is why it's not important only for us to be critical of the information we take in, but also to be critical of the lenses with which we've been socialized and the way they filter the information we're taking in. That Payne's work rings true for you says less about her work than it does about how strongly we're socialized to see things in stereotyped and deficit-laden ways... After all, what rang true for you (and for many, many others) has been shown to be completely and wholly inaccurate. It's based on a paradigm (the culture of poverty) that was rejected forty years ago in the social sciences.

Which, as insults and dismissals go, is pretty erudite. I liked Payne's work because of my failure to overcome my socialization, and my lack of awareness that "the social sciences" rejected her paradigm forty years ago. OK! This is not the first time--and probably won't be the last--that I have said to someone, sometimes indirectly as here, and sometimes directly--"tell me more about why you see that way"--and been told that my failure to already see it their way was proof of my classism or cluelessness or insularity. Oddly enough, I don't find this helpful.

I asked if he had a link to the article he mentions, and Jeanne sent me a link to one of his articles on Payne, which you can find here. I found it really helpful; after reading it I feel I have a much better understanding of the criticism of Payne and her work. Gorski does the kind of specific critique I had not found before, looking in some detail at the content of Framework.

I didn't plan to write about it, so I didn't take notes. But it has stuck with me overnight and this morning, so here I am writing about it. So far since I've started, I've had to help a kid on the potty, I've had to stop to feed someone, I've had to mediate a dispute, I've had to answer about 20 questions, and I've had to take a phone call from the hospital about my surgery on Monday. My point is that I am squeezing this writing into a morning in which I don't really have time to write, so I'm not going to do what I should do and do a second reading of the article. I'm going to work from memory. Which means I'll probably make a mistake or two. And I'll certainly end up focusing on what most stayed with me, which means I'll probably overlook some things. But there you have it.

First, Gorski makes the same complaint I've seen others make: she is not a social scientist, and she does not pay attention to the scholarly work being done on social class. I'm of two minds about this criticism; on the one hand, I am a big fan of scholarly work. I appreciate that social scientists think carefully about methodology, are aware of potential biases and work to design studies that overcome or avoid them--that the work of social scientists is a tremendously useful tool for helping us see beyond our own limited circle. On the other hand: do we require that everyone either be a social scientist or be conversant with the work of academics before they can speak publicly about social class? Because that's a pretty high bar, and even I, who have failed to overcome my socialization, can see who it excludes.

Admittedly, Payne is a special case: she's not just any old writer on social class. She and her minions are in, apparently, the majority of school districts in America, telling teachers how to understand and relate to their students who are poor and working class. To the extent that's true, she wields tremendous influence and should be held to a very high standard. But "she ignores me and my friends and our very important work" feels a little dicey.

Of course, that's not Gorski's only criticism. One of his complaints about Frameworks is that the hypothetical families Payne creates to illustrate her points are all stereotypes of poverty: single mothers of children whose fathers are in prison; families that include alcohol or drug abuse; and so on (Oops, that's actually in a different article: page 137 of this one). I don't have either a copy of the book or a clear memory of this, but Gorski provides such a long list of Payne's case study families that it wouldn't surprise me if he had named them all. And in that case, I agree with Gorski: that sucks. And Payne should have known better.

Eventually a couple of things rose up to me as central issues. One is that Payne is perceived as buying into and promoting the idea that there is a "culture of poverty," which is an idea that has been used as a way to blame the poor for their continued poverty. The other, very related criticism, is that Payne does not pay attention to the systemic forces that create poverty and trap people in it. I think this quote puts it nicely:

I believe the Ruby Payne phenomenon illustrates the temptation of the path of least resistance. Her work allows us to content ourselves by learning a set of cultural rules and helping a dominated group fit into a dominating system. She never insists that we secure social justice or eliminate educational inequities. She never challenges us to confront classism. In today’s anxiety-ridden education milieu, many of us may experience A Framework as a reprieve from the difficult reflective and transformative work called for by Kozol (1992), hooks (2000), and others. Their work challenges us to be part of institutional reform. Payne’s demands shallow awareness and no commitment to authentic reform. In other words, if I am from the upper or middle socioeconomic classes, Payne protects my privilege and gives me permission to do the same.

In other words, Payne's work does not challenge the status quo. At best--and Gorski and others question the accuracy with which she does this--she merely describes it. At worst, she helps to perpetuate it.

As I read, one of my reactions was that Gorski and others were criticizing Payne for not writing a different book--they wanted theory. He quotes Payne, responding to one of his critiques, as saying, “Gorski states that his lens is critical social theory. My theoretical lens is economic pragmatism. The two theoretical frames are almost polar opposites.” So, for a bit, one of my reactions to Gorski was that he and Payne were talking past each other.

As I read more, though, I began to feel like there was a question Gorski wasn't addressing that feels important to me: just what exactly are classroom teachers supposed to be doing? I wanted him to acknowledge how challenging it is for a teacher in the classroom to navigate the mess of resource distribution, home and neighborhood influences, academic expectations, administrator pressure. Teachers and their students are at the center of a big complicated mess, and it is not at all clear how best to behave within that mess.

I was a teacher for 13 years; I taught freshmen at community colleges, a course that every incoming student was required to take, so I dealt with students with every level of preparation for college work (though "well-prepared" was vanishingly rare) and a spectrum of class backgrounds.

I believe in theory, and I believe in understanding the systemic reasons why poverty persists and the institutional barriers that prevent individuals (except in rare cases) from getting out of poverty. But I'm not sure how helpful that theory is in the classroom. As a teacher, I might be inclined to say, "You want me to help dismantle structures of inequality? Great, I can do that with you on the weekend. But Monday through Friday, I am in the classroom with students who are already victims of those structures. All the critical social theory in the world is not going to help these kids right now. What do I do?"

Payne has an answer to that. Maybe it's the wrong answer--her critics say that the answer she's peddling is that poor and working-class kids should become more like middle-class kids, should buy into the existing structure to the extent they're able, in the hope of moving themselves to a more comfortable and secure place within it (I don't know how accurate this is, as I am not at all familiar with her teacher trainings or her writings other than Framework). Gorski et al are right that this solution does nothing to dismantle the structure. But what else is a teacher to do?

I have faced this myself, teaching students whose home language was a dialect of Black English. Yes, it's a language. Yes, it has a coherent (and complex) grammatical structure. But in my students' lifetime, writing that uses the vocabulary and grammar of that dialect will not be accepted in an academic setting. What am I to tell my students? Am I not supposed to teach them to code-switch, to write in the voice that will let them stay in school? If I do help them develop an "academic" writing voice, am I helping to support the system? Am I doubly burdening those who already bear the brunt of inequality, making it their job, their responsibility, to learn to fit into a system that denigrates them? But if I don't teach them to write that way, am I helping to trap them in marginal economic circumstances?

Gorski creates a list of what authentic anti-povery education would include. He mentions eliminating tracking, creating integrated school districts, using vouchers. Most of these kinds of changes are things that classroom teachers have little or no control over. He also mentions things like, "transcend[ing] identity politics and examin[ing] the ways in which these sorts of policies and practices help to concentrate power in the hands of the corporate elite" and "[a]cknowledg[ing] the interconnectedness of poverty, classism, racism, sexism, linguicism, ableism, and other forms of oppression" (pp 145-146 here). OK!

(To be fair, he ends with a list of practical things that can be done immediately, that includes things like "Assign work requiring computer and Internet access or other costly resources only when we can provide in-school time and materials for such work to be completed," and that I mostly applaud.)

It seems like the core of the problem is that Payne embraces a model in which there are class-based cultural differences, and Gorski rejects that notion. He is, I think, very conscious of a history in which the idea of a "culture of poverty" has been used to blame the victims of poverty and to absolve the rest of us of responsibility, and he fears that Payne's work perpetuates this. I fear that denying class-based cultural differences can deprive of us of tools we can use both to reach that high-falutin' glittering dream of a world in which we have "transcended" and "overcome" and "acknowledged," and also to improve things in the little slice of the world we live in.

For instance, my friend Jeanne sees class-based differences in how people deal with conflict. She writes about it here, for instance. If, as Gorski says, "There is no 'way' poor people communicate.... The range of ways poor people do that is exactly the same as the range of ways wealthy people do it," then Jeanne is wrong. And if Jeanne is wrong, then when I am dealing with that person who makes me uncomfortable by being very direct and using language that sometimes strikes me as rude or crass, we don't have a social-class problem. We don't have a problem in which I was raised to a (dominant) middle-class model of suppressing emotion and avoiding conflict, while that other person was raised to a working-class model of direct confrontation. And I don't have a responsibility to think about my class position, or to challenge myself to accept a different way of communicating. No, if it's just human variation, then I get to say, "That person is behaving inappropriately." And since my mode of discourse (if you will) is the dominant one in most places, other people there, and people in authority, will agree with me and conspire with me to silence her or drive her out.

I'm trying to say that, to my mind, denying class-based cultural differences carries its own set of dangers. I get that talking about these differences is a risky business, but nothing I have yet seen or read has convinced me that these differences don't exist.

Wrong Again

2010-11-09T09:33:00.007-05:00

Yehva is having one of those mornings when it seems like she is deliberating devoting her time to doing things she knows perfectly well she shouldn't do: using her brother's motorized toothbrush, spitting chewed-up corn chips onto Eric's plate, getting down the sugar canister and scooping out a handful, letting herself out into the front yard, typing on the keyboard I'm using, pulling all the toilet paper off so she can put a new roll on the dispenser, trying to ride the dog, throwing the dog's metal bowl onto the wood floor to hear it clank (repeatedly), dumping a bowl of crackers into my bed. That's about 10 minutes' worth.

And yes, part of the solution to this is finding a way to help her burn off some energy, and steering her toward interesting appropriate activities. But those things aren't fixes. They're temporary patches when she's in this kind of mood. Because I have come to believe that for Yehva, part of the appeal (most of the appeal?) of doing certain things is that they are forbidden.

It's an interesting problem for a parent. And another of those great moments when you are reminded of two things: 1) Children are little human beings with their own complex set of desires and motivations; and 2) What you think you know from raising Child Number One or Child Number Two is not necessarily of any use with Child Number Three.

Eric, for instance, was also very difficult to deal with starting around three, lasting until The Great Upgrade at 7, when we began to get a glimmer of an easier life, and culminating in The Singularity Of 2010, when he left a whole stage of childhood behind and grew into himself. But Eric's form of difficulty was very different from Yehva's. Trying to figure out how to cope with him, I read every parenting book on the market, including a lot of discipline-y, reward-and-punishment based behavioral programs. And it was always clear that these books had nothing to do with Eric. When you asked Eric to do something and he didn't, or asked him to stop doing something and he didn't, it wasn't because he didn't want to. It was because he couldn't. So offering him a reward, or threatening a punishment, didn't help--any more than (in an example stolen from Ross Greene) you could get me to successfully perform open-heart surgery by offering me a new car if I did it, or threatening to kill my family if I didn't.

Eric's particular brand of sensitivity and inflexibility meant that, if you wanted him to stop and he didn't, it was probably because once he was set on a course, it was very difficult for him to veer off it (we called this "being on rails"). if you wanted him to do something and he didn't, it was probably because he was so overwhelmed by his environment that he couldn't function (we called this "being stuck"). So, for Eric, the answer was never to offer rewards or "consequences" (the modern PC word for "punishments"). Because if he could do what you were asking, he would. He just couldn't.

For Eric, what we did was much more about working to help him learn flexibility, becoming more and more flexible ourselves, and reducing the load on him so that he wasn't constantly topped-up on stimuli. I can't tell you how many people told me I just needed to be firmer with him or stop "letting him get away" with certain behaviors or learn to "set limits." They were all wrong. I've talked before about the book The Explosive Child, which was a terrific tool for us in dealing with Eric, reducing conflict, giving him the help he needed to succeed, and preserving our good relationship with him until development made new things possible for him.

I am amused by the little addendum I put at the bottom of that post: I have a suspicion that working on this with Eric has been good practice for life with Yehva.

Wrong again.

Yehva's behavior sometimes looks similar to Eric's at the same age, but she is not like Eric. I have come to believe that the underlying reasons for her behavior are very different. She is not inflexible, and does not get overwhelmed by people, noise, lights, crowds, activity. When she's having a fit or pushing limits--a concept that really made no sense to us with either Eric or Carl--she's doing it for other reasons.

I have come to believe she's doing it to find out where the limits are.

I know this is a truism of parenting, that kids will "test limits." But we never had a kid who did it before, or did it so intensively all the time. I just read a book called Setting Limits with Your Strong-Willed Child. I read it when Eric was younger, too, and it just had nothing to do with us. But Yehva is the kind of child the author, Robert MacKenzie, is talking about.

MacKenzie suggests you think of your challenging child as a dedicated researcher who needs many data points before drawing a conclusion, or as a child who is wired to always learn things the hard way. A more adaptable, mellow child (like Carl, say) might respond to a request to turn down the volume on the TV by turning down the volume on the TV. Your more strong-willed child will hear that same request and think, "Hmmm...what happens if I don't?" And once that scenario has played out (you've argued with the kid until you lost it, or you've been all discipline-y and turned the TV off after one warning), the child takes that as just one data point. The next time you ask her to turn down the TV, she'll think, "Hmmm, last time mom got all purple-faced and screamy when I didn't do it...I wonder what will happen this time?"

When I read that description, my brain played a little movie-montage of shots of Yehva--holding her brother's toothbrush, heading out the door, holding an apple in one hand and a knife in the other, elbow-deep in the sugar canister, about to flush her stuffed bunny down the toilet--looking at me with a look that says, "And what are you going to do about it?"

It all rings so true with Yehva: she's testing all the time, collecting data all the time, wondering where the limits are and what will happen when she reaches them. This means that you can't assuage her by giving in to something she asks, because she'll just think, "OK, that wasn't the limit--what should I ask for next?" With Eric, flexibility on our part was essential. If he asked for something that wasn't originally on the agenda--even if he asked while upset--figuring out a way to give it to him was almost always a good idea (this was very controversial among people who felt moved to comment on it, because they thought we were "giving in" to bad behavior. They were wrong). With Yehva, that same kind of flexibility just ramps her up.

Which means I'm being a very different mom with Yehva than I was with Eric at the same age. With Eric, I was exploring how flexible I could be; with Yehva, I'm exploring firmness. With all the kids, I am constantly being asked to give up my vision of what kind of parent I want to be, in order to better be the parent they need.

Edited to add: This is not true all the time. Sometimes she's getting into stuff just because she has energy to burn, and then it really is about helping her burn it off with dancing, or taking a walk; she's getting a trampoline for Christmas. And just like with Eric, if you mis-diagnose--if you think she's in a testing mood when really she's just restless with all that energy--then you just make things worse. It's tricky. It's always tricky.

Buffy! The second time

2010-11-03T00:08:00.008-04:00

David is watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with me. He should stop reading now to avoid spoilers.

We're up to Season 2 together, about halfway through--about one episode away from that one thing that happens, you know what I mean, that sets the whole tragic dramatic arc of the rest of the season into play? I'm all excited. If he weren't such a grown-up, we'd be sitting up watching until 5 in the morning, like I did a few years ago when I watched the series for the first time, instead of a stately two episodes per evening after the kids go to sleep.

One thing I'm enjoying the second time through is seeing how many things in the first two seasons get called back later on. Not just characters who show up in a small way and come back later to play a bigger part, but jokes that are set up two seasons before the punchline: A couple of episodes from now, for instance, Oz will be looking into the trophy case and observe that one trophy has eyes that seem to follow him. In an episode we watched last night, Xander did a funny offhand riff about his Uncle Rory, the drunken taxidermist, and I got all excited--last week I watched most of Season 6 on my own, including the Xander/Anya wedding episode. Uncle Rory was at the wedding! Drinking, and talking about taxidermy! Who in the writers' room, working on the wedding episode, said, "Hey, remember four years ago we had a line about Xander's Uncle Rory? Let's work him in!"

I've also spotted one or two continuity errors--in Season 2, Spike says Angel is his sire, but we who have watched the whole series know that Drusilla made him. (And what a great episode that is, when we see that--there's so much I just can't wait to get to with David.)

I also see how some of Joss Whedon's writerly tics can get kind of irritating. Ironically, it was from the blog of one of the Buffy writers--Jane Espenson, who also wrote for Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and a whole bunch of other shows over the years--that I learned some of the vocabulary of comic writing, and thus learned to recognize certain kinds of jokes by name (I haven't read Espenson's blog in awhile, and don't remember everything). One tic Whedon has that has come to irritate me is shining a light on a joke or awkward moment. If I were inventing a Buffy drinking game, you'd take a shot every time a character said, "Did I say that out loud?" or "Let's pretend I didn't say that," or something similar. One example: Spike says to Buffy, "So, you just came here to pump me for information." Buffy says, "What else would I want to pump you for?" and then, after a beat, she says, "I can't believe I said that," or some such thing. I would argue that these kinds of awkward/funny moments--which Whedon and the Buffy writers' room love to pepper their scripts with--would be stronger and funnier if the awkward was just left to hang in the air a moment.

I can't remember the exact word, but Espenson calls this something like "lamplighting" a joke--some word that evokes an image of shining a spotlight on it, perhaps with a big illuminated sign flashing J-O-K-E JOKEJOKEJOKEJOKE. I reckon each Buffy episode would be about 30 seconds shorter if all of these moments were cut in favor of trusting the audience to notice the joke on their own.

So, David and I are in the middle of Season 2, the Greek Tragedy of the Buffy ouvre. But I just watched Season 6 for the second time on my own. I know fans are divided about Season 6, and the role Spike plays in it, but I'm a sucker for doomed romance, so I like it probably more than I should. I like Spike's striving. We who like cultish TV shows that spawn cosplay and attendance at conventions where people can pay as much as $75 to get a picture taken with a star (60 bucks for James Marsters!) are very used to the "non-human seeks humanity" trope: we've seen it with Data, Seven of Nine, Angel, Anya. If it weren't so late and my brain were at full power I could probably list another 10. We must like it or our favorite shows wouldn't keep giving it to us. I like Spike's version of it, I like how mixed-up his motivations are, I like how tragically wrong he keeps getting it, and yet how sincere he is. (And I like how ashamed Buffy eventually is about how she's been treating him.)

It's interesting to watch Season 2 right after Season 6. I found Buffy's constant abuse of Spike hard to take in Season 6, but you should hear her insulting Angel the first half of Season 2--seeing the two in juxtaposition made it clear how much of a character trait this is for Buffy, to be mean to men (OK, vampires--I'll have to see how she deals with Riley in Season 5) who are in love with her. It's of a piece with her constant whining. She's really not such a pleasant person, overall. David and I just watched the episode where Kendra appears for the first time , and I admit I couldn't help thinking that it might be kind of refreshing to watch Kendra's TV show for awhile, to just hang with a Slayer who is totally into being a Slayer and not so much about hanging around graveyards fondling Mr. Pointy and complaining about how she can't be a cheerleader and nobody understands her.

This is a lot of stuff about a TV show, and it's not all that coherent, but I'm going to let it stand because I haven't written anything in like three months and I have this huge backlog in my brain and in my notebooks, and everything I've tried to get down in order to break the bottleneck and get things flowing again has petered out after about 100 words. Perhaps this will do it.

Anarchy in the Pre-K

2010-09-16T23:37:00.016-04:00

On Wednesday, Yehva's second day of preschool, she felt nervous about going and asked me to go in with her. She was already perking up by the time we climbed the stairs to the third floor, where her classroom is, and had started telling me about all the things she was going to do, and what she wanted to show me, and once we were in the room, she did all her stuff--hanging up her backpack, washing her hands--independently, while I stood around watching.

During circle time, the kids sang a song and one of the two teachers told them about what was at the art table, the sand table, and so on for the day. Then one of the four-year-olds (the four-year-olds are so big and mature! It's amazing) said, "Ms. S, I don't know how many children are here today," and the teacher said, "Well, why don't you count them?"

So the little girl did. She even remembered to count herself, which impressed me.

Then somebody wondered out loud how many girls there were in the class. And the teacher told this same little girl to count them. She counted a little girl with long curly blonde hair, and herself. "That's right, there are two girls!" the teacher said.

The other teacher said, "We have three girls in the class, Ms. S." And Ms. S said, "But L. isn't here today! We have two girls today."

One of the boys wanted to count the boys, and he did. He counted Yehva as one of the boys, and announced that there were 8 boys in the class. "That's right!" Ms. S said perkily.

The other teacher said, "There are seven boys in the class today." I think she might have been trying to avoid saying "Yehva is a girl" out loud--maybe so Yehva wouldn't feel self-conscious?--but I was about a half-second from saying it myself. When Ms. S still didn't seem to get it, the second teacher moved over behind Yehva, and pointing down at her from behind her back, said firmly, "Ms. S, there are three girls in the class today." At which point you could see the "No Clue/ Gets It" meter flip in Ms. S's head, a la Scott Pilgrim.

Ms. S was mortified, and she apologized to me later. The whole thing went over Yehva's head; through this whole drama, she sat happily on her little mat waiting for free-play time so she could turn the music player on and dance.

My own reaction was surprisingly complex. On the one hand, I don't really blame the teacher for "reading" Yehva as a boy during circle time; little kids and their hair and clothes are so strongly gender-coded that it's no wonder someone who had just met the kids two days earlier, and who was preoccupied with managing 10 of them, would slip into temporarily thinking that a little kid in boys' shoes, blue jeans, a boys' t-shirt, and a mohawk was a boy. Heck, I have trouble looking at her and seeing a girl sometimes. (David, after cutting the mohawk: "We'll never convince anybody she's a girl now." Me: "Are we convinced she's a girl?")

At the same time, I felt surprisingly emotional about it. By the time Ms. S's clue-meter clicked over, I had tears starting behind my eyes. I still don't really know why; I wasn't angry, Yehva was just sitting happily and obliviously in the circle. But there you have it.

I'm not reading a lot into Yehva's current fashion sense. She does vehemently reject flowered shirts, and she did ask David to cut the decorative sateen bow off her underpants tonight. She is awfully fond of Spider-man, she did ask me to take her to another minor-league baseball game, and she did strongly express her desire for, first, short hair and then, a mohawk like Eric's. But I'm not really sure what, if anything, that means for a kid who is barely 3. As the poet says, I witness and wait.

Edited to add: Carl, David and I saw Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World the other night. I agree with reviewers who think it dragged a little around the third through fifth evil exes, but we were also clearly the target audience and so there was much for us to enjoy in it (we all squee'd with delight when we recognized the Zelda theme music on the soundtrack, for instance). Also, this whole not-so-much-with-the-girl-stuff thing Yehva has going on is one of the things that makes me glad she found her way to us, where we're pretty much down with whatever combination of gender(s) and sexualities the kids work out for themselves.

John Scalzi says: Write, or don't write.

2010-09-16T12:58:00.007-04:00

I like this post at John Scalzi's blog. It made me laugh because I have written a lot since I became a mom, and this made me realize two things: one, that I write because if I don't, at some point I start to go crazy from not writing and have to write instead of doing anything else. I have a friend whose husband is like that about running--he doesn't have to make himself do it, he just does it, because if he doesn't, gradually his body and mind become so fixated on getting out for a run that he has no choice but to do it now. And now can be inconvenient, if you're supposed to be sleeping or fixing a meal or on your way to an appointment or the job that pays your bills. So he runs, like I write, as a way to keep the pressure from building up so much that a valve pops.

The other thing it reminded me of is how entitled my writer friends and I were, back when I thought of myself as A Writer instead of a writer, a person who writes. We were in our 20s, with this boundless energy, and the only obligations we had were full-time jobs, and we spent much of our time sitting around complaining about how we couldn't find time to write. In retrospect, as I write--like I am now--in little pieces here and there, while two kids are watching a movie just after I gave them a snack, and one is carrying the dog around saying, "good baby, good baby," which is at least keeping her busy; and the dishes are unwashed and the laundry unfolded and I'm trying to keep an eye on the clock so I don't forget to pick up our housemate's son from school at 3:38 (when did schools start having these crazy end times? What happened to 3:30 or 3:35?), and I'm almost 45 so I have to do more than I ever did back then and do it with, in general, less energy--well, I want to go back in time, interrupt one of those late-night bitch sessions, shake myself and say, "Su! You will never have more time or energy than you have now! So please stop whining and write something!"

On the other hand, if I had paid attention to what my actions were saying, it would have been clear that, at that time in my life, spending time with friends discussing books and ideas (and, yes, bitching, which is fun and great for bonding) was more important to me than writing, so the other thing I would say to 25-year-old Su is that it is OK to want to talk about books with your friends more than you want to write, because that is also a good thing to do.

I think part of the problem for us in our 20s was that we had a vision of what our lives were supposed to look like, as writers, and we didn't have the time and resources to live that vision. It usually looks like waking without the alarm in a lovely home with a view of either the woods, the mountains, or a seashore; drinking coffee or tea in a little windowed nook while doodling in a leather-bound journal with an expensive fountain pen; then settling in to a couple of uninterrupted hours with our muse before nibbling a simple yet elegant lunch and spending the afternoon strolling through bookstores and chatting on the phone with publishers and agents. Etc.

Some years ago, I led a weekend retreat for women writers. On the whole, I think it went OK, but halfway through the weekend I had to abandon my planned agenda because most of the women in attendance were resisting it. Turned out they didn't want to spend time thinking about what writing meant to them, what kind of writer they wanted to be, what kind of work they wanted to do. They wanted to do writing exercises (which is great, both fun and productive, no problem there) and live, for a weekend, the life I have described in the previous paragraph. When I asked them to do an exercise about their writing, not one thought or wrote about what kind of writing project they'd like to do. Most of them wrote little fantasies about a life of leisure and the mind. Fresh-ground coffee and warm croissants at a window with a view loom surprisingly large in the minds of people who think they want to write, words on paper surprisingly small.

That's fine. As Scalzi said, it's actually OK not to be a writer. And it's OK to dream of days spent reading, writing, contemplating. The last two autumns, I've spent long weekends in the retreat house at a monastery, doing not much but reading, and writing, and praying with the monks--and doing it with a view!--because I like days like that myself. But I also write in the midst of life, because that's how almost everybody has to do it. And that--those words, "I write"--is what makes me a writer.

Prematurely Arrogant: A Tiny Bit About Flannery O'Connor

2010-09-07T14:18:00.010-04:00

I went looking for a Flannery O'Connor quote the other week, and couldn't find it. But it reminded me that I might want to re-read The Habit of Being, a collection of her letters. It has probably been 20 or 25 years since I read them last, and I thought that they might be very rewarding to read again as the person I am now. I am only on page 10, but am struck by her self-confidence. OK, she does do a lot of self-deprecating in her letters to her agent: "The enclosed story is for sale to the unparticular," and "I have another chapter which I have sent to Partisan Review and which I expect to be returned." (On the contrary, Partisan Review published it.)

But I like how she thinks about the bottom line. In her query letter to the woman who would become her agent, she wrote, "I am writing to you...mainly because I am being impressed just now with the money I am not making by having stories in such places as American Letters," and, later, "Here are the first nine chapters of the novel, which please show John Selby and let us be on with financial thoughts."

But this is what made me stop writing to share with you. Flannery O'Connor is 24 years old; she has published a few stories in the kinds of literary reviews that don't pay much, and has written about 2/3 of what was apparently quite a bad draft of her first novel, Wise Blood. She has heard back from John Selby, who is editor-in-chief at Rinehart, who is interested in Wise Blood but has given her an extensive critique which she feels misses the point, and she writes this to him:

I think, however, that before I talk to you my position on the novel and on your criticism in the letter should be made plain.

I can only hope that in the finished novel the direction will be clearer, but I can tell you that I would not like at all to work with you as you do other writers on your list. I feel that whatever virtues the novel has are very much connected with the limitations you mention.... In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do. I will not be persuaded to do otherwise. The finished book, though I hope less angular, will be just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you have now. The question is: Is Rinehart interested in publishing this kind of novel?

She wrote to a friend a bit later:

I learned indirectly that nobody at Rinehart likes the 108 pages.... I told Selby that I was willing enough to listen to Rinehart criticism but that if it didn't suit me, I would disregard it. That is the impasse.

Any summary I might try to write for the rest of the novel would be worthless and I don't choose to waste my time at it. I don't write that way. I can't write much more without money and they won't give me any money because they can't see what the finished book will be. That is Part Two of the impasse.

To develope at all as a writer I have to develope in my own way. The 108 pages are very angular and awkward but a great deal of that can be corrected when I have finished the rest of it--and only then. I will not be hurried or directed by Rinehart. I think they are interested in the conventional and I have no indication that they are very bright.

...If they don't feel that I am worth giving more money to and leaving alone, then they should let me go. Other publishers, who have read the two printed chapters, are interested. Selby and I came to the conclusion that I was "prematurely arrogant." I supplied him with the phrase.

You will be astonished to learn that Rinehart did not choose to publish Wise Blood. I am astonished at O'Connor's certainty about her direction. It's not that she thought she knew everything about writing--she mentions just one paragraph later that she hopes to reach a point "in a few years" where she doesn't have to do so much re-writing--but that she has confidence in both her process of developing as a writer, and in the work she's producing. I am almost 45 and do not have that kind of bold self-assurance. I can't help wondering where I'd be if I'd had it at 24.

(Also, I love the little dig in "I supplied him with the phrase," that she had to give him the words to criticize her with. Heh.)

Update: Rinehart later released O'Connor from the option-to-publish she had signed, which freed her up to sign a contract with Harcourt. In the release letter, Selby called O'Connor, "stiff-necked, uncooperative, and unethical." "Unethical" stung.

In Which I Admit to Having an Extravagant Gadget

2010-09-06T01:41:00.004-04:00

Awhile ago, David received a windfall, and in the middle of me thinking about which bills to pay with it, took it to Best Buy and got me an iPad. I've been very hush-hush about it, because he did it not long after I wrote a blog post in which I bitched about how broke we are, but I'm ready to talk about it now.

The short version of things is that I love it, and so do the kids. I can see why, when it first came out, some people who had smart phones and laptops said skeptically, "What niche does this fill for me? What does it do that I can't do with my smart phone and my laptop?" I, however, have neither a smart phone nor a laptop, so I enjoy having a little gadget I can get on the internet with wherever I can find free wi-fi, which is pretty much everywhere these days. I like that I can lounge in my comfy chair to do my internet-checking, especially since that keeps me closer to the kids than being on the computer in another room. It's easier for me to put down the iPad and fix a quick snack than it is for me to get up from the computer when the kids want me. So that's a good thing.

I love how tiny-kid-friendly it is. It took Yehva about 30 seconds to figure out how to work the thing, and I have a small collection of preschooler-friendly games like simple connect-the-dots, a thing where you dig for dinosaur bones by rubbing the screen, a counting game, a Concentration game, some drawing apps, and something called 2cute that aggregates images of cute things from websites. Yehva also has no trouble using the YouTube app.

Carl and Eric both like the usual assortment of games: free versions of a lot of games like checkers, mancala, and Simon. David and Eric are very into a game called Angry Birds, where you shoot little cartoon birds out of a slingshot in an effort to annihilate the pigs who stole their eggs. Carl and I are enjoying mystery games, the kind where you explore your environment and solve puzzles. The first one we got was Bartleby's Book of Buttons, which is specifically for kids, but we've also been playing some for grown-ups.

I, of course, have been playing a lot of solitaire and Sudoku. Because that's what you do with a state-of-the-art $700 computing device that would have been unimaginable when you were growing up, right?

Web-surfing is great. I'm a little unhappy with the reduced functionality of the Mail app--the biggest problem is that I have elaborate filters set up so that only a tiny fraction of my incoming mail actually ends up in my in-box. On the desktop computer, each mailbox that has new mail indicates it with a little number that shows how many new messages are in it; on the iPad, only the inbox indicates when it has new mail. This means that, short of clicking individually on 50 different mailboxes, I can't tell if I've gotten something new from any one of the 30 or so friends who have their own mailboxes, or for any of my committees. I don't know if there's a fix for this; I haven't been very motivated to look into it since 99% of the time I'm using my iPad within 20 feet of a computer I can go to if I have a burning need to check e-mail.

I read a lot on the iPad, but haven't dived into a whole book yet, though I have both Apple's iBooks app and the Kindle app. I don't ordinarily buy books, so I haven't been able to bring myself to pay for any e-books yet, and though there are a lot of free public domain books available, I haven't found one yet that I'm really raring to read. (I have Leaves of Grass, all of Jane Austen, Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe, and a dictionary, all good for emergencies, but nothing yet that I want to sit down and dig into.)

Mostly I read articles. My favorite app has got to be InstaPaper, which installs a button on your browser's bookmarks bar that says, "Read Later." If you find an article you want to read but not right now, you click that button and it saves it; next time you open the InstaPaper app, it downloads everything you've saved. InstaPaper can be used in your browser and on your desktop or laptop as well as on handheld devices, so I can save stuff when I'm on the desktop and read it later on the iPad. It's like always having a really good magazine that only has your favorite kind of stuff in it. Right now I've got something by David Foster Wallace, a Tim O'Reilly piece called "The State of the Internet Operating System," a New York Review of Books article about prison rape, an article about the New Orleans school system in the wake of Katrina, an article about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from The American Prospect, and a couple of dozen other things to choose from next time I'm looking for something to chew on.

I have a few movies, including Lord of the Rings, and a collection of Bugs Bunny cartoons, mostly for the amusement of the children. I have not signed up for Netflix, but if I do, I will be able to stream videos.

I have a whole bunch of free non-fiction, education-type apps, including a collection of historical maps, a history of the battle of Gettysburg, a "this day in history" app, Astronomy Picture of the Day, NASA's news app, Google Earth, and something called "3D Sun" that lets you see amazing things that have happened on the sun, using data from NASA spacecraft. There's a false-color movie of a magnetic eruption that happened in April that is so cool I could watch it a hundred times. Also, with this app I can keep up with what's happening on the sun today. For instance, I received an alert on Sept. 3 telling me that active sunspot 1100 had moved into the spacecrafts' blind spot and would remain there for about 24 hours. Big doings!

Very few things in the app store cost more than 9.99, and 4.99 or 1.99 are more common (browsing, the only things we found that cost a lot were law and medicine reference materials). But it would be the easiest thing in the world to spend your grocery money there--so many nifty things. I have sought to be mindful of that. There is a lot of good free stuff available.

What don't I like about it? Typing, for one thing. I think if I'm going to use it to write e-mail or notes when traveling, I'll need a Bluetooth keyboard. It gets surprisingly heavy, so switching from the keyboard and mouse to the iPad has mostly shifted me from one kind of incipient RSI to another. It's bulky to carry all the time; I have my calendar on it (iCal syncs nicely between the desktop and the iPad) but don't think it's something I want to always have in my bag in case I need to set up a meeting or make plans with a friend.

Overall, though, it has been a welcome addition to the family. It's great for entertaining kids on car trips and in restaurants or waiting rooms. It gets such heavy use that we have joked that Apple should start selling them in the Handy Family Four-Pack. I wouldn't be surprised if we get a second one someday, because it is nifty and does many many cool things, and there is always somebody waiting their turn to use it.

A Compendium of Bits & Pieces about Anxiety

2010-09-03T09:42:00.010-04:00

A friend asked me a few weeks ago if I would consider writing some about my experience with anxiety, and I said yes, but I haven't done it yet. And then I remembered that I have in fact done it, in the past. Here are a couple of links to posts at an old dead blog of mine:

On Mental Illness

From the Crazy Days

I will add that I had an untreated anxiety disorder from early childhood until I was in my late 20s, when we stumbled upon it while doing couples therapy. Until then, I thought pretty much everybody was as crazy as I was, though that's not strictly true: I did try to get help. In middle school, I asked my parents to take me to a psychiatrist and they refused; in college, I asked them to help me get therapy and they refused. When I was in graduate school the first time (at Rutgers, in the late 80s), I did get therapy for awhile and it helped some. But it was a revelation to me to find out that most people did not live in constant fear, or with the constant sense that everyone was watching and judging them. An even bigger revelation to consider that I might become one of those other people.

Interestingly, things really fell apart for awhile after I first recognized my anxiety disorder--as I said in one of the links up there, it was like all my dysfunctional coping mechanisms fell away long before I had new, functional ones to replace them. It was a bad, bad time.

Regular generic talk therapy helped in the sense that I came to have a pretty good understanding of what anxiety was, and what mix of temperament and upbringing had constructed mine. But the anxiety itself didn't really improve. Either my doctor or my therapist (I don't remember now) suggested I try cognitive-behavioral therapy, and seeing a good cognitive-behavioral therapist got me over the hump literally in a manner of weeks; I also saw a psychiatrist and used medication for awhile, which was such a life-saver that I kicked myself for resisting it for so long.

Being a person who is recovered from anxiety doesn't mean I don't have anxiety; I'll always be an anxious-ish person with a racing brain. Recovery means I don't have anxiety that interferes with my life, that I have very good coping mechanisms, that I recognize the early signs that a bad patch might be coming and know how to get help quickly. For me, one early sign is what I call "morbid fantasies," these images that jump into my mind of, say, one of my children crumpled, severely wounded, at the foot of a play structure at the playground, or of someone walking out of the water carrying my child's limp, drowned body. I know how to stop a morbid fantasy before it turns into a full-blown inner brain-movie, but if I start having them regularly, something needs to be attended to.

Sometimes I think things are pretty bad, and then I read that second link and I remember that I spent the first 25, 30 years of my life simply dominated by my anxiety. I remember being paralyzed over what to wear to my department orientation at Rutgers because of how people might judge me, good or bad, depending on the choice I made (my therapist at the time: "Su, a little hint here: nobody is paying that much attention to you." This was surprisingly helpful). I remember bursting into tears on a bus at the University of Michigan because I overheard someone I didn't know in a seat near me mention a friend of hers whose gpa was better than mine. I remember 1000 times not trying something because the fear of failing at it was stronger than the hope of success. I remember many times when my revving brain led to overly-dramatic behavior; sometimes I think I ought to make a list of people who were my friends and lovers before I was 26 or 27 and write them all letters of apology for the ways my insecurity strained our relationships (Carol, Jim, and Bill from freshman year at Oakland: this especially applies to you). Likewise my students from the first 3 years or so I was teaching, when my anxiety was so bad that it was much too common for me not to make it to class at all.

I hardly believe it myself, it's been so long since things have been that bad. I am lucky David stuck with me through the falling-completely-apart-and-recovering period, though I'm pretty sure he thinks it was worth it. It is such ancient history now.

Three more things:

Awhile ago, somebody asked at Ask.Metafilter.com, "What does it feel like to have anxiety?" The answers are worth reading (mine is in there, the same as one of the links above.)

One of my children has anxiety. It is a great balm to me to see how much better he is doing than I was at that age. I did recently have a conversation with my old therapist about how to know whether he needs treatment, and she gave me a great rule of thumb for figuring it out: if his anxiety keeps him from doing things he wants to do, or affects his relationships. So far, so good. But I've been applying CBT stuff I know to him: for instance, even though he is afraid of elevators and parking garages, I get him into elevators and parking garages pretty regularly. Avoiding a thing you're afraid of just reinforces the fear.

The other day, I found this as a saved draft for the blog, a fragment that never really got enough to a point that it was worth posting. But it is also a little picture of anxiety, so I'll share it here:

When we were in the middle of our custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather, I would sometimes have days when I could not stop thinking about what it would be like to lose her. My brain would just keep playing the movie of There Goes Yehva, and its blockbuster sequel, Life Without Yehva. I have an anxious mind and an active imagination, and they could put together a three-reel tear-jerker for me on a moment's notice. I know a thousand ways to distract, quiet, and re-direct my mind when it gets like that. And if that wasn't enough, these little pills my doctor gave me were supposed to be like pouring oil on the water, they were supposed to settle the waves.

Mostly, it all worked. But sometimes--usually just after I'd had a phone conversation with our lawyer and her voice had reminded me that all of this actually was happening to us in the real world--nothing was enough. I had to watch the movies, like Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

But I couldn't just watch the movies. I had Yehva's diapers to change, and Eric's toast to cut neatly into triangles, and Carl's endless questions to answer, and the dishes to wash, and the parrots to feed. So some days, I watched the movies and they were so sad that tears just flowed quietly down my cheeks the whole time, tears for my present fears and my future grief. I could give a bath, grill a cheese sandwich, clean a toilet, pour juice--all with the tears just coming down as if they were a thing my body just had to do right then, like breathing.

I have a little flair for the dramatic.

David was not subject to this sort of thing. He has a constitutional tendency to be content with things the way they are, and a quiet optimism. His brain doesn't show him crazy movies all day long; it says things like, "life is good," and "everything is going to work out OK," and "nothing to worry about," and "my, my, my, that's just fine, isn't it?"

I am grateful for David's phlegmatic brain, because two people like me going through a thing like that together would have just flown to pieces.

I can't remember why I started telling this story.

I said in one of the old blog posts I linked above that one of the great gifts of my life is that I respond very well to therapy. Short of not having an anxiety disorder at all, which would have been better, that's true. I know people, I have people in my life right now, who are treatment-resistant, and it's so hard to watch them be stuck in that place of pain and to see their brains convince them over and over that none of the steps that their friends or their therapists suggest to them will do any good, so why bother trying? My therapist told me once, "I like working with you...when I suggest you try something, you always come back the next week and tell me you tried it." Well, sure. That's what I'm paying her for, right? I wish nobody I loved had mental problems or mood disorders, but, barring that, I wish they could all be as susceptible to treatment as I have been.

I also cannot recommend cognitive-behavioral therapy enough. Maybe it's not for everybody, but sorting out my own temperament and brain chemicals and all the things my mom said to me when I was 14 and the way my dad did thus-and-such was very interesting, to be sure, but it didn't fix me. Seeing a therapist who just really did not much care about my relationship with my mother but who would send me home with a to-do list and who taught me all kinds of good ways to stop my revving brain and re-direct anxious thoughts is what did it for me. Maybe I needed the other piece first, or in addition, maybe CBT wouldn't have helped without it. But I do not think I would ever have recovered without CBT.

Oh, finally, the book I found most helpful (though you have to be careful reading books about anxiety, as it's possible they'll just give you other things to be anxious about. Thanks to this book, my anxiety improved. But I also briefly developed a fear of driving on freeways, and had one panic attack, after reading about them in this book. So, handle with care, and perhaps only under the supervision of a trained professional): The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook.

That's it for now. Some bits and pieces. I do wish I could reach every person living with untreated anxiety and show them a glimpse of what is possible. That someday you could be so recovered that you can hardly remember what life used to be like.

Dad and Nephew overheard

2010-08-31T12:30:00.003-04:00

My dad and my nephew, who is 14, came to clean my gutters today, bless their hearts. Yehva and I went out to watch them, and I overheard this conversation:

Garrett: This is so matted, I can just pull it down and pull the next bit out...I'll be able to get halfway behind that tree without moving the ladder.

Dad: Do you want a broomstick? Sometimes it's easier to get that stuff with a broomstick.

Garrett: No, this is OK.

Dad: I can get you a broomstick.

Garrett: I'm doing fine.

Dad: Here's a stick.

Garrett, to me: Grandpa always keeps asking me stuff after I've already said no. Like, I'll be having eggs and he'll ask if I want toast, and I say no, and he's like, have some toast, toast is good with eggs, and I'll say no thanks, I don't need any toast, and he'll be like, Here, I made you some toast.

Dad: I'm just trying to teach you to do things right!

Garrett: There's a right way to eat eggs?

Dad, vehemently: Ya gotta have toast with eggs!

Garrett: I don't think there's a rule book...

Me, scoffing: You've been a Penn for 14 years and you don't know about the thousand-page rule book of Gary Penn? I'm astonished!

Dad: Oh, ha ha ha.

Me, to Garrett: We love him a lot, but he hasn't changed in 50 years.

"Ho, my merry men! Come quickly!"

2010-08-29T00:36:00.003-04:00

I've been reading the Howard Pyle Robin Hood to Eric at bedtime the last few nights, from the same now-slightly-musty copy I had as a child. A 1946 edition, it was probably from the same box of my mom's childhood books that made me anachronistically fond of the classic Christian children's series The Sugar Creek Gang, especially We Killed A Bear and whichever book it is where Circus gets bit by the black widow spider and finds Jesus.

Reading a particular favorite to your child feels risky. The book was written in the 1880s--what if he can't follow the language? What if he can, but he just doesn't like it? Can our relationship survive his indifference to a book I've loved for 35 years?

So far, so good, but reading aloud I stumble sometimes over passages like this, and I do wonder if Eric gets the jokes:

"Halloa! Art thou deaf, man? Good friend, say I!"

"And who art thou dost so boldly check a fair song?" quoth the Tinker, stopping in his singing. "Halloa, thine own self, whether thou be good friend or no. But let me tell thee, thou stout fellow, gin thou be a good friend it were well for us both; but gin thou be no good friend it were ill for thee."

"Then let us be good friends," quoth jolly Robin, "for ill would it be to be ill, and ill like I thine oaken staff full well to make it but well, so friends let us be."

"Ay, marry, then let us be," said the Tinker. "But, good youth, thy tongue runneth so nimbly that my poor and heavy wits can but ill follow it, so talk more plainly, I pray, for I am a plain man, forsooth."

"And whence comest thou, my lusty blade?" quoth Robin.

"I come from Banbury," answered the Tinker.

"Alas!" quoth Robin, "I hear there is sad news this merry morn."

"Ha! Is it indeed so?" cried the Tinker eagerly. "Prythee tell it speedily, for I am a tinker by trade, as thou seest, and as I am in my trade I am greedy for news, even as a priest is greedy for farthings."

"Well then," quoth Robin, "list thou and I will tell, but bear thyself up bravely, for the news is sad, I wot. Thus it is: I hear that two tinkers are in the stocks for drinking ale and beer!"

"Now a murrain seize thee and thy news, thou scurvy dog," quoth the Tinker, "for thou speakest but ill of good men. But sad news it is indeed, gin there be two stout fellows in the stocks."

"Nay," said Robin, "thou hast missed the mark and dost but weep for the wrong sow. The sadness of the news lieth in that there be but two in the stocks, for the others do roam the country at large."

"Now by the pewter platter of Saint Dunstan," cried the Tinker, "I have a good part of a mind to baste they hide for thine ill jest. But gin men be put in the stocks for drinking ale and beer, I trow thou wouldst not lose thy part."

Loud laughed Robin and cried: "Now well taken, Tinker, well taken! Why, thy wits are like beer, and do froth up most when they grow sour!"

Eric seems to listen happily, and I think tonight he did enjoy the story of Robin going to the shooting match in disguise to win the golden arrow from the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Pyle's Robin Hood will always be my touchstone Robin: unnaturally gifted with the bow; always merry, yet touched by tragedy from the moment he let anger and pride drive him to kill, first, a King's deer, and then the King's forester who had taunted him to commit that crime. I like other tellings--earlier this year I read Robin McKinley's Outlaws of Sherwood, and I liked her version well enough. It had a strong Marian, wrote Robin across the grain by making him an indifferent archer who had to be pushed into outlawry by Marian and another friend, and addressed questions like, "How do you have threescore and ten stout yeomen wandering the forest without creating paths the King's foresters can easily follow, and what did they do with their garbage and poop?"

But McKinley's book, and others like it, are best appreciated, I think, in contrast to the more classic Robin we get from Howard Pyle. You need to be well-versed in the legend to be able to enjoy playing around with it. Or so it seems to me. I don't know if Pyle created the version we're all so familiar with, that underlies everything from the 1938 Errol Flynn movie to the 1973 animated Disney version, but he certainly exemplifies it: Robin as the jolly, clever trickster in green who always triumphs.

I loved Robin Hood as a child, and I still do. Robin keeps inviting people to join his band, and this is what he tells them:

Say, good fellow, wilt thou join my merry men all? Three suits of Lincoln green shalt thou have a year, besides forty marks in fee; thou shalt share all with us and lead a right merry life in the greenwood; for cares have we not and misfortune cometh not upon us within the sweet shades of Sherwood, where we shoot the dun deer, and feed upon venison and sweet oaten cakes, and curds and honey. Wilt thou come with me?

What a sales pitch! Is it any wonder they always say yes? I certainly would.

Norcroft Women's Writing Retreat to close

2010-08-28T10:16:00.005-04:00

Many years ago, I spent a month in Lutsen, Minnesota, at Norcroft, a writing retreat for women founded by Joan Drury. Drury is a novelist and publisher who wanted to support other women writers, and her retreat was wonderfully egalitarian in its vision: it was free to everybody, and you didn't have to be published to go there. Places were assigned by lottery among everyone who applied; I think I got a spot the second year I tried for one.

The retreat itself was wonderful. There was a main lodge, a roomy house overlooking Lake Superior, where four writers in residence had bedrooms, and four writing sheds (I loved mine and still dream of having something like it again someday). If you got a bedroom overlooking the lake, your writing shed was in the woods, and if your bedroom overlooked the woods, your shed had a lake view. I had a lovely, roomy bedroom overlooking the lake.

A caretaker did the housework and bought groceries; you could put anything you wanted on a list in the kitchen, and it would appear in the fridge. Writers did their own cooking. Because writers had to share space during the day, silence was observed until 5 p.m. every day so as to keep the writers from falling into socializing instead of working. The caretaker also made sure there was always a fire laid in the fireplace, so you could have one whenever you wanted (and, this being the north shore of Lake Superior, you often did, even in July).

My four weeks there was a productive, peaceful time. I was either writing, reading, walking, or riding my bike to a nearby resort where I could use a public phone to call David. It was a gift I do indeed thank Joan Drury for.

However... friends who had been there warned me that Drury was a difficult person. She owned a home next door to the retreat, and they told me that if she was staying there, she would usually come for dinner at least once a week, and at these dinners she expected to be fawned over. Each one of them had a story of being insulted or offended in conversation with Drury. "Whatever you do," my friends said, "just don't have dinner with Joan."

For the first three weeks I was there, Drury wasn't. But the final week she was, and one night she did indeed come for dinner. I was mindful of my friends' warnings, but I was too curious not to attend the dinner.

As with so many things in life, I really should have listened to my friends. In the course of dinner, Drury told me that one project I was working on was of no interest to anyone and completely unpublishable, and that another project, which I had been most productive with during my stay, had been a waste of time that squandered the opportunity she had given me.

One of the the other writers who arrived that week was from Minneapolis, where Drury lived, and was a friend of hers. A semi-famous ex-girlfriend of mine had been involved with this writer's lover while on sabbatical in Minneapolis a couple of years earlier; this writer considered my ex to have "stolen" her lover and she had stopped talking to me once we had stumbled upon the connection in a getting-to-know-you conversation. Apparently she talked to Drury about it, because it amused Drury, during the dinner, to reveal my former relationship in an insulting way calculated to get a laugh at my expense.

Which is when I got up and went to my writing shed.

I don't know if Drury was universally nasty or if she picked a scapegoat at every meal, and I was just unlucky. Some of my friends thought she picked on women who weren't deferential or fawningly grateful enough; I don't really know, I only met her the once, and once was enough. The other three writers in residence at the time seemed to like her well enough, and stayed up late laughing and drinking with her in the living room of the lodge.

I just took a break, wanting to find something from the letters I wrote while I was there, and got sucked in. It's fascinating in a painful way; I was so early in my recovery from an anxiety disorder and it's all out there on the page, these long daily letters I wrote to (very patient) friends, full of crazy ups and downs. Nothing I'd really want to excerpt here. On the other hand, I had forgotten the good camaraderie I had with the other writers there; I always see myself alone in my memory but the letters reveal we were quite a social bunch. Also, I smuggled a hamster into my writing shed with me, and fed the local chipmunks her pellets and seed mix. They used to come and stare at me through my screen door if I hadn't put any out on the stoop, and there were several I knew by sight.

Anyway, I read this morning that the retreat is closing. While I don't share the article's enthusiasm for Joan Drury (if I have a "fairy godmother," I do so very much hope it's not her), on balance I think this is the passing of a good thing. I'm sorry it won't still be there for other women; I don't know of any other writing retreat that is both free and open to writers at all levels, and Drury is to be honored for that.

Social Class, Female Solidarity, and the Child Welfare System

2010-08-26T17:21:00.006-04:00

In the Baltimore Law Review, Chris Gottlieb, a lawyer who represents parents who have been accused of abuse or neglect, talks about the child welfare system, the rights of parents, and why women with privilege should feel more solidarity with those whose parental rights are challenged.

(Adapted, shorter, non-pdf version in the New York Times here.)

I'm only about halfway through and am already kind of goggle-eyed at the analysis she's making and what she has to say about the child welfare system. Some quotes:

In advising my clients, I frequently tell them that the single most important factor in whether they will be able to keep their children (keep their children!) is how well they get along with the caseworker. You've seen the pictures of the burnt and beaten children who have suffered at the hands of abusive parents, some ending up dead. Those are the children whose stories motivated our child welfare system and continue to fuel efforts to be more protective of children. Yet, as almost anyone working in the field will tell you, those instances of severe abuse, which garner all the attention in the media, are unrepresentative of the cases that clog the system.

Most children in foster care simply are not there because of child abuse. In most cases abuse is never even alleged. Neglect is the charge and neglect is broadly construed. It entails everything from having a dirty or run-down house, to refusing special education or recommended psychotropic medications, to corporal punishment, to smoking marijuana. In other words, neglect includes many things that reasonable people have very different ideas about. Indeed, it includes many behaviors that my yuppie friends and I engage in without threat of government intervention. (pp. 378-9)

And this:

But these cases are often viewed by the caseworkers and judges not as being about material, economic problems, but as being about parenting ability. The parent who "chose" to leave her ten-year-old alone while she went to work is deemed to have such bad parenting judgment that she may not be trusted to keep her child safe under any circumstances. Of course, a mother who leaves a child home because otherwise she will lose her job and means of supporting that child was choosing between two bad options. She may have made the wrong decision (though, of course, this is one of the many parenting questions on which contradictory views are held), but she may be an excellent parent. She certainly is a parent who could be given better options. Similarly, the mother who "chooses" to let her child live in sub-standard housing may not be taking every step another parent would to address the situation, but that doesn't mean she's unworthy to be a parent (whatever "worthy to be a parent" might mean.) It surely does not mean her children must be better off without her.

Acting as if these cases are about parental judgment is dangerous and ultimately bad for the kids involved. None of us would pass the test of always exercising the best possible judgment when parenting. It's just that some of us have luxuries that mean our bad choices don't have to be between two really bad options (and our choices, whether good or bad, are far less likely to be seen by government officials). (p. 381)

And this:

The point is not that rich, white kids are never abused, and certainly not that we should be less concerned about the poor and minority children who are. The point is that, just as when there is any severe discrepancy in how rich and poor or black and white are treated, we should question what is underlying the disparity. Clearly, we are far more willing to allow government officials to judge the parenting of poor and minority parents. We have allowed, indeed encouraged, government officials to be judgmental of certain--but only certain--parents. With respect to these disadvantaged groups, rather than limiting intrusion into family life to the relatively rare extreme cases of parental behavior that are truly beyond the pale, we have invited the government to engage in an endless game of "What is wrong with that mother?" As any mother knows, this is a game no mother can win. (p. 382)

And this:

Even when mistakes are caught and unnecessary separations ended, those children can never again have what we like to believe is the birthright of all children: a feeling of security that their parents will always be there for them, that their parents have some power to control an otherwise scary world. We take that away when we act as though parents are so great a threat to their children that it should be easy for government workers to come between them. (p. 385)

It's very much worth a read.

You Can Tell I'm Feeling Better When I Sing

2010-08-25T11:53:00.004-04:00

When I've been through a bad patch, it's always a sign of recovery when I catch myself singing as I go about my work. I don't notice when I stop singing, but I always notice when I start again. Some songs I've caught myself singing in the last few days:

Queen Anne's Lace, Del McCoury Band ("She could never place me in her mind, to me the years have not been kind. She'd never see the boy she knew in the man I've grown to be. From her station and her place, she'd never recognize my face; I have fallen like a windblown leaf from her memory. For she's traded all her pain for bright lights and chilled champagne, and I'm sure her new-found friends all think they know just where she's been. Yes, they think they know her well; Oh, the stories I could tell! She's as fine as Queen Anne's Lace, but I knew her when." Give it a listen!)

All This Beauty, The Weepies

The Weakness in Me, Joan Armatrading

Turn It On, Turn It Up, Turn Me Loose, Dwight Yoakam

142 Stratfield, from The Sacred Harp, 1991 ed (just the alto part!)

What We Look For, and What We Get

2010-08-20T09:36:00.011-04:00

Kirk Cowell over at A Soul in Training is looking for a new church to attend, and while he is explicitly Christian in a way I'm not, and most Quakers I know aren't (even the Christocentric ones, I think), his thinking about what he and his family need from a church resonates with me. I've been musing off and on in recent months about how people come to Quakerism, and what they look for once they're there.

I know some people in my meeting come and stay because they find support and recognition for their political activism, a community that sees that work as important and spirit-led. Some come, I think, because we're a group of nice, welcoming people. Although some people in our meeting have known each other for twenty years or more, we're not insular. I think we do a pretty good job of making newcomers feel welcome but not overwhelmed. We can be accepting in good ways--one single mom who started attending a few years ago told me she appreciated the lack of judgment about her status as a single mom and about the way she dressed, after spending some time at a church where she felt scrutinized.

Some of us come to Quakerism because we're not comfortable with liturgical worship, or because we've been hurt by the Christian churches of our upbringing. This was my path; I wasn't raised in a church, but as a young radical lesbian feminist with vague spiritual yearnings, I couldn't see myself listening to a sermon about God the Father or singing hymns about Jesus. I tried joining some of the local lesbians in their pagan celebrations, but it didn't seem to me that anybody there really believed in what they were doing (I could have been wrong about this). And I wasn't comfortable with the Native American Lite spirituality of many white lesbians. So I tried the local Quaker meeting, and liked it well enough to stay.

The thing is, we come there for all kinds of different reasons. This can create tensions--as at a recent Meeting for Business I've talked about before, in which I had been seriously thinking, "If we approve this wording about what it means to be a Quaker, I'm going home and writing my letter withdrawing my membership," only a few minutes before a very beloved Friend said something like, "When we do this kind of word-smithing, I think we're getting awfully close to defining a creed, and I have to tell you if we start spending very much time on this kind of thing, I'm out of here." Despite the distress I was feeling, I couldn't help grinning inwardly and thinking of Mr. Bennett telling Elizabeth, "An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do." I think people in the meeting that day would be aghast to think they'd come to the brink of losing one or the other of us.

But I think overall we--my meeting, at least--do a pretty good job of being together in all our unlikely unity. I have a mystical relationship with a personal God I know experimentally, and Paul is an avowed atheist, but not only does the meeting want (and need?) both of us there, but Paul and I really care for and about each other. It seems to me that we bump up against our differences as we go about our Quakering--half the meeting loves so-and-so's vocal ministry, and the other half wishes he'd shut up already; one person needs to name God and another is pained to hear the word--but when we take time, in retreats or in business meeting, to listen to each other, we do it well, and it unites us.

What was my point?

Oh, I was going to say that we come to Quakerism for a reason. We're looking for a place where we will be comfortable and accepted, or where some of our questions can be answered. Does anybody walk through the door hoping to have all her most treasured beliefs challenged, to be transformed by faith, to be converted? Somehow I doubt it. And yet, to me, that's the best part of being a person of faith (also the scariest): the completely unexpected things that can happen to you when you let yourself be open. I joke that I am a person of faith today because when people told me that Quaker worship was a bunch of people sitting around waiting on God, I naively believed them, and after I waited long enough, God started showing up. And the thing is, once God shows up, crazy unexpected things start happening. Your whole like can change.

The balance seems tricky to me: we don't want to frighten people off, but if we think our purpose is to make them comfortable, we're never going to do God's work or help them find their piece of it. And yet, if we're honest with people, we would have to tell them that they're taking big risks by trying to listen to God, even if they don't call what they're listening for by that name. Mary Karr, author of The Liars Club and Lit, converted to Catholicism right in the middle of the pedophile priest scandal. She totally gets why people think she's a complete moron, and yet her conversion felt inevitable to her, and it was central to helping her become sober--conversion saved her life. But it also wrecked her life. Does anybody come to meeting for worship hoping to have their life wrecked? Should we warn them?

I went looking for a Flannery O'Connor quote I remember from 20 years ago, something about most people coming to church by means the church does not allow, and I couldn't find it. I found this one, though: "All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful."

I preached in worship on Sunday (I just can't say "offered vocal ministry" right now, sorry) on the subject of conversion. At least, I think that's what I was trying to talk about, with God's help. I was hoping, I think, to encourage people to be open to the way their faith and their practice can change them, though I also ended up talking about why people resist that. Why I do, even after having been through it before. It's because your faith and your practice can change you in ways that seem intolerable from where you're sitting now.

When I first came to Quaker meeting, I came to "Quaker meeting." It was years before I could say "worship," or anything else that sounded religious. Now I have an affinity for the religious aspect of our society (I am the one who, if I didn't rein myself in, would be prissily correcting people who talk about "The Society of Friends" instead of The Religious Society of Friends) and even for religious language from outside our tradition: convicted, preach, grace, mitzvah. And yet, having gotten comfortable here, I don't really want to be changed any more. It's not that I have thrown down all the walls and am ready to follow God wherever God leads; it's more like I moved the walls. This far, and no farther.

I talk about me here, and I talked about me some in worship on Sunday, not only because I like to talk about me but because I want people to know that when I invite them to be open not only to the comfort that Spirit and spiritual community provide but also to the ways that Spirit and their spiritual community can change them, push them in uncomfortable ways, I am not speaking as someone who has solved this problem for herself. It's more like I'm looking for company in a prickly and frightening place.

I am woefully ignorant about the Bible (I recently asked my friend Julie, a Lutheran pastor, to clarify for me: Peter and Simon Peter: one person, or two? Julie is very patient). But in the few bits I do know, it seems like Jesus is always asking people to give up all they have to follow him. And nobody can blame the ones who answer, "You have got to be kidding me," and go back to their vineyards and mansions and piles of gold coins. And even the ones who say yes sometimes get what seem like paltry returns. There are a couple of people in my meeting who can speak eloquently on the subject of following a leading right into a brick wall at 60 miles an hour.

Hmm, I don't think Ministry & Outreach is going to be asking me to write the new outreach pamphlet anytime soon. All this talk about life-wrecking. But there you have it. You come into a silent room for a little peace and quiet, with maybe some coffee after with nice people who seem to like you. And then a bomb goes off.

The ranty part of the Hierarchy of Harm post

2010-08-19T13:29:00.004-04:00

That last post was two-faced: loving and gentle in the top half, angry in the bottom half. I decided to split it into two; I really want people to hear the angry part, but I don't want it to overwhelm the loving part.

A few things I wish everybody would get:

1. Just because it's "natural" doesn't mean it's not a trigger.

Let me repeat that: JUST BECAUSE IT'S "NATURAL" DOESN'T MEAN IT'S NOT A TRIGGER.

To emphasize this, I will tell you that I have been made ill by herbal teas ordered by people sitting at my table. Also, if you think for a minute you will be able to come up with a list of a hundred natural things that can be harmful to some people, from pollen to snake venom. So please, please, please, stop telling us folks when we ask you not to use something that's making us ill that it is impossible because it's "natural." When you say, "It's really the chemicals that people react to, not the scent," you may be right about some people, but you are wrong about a whole bunch of other people including me. It's possible I'm going to stab the next person who says this to me, so you'll want to be very careful about it from now on.

2. This goes for essential oils, too.

3. I am not the only person who is sensitive to scents and chemicals.

I really appreciate it when you "try to remember" not to put perfume on when we're meeting for lunch. But all those days when we are not meeting for lunch, and you wear perfume, you may be making other people ill, giving them headaches, or triggering their asthma. When people treat this as an issue that they only need to think about because of that one friend of theirs, it puts every sensitive person in the position of having to advocate for herself all the time, and this is stressful and exhausting. I get tired of having to ask, everywhere I go, for people to make "special" accommodations for me, or of telling someone they've made me ill after I'm already ill, which feels really crappy to both of us. [And those times you forget to try to remember, and wear the perfume? They break my heart.]

If you stop thinking of this as an issue of mine, as something that you only need to think about when you know you're going to see me, but instead as something that you do for the well-being of all kinds of people you don't know who might be in that stuffy conference room with you, or in line behind you at the grocery store, or on the bus, if you start to think of it as something you do for the sake of accessibility, you won't have to "try to remember" not to put perfume on to have lunch with me, because you won't be wearing it anyway.

I'm not special. I'm unlucky in this way, but I'm so far from being the only one that it's not funny. This is not an issue about me. It's an issue about accessibility and harm reduction. Please consider taking a step down the Hierarchy of Harm. I will thank you, and the unknown person who does not have to go to bed for two days after you get in the elevator with him thanks you, too.

[Also, I say this with all love: if you find yourself wanting to post a comment that is a defense of your choice to use perfume or other scented products, please squash that impulse. I don't need to hear it again. That's your choice, you don't need to justify it to me, and I'm not going to give you my blessing. "But I just don't feel dressed until I've put on my perfume," is another thing that's getting awfully close to a justifiable stabbing offense, so tread lightly. I know this is hard; I've lived with it a long time. You have my sympathy if you just don't get it, or don't want to be told you have to change one more behavior, or think me and people like me are just entitled whiners, or want me to forgive you for refilling the fragrance-free soap bottle in your bathroom with Dial, as one of my best friends recently did. Lots of very good people have been, or are, in that same spot. But right now in my life, beyond writing this and other things about the issue, I can't be the one to help you with that. Because I realized as I was writing this that I'm carrying a lot of anger and pain about this right now.]

For People Who Want to Be Scent-Sensitive: Su's Hierarchy of Harm

2010-08-19T12:31:00.019-04:00

People are becoming more aware of how scented products and chemicals can impact accessibility, for people with asthma, those who get migraines, and folks like me who react to the scents themselves. But it can be hard to know what's hurtful and what's not, and some well-intentioned people trying really hard bump up against the problem that the limited array of fragrance-free products may not meet their needs, so that it is a gleeful discovery to find a FF hair gel that doesn't make your hair look and feel like you styled it with Elmer's Glue. As a scent-sensitive person, I appreciate people's efforts and don't want them to give up because they can't be perfect, so today in the shower I came up with Su's Hierarchy of Harm: a list of scented things from worst to best, which I offer with the idea that the farther you can move down this list, the more helpful you will be to folks like me.

Caveat: this is my list. Some people are more or less sensitive than I am, or sensitive to different things. But I think the stuff at the top of my list does most harm to most people who have sensitivities or for whom scents are triggers, so this should be more broadly helpful, I hope.

So, from worst to best:

1. Anything whose only purpose is to add fragrance to a person or environment.

Perfume, essential oils, scented candles, incense, plug-in air fresheners, hanging air fresheners in cars, and oh god patchouli. Patchouli is far and away the worst for me, with incense a close second. Patchouli is about the only thing that can require me to leave an open-air event (homeschool park day, for instance) if someone shows up wearing it. If people would stop adding fragrance to the environment just to add fragrance to the environment, about 80% of the exposures that make me ill or exclude me from events would disappear.

2 (tie). Scented grooming products used in communal spaces or in my presence.

Most scented grooming products, like shampoo, conditioner, soap, and deodorant, don't trigger me unless they're freshly applied, I'm in the bathroom where they are or have recently been applied, or we're sleeping together. (Reminder: this is me. I am not everybody.) Usually I am not bothered by anyone's shampoo if their hair is dry. These scents linger in poorly-vented bathrooms, so if we're sharing a communal bathroom at the Gathering, say, I need you to not use this stuff in the shower even if I'm not in there right now (so please don't call out, "Is anybody in here sensitive to scents? No? Then I'm going to go ahead and use this body wash.").

2 (tie). Scented hand lotion.

I don't know if scented hand lotion is really stinkier than all the other stuff people use, or if it's just that this is the product women are likely to whip out of their purse and apply any old time--at the table in a restaurant, in a meeting, in the car--but scented hand lotion accounts for a lot of my worst exposures. If you could swap out a nice little tube of Aveeno or Eucerin FF lotion for whatever's in your bag right now, it would make a big difference in my life.

4. Fabric softener, especially the long-lasting sheets.

Even if you use scented detergent, that probably won't cause me any problems unless we're snuggling or I'm trying to sleep in a bed at your house. But some of the strongly-scented, long-lasting dryer sheets (at least, that's what I think is causing this) are so toxic I can't have you in my house, and may have to leave a public event, if you're using them.

-----------------------------------------------------

What's above this line are the things that, if people would just stop using added scents, switch to unscented hand lotion and unscented fabric softener, my world would be a lot friendlier. If you want to work on this issue, making those changes would get you much of the way without, I think, being too onerous.

You can go farther than this if you like, of course. There are a lot of unscented products (but you should know that "unscented" products sometimes have "masking" scents added, so they are not fragrance-free and can be triggers) and more and more FF products all the time. You might consider at least trying laundry soap, shampoo, soap, lotion, and cleaning products (edited to add: and cat litter!); they may not work as well as their smelly brethren, but they might work well enough for you. And if they don't, at least you're making an informed decision to keep using that hair goop that is the only thing that tames your frizz. And maybe that hair goop ends up being the only scented product you still use. This is a harm-reduction model, so any fragrance you can cut out adds to the communal good.

(Note: there was a ranty lower half of this post. I moved it to its own post here so it wouldn't drown out the more loving voice I want people to be able to hear in this part.)

Things I Hate to Admit

2010-08-13T10:42:00.026-04:00

Thinking leads to thinking, and in yesterday's post about adoption and social class, I talked about finally getting, for instance, why Barbara Katz Rothmann, whose book on transracial adoption remains one of the best I've read, is so negative about international adoption, and why Harriet at the fugitivus blog can write:

International Adoption Is Fucked-Up

Yes, I know that’s a blanket statement. I’m not going to change it. International adoption is fucked-up.

If you follow that link and scroll down to the section on international adoption, you'll see that she makes a couple of points that make sense, to me at least. One is that there is a lot of money in international adoption, and people's livelihoods depend on successfully completed adoptions. Harriet argues that just because there are babies involved doesn't mean that normal economic forces don't apply; they do. And where there's money involved, there's going to be someone skimming cream or cutting corners. If the equivalent of several years' income is going to come into your community (or your pocket) if you can provide a baby to an American couple, are you necessarily going to wait for that baby to be abandoned or orphaned in the normal course of things? You might not.

That people have not waited for the normal course of events, but have pushed things, is known to have happened: birthmothers have been paid or coerced to give up infants, and many countries lack the kind of legal protection and process we have in the US. Harriet touches on this, that international adopters will sometimes be reassured that their children's placement for adoption was fully legal, without knowing that in the child's country of origin, what is legal may not rise to US standards. For instance, I recently read that in Guatemala, there needs to be only a short report from a social worker and another from a lawyer for a child to be released for adoption; there is no judicial oversight of the process. That the lawyer making the statement is often the same person who gets paid by the adoptive family ought to raise some red flags.

The other point of Harriet's that I want to highlight is that sometimes people do bad things with good intentions. Here she is on the subject:

Let’s continue to give international adoption agencies the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say they uncover something unseemly about the adoption. Perhaps they suspect the child is not an orphan, or was not willingly relinquished by their parents. Maybe the child begins to act out in ways that indicate past sexual abuse. But this adoption is SO CLOSE to going through, and they know that if they tell the potential adoptive parents about this new discovery, the whole thing will get derailed.

And if the whole thing is derailed, this child that the agency worker has such compassion for is going to remain in an orphanage when they could have been in a family. The agency worker has met the potential adoptive parents. Zie feels that they are strong, good, smart people. Zie is sure they will be able to deal with the child’s new issues. And so zie continues the adoption, never mentioning these pesky new issues that have cropped up. Zie is sure they will be worked out. And, really, isn’t it better this way than the alternative, to let the child languish in an orphanage?

This is a hard one for me, and I'll tell you why, although I have not even admitted this to David: Over the course of our custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather, a number of things happened that were very troubling to me. Probably, if K. had just disappeared after placing Yehva, like she was supposed to, and C. had never showed up to pursue custody, none of this would ever have occurred to me. But the custody fight gave me the opportunity to know K. and C. better--at a remove, to be sure, but I know a lot more about them than I would have otherwise, both through depositions and through reports of their behavior in calls to the agency and in court. And I know our agency better, too. This is hard to admit because it implicates us in a process that was less above-board and ethical than I believed it to be. But here are some things I now believe or suspect:

The agency did not counsel us adequately in evaluating the content of K's intake form.

It was read to us neutrally, without commentary, and my questions asking for interpretations were not answered. It was only in the last couple of years, as I did some reading on the behavior of people living in poverty, that I was able to make sense of things like K's assertion that she intended to get a Master's degree, made at a time when she was actively a drug addict. This kind of aspiration without understanding of what is necessary to achieve it or realistic plan to take steps toward it is apparently common; I saw similar things described many times in literature on people trapped in inner-city poverty. But the agency director, who had much more experience dealing with people like K. than I did, made no effort to interpret her statements for us; as a result, I, at least, believed her to be much more functional than she was. I was able to believe (albeit very briefly) that we had that mythical good birthmother who was making a rational decision for the good of her baby, and with her own future well-being in mind. This is, of course, what any adoptive parent wants to believe.

I have come to believe that the agency knew or suspected that K. was lying about not knowing who the birthfather was.

I am not quite ready to believe K.'s assertion that a social worker at the agency counseled her to lie and claim the baby was the result of a one-night stand, but from things the agency director said to me later, and from my now-much-vaster knowledge about adoption, I believe that they must have had suspicions. Even if they didn't have specific reasons to be suspicious of K., they should have better counseled us about how common it is for birthmothers to muddy the truth.

Why would they lie to us, or not share their suspicions? I can see several things that would pressure them in that direction. One is that we had already had one fall-through, and they might have wanted to avoid disappointing us a second time. Another is a more general pressure to complete adoptions in the most timely way possible; one thing adoptive and potential adoptive parents report to each other about the agencies and lawyers they work with is how long the wait was for a baby. Shorter is obviously better in the eyes of adopters--who pay the fees that keep the agency open and the caseworkers' children fed. Which leads to the third, economic, reason the agency might not have wanted to tell us anything that would make us hesitant to accept the placement: we paid the second half of our fee when the baby was placed with us.

I'm not sure why I don't (yet) believe that K. was telling the truth about the social worker pressuring her to say that the father was a one-night stand. It would be in the interest of the agency to have her do that, certainly: adoptive parents are going to be much less worried about the no-name one-night stand than the estranged former live-in boyfriend who is not willing to sign off on the adoption. And, given the stereotype that Black teenage fathers are not interested in being parents, the risk of lying--or of not admitting suspicions--would have seemed very low. My lawyer told me once that contested adoptions are so rare that many adoption lawyers practice their whole career without being involved in one; what were the odds C. was going to actually pursue parental rights?

The agency's response to K's assertion that her caseworker told her to lie about the birthfather was that we shouldn't worry about it because nobody would believe her over the caseworker. (This was also my lawyer's response.) In some ways, this was probably simply a reflection of reality: yes, had K. ever ended up on a witness stand, she would not have been seen as a credible witness. She was indeed a drug addict, and prone to violent outbursts, and statements she made at different times contradicted each other. But, given other doubts I've begun to have, I could also see the caseworker relying on knowing that K. would be disbelieved. I'll never know, of course. But I will never again be sure that K. lied and the agency didn't. And by God I would give up a lot to be able to be sure.

I am complicit.

I overlooked several things that made me uncomfortable at the time, telling myself that the agency were professionals and knew what they were doing. For instance: we were told that in the days after the birth, K. was so hysterical and unstable that it took two case workers four hours to get her to sign her surrender of parental rights. At the time, a voice in my head said, "How can it not be coercive if it takes her four hours to be talked into it?" But I had never adopted a baby before; the agency had done this hundreds of time. I trusted that they knew when a line had been crossed, and when it hadn't. But a part of me wishes I had said, "Wait a minute--four hours? Two case workers?" I wish that we had had more time in all the rush and hysteria and fear and excitement to sit down and think about whether our line had been crossed, even if the agency's hadn't. (Though, honestly: could we have walked away? We had driven to Chicago, we were standing in the agency offices, all we had to do was sign some papers and write a big check and we could go pick up the baby from the hospital. You'd have to be a lot stronger than I am to walk out of there and drive home without a baby just because you weren't completely comfortable about how the birthmother came to sign her surrenders.)

The director of our agency was racist.

Again, specifically because of our custody dispute, I had much more contact with people at our agency than we normally would have. This gave me the opportunity to learn that the director of our agency was a racist. I hate saying this, but she sometimes said things to me that suggested to me that her feelings toward the birthmothers she worked with (and ours in particular) were somewhere on a spectrum between disrespect and contempt. Once, she told me a story about another contested adoption that included descriptions of the birth family's behavior in court. I will not repeat what she said, because it would be familiar to most of us and might only cause pain to any Black people who happen upon this post. I will say that it involved mimicking people's accents and ridiculing their religious beliefs.

Somebody on AskMetafilter recently asked, "What do you wish you had known before you adopted a child?" People gave answers like, "If you adopt an Asian baby, it might be lactose intolerant. It took us a week to figure that out!" I told her that I found the forums at foreverparents.com the most useful thing pre-adoption; having private conversations with lots of adoptive parents gave me the best information I had.

I did not say: If I had known then what I know now, I might not have done it. I have friends who are vegetarian or vegan because they cannot bring themselves to participate in the factory farming system that feeds so many of us; they do not want to be complicit in that cruelty. Similarly, I might have chosen, had I known then, not to participate in what increasingly seems to me to be a system rife with ethics abuses. On the other hand, part of what I know now is from my own direct experience, and sometimes that's the only way we learn. I'm not sure any number of books or blogs or stories from adult adoptees would have deterred me. "That's not me," I'd have said. "That's not my agency."

Except that, it turns out, it was me. It was my agency.

Harriet has some words to say about that, though, too:

I’m a little uncertain how I feel about it when I put up something like I did, and then people say, “Oh, this has made me choose not to adopt, thank you!” Because I still believe in adoption, and for some kids, it’s their best hope, their second best option now that the first best is gone. I sympathize with workers who want to hold back details, because here they have this kid who needs a chance, and these parents who could be so good for them, but the parents might balk if they knew how hard it was going to be, even though the worker knows they could and would do it if this child was already in their home, or if this was their biokid.
The thing is, adopting a child means accepting a new burden into your life, but that burden is more than the child. Adoptive parents must accept ethical burdens as well. Adoptive parents must accept that by adopting their child, they are likely contributing to the same system that damaged their child. And there’s just no way around that.

Yehva is running up and down the house with the boys. They are pretending to be friends who visit each other's houses. They are having sleepovers. Her fortune cookie last night said, "You are strong and brave," and the rest of us all laughed at how true that is. I am not sorry she's here, I am not sorry to be giving her everything I possibly can to make her life good. But I am sorry about so many things, about the world, and K.'s life, and about our agency, and about my own naivete and willful blindness. I always tell people how much money the custody fight cost us, but it also cost me a certain measure of peace of mind, because it revealed things I would never have had to see otherwise.

I don't know what I would tell a potential adoptive parent who came to me for advice, other than: be prepared for it to be a big stinking mess. Try to believe that the things that happen to other adoptive parents--the birth mother who changes her mind, the undisclosed drug use, the child adopted from foster care who is so traumatized that she can never give you the affection you crave, the agency that turns out to be less than above-board, the internationally adopted toddler who turns out to be a four-year-old whose growth was stunted by malnutrition, the teenage birthfather who inexplicably of all the teenage boys in the world wants to raise his daughter--try to believe that any of these things could actually happen to you, too. That you cannot wade into that morass and come out clean on the other side. Some of the shit is going to get on you. But shit getting on you is part of being a parent, so go ahead and be a parent. Mazel tov, I say to you. And welcome to the hard world we live in.

"There oughta be a lemon law": More About Social Class and Adoption

2010-08-12T10:31:00.008-04:00

I just re-read what I posted a minute ago, and I noticed that I said "Yehva was born into a family of introverts." I didn't catch that when I was writing it; technically, of course, Yehva was not born into our family. She was adopted into it. But I like my little slip of the tongue, and I don't think I'll change it.

It reminds me that I have been wanting to say more about the book Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love, which I blogged about back in June, when I was only partway through it. Having finished it, I have a lot more to say about it, and it's been rattling around in my brain in a very annoying way, so I'm going to try to get it out before I shower and load the kids into the van for homeschool park day. It may not be very well-organized; more of a brain-dump.

I have a lot of respect for Christine Ward Gailey, the sociologist who did the research and wrote this book. I so appreciate her willingness to think about, in particular, social class and how it affects the experiences of adoptive parents and their children. In her study, there were differences in how adopters from different social classes talked about their adopted children and their role in the family, and this is what my slip of the tongue about Yehva reminded me of. In her interviews, it was only among the working-class adopters that people said things about their adopted children like, "He reminds me so much of my Uncle Louie." On the other hand, it was only among the middle-class and wealthy parents that people said things like, "We love him like he was our own." One international adopter described going to Guatemala for an infant in these terms (I have a note but not a direct quote, so I'm paraphrasing): "We went to Guatemala because we'd heard they had very healthy Caucasian infants there, and we wanted to get as close to the real thing as possible" (p. 107).

"As close to the real thing as possible." "Love him like he was our own." Hmmm.

Adopters also varied by social class in how they responded to troubled children. Gailey says that children adopted into working-class homes are more at risk of being hit, but children adopted into middle-class homes and wealthy homes are more at risk of emotional abandonment within the home when they don't meet their parents' expectations. For instance, wealthier families whose kids have behavioral problems are more likely to isolate the children from extended family. "I just leave her home with the nanny; it's easier for everybody." But working-class parents say things like, "I always take him to family get-togethers. He is part of the family. We stay as long as we can; sometimes it's two minutes, sometimes it's all afternoon." Wealthier families also tend to build a buffer of professionals between themselves and their troubled kids: therapists, special schools, nannies. Working-class families look to extended family and friendship networks for support and help (interestingly, single women who adopt, even if they have middle-class professions and backgrounds, often adopt working-class style strategies for support, relying on extended family, surrogate family in the form of neighbors, and alliances with other single parents).

I have often heard people speak with extreme vitriol about international adopters and the agencies that serve them, and I haven't really gotten why. I know that there are ethical problems and risks associated with international adoption, but I think that's true of domestic adoption as well, and I have always seen international adopters as embedded in the same complicated mix of love, risk, and privilege that we live in. I know many international adopters, and they are compassionate people who do not shy away from the ethical complexities of their choice, or from the responsibility they bear to their children, so I just couldn't understand where the anger toward international adopters was coming from.

And then I met the people Gailey interviewed for her book. And I get it. Oh, oh, oh, do I get it.

In her sample, international adopters were significantly more wealthy than other adoptive parents. International adoption costs more, in general, than other forms of adoption, and what adopters get for their money includes less-invasive home studies and fewer education requirements. International adopters generally pay about twice as much for their home studies as domestic adopters, but are subjected to less scrutiny.

At one point, Gailey called an international adoption agency to see if she could set up some interviews with staff for her study. The person she spoke to on the phone mistook her for a potential adoptive parent, and Gailey decided to run with that. She was told that her home study would cost about $5000 (for comparison, ours cost $1500; $1500-2500 is pretty typical, as I understand it) and would take a few months to complete. Gailey said she was in a hurry because she had already identified a child in a Peruvian orphanage that she was interested in; she was told that for $10,000, she could have her home study in two weeks.

Gailey decided to throw up as many red flags as she could. She told the representative that two weeks would be great, but she was very busy at work and often not getting home until late in the evening. The agency rep said that was no problem; they could do her interviews over the phone. "What about this class we're supposed to take? I don't see how I have time for that," Gailey said. The rep replied that they could send her the reading materials and then someone would go over them with her by phone.

In other words, this agency essentially said that for $10,000, Gailey could have a completed home study in 14 days, without ever having a home visit or meaningfully fulfilling an educational requirement.

Of course, this is neither typical or ethical. But it was only an extreme example of a trend Gailey found in her study, that the wealthiest people in her study, who chose international adoption most often, were able to use their financial resources to avoid the rigorous process other adopters go through.

Another thing the international parents were able to avoid was knowing much about the nations they were adopting from, and the political, social, economic, and racial conditions there. Some of them avoided this deliberately. International adoption agencies sometimes actively advertise, "We have caucasian babies!" Seeing an ad like this in the program at a conference, Gailey asked a woman she was talking to, who was in the process of international adoption, whether she knew that in other parts of the world, "caucasian" doesn't necessarily mean what it does in the US; in other words, a baby might be "caucasian" but be olive-skinned, with dark hair and eyes. This woman actually held out her hand to stop Gailey talking, said, "I don't want to hear about this," and walked away.

Many of the international adopters in Gailey's study had little or no information about their children's biological families. In the absence of information, they were free to construct their own stories, and they did. The stories they constructed were often Tales of the Deserving Poor. "I didn't want to deal with some crack whore's damaged goods," they might say when explaining why they didn't adopt domestically, and then go on to say something like--remember, this is in a complete absence of actual information--that they thought their child's birthmother was a pregnant teenager who had no family support, or a woman who had all the kids she wanted and could handle. In other words, your birthmother is immoral and bad, but mine is a decent woman in a hard situation making a responsible decision.

So interesting.

Gailey found that international agencies did little to educate potential adopters about the risks associated with adopting children who have been institutionalized, (most children adopted internationally have spent time in orphanages) and the adopters themselves generally did not seek this information. As a result, adopters were surprised, disappointed, and ill-equipped when their children displayed attachment or behavioral problems, or learning disabilities. And here is where social class again comes in in a very interesting way: working-class parents whose children (usually adopted from foster care) exhibited problems tended to attribute the problems to the traumatic experiences their children had had. "Who can blame him, with what he's been through?" they'd say, and focus on process rather than outcomes: "But when I think about how far he's come..." International adopters tended to give genetic explanations that absolved themselves of responsibility: "I used to think nurture mattered most, but now I see that some kids really are just bad seeds." (That's not a direct quote, except the "bad seed" part, which more than one international adopter used.)

Working class parents also tended to take a very long view in dealing with their troubled children. One parent said, "There are some wounds that take more than one generation to heal." Another said that when things were hard for her with her child, she would remind herself "that I'm doing this for the grandchildren." In other words, they accepted that their damaged child might not be healed, but they hoped they were taking a step that would make things better for the next generation.

Wealthy parents, on the other hand, tended to draw back from their children when it became clear that their children would not meet their aspirations. Reproduction of social class was an issue, and children were sometimes written off when it became clear that they weren't "college material." These parents often felt they had been duped into believing they would get a healthy, normal child, and thought that someone other than them should be accountable when that didn't happen. One father said, "There oughta be a lemon law for these kids. You ought to be able to send them back."

In Gailey's study (which she is careful to point out was done with a snowball sample, not a random one, so may not be generalizable), international agencies and adopters colluded to shield adoptive parents from the realities of conditions in children's home countries and the real risks associated with international adoption, with lamentable outcomes for the children involved.

(There are exceptions: Gailey's study included a small cohort of international adopters she called "academics." These are people who adopt from a country in which they have been doing work of some kind over extended periods of time; usually they adopt in response to observed conditions. For instance, one parent in this cohort adopted her daughter after seeing young girls selling their bodies on the streets in exchange for food. These adopters usually speak the local language, and continue to spend extended periods of time in their child's home country. Some of these children spend as much as 3-4 months per year in their country of origin, and it was only among this cohort that some children continued to have relationships with extended biological family.)

I could say so much more, about the word "orphan," what adopters think it means and what it really means (it's often a legal fiction, allowing adopters to believe they're adopting a child whose parents are dead, when in fact it may simply mean that their legal relationship has been severed); about wealthy adopters who meet their child's need for cultural knowledge by hiring domestic help from the child's country of origin; about so many other things--I have pages of notes.

But this stuff about international adoption and social class has really stayed with me. The international adopters I know are (thinking a minute) all Quakers, and almost all lesbians. In my experience, both Quakers and lesbians would be unlikely to ignore social and political realities. I would like to think that my sample is typical and Gailey's is exceptional, because the international adopters in her study really did not come off well at all (and by "really did not come off at all," I mean that they provoked rage in me). But I fear the opposite is true.

I have to get the kids fed and ready to go the park; I have to shower and load up swimsuits, towels, and snacks; I have to look up directions to the park and get my laundry out of the dryer if I want to wear a clean shirt. And I have to do all of this in the next 32 minutes, ideally. So I'll leave this here. I have tremendous respect for Gailey and her willingness to look at issues of social class, which I do not think most researchers have done.

My More Moderate Views on Education

2010-08-12T08:30:00.004-04:00

I enjoyed my rant the other day, but find that I want to say a few words about my more measured opinions about education and the schools.

1. I have been a teacher. Not in the public schools, but in their closest collegiate analog, the community college. In addition, I taught a class (freshman composition) that was required of all incoming students but which almost none of them wanted to take or expected to enjoy. From this, I have first-hand knowledge of how impossible it is to teach students who are in your class by compulsion. I also know first-hand that a system can be less than the sum of its parts; that is, it can be full of mostly-competent people doing their best according to their lights and with as much goodwill as they can muster, and the system overall can still be failing (in my department, after we instituted a portfolio review process, we had a failure rate of about 1/3--and this was of the students who made it to the end of the semester. Another sizeable chunk tended to disappear partway through). So I have tremendous sympathy and respect for individuals in the schools, doing their jobs. And sympathy for the ones who, like me, burn out and leave.

2. I homeschool for what seem to me like good reasons, but I think the truth is that my kids, and the kids of people like me, would probably do OK either in school or homeschooled. There are some reasons of temperament that I think this is less true for Eric than for most kids, but in general the children of middle-class and upper-middle-class families, with educated, involved, loving, functional parents and resources for books, travel, trips to museums, and so on, seem to learn what they need to learn and do all right. You hear a lot about how the American school system is failing--all those media reports that we're second-to-last in some international test of math skills. But we really have at least two different educational systems in American, and my kids (and your kids, probably, if you're reading this) are in the one that works pretty well.

A few years ago I read a book whose title I can never remember, something like Making Sense of Research in Education. It looked at some of the typical education headlines and examined the research behind them. One I remember is those international tests. According to the author, most countries have more explicit tracking than the US does, and when they participate in these tests, they choose students from specific schools to participate. In some cases, they choose the students individually. IIRC, only the US and Canada actually provide random, national samples. So "America came in 26th out of 29 countries," for instance, might be a statistic that compares all American children to only the children who've been tracked into academic schools in other countries, or an even smaller sample than that--like comparing all American kids to the equivalent of kids at the High School of Science and Technology. When the American sample is sorted by race, the white kids move up to second or third; the black kids drop even lower in the rankings.

So, when people urge me to put my kids in school and get involved in my local school district: well, I know my local school district has problems (I've heard the kid culture is unusually toxic, for instance), but for the most part, that school district doesn't need me, or my kids. There's a case to be made that Lansing does, and I know that one woman in my Quaker meeting carries a concern about Quakers taking their kids outside the Lansing school district. But there are bigger problems with education for working-class people, poor people, people of color, immigrants. I don't know what to do about those problems, either as an individual or as a society. But I do think both I and society could be doing better in this regard.

3. For all my bluster, I am not a zealot about home education. I don't think it's necessary or right for all kids (or their parents)--not even necessarily for all of mine. Yehva, for instance, is so high-energy and extroverted that I will not be surprised if we put her in kindergarten just to see how it goes (yes, I know extroverted children homeschool...but poor Yehva was born into a family of introverts, and I think it will always be a challenge to get her enough stimulation if she's stuck with us most days. But we'll see). I am also less sure about what I'm doing than it might seem from my writing; one of my weaknesses as a homeschooler, I told a friend recently, is that I am always second-guessing myself. It's actually one of my weaknesses in general; I'm more likely to have questions than opinions, about a lot of things.

That's all, really. I have my ranty moments, and I have my moderate, see-all-sides moments. I shared one the other day, thought I'd share the other one today.

A Darn Cute Little Guy

2010-08-11T10:14:00.004-04:00

Yehva has been asking for a haircut for weeks, and I've been sort of putting her off, not sure whether it would be a good idea. Yesterday I finally promised I would cut her hair, so I spent some time googling around for instructions on cutting an afro, and watched a couple of videos of little boys having their hair cut (from which I learned that some black boys wear their hair in braids until they get their first haircut at about 4. Who knew? Probably lots of people who aren't me. Some of those kids had amazingly long hair--Yehva's must be kind of on the slow side, growth-wise).

And this morning I got out the clippers, chose the second-longest blade guide, and buzzed it all over.

It looks a little uneven in places, but I think it's hard to tell for sure until we wash it and comb it out. I warned her we might have to do a touch-up in a couple of days. And I wish she had let me trim it a bit shorter over her ears and at the nape of her neck, but she says she likes it as it is.

Many thoughts and feelings arise.

I wrote a few months ago about thinking about cutting her hair because my health problems were making it hard for me to keep up with it, and the extremely negative reactions I got when I went looking for advice on how to do it. I can't pretend not to feel that pressure to keep her hair long. Especially because I find myself worrying that people who see her will think I'm a clueless white mother who doesn't know anything about the importance of hair in Black culture and couldn't be bothered to learn to care for my black daughter's hair.

On the other hand, as a parent I've always had a philosophy about my kids' hair that goes like this: It's only hair. They can do anything they want with it. I think parent/child fights about hair are about the stupidest fights parents choose to have with their kids, and I'm not looking for any extra or unnecessary conflicts. So, when it switched from being about me and my energy level to being about Yehva's wishes for her hair, and when her desire to have her hair cut persisted over a number of weeks, I thought I had to respect that, as I have respected it for the boys, or I'd be a rotten hypocrite. "White boys get to do whatever they want with their hair," I'd be telling her, "but you don't because you're a girl, and you're black. So even if you hate having it long, and it hurts to have it combed out, well, that's the price you have to pay."

Another piece is that a lot of people tell me Yehva is beautiful. I've always thought so, but I'm the mom and hardly objective. But people say things to me like, "She's the most beautiful little girl I've ever seen." I posted some new pictures on Facebook, and a friend commented on one picture, "Holy smokes, that kid is model-gorgeous!" (It was an especially good picture.) I feel surprisingly ambivalent about the prospect of her being beautiful; on the one hand, I like to look at beautiful people; on the other hand, I think being beautiful may be hard for women in certain ways. I've heard beautiful women talk about not being taken seriously, about not having their other qualities being appreciated. Some friends in my Quaker meeting have an adult son who is unusually beautiful and has been since childhood, and his mother has told me that one way it has been a problem is that people let him get away with things. So, in my usual way, I have fretted some about how to help her know she's beautiful without being over-invested in it; I've hoped that I and other people will also help her see her many other qualities; I've appreciated her beauty, and enjoyed the attention and praise she has always gotten for it, and yet I have seen it as a minefield as well.

And yet, in cutting her hair, one of my fears was that she would no longer be beautiful, or that people would no longer be able to see her beauty. I shouldn't worry; she always wears jeans, and old t-shirts of her brothers' (I gave away all her pink t-shirts with flowers on them earlier this summer because they were just taking up drawer space). Even with her hair in braids or puffs, she is often mistaken for a boy, so with short hair, I suppose I shouldn't worry that people will judge me for cutting her hair or no longer see her as beautiful; they're not going to see her at all. Everyone is going to think she's a darn cute little guy.

What It Looks Like When I Finally Snap

2010-08-09T09:44:00.006-04:00

Last night, I took an allergy medication with a decongestant in it too late in the evening, and couldn't get to sleep. At 1:36 a.m., on a website I hang out at, I came across someone making a very familiar argument, that people who opt out of the pubic school system (homeschoolers were mentioned specifically) are exercising privilege in an unacceptable way. Why don't they stay in the school system and work to improve? Why do they criticize without proposing solutions to the problem? "I don't see anyone with an alternative, besides pulling out of the system.
I just see a bunch of people who are privileged enough to be able to have an alternative, whether it's having someone homeschool their children, or a private school, dump on the system without giving any kind of path to change," this person said.

I am so tired of this argument. I don't know why my decision to homeschool my children seems like an intolerable expression of my privilege to so many people (including some I've met in real life, and including some friends of mine, as well as various internet commentators), or why they think it's my job but not theirs to fix public education. And last night, sleep-deprived and wired, I snapped at hearing it one more time, and I got ranty. Here's what I wrote:

[name redacted], I think I would fall into your category of people who "are privileged enough to be able to have an alternative," in my case homeschooling my children.

I am very interested in education issues, and over the last few years have read probably 60 to 80 books on the subject (that's a guess that may be wrong, but kind of totting up in my head--if anything it's probably low), including Alfie Kohn's stuff and Diane Ravitch's stuff and books about the history of education in the US and books about how schools shortchange boys and books about how they shortchange girls and every Respected Scholar's theory on the subject and every Nutcase Crank's theory on the subject. I also regularly read journalism on the subject, like Education Next, for instance, which I've found very informative. I did a whole reading project a couple of years ago on school finance, and another on the teachers' unions. I have done some freelance writing and editing work in the field of education and school improvement.

I could list what I see as the major problems with schooling today, and it would range from, oh Jesus, incompetent teachers to testing to a general disrespect for kids that means nobody cares if their time is wasted; from funding problems (both the problem of under-funding and the problem of funds coming from multiple sources for specific purposes so that a school might have the money to put in a swimming pool but not to buy the updated textbooks they need more urgently) to an over-powerful union to parents who protect their children from failure; from the progressive myth that every child under the right circumstances can be an intellectual to, at the other end of the spectrum, rigid tracking; from inadvertent sorting by social class that begins with what first-grade reading groups kids are placed into, to city schools that are so understaffed that one book I read about the Chicago school system said that on any given school day there are dozens of classrooms in the system that literally do not even have an adult presence; from bloated administrations to decaying infrastructure to technology initiatives that throw resources at putting computers at every desk, say, as if that will somehow magically make learning happen with joy while never asking teachers what they really need in their classrooms in order to do their jobs.

How's that for a start? If I put more thought into it, I could come up with more.

Solutions? Well, if I were the Great Omnipotent Being Of The World, I'd start by eliminating poverty, drug abuse, bad parenting in all its guises from neglect and physical abuse to pressuring kids to excel in parent-defined ways. I'd provide so much support for teachers, in the form of grading assistants, say, or a schedule of only 4 contact hours a day, and pay them so much that the profession would attract the very best, enthusiastic young people and not burn them out or spit them out. I'd lavish money and resources on some of the nutcakes who want to try radical alternatives; I'd seed Sudbury Valley-model schools all over the place, and same-sex academies, and year-round schools, and Montessori schools, and Reggio Emilia schools, and I'd make them all free so every parent could try the school she thought would work best for her particular kid. I'd turn the American workplace into a Dolly Parton/Jane Fonda utopia of job-sharing and on-site daycares and sunny little elementary schools right next to the corporate enterprise parks so that parents could be involved with their kids' educations and have the time and energy to also just hang out with them and enjoy them.

Read a little on the subject and you will find that the problems with schooling are many and varied and intractable. I get so tired of people jumping on my back for homeschooling my kids, as if I'm not entitled to do that unless I am somehow the one magic person who knows the secret solution to a decades-old problem.

I know it's an expression of my privilege that I get to be home with my kids full-time and homeschool, but practically everything in my life is an expression of my privilege, from waking up in a warm bed in a home with intact windows in a nice if modest suburb of a decent-if-declining small city, and driving a reliable car, and feeding my kids three meals plus snacks every day. Nobody has ever suggested that I stop feeding my children until I solve the problem of childhood hunger, and yet I'm supposed to know how to fix the American education system before I'm allowed to be critical of it, I'm supposed to somehow make my local schools an edutopia before I'm allowed to sit down and work a few math problems with my kids.

(I forgot to mention bullying, homophobia, sexist teachers, meaningless busywork, the resemblance between American high schools and minimum-security prisons, incoherent curricula, constantly-changing standards, educational fads, excessive oversight of teachers except where they are neglected, declining resources for gifted & talented programs, the over-medication of elementary school children, and a dozen other things, I'm sure, which will come to me later.)

Well...that'll be an interesting day.

2010-07-23T11:18:00.012-04:00

I spent the last couple of days re-watching the entire series of Firefly, Joss Whedon's love-it-or-hate-it story of outlaws eking out a living on the edges of a galactic civilization. Well, not quite the entire thing--I finally had to go to bed last night about 10 minutes into Objects in Space, the final (on the DVD, anyway) episode. It's a creepy one, so I'll wait until after the kids are asleep tonight to finish watching it.

All over the internet, people have said everything that needs to be said about Firefly, so I won't try any deep analysis. Just a few observations:

I still love it.

I was really struck on this watching by how charming I find Morena Baccarin (Inara) when she smiles.

I will go to my grave thinking Inara and Chiana would make great names for twin girls. (Hey, it's better than my other first choice: Scylla and Charybdis.) 80% of the people you met would just say, "Oh, that's pretty"; and the remaining 20% would be divided between people who would do a slow double-take and then high five you; and those who would think "You named your daughters after intergalactic space whores? You're going to the special hell."

Simon Tam's character arc really stood out for me on this watching. He goes from sheltered, arrogant, and kind of hapless to strong and a little bit ruthless (the medical-supply heist he comes up with on Ariel, for instance), yet at the same time more relaxed and easy-going; it's only in the last couple of episodes that we get to see him wearing a pullover sweater and smiling with Kaylee. And his scene with a paralyzed Jayne, after he finds out Jayne called the feds on Ariel to try to get the reward, is just masterful. Boy-to-man all the way for our Simon.

I will always love Badger, and his very fine hat.

Eric and Carl watched "Jaynestown" with me. It's like a test of developmental stages; Eric and I were rolling on the floor laughing, while poor Carl kept saying, "Why is that funny? Why is that funny?"

One of the problems I always had with Star Trek: Voyager was how quickly the Maquis crew integrated with the Federation crew; the show didn't do a good job of maintaining the tensions there. Firefly comes off pretty well by comparison, especially in maintaining the tension Jayne brings to the crew. But when you think about all the various tensions swirling among the nine people on Serenity, it goes a lot deeper than "Jayne would cut your throat for a dollar."

I love that Kaylee complains in the very first episode that they need a spare compression coil, and Mal says they can't afford it and will have to make do. "That coil busts, we're drifting," she tells him. Seven episodes later, it busts, they're drifting, and this is what sets the action of "Out of Gas" going.

Other extended foreshadowing, from the end of the pilot: Mal: How come you didn't turn on me, Jayne? Jayne: Money wasn't good enough. Mal: What happens when it is? Jayne: Well... that'll be an interesting day. When they get to Ariel, eight episodes later, it is indeed an interesting day.

The developing friendship between Jayne and Book is very well done in the incidental bits before and after more important business.

"River, you don't fix the Bible." [River: "It's broken! It doesn't make sense."] It's not about... making sense. It's about believing in something. And letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It's about faith. You don't fix faith, River. It fixes you."

In "Trash," when Mal calls Saffron/Bridget/Yolanda "YoSaffBridge," a mashup of the three names he's known her by, it was captioned as "speaking Chinese." Heh.

When Wash and Mal are taken by Niska, what follows is the most hilarious extended-torture scene in the history of filmed entertainment. But it's really just a riff on what got to be a pretty tired Buffy meme, the Scoobies combining doing something really mundane (arguing about their relationships, studying for the SAT) with something heroic and/or supernatural (fighting demons, sitting around the cemetery waiting for a newly-spawned vampire to emerge from the grave so Buffy can stake it). Amazing they could dust it off and make it work again.

Like every other fan, I want more Firefly. And yet I think the show did just about everything it needed to in these 14 episodes; Inara and Mal were even dangerously close to getting together (likewise Simon and Kaylee), and we all know how the life goes out of a show once the sexual tension between the bickering leads is resolved. Jayne was humanizing, too. Maybe it's better to have 14 strong episodes and a bit of longing than to have to suffer through a sub-par second season. This is how I try to comfort myself.

You should all be glad I don't have a smartphone or my Facebook page all afternoon and evening yesterday would have been an endless stream of Firefly quotes.

Smallness of Spirit

2010-07-20T00:09:00.006-04:00

I'm going to start by saying that today may have been, in some ways, about the worst of my life. I was going to say more, and typed some, and then deleted it. The details are complicated and you have to go back almost three years to get to the start of it. But I wanted to say something about how when I'm writing a blog post or hanging out at Facebook, I can seem like my usual cheerful, smart, chatty, funny self, but there's some stuff I'm struggling with right now that's being very hard, and that can end up being invisible. I'd welcome good thoughts and prayers from any and all directions, though.

So, Yehva turns 3 in a couple of weeks. And that means that, in addition to buying her the roller skates she claims to want, and planning a birthday party that, if left up to her, would include ice cream, cake, bowling, swimming, more ice cream, and a bike ride, it's time to write the annual letter to her birthmother.

I started thinking about it a few weeks ago, when it occurred to me that I ought to order prints of a couple of good pictures to include. And in the back of my mind, I started working over what this year's letter might say. Last year, we were just a few months past the final decision of the appeals court in our favor in our custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather, and I was feeling generous-hearted. This year, I spent a week or so feeling stingy and mean and wondering what would happen if I just didn't send the letter this year. After all, Kimberly has never sent anything to us or Yehva, even though every letter I've written, I've ended with a reminder that the agency will forward letters to Yehva if she wants to write one, and that there is a place in Yehva's baby book for a picture of Kimberly if she wants to send one.

I almost went back to a forum for adoptive parents I used to hang out at, to ask if anyone there had just stopped doing the letters, and what consequences there were, if any. The law can't mandate contact; we signed a document that reminded us we'd made a moral and ethical commitment to send letters and pictures. But I was kind of in a "fuck moral and ethical commitments!" for a few days there. I was tired of what seems like a lack of reciprocity, and annoyed that this hangs over Yehva's birthday every year.

And then somebody at the summer gathering asked me how things had turned out with our custody dispute, and then followed up by asking whether we'd been happy with our agency.

And I remembered that our agency really let us down in some ways. That poor communication within the agency and with us led to a whole variety of problems, large and small. That they never took responsibility for certain things that were pretty much entirely their fault and that cost us a lot of money to fix. That, in retrospect, we weren't given guidance I thought we could have used in understanding Kimberly and what she said in her intake form--that to some extent I think the agency down-played her mental instability to us, perhaps deliberately (?). I remembered that I was so disgusted with certain things that by the time we were about a year into the custody fight, I had stopped taking the director's occasional phone calls. I would let them go to voice mail, listen to the message when I felt strong and had David nearby, and then answer, if an answer was needed, by e-mail, and as briefly as possible.

My point is: it got to the point that I didn't even want to talk with our agency. And yet somehow I think I'm being Lady Magnanimous to invite Kimberly to use the agency as a go-between to send letters to us and to Yehva, just as they forward my letters to her. Why would Kimberly want to talk to anybody at the agency? She can't have good feelings or warm memories about them--she thinks they stole her baby.

"Send a letter through the agency," I chirp at her every year (four times the first year!), and then blame her for not taking me up on it. Consider it proof she's not interested, hasn't moved on, hasn't stopped using, hasn't gotten her life together, is still too unstable for us to risk opening the door even a crack.

Jesus, that's mean.

Now, Yehva's birthparents don't know our names or where we live. We were in any court documents they saw as John and Jane Doe. And there have certainly been indications that it is better for us that they not know. So I'm not going to put a return address on the envelope this year, or include my cellphone number or e-mail address, or anything crazy like that. It's not that we can't be easily found--I could write, "Dear Kimberly, How are you? Yehva is fine. Yours truly, Su," and that would be enough. After all, this blog is the first hit if you google "Yehva Su." One of the effects of having unusual first names. She could find us easily enough if she decided to look, but even so I'm not comfortable, yet, with painting a great big arrow for her to follow.

I am, though, going to ask a friend who lives in another state to let me include his address, so that Kimberly could write to Yehva without having to contact the agency first, in case that would be easier for her.

And I'm going to tell her that next year, she should look for my letter early, around late May or early June. We said we'd send a letter every year; that doesn't mean it has to be part of the run-up to Yehva's birthday for the next decade and a half. For my own sake, I'm doing to de-couple those two things. But for Kimberly's sake, and maybe Yehva's too, I'm going to try to be just a little bit bigger-hearted.

*****************

For your amusement, from an e-mail to friends written January 30, 2008, when Yehva was about six months old and the custody fight was just warming up and we still thought it would be resolved quickly. It actually took me less than a year to decide talking to Margaret was a bad idea:

Margaret, the director of our adoption agency, just called to see how we're doing. I appreciate that she's concerned and takes the time to call, but talking to her is really frustrating. She's the kind of person who never lets you finish a sentence, so it's never clear whether she understands what I'm saying or not. Also, she is an anxious person, and she tends not to call so much to let me talk to her as to vent her own anxieties. Today's gem: "I'm just so scared because Illinois judges tend to be on the side of birthfathers. They're known for it." Thanks, Margaret. That helps.

She also got all worked up about whether the birthfather had been at the hospital during the birth. "Noreen! Was he at the hospital?" Noreen said no. I said, "Margaret, if he'd been at the hospital and anyone from the agency had known it, you'd never have accepted Kim's claim that she didn't know who he was, would you?" Jeesh.

Next time she calls, I'm just going to let the machine get it, sending my appreciation for the thought into the ether but not actually subjecting myself to the conversation.

The Surprisingly Vexed Issue of Birth Certificates

2010-07-14T11:55:00.007-04:00

On an unschooling list I'm on, somehow the issue of adoption came up, and the issuing of revised birth certificates that name the adoptive parents, rather than the biological parents. We don't tolerate a lot of off-topic chatter on that list, but I found the brief conversation thought-provoking, so I thought I'd bring my thoughts here.

One person said that she thought the creation of new birth certificates for adopted children was "the most horrible abuse of public records I can imagine."

I said that I could think of worst abuses (people use public records to stalk ex-girlfriends, for instance, or to commit identify theft, both of which seem worse to me). But I also said:

I have mixed feelings about re-issued birth certificates, but it's really standard now. We were not presented with any option to do anything but have Yehva issued a new birth cert with our names as her parents as part of the process. It makes many things easier--it's one document I have to present for proof of ID and relationship, rather than 2 (birth certificate and stack of papers from the court finalizing the adoption). It does seem strange to me, though. I would have been very happy with a birth certificate that reflected both birth and adoptive parents, and then, too, that would be a record that an adult adoptee, or her descendants, could use to trace both adoptive and biological families. It would be both more honest and more complete.

I was thinking more this morning as I was on a long drive, and reflecting that a non-revised birth certificate would reflect a different name for Yehva as well as her birthparents' names. That wouldn't be the end of the world at all; we have a single document from the court that uses her old name but that both finalizes our adoption and legally changes her name. So, for the purposes I can think of that we might need a birth certificate--to prove identity, prove her age for school enrollment, or prove our parental relationship to her--it would be easy enough to show both documents, and would only take any reasonably intelligent bureaucrat an extra minute or two to put it all together.

On the other hand, I was thinking of other instances where birth certificates don't reflect biological parentage, or have been revised in such a way that they show a later truth rather than the truth at the moment of birth.

One instance involves certain reproductive technologies. David, for instance, is not the boys' biological father. An anonymous sperm donor is. Under the law a married man is presumed to be the parent of his wife's children, so we didn't have to take any extra steps to have him named the boys' parent, and he appears on their birth certificates as their father. (And some studies show that a surprising percentage of married men are not the biological parents of their children, so while our path was different, David is by no means alone.)

This is different from adoption because there was never a thought in anybody's mind that anybody but David was, and would be, their father. Some nice young grad student in Detroit donated sperm to a place with the warm and fuzzy name of International Cryogenics, presumably because he needed cash. They assigned him a number and put him in a catalog, and when we were sperm-shopping, we picked his. We didn't want to know him, and he made it clear in his intake forms that he didn't want to know us, or any children who might be conceived with his sperm.

I know that some kids conceived with donor sperm are curious about their donors, and even look for them. When there are proposals for laws that would un-seal these records when kids turn 18, I understand that the intent is to give children more information, and yet I worry that such a law would make men less likely to donate sperm. And even though these children are curious, it seems a great deal different to me than the curiosity adopted children have about the men who fathered them "in the old-fashioned way," who must have had some kind of relationship, however brief, with the women who carried them and gave birth to them, and perhaps cared for them for some period of time after birth as well.

I just don't feel the same way about Donor # F006, as grateful as I am to him, that I do about Yehva's birthparents. When I imagine Yehva's granddaughter, say, curious about her past, wanting to know where she came from, it seems to me that she might want to know not only about my family history, and David's, but Yehva's birthparents' histories as well. Perhaps she would want to know that even more. I don't imagine Eric's granddaughter having the same curiosity about the sperm donor. This could be a failure of imagination or empathy on my part.

Even as I am curious about that branch of my family that came to the US during the Potato Famine, or the branch that came (via Canada) because somebody was heading to Australia and got on the wrong boat, Yehva's granddaughter might be curious about the forces that brought Yehva's biological family to Chicago. Were they the descendants of free blacks, who had a community in Chicago even before the Civil War? Did they come north in the early 20th Century to work in the slaughterhouses, or seeking industrial jobs during WWII?

Perhaps most interesting to Yehva's granddaughter mght be the question of how her grandmother came to be adopted into a white family in Michigan.

We happen to have quite a bit of information about Yehva's birthparents, and her maternal grandparents. But what I have in a file is not a public record; it might not be available for Yehva's granddaughter when she wants to answer these questions, even if I am careful to save it and hand it down. I understand that Yehva's revised birth certificate creates a disjuncture in the record, and I know that it felt strange and uncomfortable to hold the revised birth certificate in my hand and see my name on it as if I had birthed her. I wondered whether that birth certificate violated the Quaker testimony of Truth.

(I understand, too, that genealogy can be especially difficult for black people, because records are sparser and less complete--I was looking at a website with some old census documents awhile ago, for instance, and some places submitted documents that listed every single white person by name, but then only "10 free blacks, 27 slaves," or a list of first names for black people. Marriages among slaves might be informal, or not recorded. And so on. So, in Yehva's case and the case of other transracial adoptees, the revised birth certificate can throw up an additional barrier to her black or mixed-race descendants who want to trace their history, and don't want it to disappear into the history of my (mostly) white family, and David's.)

On the other hand: there are times when it seems entirely right and proper to me for a revised birth certificate to be issued. Neither David nor I uses the name we were given by our parents; David has a revised birth certificate, but I have never bothered to get one although I did legally change my name. These certificates are similar to Yehva's in that they reflect a reality that was not true at the time of the birth.

Likewise, some states allow transsexuals to receive amended birth certificates. Some of these are marked as amended, and some aren't. It seems entirely good and right to me that transsexuals should receive amended certificates; they are an aid in getting other documentation with the correct name and gender on them, and it is a gesture of respect.

These changes can also create gaps and confusions in the historical record. But one thing that seems different about my name change, and various friends' gender transitions is that it was their own choice to make the change and request an amended certificate.

Yehva, and other adopted children, aren't given that choice. That makes a difference to me, that question of choice. As one person on the unschooling list pointed out, it's even stranger when a child is adopted at the age of 3, or 10, and a new birth certificate is issued. How might it feel to a child who remembers her birthparents, to have them removed from her documentation?

I have protected the name Yehva's birth mother gave her; as a person who doesn't use her birth name, married to a person who doesn't use his, I have had too many instances of people pushing to know my "real" name or David's to toss that kind of information around freely. Yehva may or may not be comfortable with people knowing the name she was given at birth and carried for four short days, but I tend to think it's up to her. From that perspective, I welcome a revised birth certificate that doesn't disclose information she might not want to disclose.

And yet--the revised birth certificate hides information that may not need to be hidden. It erases Kimberly and Cordelro. It pretends to hide an adoption that is plain as day to anyone who sees our family together. Some adopted people feel that revised birth certificates are one way that adoption is still shown to be shameful and loaded with stigma.

I haven't spent a lot of time reading up on what adopted people or other adoptive families think and feel about this. I haven't talked at all, or thought much, about what the preferences of birthparents might be; I imagine they would vary. These are just my own thoughts, and there are undoubtedly aspects I haven't considered. There's a lot going on with these apparently simple pieces of paper.

Anticipation

2010-06-27T19:19:00.012-04:00

I'm really excited about leading my Song of Myself workshop at the FGC Gathering next week. This will be the fourth time I've done it; twice previously at Gathering and once for a group in my monthly meeting. I love reading the poem again--it's like a favorite old movie, I find myself all excited thinking about when we get that that part--and that other part--and then the one part that....

It's also a mystery, doing this. My system is to simply read the poem together; we read it aloud, stopping at the ends of the 52 numbered sections, and then discussing what we've read, asking and answering questions. It's a big poem and the whole world is in there (dinosaurs, even!), and what rises to the top for any group depends on who's there. One year, I had someone very versed in scripture, for instance, and from him we got a lot of insight into scriptural echoes. Or there might be someone who knows a lot of 19th-century or Civil War history, or who is familiar with other poetry written during the same era, or who knows more about Whitman's biography than I do, or who knows very well the Eastern religious texts that had recently been translated for the first time and were lighting Western thinkers on fire.

Much also depends on what happens in the room as we read, which is always unpredictable. One year, my group got to the end of section 45 and was so moved to be at that place that we stopped and re-read the section chorally, in unison, and then just sat there in stunned, emotional, worshipful silence together. Here's some of it:

I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems.

Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
Outward and outward and forever outward.

My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.

There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,
If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces,
were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail the long run,
We should surely bring up again where we now stand,
And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther.

A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient,
They are but parts, any thing is but a part.

See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that,
Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.

My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,
The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,
The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.

My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,

The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,

The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.

Gives me shivers.

So the next time I led the workshop, I couldn't wait until we got to this piece! And people would be amazed and moved! I quivered with anticipation.

And the group blew right past it. It just didn't particularly speak to their condition.

That group, on the other hand, went nutso for the sex parts (this was also the group that really went deep into the scriptural references--what a great week that was. My ignorance of scripture is vast, so I learned a lot). They thought section 28, in which the poet's "other senses" abandon their sentry posts and leave him at the mercy of "villain touch" was absolutely the best description of sexual abandon and orgasm they'd ever heard, and they really wanted to talk about it:

The sentries desert every other part of me,
They have left me helpless to a red marauder,
They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.

I am given up by traitors,
I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor,
I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.

You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat,
Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.

"Unclench your floodgates," indeed. Walt, you sexy old guy.

There's always a day when we end in the darkest part of the poem, where the poet has let himself get caught up in the contemplation of evil, and feels lost, degraded, hopeless. He sees himself imprisoned, impoverished, ill to the verge of death; he feels himself united in every sufferer:

For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,
It is I let out in the morning and barr'd at night.
Not a mutineer walks handcuff'd to jail but I am handcuff'd to him and walk by his side,
(I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips.)

Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced.
Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp,
My face is ash-color'd, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat.
Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them,
I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.

I don't plan for us to end a day's session at that point, but somehow we always do. And as the group shuffles out, discouraged, cloud-covered, hag-ridden, I call out after them desperately, "It gets better! We're not stuck here! Trust me!" The next morning, they are impatient to get started, to hear the poet's next words:

Enough! Enough! Enough!

I think it's good to break there; it's only 10 lines from the poet as degraded beggar to the resurrection ("the grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves/ corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me."), and it's possible to come up for air too quickly, to dash past the dark place the poet has led us to. It's good to carry it for an afternoon and evening.

I could go on and on--about 85% of the poem falls into "OMG I love this part!" territory for me. And that's really why I lead the workshop, because it's a chance to inveigle 20 or so people into listening to the poem, to all the parts I love so much, and I get to see them fall in love with it, too (and get angry at it and frustrated at Walt and suffer from bafflement and all the other things that always happen alongside the loving it part), and sometimes--always, at some point during the week--the thing they fall in the love with and the ways they love it illuminate the poem in a new way for me, and it becomes a new poem and I love it even more.

Stop this day and night with me [says our Walt] and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love

2010-06-26T11:42:00.013-04:00

I wasn't sure about reading Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love: Race, Class, and Gender in US Adoption Practices by Christine Ward Gailey. I've read a lot of books about adoption, and as has happened to me with some other topics, although I remain interested in the subject, I've reached the point where I've heard the information and arguments so many times that a new book is not likely to yield a lot that's new.

I'm so glad I decided to give this book a try. For one thing, it's an academic book, and Gailey is more interested in reporting her findings than supporting an argument, and that's refreshing--it doesn't feel like I have to try to read through her biases as I have had to do in other books.

More importantly, though, Gailey addresses some adoption scenarios that no other book I've read has touched on (this may be a function of my own interests; there could well be a whole adoption literature out there that I'm not familiar with). One is public (from foster care) adoptions by working-class families, especially single mothers. Gailey talks about the forces that bring the least-adoptable children--those who have been traumatized and may be displaying behavioral problems--with the least-desirable adoptive parents--those who have few resources and no partner to share the work. She describes the bitter irony that leaves parents of the most challenging children, who need the most support, with the least. These parents often experience significant downward mobility after an adoption, in some cases losing jobs because of the demands of caring for their children, or flirting with bankruptcy, or losing homes.

I'm only 40 pages in, and I'm in a section right now where Gailey discusses the adoption of black children by black families. You wouldn't know it from the kinds of adoptions stories that get media play, but most black children available for adoption are in fact adopted into black families, and Gailey is (uniquely, in my experience) interested in the experiences of those children and families, both in their own right and in contrast with transracial adoption.

After a long section in which she has discussed the various strategies white adoptive parents use to address their child's race (ranging from denial of the child's race, interestingly enough, by such techniques as asserting that a child is mixed-race, not black, or by commenting on the lightness of the child's skin; to active efforts to create a more racially-integrated social circle), Gailey moves on to looking at how black adoptive families deal with their adoptive children's race--and this is fascinating.

Gailey found that adoption researchers had been almost universally unwilling or uninterested in looking at issues of color preference among adoptive families. But she wanted to know if, and how, that played a role, and so she asked both adoptive parents and adoption workers about it. She says, with what I can only take to be monumental understatement, that these were uncomfortable conversations:

For African-American social workers and adopters, it meant having to confront patterns of color preference and racial stereotyping within black communities in front of a white person who was going to be writing a book. It meant deciding or not deciding to speak or not to speak to an audience that would include whites. For some of the white adopters, it meant finding the words to talk about their children having been rejected by potential adopters who were black, without condemning a racialized community or appearing self-righteous or entitled. I could sense their struggles, and some expressed their discomfort to me. (38-9)

One African-American social worker was willing to talk about her experiences placing black babies, but only after talking about her own experiences growing up, in which her family privileged her brother over her because of his lighter skin and "better" hair. "It's a problem, but it's not much compared to what happened to me because I was a black woman in this society. Just get that down: I want that in the book." (39)

This social worker went on to talk about the reasons she sometimes had problems placing black children with black adoptive families. Often, the reasons are what makes children hard to place in any case: developmental delays, a history of abuse, behavioral problems. These children are often refused by black and white adoptive couples and end up with the "least desirable" adoptive families: single white women. But the worker talked about how these factors intersected with the darkness of the child's skin and the type of hair the child had. One baby, who had been born prematurely, was turned down by two black families before being placed with a white family, one because she had "bad" hair, and the other because they expected her to "darken up" too much to fit into their family.

As a white adoptive mother, this kind of story feels a little bit like a get-out-of-jail-free card, and a little bit like a point of solidarity, if that makes any sense. For good or ill, according to Gailey, black adoptive families wrestle with some of the same questions white adoptive families do, and are just as imperfect in their responses to the multiple issues raised by adoption.

She goes on to quote a number of social workers at length, who thoughtfully consider the issues and talk about how placing black children with white families, while being an option of last resort, is nonetheless an option they turn to more often than they'd like. And then she gets this refreshingly "curt" response from one adoption worker:

They're not kidding when they say these kids are "hard to place." We're lucky to get anyone to adopt them. I should, but I don't even bother about whether it's transracial or not anymore. The ones [social workers] I know who handle the crack kids would tell you the same. If [the prospective adopters are] alive and not child molesters, we'll place 'em. (40)

Only one of the adoptive families in her study said they'd had a color preference for their adopted child; in that case, an interracial couple wanted a child who would not be obviously adopted, but who might plausibly have been their biological child.

Gailey points out that transracial adoption is less common in public (foster) adoption. Private adoptions are common in the US, and take many overlapping forms. One is "facilitated" adoption (adoptions arranged by a person who might or might not be an attorney but whose role is to match adoptive parents with babies). Another is adoptions in which prospective adoptive parents are primarily responsible for making contact with birthmothers, through placing ads, posting websites with contact information, and so on. There are also private agency adoption, like our adoption of Yehva, where an agency maintains a pool of potential adoptive parents and is also the contact point for prospective birth parents; the adoptive families do not advertise or attempt to find birthmothers. [Many potential adoptive families pursue more than one of these paths at a time.]

Gailey points out that all of these forms of adoption are illegal throughout Europe, where they are seen a constituting a market in children. [I am curious about the details of this, as I know that, for instance, our agency places babies with European families, but Gailey didn't go into detail.] And I admit to feeling a bit uncomfortable when she talks about how much easier it is to get approved for private adoption than for public adoption, even though private adoptions often deal in the most "desirable" children: newborns, especially white ones, with no health problems or risk factors. For instance, a family seeking approval to work within the foster system, either as a foster family or in hope of adopting, needs to complete a course: a 3-hour class once a week for 12 weeks is typical. On the other hand, David and I were required only to take a course in "Becoming an Interracial Family" that lasted for, IIRC, 3 2-hour sessions.

The point Gailey is trying to get at, I think, is that private adoption skews more toward meeting the demands of potential parents for babies, while the public adoption system has no choice but to wrestle with meeting the needs of children, including the challenging ones. There are not a whole lot of white babies placed for adoption, compared to the number of families who would like to adopt a healthy infant, so, even though Gailey reports that adopters are less likely to cite "the long wait for a white infant" as a factor than they were 30 years ago, there are certainly "market forces" driving the higher number of transracial adoptions in the private adoption arena.

There's a part of me that does agree that private adoption and international adoption constitute a market in children and babies. I think it's naive to not take that into account. On the other hand, I think the private agency option was a good one for Yehva: she was drug-exposed in utero, and her birthmother was on drugs when she arrived at the hospital to give birth. K.'s decision to place Yehva for adoption allowed Yehva to bypass the foster care system, where she might have moved through multiple placements before being either reunited with her birthmother, or released for adoption. Gailey cites research that has found that 8 out of 10 black girls over the age of four have been sexually abused while in foster care [edited: this was her finding in her own research for the book. She was unable to find any other research that tracked this statistic, and hoped that her sample for the book was somehow anomalous]; although Yehva might have entered foster care as a newborn, it's a risky system that is not often able to provide stability for children, and I'm glad she, and other newborns like her, didn't have to spend time in it.

I didn't mean to digress; Gailey doesn't need to be argued with. She's thorough and clear-eyed and, so far at least, doesn't seem to have an axe to grind. This is a really worthwhile book. At least, the first third of it is.

Understanding Normal

2010-06-25T10:23:00.009-04:00

My Facebook status this morning was: I feel so sorry for the mothers of only children. They'll never experience the joys of the extended, passionate, knock-down, drag-out fight over a toy nobody had previously touched for six months.

A friend commented that mothers who are only children will never understand such fights. Which reminded me of something I've been thinking about lately: David's and my efforts to understand what's normal when it comes to kids fighting.

David was an only child. I have an older brother, and for most of my childhood our relationship was so terrible that for, for awhile in my 20s, I actually considered myself to have been abused (I have a much more nuanced view of things now, and a lot of respect and affection for the man my brother is, but growing up in the same house with him was such a crap experience that when he left for college, I felt like I was being let out of prison. [Second parenthetical: apparently growing up as my sibling was no bed of roses, either. I just want to be clear that I'm not trashing my brother here.]).

My brother and I, in our mid-to-late 40s, have only in the last couple of years tentatively begun to have a relationship that goes beyond showing up at our parents' house at the same time twice a year on major holidays. Because of the way my relationship with him played out, I have never quite believed it when people told me, "My sister and I fought like cats and dogs the whole time we were growing up, but now we're the best of friends." I have always thought one of two things:

1. This person does not really understand what it means to "fight like cats and dogs," and did not in fact do it with her sister. Or,

2. They're not actually best friends.

So, because of David's lack of experience with siblings, and because of my bad experience with my sibling, we are at a loss when the kids fight (and my buttons are pushed big-time, especially if Eric does something that leverages his bigness and older-ness).

You can imagine, then, how tremendously helpful it was to me to read recently a report of a study that followed siblings through childhood into young adulthood, and tried to understand the factors that led to good or bad adult relationships. One finding was that all the siblings fought, to more or less the same degree. What made the biggest difference in predicting the quality of their adult relationships was what they were doing when they weren't fighting. Siblings who ignored each and spent time apart when not fighting tended to grow up to be estranged, like my brother and me. But siblings who had positive experiences together when not fighting grew up to be close, like my hypothetical "you" and her hypothetical sister.

I now believe you when you tell me that you fought with your sister but are best friends now. Because I'm guessing that when you weren't fighting with your sister, you were spending at least some time hanging out with her having a good time.

I'm also pretty sure, too, that my kids are doing OK. This morning's knock-down drag-out between Carl and Yehva, for instance, was followed by a half-hour or so of cheerful quiet pretend play together. A balm to the motherly heart.

That study reminded me of some of the findings in Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children, a book that, first, you have to respect for having the most straightforwardly descriptive title of the 20th century. You're probably familiar with some of the study's findings even if you haven't read the book; it's the source of the datum that children of professionals hear 5-8 million more words in the first three years of life than children of working class parents or of parents receiving welfare benefits, which I still see cited all the time, and which has led educators to really wrestle with the question of what kinds of interventions, if any, can make up for the deficits even preschoolers can bring with them to school.

But another piece of info I carried away with me from reading it a few years ago is that all of the children heard "No" and its variants--"Don't touch that," "get down from there," "come away from that"--at roughly the same level. But one of the class-based differences researchers found is that for working-class and welfare kids, that's often the vast majority or even the only speech directed at them by parents, whereas the children of professionals also heard a great many positive statements--"I see you," "Good job," "Go ahead, try it," "Wow, I like that picture."

Both of these findings--about siblings fighting, about saying No to children-- have helped me as a parent to relax about the moments when things aren't as smooth and good as I wish they were, either between the kids or between me and the kids, by reminding me that these moments exist within a greater context that makes a world of difference.

Oh, man, I would so much rather keep writing, which I am really in the mood for, than put laundry in the dryer, load the dishwasher, update the checkbook, call the vet, and take the kids grocery shopping. I have a blog post in my head about my upcoming chore of writing the annual letter to Yehva's birthmother, and another one about something else I forget right now but that will come back to me [Edited: I remember! It's about portrayals of adoptive parents in the media]. Also, the parrots remind me I have not fed them breakfast.

On the one hand, if I didn't have the kids, I could write as much as I wanted. On the other hand, if I didn't have the kids, what would I write about?

Detroit History; Black Boys in Public Schools; the TBR pile

2010-06-25T00:50:00.010-04:00

I've got a couple of books going at the moment. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Sugrue has been such a mix of what I already knew and what has completely taken me by surprise. The influx of Black people during WWII was not a surprise to me; I knew that bit of history. It was likewise not exactly a shocking revelation to me that that they were often shunted to the most dangerous, filthy jobs--one that was described in pretty graphic detail was a job workers called the "mankiller," in which the worker had to lift a heavy white-hot spring coil off a fabricating machine, to chest height, and then submerse it in a cooling bath, all within a few seconds.

I was disturbed by how deliberate the maintenance of black ghettos was, even as they were increasingly overcrowded and underserved by public works. That Cobo Arena is named for the mayor who pretty much devoted himself to maintaining a segregated city and blocking the construction of affordable public housing for black people makes me want to vow never to go there again. Well, maybe once. To spit on it.

What surprised me is that I had (from my own narcissistic perspective, I guess--did anything that happened before you were aware of it really matter?) always imagined that Detroit had a kind of Golden Age that stretched from World War II until the deep recession of 1981/82, when I was in high school.

But in fact, Detroit had something more like a Golden Blip during and for a couple of years after WWII. By 1950, there were no more parcels of land near railroad tracks that were big enough for manufacturing plants, so development within the city came to a standstill. Automakers had to build new plants someplace, so they build them in Ohio, in the South, in California--places with weak unions, lower taxes, and vast tracts of undeveloped land.

I was amazed to learn that Detroit lost 70,000 jobs in the decade of the 50s. Jobs were lost to automation (no more "mankiller" once a machine could do it...but then, no more job, either), to companies' shifting of manufacturing to other locations, and by the weeding out of the many auto companies and related industries that had sprung up during the Blip and later failed.

By the end of the 60s, the city had lost a total of 130,000 jobs. When the book was written in 1996, the author was able to say that Detroit had sustained a steady decline in jobs for over 40 years. Who knew?

After WWII, companies like Lockheed stayed in the defense business, but in Detroit, auto companies couldn't re-tool factories and get car production up and running fast enough, in anticipation of high demand as soldiers came home, got married, bought houses, had families.

But putting so many of its eggs into auto production made Detroit perpetually vulnerable. New cars are one of the first things people put off buying in an economic downturn, even a small one. So, rather than being the powerhouse I imagined it to be, Detroit spent most of the 20th century limping along, booming and busting, struggling with race relations and economic downturns and business failures.

I'm not done with the book; I'm in 1960, where:

Only 15 years after World War II, Detroit's landscape was dominated by rotting hulks of factory buildings, closed and abandoned, surrounded by blocks of boarded up stores and restaurants. Older neighborhoods, whose streets were lined with the proud homes that middle-class and working-class Detroiters had constructed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were now pockmarked with the shells of burned-out and empty buildings, lying among rubbish-strewn vacant lots. (pp. 147-148)

That is not the image I would have come up with for Detroit in that era. The first Detroit history I was aware of were the late-60s race riots, and white flight (my mother says that white people from Detroit used to drive out to South Lyon, where we lived when I was very young, and knock on doors in our neighborhood, offering to buy houses that weren't even on the market). I always thought of that as a kind of sudden explosion, but it had been simmering for 25 years.

This may be the kind of academic book I don't end up finishing; I'm interested, but not sure how much tolerance I have for year-by-year analyses of housing patterns broken down by race--though there's a chapter coming up about how class divisions within the black community created conflict in the 60s and 70s that looks pretty good.

Mostly, it's a sad, sad story. And I'd like to warn any of my Black friends away from reading it, the same way I'd warn a rape victim not to rent I Spit on Your Grave because--well, because it seems like the history of Detroit from 1944 to 1996 is pretty much a 50-year parade of white people fucking Black people over on purpose, viciously, humiliatingly, and with malice aforethought. I know Detroit is not alone in this by any means. But you probably don't need to hear it again.

I'm also reading Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity by Ann Arnett Ferguson. It's a meaty book, written by a sociologist using participant-observer techniques. Since it was a dissertation, it's perhaps a bit heavy on jargon ("This can be understood as a transgressive act...[that] can be seen as redressing a fundamental social lack.") though readable enough overall. What I am finding especially interesting--as I did when I read Literacy With an Attitude: Educating Working Class Children in Their Own Self-Interest--is how people who not only don't intend to stereotype children, but in fact may see themselves as deliberately doing the opposite, nonetheless manage to conspire with other factors in children's lives to push them into predetermined roles. (On the other hand, an administrator in the school introduces the author to a 10-year-old boy with the words, "There's a jail cell out there with that boy's name on it," so it's not all about damaged institutions overriding individual good intentions.)

The author of Bad Boys is also interested in the narratives educators tell themselves about why children are the way they are (family factors are a common one), and in the ways that classroom misbehavior and deliberate challenges to authority can become adaptive responses for Black boys, a source of self-esteem and peer respect.

At the school she studied, she was also interested to discover that the room where kids served in-school detentions was essentially hidden from the rest of the school; it couldn't be reached from the school's interior, but only through an exterior door that let onto the playground, the windows were arranged in such a way that people couldn't see inside; the children serving detention had playground and lunch times separately from the rest of the children in the school. Not only would it be almost impossible to stumble upon this room, she could barely find it after she'd been given directions.

Her sense that problem Black children were being hidden away led to her exploring, and finding evidence for, the theory that one of the school's agendas was to hide problems in the school from white families, for fear they would exercise their options to take their children elsewhere to be educated.

I don't always love the author--her analytic sections seem very good to me, as do her descriptions of what she observes in the school. But memoirish "field notes" sections between chapters seem a little precious and self-indulgent to me, and I have taken to skipping them, mostly. I hope her next, post-dissertation book won't read quite so much like she's trying to impress her committee with her grasp of theory and jargon. I may get worn out and come to feel I've learned as much as I need to know about how Black boys get shafted in school--especially since it's really no surprise to anybody that they do. So this is another one that has felt worthwhile but that I might not read every page of.

On the other hand, I have just learned that the publication of One Was a Soldier, the new Clare Ferguson/ Russ Van Alstyne mystery, has been pushed back to March of 2011, so I may read every single page of both these books, including the footnotes, because what else am I going to have to do?

In my to-be-read pile:

Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say): Reflections on Literature and Faith by Frederich Buechner

Claiming Abraham: Reading the Qur'an and the Bible Side by Side by Michael Lodahl

Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time by Sarah Ruden

Walt Whitman's Song of Myself: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition by Ezra Greenspan, which I really want to dive into in the next 10 days because I am leading my workshop on Song of Myself at the summer gathering and I always like to know something about the poem that I didn't know before when I teach it.

I also have an annotated edition of Song of Myself (published just a few months ago) to take along. Very excited about that. We can look stuff up!

Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love: Race, Class, and Gender in US Adoption by Christine Ward Gailey. This one may end up back in the library bag unread; it's possible I've read so much about race etc. in US adoption that the marginal utility of reading another 200-page book on the subject is approaching the vanishing point. Though the class and gender stuff could be new and interesting.

The Preaching Life by Barbara Brown Taylor. I've started this several times and not finished it because it's so good I want to be able to really take it in and digest it and never feel like I have time to do it justice.

Liturgies of Quakerism by Ben Pink Dandelion. I paid a lot of money for this last year at the summer gathering, after considering it for several years, and I have tried several times to get through it. Here's what I said last time I attempted it, in September:

I’m not sure I’ll ever get through The Liturgies of Quakerism. This is an import from Britain, and it cost $35. I’d been looking at it in the bookstore catalog, and at the Gathering bookstore for a couple years, and thinking, “That’s a lot of money for a book.” Finally this summer, I decided to buy it. I am very interested in this notion that Quakers have a liturgy and curious about what that might mean.

However, this is my third attempt at the book since I bought it, and I have yet to make it past page 2, “The liturgy functions as a hermeneutic of sorts that, through its ordo, helps to make sense of numinous experiences,” or page 3’s “A rhetorical transaction, therefore, may be best understood as operating at some point on a continuum of conscious choice-making on the receiver’s part.”

It’s not that I’m not equipped to read this sort of thing; a graduate degree in Political Philosophy and two years of graduate work in literature render it all very familiar. It’s just that one of the consolations of having dropped out of grad school eight years ago when Eric was born was the freedom to never have to read about hermeneutics or rhetorical transactions or “the artificial tensions and releases created by consonance and dissonance” or how the Quietist experience is “inherently related to a realized eschatology” or the “de-coupling of a sense of end-time and a sense of intimacy.”

I think there’s a lot of good stuff in this book. I just don’t know that I have the intellectual energy to cope with the language. On the other hand, I paid $35 for the damn thing. I suppose if I were to add up all the $10 words I would see that I was getting much more than my money’s worth.

Broke, But Not Really

2010-06-21T00:17:00.007-04:00

I know I talk about this a lot, and while I suppose that will fade in time, I also think that our custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather will remain one of the defining events of my life.

One of the ways it's the gift that keeps on giving right now is that, 14 months after the appeals court finally ruled in our favor, we're still paying the bills. Lots and lots of bills.

Some of our debt pre-dates the adoption, but most of the debt we're carrying is from the fairly modest amount we borrowed to pay adoption agency fees and then, when C. showed up, to pay the lawyer. And then borrowed again to pay the lawyer again. And then borrowed again to pay the lawyer again. And then, finally, when she called to say the birthfather had filed an appeal, to not borrow any more because we couldn't--we were tapped out. I told the lawyer then, "I don't know how we'll pay for this, or when. But I promise we will."

We initially thought this adoption would cost about $14,000. That was revised upward by a couple thou after we paid birthmother expenses for a woman who decided to parent. And a little bit more when problems with our home study stranded me and Yehva in Illinois while we got them fixed. But still in the range of about $18,000--a lot of money, but nothing to panic about.

Until the custody fight, and the endless months of our lawyer filing papers and responding to the other side's filed papers and attending hearings.

By the time the dust settled, the adoption had cost us something close to $65,000. A number that makes me either laugh or cry every time I say it out loud. I laugh because it is so completely ridiculous and unbelievable, or I cry because the effect on our family of incurring that kind of debt could so easily have been catastrophic.

It's been hard. We have so many payments that by the time I pay the bills, and we put gas in the cars, and we buy groceries, it's pretty common for us to have almost nothing left to get through the week. I can't tell you how many times I've cried when I thought I had the pay period all figured out and then was reminded that we had a $40 prescription to refill, or opened the mail to find a bill I hadn't expected, or had a sick cat, or something broken on the car.

I never thought I'd pay my mortgage late. I can't tell you how many times I've paid my mortgage late over the last three years. A year ago, we took a forbearance for 90 days because we got behind and realized we would never be able to catch up.

I've needed a new pair of sneakers for six months, and every month I say I'm going to get them, but by the time I sort out the more urgent bills and set aside the mortgage money, there never seems to be any extra. I'm still wearing my post-surgical bras from my breast reduction last November because there are always better things to spend my cash on than new bras--though we're getting close to the crisis point, undergarment-wise, and it will have to be a priority soon enough. The kids' birthday presents come from craigslist and the local consignment shops; David and I just didn't give each other presents for birthdays or Christmas last year.

I had promised myself a new dress for Joann and Carolyn's wedding in May. Back in January, I was sure that sometime in the next three or four months, there'd be a little extra for me. But as the date approached, it became clear that there was not going to be any extra, and I would not be able to buy a dress. (Let alone the new bras, dress, slip, and shoes I had originally envisioned. What was I thinking? I pay the bills. I know where the money goes and exactly how much is left every week.)

And this is where my story turns happy. Because I e-mailed my friends Adrianne and Carla, and asked if I could root around in their closets for something to wear to the wedding. They both dress professionally for jobs, and I was sure I'd be able to put together some flowing pants and a dressy top, maybe not a perfect fit, maybe not in my colors, but nice. Good. More than good enough.

But they e-mailed me back and said they had talked it over and, while they'd be happy to let me into their closets, they wanted to buy me a dress instead.

So I had a beautiful new red dress for the wedding, because my friends bought it for me. (I wore an old bra, no slip, and old shoes...it doesn't seem to have ruined the wedding.)

Our version of broke is a pretty good one. We've never been without food, only, sometimes, without a favorite or a treat. We've more than once eaten the pantry and freezer to the bare walls while waiting for a paycheck, but we've always had the pantry and freezer to turn to. David doesn't have an Xbox 360, and I don't have an iPod Touch, and Yehva won't go to preschool this fall even though I know she would love it, and Eric doesn't get to take a summer class at the science museum this year, and Carl...well, I can't think of anything Carl wants and doesn't have right now. Carl's good.

We're all good. The stuff we do without is stuff most people do just fine without anyway.

And there's a lot of stuff we haven't had to do without, and I want to say why. It's because so many other people have been pouring money into our household. Not just the hundred dollars for a dress. The kids and I haven't missed a summer gathering, because my monthly meeting pays for the kids to go, and FGC itself gives me scholarship funds, and FLGBTQC helps out with travel funds. This winter, we were able to attend the FLGBTQC midwinter gathering because one friend just flat out wrote me a check for half the kids' cost, and the friend we traveled with paid for gas and our meals (though writing that I am reminded that I still owe her for hotels). Just last week, I got to go out for a really nice dinner with a fancy appetizer, because a friend treated me. Friends have treated me a lot. Adrianne even invited me and all three of my kids out to dinner the other week, which has got to be the very picture of generosity.

Two families in my monthly meeting, independently, were led to send us $1000 each to help with lawyer bills, "or for any need," as one put it. My monthly meeting helped us through the Fund for Sufferings, as did FLGBTQC. My parents lent us $10,000 and then forgave the debt, and then a year later sent us a check for another $10,000 when the birthfather appealed. Without my parents' generosity, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say we would have had to choose between paying the lawyer and keeping our house.

I'm thinking of all this now, because I just asked my monthly meeting to help with travel expenses for the summer gathering. I didn't think I'd have to--between my discount for leading a workshop, and my meeting's Connecting Kids to Quakers money for Eric, Carl, and Yehva, and the gathering being only two hours from my house, I only needed to come up with $307 plus two tanks of gas. I was sure I could do this. I even have an excel spreadsheet showing that, on paper at least, that money could be squeezed out of the budget.

But it turns out that, like the money for my dress and the money for Yehva's preschool and the money for every other thing I thought we'd surely be able to pay for in another few months, that $307 doesn't exist. So somebody else is picking up the slack for me, one more time.

There is an endpoint: in June of 2011, we pay off a loan whose payment is $525 a month. And then the rest of them drop like dominoes month by month, until (knocking wood) by the end of 2011 we have somewhere between $950 and $1100 every month that we don't have right now. When I look ahead, I'm amazed by how suddenly we're free of the whole thing: a matter of a few months. Like snapping your fingers, once we get there.

And then, as I e-mailed some friends this morning, we'll be wallowing in money like pigs in shit, frolicking through meadows tossing dollar bills like rose petals, lighting our cigars with $20 bills.

I'm trying to remember why I wanted to write a blog post about this, other than to invite others to boggle at the numbers, to laugh or cry with me about it as led. Or to get my perpetual fretting about money out of my head and onto paper so I could let go of it for awhile. Or to explain to the world why I asked my Friends meeting for $200--again!--to do something as arguably self-indulgent as attend the gathering. Or to remind myself to stop complaining because we really have nothing to complain about.

Oh, I remember--I think it's worth knowing, for those of you who haven't been through anything catastrophic like this, that when push comes to shove you have a lot more to rely on than just your own resources. That people love to help. That sometimes they act like you're doing them a favor by letting them write you a check. That they can surprise you by choosing compassion over judgment. I used to hate to ask for help, and usually turned it down when it was offered. Turns out, it's not so bad, being humbled. It's been one of the unexpected gifts of the custody fight, this whole mess of help coming our way, when we asked for it and when we didn't ask for it, whether we wanted it or not.

We're so damn broke. But so much goodness came to us out of this mess that I honestly would not wish for it to be different.

I kid you not, come January 2012, I'm lighting a cigar with a $20 bill. And then we're re-starting our savings, and catching up all the deferred maintenance on the house, and giving money to charity again, and, yes, buying poor David his Xbox 360. And looking around for opportunities to pass on a little of what we've been given in such abundance.

A couple of more things about my meeting

2010-06-15T10:09:00.004-04:00

I am loving how many comments I've gotten on my last post, and a few private e-mails as well. I want to be clear about something, though, which is that my monthly meeting is actually a splendid one. We are very good at listening to each other and holding our differences lovingly. For instance, year before last the Adult Religious Ed committee held a retreat at which we talked about our different relationships to Quakerism. It began in the morning with a panel of Friends describing their paths, and in the afternoon we did this great exercise where the leader would read a statement, such as, "I have a personal relationship with God," and then we would place ourselves along a continuum based on how true it felt for us.

The discussions then of why people places themselves where they did were deep, loving, and at times hilarious. Sometimes a person listening to someone else speak would move a few places down the continuum; once the people on the opposite ends of the continuum decided that they were talking about exactly the same thing using different words and that we should more properly therefore form a circle. It was great.

And I want to say, too, that during our almost-two-year custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather, my meeting's support for us was incredible. The meeting helped us financially through the fund for sufferings; two different families in the meeting were independently led to send us large checks to help out with legal fees; the meeting convened a support committee for us; and, more than any of that, I could feel how deeply people in the meeting were entering with us into our fear of losing her and our deep love for her. People's sympathy for our situation seemed to go so deep that I felt like some members of the meeting, at least--and not always the people I'd had the closest or best relationships with--were feeling it all with us.

That my hiatus from meeting began only two months after the appeals court finally settled the case in our favor once and for all sometimes makes me feel, as I told David recently, like the guy whose wife puts him through med school, and then he dumps her for a younger woman right after graduation.

But, you know, it is what it is. God told me to leave my meeting for awhile, in one of the clearest messages I've ever gotten in meeting for worship. I'm just a little cranky that the next step hasn't been made so clear.