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.