2010 Reading Report: The Highlights

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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!"

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

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

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

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

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.