It's really easy when you blog, or are posting on Facebook, to only mention the glorious moments. So in the interest of full disclosure, I'd like to mention that at 10:00 this morning, the boys and I were having such a dismal time that 1) I was ready to give up on homeschooling, and 2) we had retreated to three different rooms, where we were each weeping in solitary splendor.
I could not think how to salvage the situation. But after awhile I wandered into the hallway and said to the closed doors, "Um, guys, *sniff*, I'm going to go ahead and graph our Mystery Class data so we don't fall behind. Anybody who wants to come help, *snuffle*, can come help."
The boys wandered out to the living room, wiping their noses on their sleeves, and we transferred our sunrise/sunset data to the data sheets, calculated the photoperiods for each of the mystery sites, and charted them on our graph. We found and fixed a couple of our mistakes--calculating photoperiods is surprisingly tricky math--and were astonished that the site that got 24 hours of sunlight just a week ago got only a little more than 18 hours a week later! We checked and double-checked the numbers and that's what they said. I'll be curious to see where it is--the South Pole is still in full-time daylight this week. So it's someplace north of there.
Then we did an activity where you find other locations that are at your latitude and check their photoperiod. We did Sapporo, Japan; Florence, Italy; and Changchun, China; all of which we found by using the globe we got for Christmas. They all had photoperiods within a few minutes of ours. It was fun to see the boys figure out that photoperiod is all about latitude; they had previously thought that places with similar photoperiods must be close to us but now they get that they could be very far away.
Then we worked on this week's Lego Quest challenge. The challenge was to build something using 30 specific bricks, and we made a set for Yehva, so when she got home from preschool, she did it, too. I'd post pictures but the boys are excited that their creations might be on the website next week so I'll save it for then.
Doing fun stuff together got us feeling much less horrible, and the rest of the day went pretty well. Yehva and I had to run to the store at one point to buy eggs so we could make cupcakes, and I was reminded of why I am always running out of things: I simply cannot do the grocery shopping with Yehva. This is what it was like just running into a convenience store for one item:
Me: OK, Yev, just so you know, we're only buying eggs. We're not buying anything else.
Yehva: OK.
We enter the store.
Yehva: Mama, they have candy!
Me: I see.
Yehva: Can I have some?
Me: Not today. Today we are just buying eggs.
Yehva: But I'm hungry.
Me: We'll have lunch when we get home. And we're making cupcakes.
Yehva: Can we get donuts?
Me: No. We're just buying eggs. Another day we can get donuts.
Yehva: I want donuts.
Me: Donuts are certainly tasty.
Yehva, escalating: I want donuts!
Me: No donuts. We're just getting eggs.
Yehva: I see cookies.
Me: I see the cookies, too.
Yehva: I want some cookies.
Me: Sorry, we're just here for eggs.
Yehva stomps her foot: I want cookies!
Me: Not today.
Yehva picks up a package of bakery cupcakes: Can we get cupcakes?
Me: Yehva! We are buying eggs--and only eggs--so we can *make* cupcakes! We are not buying cupcakes!
Yehva: Then can I have some candy?
Showing posts with label Yehva. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yehva. Show all posts
Friday, February 11, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Public School Mom: It's a Whole New Skillset
So, Yehva loves her 3-morning-a-week preschool so much that next year I'm thinking of sending her to one that meets five mornings a week, and I tend to assume we'll send her to kindergarten the year after that. Because she's just that extroverted! I've spent the last four years of my life as a homeschooling mom (and I'm only just starting to figure it out), and it has been a relief not to have to deal with schools. My friends have had to wrestle with teachers who wouldn't give their disabled kids reasonable accommodations, with math curricula that were poorly-designed and leaving their very bright children high and dry, with pointless homework that doesn't make sense. I have been happy not to have do these things. For one thing, I'm not very assertive with authority figures (David jokes that I'm "ruly," which is of course the opposite of "unruly"). I've been reading the blog at Coalition for Kid-Friendly Schools, and one of the moms there has been engaged in a protracted conversation with her kids' principal about the math curriculum the school uses--her daughters are at a Quaker elementary school that routinely feeds its graduates into the remedial math program at the local middle school.
I am following this mom's saga with the principal with great interest, because I simply can't see myself in that role. I'm much more the type to suck it up and then bitch to my friends. I have often thought that one reason we homeschool is that I am not assertive enough to be a good advocate for my children in the public schools.
And yet, there I was at 9:30 this morning, taking a tour of the public Montessori school a mile down the road, because one option for Yehva next year is to enter the pre-school there. It's close to our house, it might be a good option if she ends up in the public schools (likely because even the very reasonable tuition at the private Montessori schools around here would be a stretch for us), and their preschool program, while fee-based, is cheaper than the other Montessori schools near us.
The tour was very interesting. As you'd expect in an affluent suburb, the school itself is in good shape, clean and shiny and freshly painted. Every classroom we visited had computers in it; there's also a large computer lab. Instead of blackboards or whiteboards, the classrooms have "smartboards," which can display material from the teachers' computers or be worked at directly; apparently they're touch screens and also have special markers they can be written on with, though we didn't see one in action.
I appreciated the principal's honesty about the extent to which the school is "compromised" Montessori. "We're as Montessori as we can be given that, as a public school, we are not exempt from standardized testing or from meeting state curriculum guidelines." In other words, they're pretty darn Montessori for the 3-year-olds, but less and less so as the kids get older.
Still, I liked the 3rd and 4th grade classroom we visited. There were no desks in rows, though there were tables available for kids to work at. Kids were moving around freely, and engaged in a variety of activities around the room. I liked the atmosphere in the room much better than most classrooms I've been in.
While I know a couple of moms who have kids in the school and are very happy with it, I also know a couple who've had serious problems, in both cases with a teacher refusing accommodation for a disabled child. One of the families left the school because of it. So my anecdotal impression of the school is very mixed.
I'd be fretful about the overwhelming whiteness of the student body in any case, but this is Yehva we're talking about--she's the only AA kid in her preschool class, and if this keeps up, at some point she's going to notice. Is that a problem? I don't honestly know. I have a friend who is black and who lives in a predominately white area where her kids are often the only black kids in their classes and activities, and she's really shruggo about it; she sees it as just a fact of her kids' lives. But I think it's probably different if your parents and extended family are also black--Yehva's the only black kid at home, too. So one of the questions I have, if I'm going to be a School Mom as well as a homeschooling mom, is: Should I consider putting Yehva in one of the Lansing charter schools, or into Lansing Public Schools as a schools of choice student? Is that important enough to choose a half-hour commute over the one-mile stroll? Or to choose a struggling school district over one with a 97% graduation rate, that sends most graduates to college? Which does Yehva need more: half the kids in her classes to be black, or half the kids in her high school to be taking AP classes?
I don't know.
On the one hand, I've been pretty in touch lately with what we give up by homeschooling, things the schools offer that are a challenge to get at home, or in the homeschool community (somebody else to teach Eric Mindstorms would be very welcome, for instance. Both boys could use a bigger peer group, I think, despite their introversion. And it recently came to my attention that neither of my sons--who are almost 7 and almost 10--knows the alphabet song, a deficiency that can only be laid at my door). On the other hand: at this morning's tour, one of the moms asked how the school handled it if a kindergartner, say, was ready to move beyond kindergarten-level work. The principal threw around a lot of glittering phrases about "stretching" and "exploring," but the upshot of her response was that a kindergartner could not be allowed to do first-grade work, because then in first grade they'd have to do second-grade work, and in second grade they'd have to do third-grade work...and so on. And this would be just a big pain in the butt for everybody. "Of course, we do have a gifted education consultant available through the district," she said, but then she back-pedaled to make it clear that they'd only call on the consultant in extraordinary circumstances, if a kid was "really above...I mean really, really above...." In other words: probably not for your kid. This is just by way of saying that I am aware of the gaps and deficiencies of schools, as well.
I also came away not sure Montessori preschool is for Yehva. I love Montessori classrooms, with their orderly shelves of interesting things, and the kids sitting around at their little rugs doing their "works." But the PPK classroom we saw today didn't have what most preschools do: a texture table, an art area, a dress-up/pretend play area. I've read Maria Montessori, so I have a pretty good idea why this is (it's all about the purposeful work!). But I think those are some of the things Yehva likes best about preschool. I think she'd like the Montessori "works"--she loves manipulating things--but I also think she'd miss those other things.
Maybe school isn't the right thing for her at all. She's extroverted; she's also high energy. She rarely sits down. It may be that she will turn out to be a very bad fit for the classroom. Maybe we'd be better off homeschooling her and using our money to hire an athletic college student to spend a couple hours a day taking her snowboarding and waterskiing and rappelling, and teaching her to play baseball, basketball, soccer, and football (she wants to play football. She wants to play every sport she has ever seen anyone play, in person or on TV).
I wanted to love the public Montessori, because it's the path of least resistance for us: it's close, it's probably better than the traditional public schools in some ways that matter to me, if she goes there for preschool she's guaranteed a kindergarten slot, we'd have to pay for one more year of preschool but then it would be free. I liked it, at least some things about it. Enough to send Yehva there? I don't know. How much more would I have to love a different school to pay $6500/year in tuition? I don't know.
I might find out, though. I sent off an e-mail asking to set up a tour at one of the local private Montessori schools. (I also know parents of kids in this school. Some of them love it. Some of them don't. One pulled her daughter because she thought the school was pigeon-holing her daughter as a "troublemaker." Her daughter was 2. I talk to too many parents. It muddies the waters.) Anyway, I sent off the e-mail. "Practically any weekday morning is fine for me," I said, "except that we'll be out of town from February 16-22." I got a very prompt e-mail back saying that I'd been pencilled in for a tour on the morning of the 16th. *sigh*
One of my friends pulled her son out of elementary school last year and tried homeschooling. "There are too many choices," she complained to me not long after. "When he was in school, they made all these choices for me!" As someone who has spent hours reading up on math curricula on the internet, and hours reading up on science curricula, and hours reading up on Language Arts curricula--and this only after spending years going back and forth about whether to use curricula at all--I could sympathize. But I find that the decisions involved in sending a kid to school are just as hairy. I'm lucky, I suppose, to live in a place where there are really very few choices, or my head would explode. As it is, I think I'll go take half a Xanax and lie down with a cold cloth on my head until the palpitations stop.
I am following this mom's saga with the principal with great interest, because I simply can't see myself in that role. I'm much more the type to suck it up and then bitch to my friends. I have often thought that one reason we homeschool is that I am not assertive enough to be a good advocate for my children in the public schools.
And yet, there I was at 9:30 this morning, taking a tour of the public Montessori school a mile down the road, because one option for Yehva next year is to enter the pre-school there. It's close to our house, it might be a good option if she ends up in the public schools (likely because even the very reasonable tuition at the private Montessori schools around here would be a stretch for us), and their preschool program, while fee-based, is cheaper than the other Montessori schools near us.
The tour was very interesting. As you'd expect in an affluent suburb, the school itself is in good shape, clean and shiny and freshly painted. Every classroom we visited had computers in it; there's also a large computer lab. Instead of blackboards or whiteboards, the classrooms have "smartboards," which can display material from the teachers' computers or be worked at directly; apparently they're touch screens and also have special markers they can be written on with, though we didn't see one in action.
I appreciated the principal's honesty about the extent to which the school is "compromised" Montessori. "We're as Montessori as we can be given that, as a public school, we are not exempt from standardized testing or from meeting state curriculum guidelines." In other words, they're pretty darn Montessori for the 3-year-olds, but less and less so as the kids get older.
Still, I liked the 3rd and 4th grade classroom we visited. There were no desks in rows, though there were tables available for kids to work at. Kids were moving around freely, and engaged in a variety of activities around the room. I liked the atmosphere in the room much better than most classrooms I've been in.
While I know a couple of moms who have kids in the school and are very happy with it, I also know a couple who've had serious problems, in both cases with a teacher refusing accommodation for a disabled child. One of the families left the school because of it. So my anecdotal impression of the school is very mixed.
I'd be fretful about the overwhelming whiteness of the student body in any case, but this is Yehva we're talking about--she's the only AA kid in her preschool class, and if this keeps up, at some point she's going to notice. Is that a problem? I don't honestly know. I have a friend who is black and who lives in a predominately white area where her kids are often the only black kids in their classes and activities, and she's really shruggo about it; she sees it as just a fact of her kids' lives. But I think it's probably different if your parents and extended family are also black--Yehva's the only black kid at home, too. So one of the questions I have, if I'm going to be a School Mom as well as a homeschooling mom, is: Should I consider putting Yehva in one of the Lansing charter schools, or into Lansing Public Schools as a schools of choice student? Is that important enough to choose a half-hour commute over the one-mile stroll? Or to choose a struggling school district over one with a 97% graduation rate, that sends most graduates to college? Which does Yehva need more: half the kids in her classes to be black, or half the kids in her high school to be taking AP classes?
I don't know.
On the one hand, I've been pretty in touch lately with what we give up by homeschooling, things the schools offer that are a challenge to get at home, or in the homeschool community (somebody else to teach Eric Mindstorms would be very welcome, for instance. Both boys could use a bigger peer group, I think, despite their introversion. And it recently came to my attention that neither of my sons--who are almost 7 and almost 10--knows the alphabet song, a deficiency that can only be laid at my door). On the other hand: at this morning's tour, one of the moms asked how the school handled it if a kindergartner, say, was ready to move beyond kindergarten-level work. The principal threw around a lot of glittering phrases about "stretching" and "exploring," but the upshot of her response was that a kindergartner could not be allowed to do first-grade work, because then in first grade they'd have to do second-grade work, and in second grade they'd have to do third-grade work...and so on. And this would be just a big pain in the butt for everybody. "Of course, we do have a gifted education consultant available through the district," she said, but then she back-pedaled to make it clear that they'd only call on the consultant in extraordinary circumstances, if a kid was "really above...I mean really, really above...." In other words: probably not for your kid. This is just by way of saying that I am aware of the gaps and deficiencies of schools, as well.
I also came away not sure Montessori preschool is for Yehva. I love Montessori classrooms, with their orderly shelves of interesting things, and the kids sitting around at their little rugs doing their "works." But the PPK classroom we saw today didn't have what most preschools do: a texture table, an art area, a dress-up/pretend play area. I've read Maria Montessori, so I have a pretty good idea why this is (it's all about the purposeful work!). But I think those are some of the things Yehva likes best about preschool. I think she'd like the Montessori "works"--she loves manipulating things--but I also think she'd miss those other things.
Maybe school isn't the right thing for her at all. She's extroverted; she's also high energy. She rarely sits down. It may be that she will turn out to be a very bad fit for the classroom. Maybe we'd be better off homeschooling her and using our money to hire an athletic college student to spend a couple hours a day taking her snowboarding and waterskiing and rappelling, and teaching her to play baseball, basketball, soccer, and football (she wants to play football. She wants to play every sport she has ever seen anyone play, in person or on TV).
I wanted to love the public Montessori, because it's the path of least resistance for us: it's close, it's probably better than the traditional public schools in some ways that matter to me, if she goes there for preschool she's guaranteed a kindergarten slot, we'd have to pay for one more year of preschool but then it would be free. I liked it, at least some things about it. Enough to send Yehva there? I don't know. How much more would I have to love a different school to pay $6500/year in tuition? I don't know.
I might find out, though. I sent off an e-mail asking to set up a tour at one of the local private Montessori schools. (I also know parents of kids in this school. Some of them love it. Some of them don't. One pulled her daughter because she thought the school was pigeon-holing her daughter as a "troublemaker." Her daughter was 2. I talk to too many parents. It muddies the waters.) Anyway, I sent off the e-mail. "Practically any weekday morning is fine for me," I said, "except that we'll be out of town from February 16-22." I got a very prompt e-mail back saying that I'd been pencilled in for a tour on the morning of the 16th. *sigh*
One of my friends pulled her son out of elementary school last year and tried homeschooling. "There are too many choices," she complained to me not long after. "When he was in school, they made all these choices for me!" As someone who has spent hours reading up on math curricula on the internet, and hours reading up on science curricula, and hours reading up on Language Arts curricula--and this only after spending years going back and forth about whether to use curricula at all--I could sympathize. But I find that the decisions involved in sending a kid to school are just as hairy. I'm lucky, I suppose, to live in a place where there are really very few choices, or my head would explode. As it is, I think I'll go take half a Xanax and lie down with a cold cloth on my head until the palpitations stop.
Friday, January 7, 2011
They Build Things
Back when I was in literary studies, we used to use the term "overdetermination" to mean that a text was making too much of something, asking us so excessively to believe something that we became inclined to believe the opposite. Shakespeare understood the notion; he wrote, "the lady doth protest too much," meaning that only someone in love would feel the need to say so very many times and in so very many ways that she was not in love.
It's also possible to overdetermine something in such a way that only one outcome is possible. So you get English grad students sitting around with a book written by someone twice as smart as they will ever be, sneering, "I don't know, I thought the climactic saber fight was a little overdetermined, you know what I mean?"
Sometimes I think we have overdetermined our children.
I come from families of men who work with their hands. My dad built the house I grew up in, literally; my brother has built a dune buggy from scratch, and a race car out of a car that had not previously been a race car. When my brother wanted a minibike as a kid, nobody bought him one. My dad and grandpa built him one out of old lawnmower motors and steel bars they had lying around, which they welded into a frame. My extended family on both sides is full of people who fix their own cars, and make their living repairing or maintaining machines or structures.
David is not that kind of guy, and wasn't raised by that kind of guy. His dad was a surveyor, but for recreation, he played competitive bridge. David was not raised to think it's a moral failing to hire someone to do a job you could just as well do yourself, like replacing an engine block or adding a porch to the front of the house or re-wiring the guest bathroom.
Still, David's a very smart guy, and an engineer in his way: he is a software engineer. So when we needed donor sperm to have our first two kids, we looked for somebody smart and with a logical mind. There weren't any software engineers in the catalog, but there was a guy who was a mechanical engineering graduate student with a 3.85 gpa. "Smart!" we said. "A logical thinker!" we said, and ordered three little vials.
Imagine our surprise when our firstborn turned out to be the kind of person who can make anything out of anything--put him in front of any material that can be manipulated in three dimensions, whether Lego, modeling clay, or leftover forks, and he'll build something amazing. All those three-dimensional-thinking and doing-stuff-with-your-hands genes are just a little overdetermined, I sometimes think. Like we doomed him to a career in engineering or the skilled trades, like we left him with not really all that many choices. "Maybe we should have chosen a sensitive poet," we joke sometimes.
It's not really like that, though--Carl seems to have gotten the ear-for-language genes that also run in my family; while Eric was amazing us at 4 with his fork sculptures, Carl was astonishing us with his observations and questions about language. Why was one word used, and not another? "I think you meant to say both, not all," he'll tell us. Or he'll point out that two lines in a picture book don't really quite rhyme.
And yet Carl is also a builder. I know that having Lego-obsessed boys is about as common as breathing, but both of my boys have the bug pretty bad, even so.
But many of my friends have heard me talk about this before. What has me thinking about it again is seeing how Yehva fits in. And she does. She loves to do Lego with the boys, and the other day produced something so cool I made the classic parenting blunder of saying, "That's really great! Did somebody help you with it?" (She was offended, as she should have been.) When we toured her preschool last fall, the director commented on Yehva's tendency to gravitate toward technology in every classroom or storage room we entered: the computer, the toy cash-register, the tool bench. It feels like a little spark I want to nurture in her, though really the boys are doing that job for me. I find myself glad she has them, and that they let her tag along sometimes when they've got a project going.
She's only three. Anything could happen. I'm just having fun watching it unfold.
It's also possible to overdetermine something in such a way that only one outcome is possible. So you get English grad students sitting around with a book written by someone twice as smart as they will ever be, sneering, "I don't know, I thought the climactic saber fight was a little overdetermined, you know what I mean?"
Sometimes I think we have overdetermined our children.
I come from families of men who work with their hands. My dad built the house I grew up in, literally; my brother has built a dune buggy from scratch, and a race car out of a car that had not previously been a race car. When my brother wanted a minibike as a kid, nobody bought him one. My dad and grandpa built him one out of old lawnmower motors and steel bars they had lying around, which they welded into a frame. My extended family on both sides is full of people who fix their own cars, and make their living repairing or maintaining machines or structures.
David is not that kind of guy, and wasn't raised by that kind of guy. His dad was a surveyor, but for recreation, he played competitive bridge. David was not raised to think it's a moral failing to hire someone to do a job you could just as well do yourself, like replacing an engine block or adding a porch to the front of the house or re-wiring the guest bathroom.
Still, David's a very smart guy, and an engineer in his way: he is a software engineer. So when we needed donor sperm to have our first two kids, we looked for somebody smart and with a logical mind. There weren't any software engineers in the catalog, but there was a guy who was a mechanical engineering graduate student with a 3.85 gpa. "Smart!" we said. "A logical thinker!" we said, and ordered three little vials.
Imagine our surprise when our firstborn turned out to be the kind of person who can make anything out of anything--put him in front of any material that can be manipulated in three dimensions, whether Lego, modeling clay, or leftover forks, and he'll build something amazing. All those three-dimensional-thinking and doing-stuff-with-your-hands genes are just a little overdetermined, I sometimes think. Like we doomed him to a career in engineering or the skilled trades, like we left him with not really all that many choices. "Maybe we should have chosen a sensitive poet," we joke sometimes.
It's not really like that, though--Carl seems to have gotten the ear-for-language genes that also run in my family; while Eric was amazing us at 4 with his fork sculptures, Carl was astonishing us with his observations and questions about language. Why was one word used, and not another? "I think you meant to say both, not all," he'll tell us. Or he'll point out that two lines in a picture book don't really quite rhyme.
And yet Carl is also a builder. I know that having Lego-obsessed boys is about as common as breathing, but both of my boys have the bug pretty bad, even so.
But many of my friends have heard me talk about this before. What has me thinking about it again is seeing how Yehva fits in. And she does. She loves to do Lego with the boys, and the other day produced something so cool I made the classic parenting blunder of saying, "That's really great! Did somebody help you with it?" (She was offended, as she should have been.) When we toured her preschool last fall, the director commented on Yehva's tendency to gravitate toward technology in every classroom or storage room we entered: the computer, the toy cash-register, the tool bench. It feels like a little spark I want to nurture in her, though really the boys are doing that job for me. I find myself glad she has them, and that they let her tag along sometimes when they've got a project going.
She's only three. Anything could happen. I'm just having fun watching it unfold.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
A Darn Cute Little Guy
Yehva has been asking for a haircut for weeks, and I've been sort of putting her off, not sure whether it would be a good idea. Yesterday I finally promised I would cut her hair, so I spent some time googling around for instructions on cutting an afro, and watched a couple of videos of little boys having their hair cut (from which I learned that some black boys wear their hair in braids until they get their first haircut at about 4. Who knew? Probably lots of people who aren't me. Some of those kids had amazingly long hair--Yehva's must be kind of on the slow side, growth-wise).
And this morning I got out the clippers, chose the second-longest blade guide, and buzzed it all over.
It looks a little uneven in places, but I think it's hard to tell for sure until we wash it and comb it out. I warned her we might have to do a touch-up in a couple of days. And I wish she had let me trim it a bit shorter over her ears and at the nape of her neck, but she says she likes it as it is.
Many thoughts and feelings arise.
I wrote a few months ago about thinking about cutting her hair because my health problems were making it hard for me to keep up with it, and the extremely negative reactions I got when I went looking for advice on how to do it. I can't pretend not to feel that pressure to keep her hair long. Especially because I find myself worrying that people who see her will think I'm a clueless white mother who doesn't know anything about the importance of hair in Black culture and couldn't be bothered to learn to care for my black daughter's hair.
On the other hand, as a parent I've always had a philosophy about my kids' hair that goes like this: It's only hair. They can do anything they want with it. I think parent/child fights about hair are about the stupidest fights parents choose to have with their kids, and I'm not looking for any extra or unnecessary conflicts. So, when it switched from being about me and my energy level to being about Yehva's wishes for her hair, and when her desire to have her hair cut persisted over a number of weeks, I thought I had to respect that, as I have respected it for the boys, or I'd be a rotten hypocrite. "White boys get to do whatever they want with their hair," I'd be telling her, "but you don't because you're a girl, and you're black. So even if you hate having it long, and it hurts to have it combed out, well, that's the price you have to pay."
Another piece is that a lot of people tell me Yehva is beautiful. I've always thought so, but I'm the mom and hardly objective. But people say things to me like, "She's the most beautiful little girl I've ever seen." I posted some new pictures on Facebook, and a friend commented on one picture, "Holy smokes, that kid is model-gorgeous!" (It was an especially good picture.) I feel surprisingly ambivalent about the prospect of her being beautiful; on the one hand, I like to look at beautiful people; on the other hand, I think being beautiful may be hard for women in certain ways. I've heard beautiful women talk about not being taken seriously, about not having their other qualities being appreciated. Some friends in my Quaker meeting have an adult son who is unusually beautiful and has been since childhood, and his mother has told me that one way it has been a problem is that people let him get away with things. So, in my usual way, I have fretted some about how to help her know she's beautiful without being over-invested in it; I've hoped that I and other people will also help her see her many other qualities; I've appreciated her beauty, and enjoyed the attention and praise she has always gotten for it, and yet I have seen it as a minefield as well.
And yet, in cutting her hair, one of my fears was that she would no longer be beautiful, or that people would no longer be able to see her beauty. I shouldn't worry; she always wears jeans, and old t-shirts of her brothers' (I gave away all her pink t-shirts with flowers on them earlier this summer because they were just taking up drawer space). Even with her hair in braids or puffs, she is often mistaken for a boy, so with short hair, I suppose I shouldn't worry that people will judge me for cutting her hair or no longer see her as beautiful; they're not going to see her at all. Everyone is going to think she's a darn cute little guy.
And this morning I got out the clippers, chose the second-longest blade guide, and buzzed it all over.
It looks a little uneven in places, but I think it's hard to tell for sure until we wash it and comb it out. I warned her we might have to do a touch-up in a couple of days. And I wish she had let me trim it a bit shorter over her ears and at the nape of her neck, but she says she likes it as it is.
Many thoughts and feelings arise.
I wrote a few months ago about thinking about cutting her hair because my health problems were making it hard for me to keep up with it, and the extremely negative reactions I got when I went looking for advice on how to do it. I can't pretend not to feel that pressure to keep her hair long. Especially because I find myself worrying that people who see her will think I'm a clueless white mother who doesn't know anything about the importance of hair in Black culture and couldn't be bothered to learn to care for my black daughter's hair.
On the other hand, as a parent I've always had a philosophy about my kids' hair that goes like this: It's only hair. They can do anything they want with it. I think parent/child fights about hair are about the stupidest fights parents choose to have with their kids, and I'm not looking for any extra or unnecessary conflicts. So, when it switched from being about me and my energy level to being about Yehva's wishes for her hair, and when her desire to have her hair cut persisted over a number of weeks, I thought I had to respect that, as I have respected it for the boys, or I'd be a rotten hypocrite. "White boys get to do whatever they want with their hair," I'd be telling her, "but you don't because you're a girl, and you're black. So even if you hate having it long, and it hurts to have it combed out, well, that's the price you have to pay."
Another piece is that a lot of people tell me Yehva is beautiful. I've always thought so, but I'm the mom and hardly objective. But people say things to me like, "She's the most beautiful little girl I've ever seen." I posted some new pictures on Facebook, and a friend commented on one picture, "Holy smokes, that kid is model-gorgeous!" (It was an especially good picture.) I feel surprisingly ambivalent about the prospect of her being beautiful; on the one hand, I like to look at beautiful people; on the other hand, I think being beautiful may be hard for women in certain ways. I've heard beautiful women talk about not being taken seriously, about not having their other qualities being appreciated. Some friends in my Quaker meeting have an adult son who is unusually beautiful and has been since childhood, and his mother has told me that one way it has been a problem is that people let him get away with things. So, in my usual way, I have fretted some about how to help her know she's beautiful without being over-invested in it; I've hoped that I and other people will also help her see her many other qualities; I've appreciated her beauty, and enjoyed the attention and praise she has always gotten for it, and yet I have seen it as a minefield as well.
And yet, in cutting her hair, one of my fears was that she would no longer be beautiful, or that people would no longer be able to see her beauty. I shouldn't worry; she always wears jeans, and old t-shirts of her brothers' (I gave away all her pink t-shirts with flowers on them earlier this summer because they were just taking up drawer space). Even with her hair in braids or puffs, she is often mistaken for a boy, so with short hair, I suppose I shouldn't worry that people will judge me for cutting her hair or no longer see her as beautiful; they're not going to see her at all. Everyone is going to think she's a darn cute little guy.
Friday, June 11, 2010
The Penn Family Talks about Guns and Babies
I had a nice visit with my parents yesterday; they came to drop off a big cushy recliner my mom isn't using anymore and stayed for several hours, mostly just chatting. My nephew Garrett, who is 14 and much-adored by my kids (and by David and me), came along and spent most of the time running the kids ragged in the backyard.
My mom looks good. She had a cardiac catheterization some weeks ago that showed that she has a fully-blocked artery to her heart, and it can't be repaired, and week before last she had a procedure to clean out her carotid artery. So I have been worrying about her. She seems to be recovering well; I could tell from her voice on the phone when she called to ask if yesterday was a good day for a visit that she was feeling better.
It charms me that Yehva reminds my mother of me as a little girl. "How funny," she said drily, "that you should get a daughter who's smart, outgoing, and headstrong." A little bit of grandmotherly schadenfreude there, I think. There's a famous family story (with picture!) about her finding me standing naked in the bathroom sink when I was about Yehva's age, planning to give myself a bath because I wanted one and she wasn't going to give me one. And another famous story from when I was maybe a late 3, and sang a little song for the church. It was my first time in front of an audience, and apparently it was quite a challenge to get me to yield the stage when I was done. I'd still be up there singing, apparently, if I hadn't been small enough to carry off.
We like smart-baby stories in our family, and my parents told me a good one about my 11-month-old nephew, Oscar. Apparently my sister-in-law got him a jack-in-the-box. She cranked the handle, it played its little tune, and then pop! up came the jack-in-the-box. Oscar liked that! So she did it again. He liked it again!
So she scooted the jack-in-the-box over to him and suggested he crank the handle himself. Oscar looked at it a second, and then reached over and popped open the latch on the lid.
We laughed. We are all familiar--as you probably are, too, if you have kids--with those moments when you are torn between thinking, "Wow, I'm so impressed with this kid," and "Oh, man, I am so doomed." Smart kids, we agree, are both a blessing and a burden.
I told my parents a friend's story about taking her kids to a shooting range as part of Be A Tourist In Your Own Town, an event here in Lansing every year where you buy a passport that gets you into all kinds of attractions free for the day. Her son, almost 8, is interested in target shooting, and my friend asked one of the staff how old kids have to be to take lessons. She figured the answer would be "older than 8" and this would be a backup for her own uncertainty about the idea. The guy answered, "Old enough to do it safely, and to follow the rules. These guys could absolutely do it! We work with beginners one on one until we're confident they can do it."
She should have seen enough lawyer shows by now to know you never ask a question you don't already know the answer to.
That story got us talking about guns in our own families. My mom grew up in a house where guns were propped in the corner in every room, and she was always afraid of them and says she only ever fired one once in her life. My dad had a couple of guns in a rack behind the door in the spare room when I was growing up, but I don't remember him using them (he goes to deer camp every year, but he's the kind of "hunter" who can spend a week at deer camp and not notice he forgot his gun at home). He did hunt when I was younger; I was born in October, and he went hunting soon afterwards. He sent home a postcard with a picture of a deer on it. If I remember it correctly, he wrote "Daddy has not seen any deer yet." He addressed it to my mom and brother, and then squeezed "and Susan" into the margin. That offended me when I was a kid: I was an afterthought! But I'm pretty sure 3-week-old me was not bothered by it.
I mentioned my friend Adrianne's Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, and my one experience shooting it. My dad said, "I got a concealed carry permit a few years ago."
Me: Oh, yeah? What made you decide to get a concealed carry permit?
My dad: I didn't have one.
Ah.
There was a big locked gun case at my grandparents' house in Gaylord, and men and boys sometimes went shooting when a bunch of us were up there. I shot some, I know; I mostly remember a few times doing target practice in my backyard, shooting paper plates with a gun I only remember as "grandma's deer rifle."
My grandma could shoot a gun; there's a story about her shooting a rabid dog from her back porch when she was eight months pregnant. Though I could be mis-remembering the pregnant part because there's another story about her getting bit by a dog just a few days before my Uncle Charlie was born, and then sometime later my aunt Clara Jean, who was 5 or 6, got bit by a dog and wouldn't stop crying, and when she finally calmed down enough to tell them what was wrong, she said, "I'm too young to have a baby!" An early lesson in correlation v. causation.
On the other hand, my grandma was pregnant six times, so maybe both those things did happen when she was about to have a baby. Just different babies.
My grandpa once shot and killed a rat in the wall of the house. With the expected unpleasant results.
My nephew Garrett seems to be following in my brother's footsteps. He loves dirt bikes and snowmobiles, things with big engines that go fast. He also likes to shoot. His big present from my parents last Christmas was a new rifle he'd been wanting. He's a very good shot, I'm told. My dad said that he is interested in firing "the pistols" but my brother isn't sure about letting him do that. "He's fired a lot of guns, though," my dad said, and rattled off a little list that ended with, "and of course he's fired Gary's machine gun."
Me: Gary has a machine gun?
Not a fully-automatic one, I am assured. Those are illegal. It's a Thompson--a Tommy gun! I said delightedly--with that round magazine like the gangsters in Bugs Bunny cartoons carry around. He also has some kind of deadly Eastern European-made not-an-AK47-but-something-like-that. From this I infer that one of the many things I did not know about my brother is that he collects guns. I think it would be interesting if he agreed to show them to me next time I visit.
Sometimes I feel like my family are all very much like each other--they live together on the same piece of land, for crying out loud! I call it The Penn Family Hilltop Compound. It has two houses on it, and two enormous pole barns full of pickup trucks and motorcycles, a race car, a dune buggy, my dad's little bulldozer ("you'd be surprised how many uses you find for it once you have it," we joked yesterday), the almost-bigger-than-my-house RV my parents roam the southwest in every winter, and God only knows what else. I didn't know about the bulldozer or the machine gun; what other surprises might there be?
Very much like each other, I think sometimes, and not so much like me. This is a feeling that was very painful to me as a child and young adult. But I get more and more peaceful with it as I get older, because, you know, I like them. And because it gets easier for me to see the ways we are alike--my parents and I laughed a lot yesterday, because we have the same sense of humor. We like to tell each other stories. I knew they'd like the story about my friend and her kids at the shooting range; they knew I'd like the story about Oscar and the jack-in-the-box. I told stories about Yehva, full of piss and vinegar and always into something, and my mom told stories about me, much the same. It was a good way to spend an afternoon.
My mom looks good. She had a cardiac catheterization some weeks ago that showed that she has a fully-blocked artery to her heart, and it can't be repaired, and week before last she had a procedure to clean out her carotid artery. So I have been worrying about her. She seems to be recovering well; I could tell from her voice on the phone when she called to ask if yesterday was a good day for a visit that she was feeling better.
It charms me that Yehva reminds my mother of me as a little girl. "How funny," she said drily, "that you should get a daughter who's smart, outgoing, and headstrong." A little bit of grandmotherly schadenfreude there, I think. There's a famous family story (with picture!) about her finding me standing naked in the bathroom sink when I was about Yehva's age, planning to give myself a bath because I wanted one and she wasn't going to give me one. And another famous story from when I was maybe a late 3, and sang a little song for the church. It was my first time in front of an audience, and apparently it was quite a challenge to get me to yield the stage when I was done. I'd still be up there singing, apparently, if I hadn't been small enough to carry off.
We like smart-baby stories in our family, and my parents told me a good one about my 11-month-old nephew, Oscar. Apparently my sister-in-law got him a jack-in-the-box. She cranked the handle, it played its little tune, and then pop! up came the jack-in-the-box. Oscar liked that! So she did it again. He liked it again!
So she scooted the jack-in-the-box over to him and suggested he crank the handle himself. Oscar looked at it a second, and then reached over and popped open the latch on the lid.
We laughed. We are all familiar--as you probably are, too, if you have kids--with those moments when you are torn between thinking, "Wow, I'm so impressed with this kid," and "Oh, man, I am so doomed." Smart kids, we agree, are both a blessing and a burden.
I told my parents a friend's story about taking her kids to a shooting range as part of Be A Tourist In Your Own Town, an event here in Lansing every year where you buy a passport that gets you into all kinds of attractions free for the day. Her son, almost 8, is interested in target shooting, and my friend asked one of the staff how old kids have to be to take lessons. She figured the answer would be "older than 8" and this would be a backup for her own uncertainty about the idea. The guy answered, "Old enough to do it safely, and to follow the rules. These guys could absolutely do it! We work with beginners one on one until we're confident they can do it."
She should have seen enough lawyer shows by now to know you never ask a question you don't already know the answer to.
That story got us talking about guns in our own families. My mom grew up in a house where guns were propped in the corner in every room, and she was always afraid of them and says she only ever fired one once in her life. My dad had a couple of guns in a rack behind the door in the spare room when I was growing up, but I don't remember him using them (he goes to deer camp every year, but he's the kind of "hunter" who can spend a week at deer camp and not notice he forgot his gun at home). He did hunt when I was younger; I was born in October, and he went hunting soon afterwards. He sent home a postcard with a picture of a deer on it. If I remember it correctly, he wrote "Daddy has not seen any deer yet." He addressed it to my mom and brother, and then squeezed "and Susan" into the margin. That offended me when I was a kid: I was an afterthought! But I'm pretty sure 3-week-old me was not bothered by it.
I mentioned my friend Adrianne's Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, and my one experience shooting it. My dad said, "I got a concealed carry permit a few years ago."
Me: Oh, yeah? What made you decide to get a concealed carry permit?
My dad: I didn't have one.
Ah.
There was a big locked gun case at my grandparents' house in Gaylord, and men and boys sometimes went shooting when a bunch of us were up there. I shot some, I know; I mostly remember a few times doing target practice in my backyard, shooting paper plates with a gun I only remember as "grandma's deer rifle."
My grandma could shoot a gun; there's a story about her shooting a rabid dog from her back porch when she was eight months pregnant. Though I could be mis-remembering the pregnant part because there's another story about her getting bit by a dog just a few days before my Uncle Charlie was born, and then sometime later my aunt Clara Jean, who was 5 or 6, got bit by a dog and wouldn't stop crying, and when she finally calmed down enough to tell them what was wrong, she said, "I'm too young to have a baby!" An early lesson in correlation v. causation.
On the other hand, my grandma was pregnant six times, so maybe both those things did happen when she was about to have a baby. Just different babies.
My grandpa once shot and killed a rat in the wall of the house. With the expected unpleasant results.
My nephew Garrett seems to be following in my brother's footsteps. He loves dirt bikes and snowmobiles, things with big engines that go fast. He also likes to shoot. His big present from my parents last Christmas was a new rifle he'd been wanting. He's a very good shot, I'm told. My dad said that he is interested in firing "the pistols" but my brother isn't sure about letting him do that. "He's fired a lot of guns, though," my dad said, and rattled off a little list that ended with, "and of course he's fired Gary's machine gun."
Me: Gary has a machine gun?
Not a fully-automatic one, I am assured. Those are illegal. It's a Thompson--a Tommy gun! I said delightedly--with that round magazine like the gangsters in Bugs Bunny cartoons carry around. He also has some kind of deadly Eastern European-made not-an-AK47-but-something-like-that. From this I infer that one of the many things I did not know about my brother is that he collects guns. I think it would be interesting if he agreed to show them to me next time I visit.
Sometimes I feel like my family are all very much like each other--they live together on the same piece of land, for crying out loud! I call it The Penn Family Hilltop Compound. It has two houses on it, and two enormous pole barns full of pickup trucks and motorcycles, a race car, a dune buggy, my dad's little bulldozer ("you'd be surprised how many uses you find for it once you have it," we joked yesterday), the almost-bigger-than-my-house RV my parents roam the southwest in every winter, and God only knows what else. I didn't know about the bulldozer or the machine gun; what other surprises might there be?
Very much like each other, I think sometimes, and not so much like me. This is a feeling that was very painful to me as a child and young adult. But I get more and more peaceful with it as I get older, because, you know, I like them. And because it gets easier for me to see the ways we are alike--my parents and I laughed a lot yesterday, because we have the same sense of humor. We like to tell each other stories. I knew they'd like the story about my friend and her kids at the shooting range; they knew I'd like the story about Oscar and the jack-in-the-box. I told stories about Yehva, full of piss and vinegar and always into something, and my mom told stories about me, much the same. It was a good way to spend an afternoon.
Monday, March 29, 2010
The Great Hair Blasphemy
Because I'm still struggling with pain and fatigue, I'm behind on a lot of things and just not doing a whole bunch of other things. One thing I am perpetually behind on is caring for Yehva's hair. Her hair is very thick and curly (at least it seems thick to me) and the best way to manage it is to put it in braids or twists after washing it. She doesn't like having it washed, even when we use the minimal-rinsing-required No Poo method, and once it's washed, she's pretty well done having it touched. So we are falling into a bad cycle in which her hair gets washed but not styled and devolves into a crazy textured Buckwheat-style sad linty mess; or I do manage to braid or twist it, but the style gets left in too long and taking it out becomes a whole time-consuming ordeal in itself, which just reinforces for Yehva that having her hair touched is a big pain, both literally and figuratively.
David and I have thought seriously about starting locks, in part because her hair seems to want to lock so very badly, but every time I get close to doing it, I lose my nerve. I'm not patient or especially dextrous, and I'm worried about starting them badly. "It's only hair!" David says, but I'm not sure there is any such thing as "only hair" where little black girls are concerned. And locks need to be maintained, too.
The author of my favorite book on black hair care blogged awhile ago about having to shave her daughter's head because of head lice (something I hadn't thought of: those nit-combs will not go through most African-American hair); she and her daughter both cried about it, but she ended up thinking her daughter looked really adorable with a TWA, or "teeny-weeny afro." And it made me think that Yehva, with her very elegantly-shaped head, would also look adorable with a TWA.
But you don't cut a little black girl's hair. Culturally, it's just not done. I was interested in the comments on Cherie's blog post about the lengths other Black moms had gone to not to cut their daughters' hair when they came home from school with lice. When I asked on the Adoption Hair and Skin Care Yahoo group about doing a short cut for Yehva, I only got a handful of replies--and they all told me not to do it. One woman said she's taught for 17 years in a predominantly Black school and has never seen a little black girl with short hair. Other people suggested that if I couldn't come up with a better plan, I either pay someone to braid Yehva's hair, or get one of my friends to learn how to do it (I am sure I have many friends who would love to give up their Saturday afternoons to come to my house and do Yehva's hair). In googling around, I found one website (warning: auto-play sound) with this question and answer:
And the answer is:
I'm not sure why not cutting black girls' hair is so important, culturally. But it does seem to be. Moreso than for little white girls, although as I've been thinking about this today I've been reflecting on the fact that I don't know a single young white girl with short hair, either. Chin-length pageboys and blunt cuts abound, but I don't know a single white girl with hair cut above her ears, for instance. No pixie cuts in this generation. So there's a girl thing there that is separate from the black thing, but I think the black thing goes deeper than the girl thing.
I honestly don't know what to make of it, for me and Yehva. On the one hand, I think I do get the cultural stuff. I mean, I don't fully get all the reasons behind the specific taboo about cutting girls' hair, but I do get that this really matters to black people, and I respect that. On the other hand, I think people should do whatever they want with their own hair. And, as I said in a discussion about this on my Facebook page, "Yehva hates having her hair washed and cries the whole time; short hair would not only be easier for me until I feel better, but it would be way easier on her. Who am I supposed to respect more, my own child or 'black culture'? Am I supposed to torture her in service to some cultural ideal?"
To complicate things for us, I cannot use any scented products. As far as I've been able to find, there are no unscented or fragrance-free product lines for African-American hair; this means that what I use on Yehva's hair is the same fragrance-free conditioner I use, which may not be right for her hair, and whatever I can cobble together from my kitchen: coconut oil, my own mix of leave-in conditioner made with water and olive oil. I don't know for sure because I can't try them, but I am told that products like the Carol's Daughter line make managing thick, nappy hair like Yehva's much easier. But we can't use them.
(This also makes the suggestions I've gotten to have her hair done at a salon not very useful; not only can it cost $70 and up to have hair braided, but hair salons are like Stinking Pits of Death for me.)
I'm not sure what my point is. Except that one reality of adopting a black baby girl is that a seemingly simple thing like, "Maybe it would be better for her to have a short haircut until I'm back on my feet" is not simple at all. It's tremendously fraught. As I jokingly said to David, "I am not allowed to cut Yehva's hair. All The Black People In America say so."