Light and Momentary

Croissants: the bakery

As a parent, I have enormous power to influence. Huge, vast, colossal, humbling, heartbreaking power to influence. When I stop and think about it, it brings me to my knees. I could not see this when my children were smaller and my ability to influence them into commonplace civilized behaviors (like, say, wearing clothes in public) seemed inadequate. I see it now, and it makes me a little trembly: oh, God, make me the mother they deserve. Make me the example they need.

As a parent, especially the parent of a small child, I have considerable power to coerce. This power has its limits. I can tell you from long-ago but still vivid experience that the toddler who has sunk his teeth into your arm can keep them there despite vigorous attempts on your part to remove them. I am really grateful in hindsight that my firstborn was a take-it-to-the-mat kind of kid because he taught me something important: there's only so much good behavior you can compel, and compelling is costly. Compelling shapes the parent as well as the child.

This is hard to see when your kids are small, but compelling is a short-term strategy. If one of my teenagers said to me, "No, I absolutely refuse to do what you're telling me," I could not physically make him do it. They're both taller and heavier than I am. (I can still pick them up, but I wouldn't get very far.) I could say, "Then I'm taking your car keys" or "Then I'm grounding you," but my take-it-to-the-mat kid is still a take-it-to-the-mat kid, whose tendency is to say, "You go right ahead and see if I care." His brother is still the kid who crumples inside when an authority figure disapproves of his behavior, taking harsh words to heart long after everyone else has forgotten them. So that's not how we do things around here.

Coercing good behavior is a short-sighted strategy as well as a short-term one. Remember that thing I said a few days ago about two goals in tension? (You probably don't, because I'm writing, like, the Moby-Dick of blog series here. Middle paragraph of this post.) It's like I have an imaginary checking account from which I draw my mothering funds. If I spend my money on the snowmobile of BECAUSE I SAID SO AND HURRY UP DAMMIT, it might feel really good. I can rev my figurative engine and zoom down the hills at speed, feeling macho and invincible. The thing about snowmobiles, though, is that they're expensive. If I sink $15,000 into a snowmobile, I might not have the funds to cover the broken leg (i.e., the injured dignity) I get when it pitches me out. I might not be able to pay for the rescue operation when I trigger an avalanche (i.e., losing my kids' respect over time).

The croissant approach is like saving for retirement: month after month, you take the money you might rather have spent on snowmobiling and put it in your 401K. Sometimes it's painful, sometimes you'd rather buy plane tickets to somewhere fun, dernit, but you're taking the long view. (This analogy is probably offending every single person who likes Supernanny, but I'm going with it anyway.) If my daughter is being loud in church, as just happened on Sunday after a long stretch of better behavior ("BORING," she announced in an outside voice, as I withered inside), my short-term goal of getting her to straighten up THIS INSTANT IF NOT SOONER may be at odds with my long-term goals of teaching her to regulate her own behavior and learn to love the Mass. What I wanted to do, frankly, was seize her by the earlobe and hiss "NOT APPROPRIATE" in a Voldemortian voice. What I did do was remind her of our expectations, with clear disapproval in my face and voice, and give her a minute to collect herself. If she hadn't quieted down in that minute, of course I would have taken her out. But another thing I have learned is that inserting a pause is good medicine for an angry or embarrassed parent as well as a defiant child. Expecting instant compliance might make me look like a better parent. I think that acknowledging how often kids need a little time to pull themselves together has made me be a better parent. I also think it has taught them how to pull themselves together after a conflict, which is a life skill worth having.

(Here I pause for a moment of self-doubt. It is deeply ingrained in our culture, this idea that good parents say "jump" and good kids immediately say "how high?" I believe, I really do, that it is easier to find the joy in jumping if you are given a minute to gather your own momentum.)

Bribes and threats are attempts to compel. They are extremely motivating for some kids, but it's short-term motivation that actually erodes long-term uptake of the target behavior. (On which topic, see Alfie Kohn.) If your kid is not motivated by a given bribe or threat, you have to decide how far you're willing to up the stakes. If obedience becomes an economic transaction, your kid might choose not to buy in.

Here I am going to offend a bunch of people again (sorry!), but I think that steady reliance on bribes and threats is something like a steady diet of Noodle-roni and chicken nuggets. Noodle-roni is quick and easy and it's designed to be tasty, and we all know every kid in America eats chicken nuggets with alacrity. That approach is everywhere, but I am skeptical about its long-term benefits. The transition to a new menu takes time. If you serve a kid accustomed to Noodle-roni and chicken nuggets a dinner that consists of grilled salmon, sauted kale, and baked sweet potato, he's going to say, "...Are you kidding me?" He's not going to say, "I've been longing to eat this kale ever since I saw its beautiful dusky blue-green leaves at the CSA pickup." Tastes can change. I would honestly rather eat a bowl of garlicky CSA kale these days than a bowl of Oreos. But (here I go again) change is slow. A kid whose only exposure to pumpkin has been the pumpkin spice frappuccino (is there such a thing? I feel like there's pumpkin spice everything these days -- pumpkin spice library paste, pumpkin spice motor oil...) is going to be slower to perceive the sweetness of a wedge of roasted pumpkin. With time and persistence he can learn to enjoy it, though, just as he can learn to find the joy in duty.

I use some strategies that would look familiar to any mom. But I frame them differently than many sources do, and it makes a difference for me that I think my kids perceive. When my oldest kid was an indomitable toddler, I would put him in time-out when he did something wrong. He wouldn't stay in the chair, so I buckled him in his booster seat. Once buckled, he would kick his feet until the chair beneath him tipped over (his motto: "live free or die"), so I laid it back on the floor until the timer went off to let us both know he could get out. This was -- what's the word? -- insane, but everyone said he should get a time-out if he misbehaved.  Right? Right??? I believe I could have broken him eventually, but I think he is the kind of kid for whom the Pearls' plumbing supply line tactics would cause broken kidneys before they caused a broken will. It dawned on me slowly that I didn't want to break anything, didn't want to dominate my indomitable boy. The goal wasn't to overmaster him but to teach him to master himself. It is right and appropriate for 2yo boys to need support in the self-mastery department.

These days at my house if you can't follow the rules at the dinner table, you go sit on the steps until you can. But it's not "the naughty stair" and you don't stay there until I decide you're done sitting. You always, always decide for yourself when you're ready to come back. Take the time you need to pull it together, and then come join us again. No shame, no wrath (or very little wrath, very seldom), no worries. (This happens...maybe every three weeks or so? Less than that, now that I think about it.)

Sometimes I do things that look punitive; I do assign extra chores to kids who don't do theirs or do them badly. I explain it like this: when I have to get after you to do a job or to do it better, that takes up space in my head and minutes in my day and it makes me grumpy. Since you added something to my plate, you'll need to remove something as well. Usually there's an option, A or B. (This happens a couple of times a month.)

Sometimes I do things that could look bribe-y: I may offer kids something to look forward to after an unpleasant experience. But I always say after, not if. Getting your tooth filled is not negotiable, and I will not attempt to bribe you into compliance. But I will sit near you and hold your hand, and I will tell you softly about the outing I have planned for afterward when we can talk together about how we don't like getting our teeth filled. (This one I can't quantify.)

These are small differences, maybe, but they have changed me and the way I think about my children's struggles.

You guys, it's important to me that you know I am writing about my best self, who disappears with troubling frequency. But it boils down to this: Do I believe in the capacity of the human soul to respond freely to grace? You'd better believe I do. And my highest goal as a parent is to show my kids that grace is real, and transformative, and available for the asking.

Croissants: the cookbook that will never be

You guys, it's so nice to hear from you! I didn't think anybody was going to wade through that whole post, so thanks! This is making me nostalgic for 2005.

Alexandra said that perhaps I could write a book, which I appreciated very much. I do not think, however, that a book is in the cards. Here is most of what my book would say:

1. Think carefully about the good habits that are (a) important for your family and (b) suitable for your kids' ages and temperaments
2. Enforce those habits kindly and consistently
3. Repeat #2 for months or years until it sticks

This is why Jo Frost's website gets more hits than mine, right? This is me telling you that we started the croissants at 1 on Sunday and they weren't done until 7:30 and we washed a lot of dishes and wiped up a lot of flour in between. Even though I tell you how pretty and golden brown they were, and how delicious the kids said they were (which I can't corroborate -- thanks, Whole 30), I would be completely sympathetic if you thought a can of frozen crescent rolls sounded more doable.

But I do want to write a bit about establishing good habits. If you can teach the kids to internalize your "do it now and do it right" voice, then you rarely have to use it. I only have ten minutes before my self-imposed blogging cutoff (that's the habit that equips me to be more patient with kids who need patience), but I'm going to throw out some thoughts and pick them up again tomorrow.

Here's an analogy that occurred to me: in teaching our kids to take on adult responsibilities, we are teaching them a foreign language. Fluency in another language takes years. No one ever hears a 5yo say "I satted down" and snarls "WHY are you STILL adding -ed to irregular past-tense verbs? What is WRONG with you?" (We would hope that such a person was taking anger management classes.) And yet we expect kids to get it quickly when it comes to responsibilities and adult behavior. I have said it myself: how many times do I have to tell you? 

The answer: a lot. A lot a lot a lot a lot. You don't notice all of the English (or whatever language you speak at home) you're modeling for your kids. You don't notice all of their errors, because you have absorbed the truth that kids make mistakes with language. It is every bit as normal to make mistakes, to sound babyish, as they learn Adult.

I used to underestimate the bandwidth that was required from me for habit formation. I had told them we were going to do this every day. I had made it clear that this was their responsibility. End of story, right?

Nope.

If I can't muster the follow-through, I'm not going to see the habits form. Good habits are another of the Golden Keys to authoritative parenting: they can carry you through annoying chores, previously soul-sucking sibling conflict negotiations, responsibilities like piano practice, you name it. But kids need support to get to the point where it's all automatic and they wouldn't dream of flaking out -- the point where they spontaneously apologize and offer to do one of your tasks* if they happen to forget one of theirs. They can get there, and you don't have to bribe or threaten or yell along the way. But you have to have the bandwidth to make it happen.

Oh, rats, I got excited and missed my cutoff. More soon!

*That's a rare occurrence. Apologies are common; voluntarily taking on more work is not.

Croissants, in the wild

Part 1 Part 2

Your requests for more details were well timed, since I had to kick into "inhabit the authority" mode twice yesterday. It was a crazy evening, CRA to the z^th power, and we needed to have done a little more planning yesterday morning. (You know the parts in the Aubrey-Maturin books where they re-enact Trafalgar with biscuit crumbs? My husband and I joke about doing something similar to plan movements of cars and drivers. Last night we wound up a few ships short of a fleet.)

I was at the gym and I needed to get Stella (a NOPE girl) into the car immediately. She's often dawdly when it's time to leave the childcare room, and I did not have time for dawdly. I said, "Stella, look at my eyes. We need to go right now or we will be late." And she came. She cried for a minute in the car because she hadn't finished her picture and she wasn't sure we had the right blue at home to match the section she'd been working on, but she did not give me a single second of pushback -- she got right up, walked willingly to the car, and fastened her own seatbelt even though she was sad. 

There were a few important things hidden in the interaction. I called her name with a falling intonation: this is not a question but an declaration. My tone of voice was deliberate; it said, "This is important. Not panic-inducing, but important." When I say "look at my eyes," it means "you have my full attention, and I need yours." (<-That right there is one of the Golden Keys of parenting with authority. In those moments I was lamenting at the beginning of yesterday's post, I was busy chatting. Inattention fuels limit-testing.) I pulled out a couple of big-gun phrases: I try not to say "right now" unless I really mean "right now," and "we will be late" comes with an unspoken "and that's serious." Both of those nuances, for what it's worth, have taken a long time to cultivate.

Some broader context: I am a huge, HUGE fan of giving my kids autonomy and modeling flexibility. Stella usually needs a minute to wrap things up in the childcare room. Sometimes I will offer the option of popping back in a little bit later. (We're usually waiting for her brother to finish his karate class, so it's no big deal to me if she hangs out with me or with the other kids.) Sometimes I will say, "Go ahead, watch the end of this scene" or "Finish using that color -- I'm not in a rush." I believe that my usual willingness to give her time contributes to her reciprocal willingness to listen and obey on the rare occasions when I say "right now, even though you don't want to."

When we got home, my NOPE teen had made plans to meet his girlfriend at 7 (and OH does he hate to be late) but I needed him to run me to church. "No," he said, "that's not going to work." I said, calmly, "There's a room full of people waiting for me. I know you're disappointed, but I have to get to church on time." He paused. Politely, he said, "Okay. Let me send a message to M."

There were three important things in that interaction: first, calm is critical. The authority I invoke if I get het up is not motherly authority; it is the dubious authority of the impending explosion. It invites a NOPE kid to explode right back, because in that scenario the bigger explosion can carry the day. Second, and this might be the single most important thing I know about mothering, compassion makes everything better. Letting a kid know that you hear and respect his feelings, even in a moment when you can't do anything to make them better, allows him to move past them instead of clinging to them. This was life-changing for me as a young mother, to learn that I shouldn't try to argue my toddler out of his feelings. Instead I could say kindly, "You really wish we could stay at the library. [slipping his arm into his jacket sleeve] What would you do if we stayed? [other arm] Maybe if we stayed we could build with the wooden blocks. [zipping up the jacket] Wooden blocks are super-fun, [taking his hand] and they have so many of them here. [heading for the elevator] I know it's a bummer to go. Would you like to push the button to call the elevator?" It was magic. And decency, all rolled into one. (On that topic, be sure to read Carol's lovely comment from yesterday. Carol is my dear friend and mothering mentor, the person whose prayers I request when I am feeling really stuck and uncertain.)

This thought really belongs in the previous paragraph, but it's a long paragraph already. (This is a long post already, and I have so much more to say!) The third important thing in my interaction with my son last night was that pause. Everybody -- everybody -- makes better choices and makes them less resentfully given a little time to own the decision. I did not leap in and say NO, RIGHT NOW, and I feel certain that contributed to the peaceful outcome. I got to church on time (although further scheduling FAIL moments meant that Stella wound up coming to the ladies' retreat team meeting a little bit later), and when I apologized afterward to my son for the interruption to his evening he said, "Nah, it's all good."

I keep thinking about Our Lord with the rich young ruler. He asked something huge of the man, something crazy, as he "looked at him and loved him." He gave the man space to choose freely. We also ask something huge, something crazy, of our children. In effect we say to our newborns, "I know you can't hold your own head up, but your task is to live independently in a fallen world and make it a better place. Ready?" So, too, we must look at them and love them, seeing how genuinely hard it is for them to learn to do what's right again and again. We know that sometimes they will choose the wrong thing. We know that free will is one of the greatest gifts of genuine love.

Last night as my daughter was drifting off next to me she said sleepily, "I love God. And you remind me of Him." Although my knee-jerk response was to think, "Oh, honey, I am SO not God," I am trying instead to be grateful for her words. I am thinking about all the freedom God affords me to serve him in ways that bring me joy. I am thinking about how uncommon it is for God to compel immediate obedience, and about how much I want to do the right thing in those moments.

I am thinking that's the kind of mom I want to be.

---

OH MY GOODNESS, nobody reads 1200-word blog posts in 2015. For Miriel and Rachel in particular I have some thoughts on the links between parenting authority and professorial authority. I have some more thoughts on the contexts that facilitate mothering with authority. But I will pause here for today. Tune in tomorrow...

Croissants, the follow-up

I woke up at 4:00 this morning and writhed -- writhed, I am telling you -- at the thought of the people who might read that post from last night and think, "Perhaps a better strategy than inhabiting your authority is in order, Jamie." I remembered the day I met Kira, when my daughter beaned her daughter on the head. (More than once.) I thought about the times that my daughter bit my brother's little boy when they were both smaller. She was not the sort of toddler about whom people said, "She's so well-behaved!" 

The point I wanted to make in yesterday's rambly post is that a short-term goal of instant compliance across contexts may be at odds with a long-term goal of thoughtful self-discipline. Like adults, kids need space to feel the consequences of their actions and respond appropriately. (Surely I am not the only one who needs a little time to offer a heartfelt apology, even when I am wrong.) Like adults, kids do better when they feel better. (Ergo, post-swim-lesson preschoolers might take some extra wrangling.) It may seem overly obvious to point out that day by day, kids are turning into adults. It's particularly clear to me given the spacing of my children: if I wouldn't say it to my 18yo, should I say it to my 15yo? to my 12yo? to my 9yo? to my 6yo? They are all heading to the same place, and while they need different responses from me those responses should have the same overarching goal.

I have two children who are temperamentally meek and pliant, and three whose default response to authority is NOPE. We prize meekness and pliancy in preschoolers, forgetting that those kids are more vulnerable to bullying and peer pressure as they grow because they're accustomed to saying yes. There is a place, a critical place, for saying NOPE. So I am muddling through, doing my best to teach the meek kids that there's a time to be less meek and the NOPE kids that yes is usually (but not always) a better response. Some days I still worry that I look like a bad mother. Some days I still worry that I am a bad mother. Some days I still wish it were faster.

Mostly I know that good things take time.

Croissants

One of the blessings of having a large family is that I can see more clearly where I'm going these days.

I knew, intellectually, that I was raising children who would one day live on their own out in the world, but it was so hard for me to feel that truth when my first few children were small. The idea that preschool discipline strategies might shape a future relationship seemed implausible.

It is the worst parenting cliche to say it goes so quickly, but WOW does it go quickly. My firstborn was just 3 years old, like, last week, and he is moving away from home in May: a summer job far from home, and then his freshman year of college. As I see his strengths and weaknesses and the places where we struggle, it shapes the way I am mothering my youngest. I know it's true now: it will actually be 12 years before she goes to college, but it's going to feel like I blinked and it was over.

These thoughts are brought to you courtesy of swimming lessons. Twice a week I find myself in the locker room with parents who are trying to wrangle their little swimmers into dry clothes and out the door. There is a fair amount of unhappiness in the accompanying cacophony. 

I think it's easy to forget that some kids find swimming lessons particularly exhausting. The noisy echoes of an indoor pool make it harder to hear the instructor, amping up the work of listening and following directions. The shallow end is not so shallow for preschoolers, and some of them find it stressful to be immersed there. Skinny little bodies are not as buoyant as well-padded adult bodies, and they may need to work harder at staying afloat. Small kids get colder faster because of their unfavorable volume-surface area ratio, and the locker room can feel like Siberia in January. The noisy echoes of the locker room make it harder to parse a parent's instructions, and the bustle of bodies in various stages of undress is highly distracting. I myself am not at my most cooperative when I am cold and tired and hungry and overstimulated.

These are the things I have been thinking about in the locker room. I am remembering evenings when I was so frustrated after swimming lessons that I could have cried, or punched somebody. I am also observing my own reactions to the Hulk Smash version of Jo Frost, who pops up there with some regularity.

Recently I watched a woman hissing at her slow-moving daughter: "You have CHOSEN to sit on the naughty chair when we get home. Are you going to CHOOSE to sit in the naughty chair even longer? Are you going to CHOOSE to forfeit all your videos? Are you going to CHOOSE to lose your American Girl doll until you learn to behave?" At this point my shoulders were up around my ears and I was twitching. (NB: I have issues -- big, ugly, old old issues -- with adults saying to kids "It is your fault that I am out of control.") I have thought about it again and again, and the thing I keep coming back to is that threats and bribes are not good long-term solutions.

One of the gifts of fifth-time motherhood is that I have learned to inhabit my authority as my daughter's mother -- to say "That is not okay" and expect to be obeyed. I have seen that kids do eventually learn: it feels better to do the right thing than the wrong thing. There is joy in duty, as implausible as it sounds. I have also learned, alas, that there are no reliable shortcuts. Threats may change behavior in the short term. (Or they may not, as I learned from my firstborn. He's the one who said to me, at age 5, "it was one of those 'better to reign in hell than serve in heaven' moments.") Threats don't change hearts.

Today I made croissants with my 12yo. It's a slow process: mixing, rising, turning and chilling to make the flaky layers, cutting, baking. "They were awesome," he said enthusiastically. But I think it is a frozen crescent-roll kind of world, in which we want tips and tricks to get the 2yo up from the locker room floor RIGHT NOW, to make her stop gawking at the naked lady next to us RIGHT NOW, to compel her into her clothes and out the door RIGHT NOW. If I were still in the intransigent 2yo stage I might be annoyed by this post. "What do you MEAN, I should inhabit my authority as her mother?! I just want to eat my DINNER before the next geologic AGE rolls around!"

And I do not mean to say "Moms of America, you're doing it WRONG!" I only mean to say that it will get better, it really will, and that love, and motherly stubbornness, can conquer all. Or at least most.

(O-kay, this post could invite a slew of unhappy comments. If I had not planned to blog daily this month, it would go straight back to the drafts folder. I stumbled across this post earlier today, which contains many of the same thoughts from the perspective of a younger me.)

Follow-up post here, and another with specifics here.

Safe

There was no school today; there was no school yesterday. It's cold here. My Facebook feed is divided on the question of whether it's really that cold, with some voices saying "Think of the children" and others cantankerizing* "When I was a kid...."

*totally a word

We had frequent snow days when I was a schoolkid in Raleigh County, WV. The mountain roads are steep, narrow, and curved, and they become unsafe quickly in winter weather. I remember missing plenty of school while we waited for the county to plow itself out. But I do not remember missing school because it was cold -- not ever, not once.

It's always about costs and benefits, right? I do not deny that there are real costs to being out in this weather and that they hit some families harder than others. I expect to give my grade-school kids a ride in the morning (my husband, born in Wisconsin, bred in Michigan and Minnesota, pauses here to roll his eyes at his softy Southern-reared wife); I understand that's not an option for some families in the district. I can replace a missing pair of mittens or buy a beefier coat -- another choice that's not open to everyone. But there are also costs associated with missing work, with hiring babysitters, with leaving kids unattended, with closing school-associated free lunch programs in communities with high rates of food insecurity. And -- oh yeah -- with missing instructional days.

It seems to me that the conviction that kids shouldn't be out in the cold is related to the idea that kids shouldn't play outside alone, or shouldn't take the bus by themselves, or shouldn't face the risks built into metal playground equipment. As a culture we prize safety, and if it might hurt someone we might need to prohibit it. This is why there are only two parks in Dubuque, Iowa where sledding is allowed. This is why a uniformed police officer once stopped me to tell me it was a bad idea to walk with my baby on a 20-degree morning. This is why, I think, there was no school today.

You might recall that I get a little het up about the hidden costs of safety. That neighbor, for instance, who was so concerned about keeping my kids safe from their negligent mother actually caused them a whole lot of avoidable stress. Of course I am not going to turn my children outside with shorts and tank tops tomorrow and tell them they can handle it. But in my marrow I am certain that there is enormous value in having authority figures in your life say again and again, "Off you go; you can handle it."

It's not just childhood that's affected by an over-emphasis on safety. Recently I have been reading Atul Gawande's book Being Mortal. I've been an Atul Gawande fan for years, and this is the best thing he's ever written. Twice today it has made me cry, both times with a keen sense of gratitude for the evanescent gifts of life and love. The first part of the book talks about how we deal with frailty in aging adults. And how, my friends, do we deal with frailty in aging adults? We focus on their safety. While the frail themselves would often prefer a focus on preserving autonomy, our system isn't set up for that. For adults even more than for children, the costs of playing it safe are substantial.

I was walking to lunch today (and let me tell you, it was a BRISK and INVIGORATING walk), thinking that we don't seem to have a problem with discomfort, exactly -- how could CrossFit be proliferating if discomfort is the problem? I think the issue is more that we want to be able to control the suffering. We assume the suffering attendant on staying home for another day with siblings and catching up on school in June is preferable to the suffering of waiting for the bus, maybe.

But I sat there in the warmth of the restaurant feeling determined to push back against a safety-at-all-costs culture: to embrace the cold. To be glad for the unexpected. To continue to encourage my kids' autonomy. To live gratefully and, as far as I can manage it, fearlessly. 

I have a bunch of other thoughts brewing but it looks like I will need to herd kids to school in the morning. I'm interested in your thoughts. Hope you are staying warm.

Intersections

I was addressing Christmas cards by the cozy rosy glow of my SAD light*, and I was thinking about strange intersections and divergences. I am old-school enough to write addresses by hand, copying them one by one from my physical address book. I have used that book since the 90s, and it shows -- addresses scratched out and rewritten, coffee spills from Advents past. 

I no longer know where to find the boy named Matt who wanted to be a priest, but I pray for him. I have respected the wishes of the long-ago friend who said (kindly) that she'd prefer not to be in touch, but I pray for her and remember her wistfully. I only address cards to a few of the names I penciled in while we lived in Edinburgh, but I think of the others fondly. I remember learning to say "Penicuik" with a proper rounded front vowel. And I remember that season of our life when I always worried at least a little about making the rent, and I feel grateful for God's providence and for lessons learned in living simply. 

Some of the people in my address book will never receive another Christmas card: my brother-in-law Brance, whose absence from this world still takes me by surprise sometimes, a lovely, lovely man named John Murphy from Edinburgh, whose kindness and quiet service I will always remember. Sometimes I reach an entry where I do not know if I should send a Christmas card or not -- has it been too long? Is my Christmas letter too weird? I wonder sometimes if anyone out there is reading my name in an old address book, and praying for me. Perhaps I will find out in heaven.

We send two envelopes to the same small Louisiana town, and I think about the strangeness of the paths we walk -- the unexpected journeys that led two couples, unknown to each other, from the same part of the Midwest to the same part of the South. Today is the O ADONAI antiphon and I am thinking about Moses -- about the loneliness of herding sheep, about the ancient story of a desultory ramble through "the far side of the wilderness" that became an encounter with the living God.

While in some ways the ability to track parcels online is a control freak's dream, it can also be an exercise in exasperation. Last month I watched a package of yarn go from a town an hour away to a small town 15 minutes away, and then back to the town an hour away, and then finally to Gladlyville and my front porch. HONESTLY, I said to myself, what's up with that? But sometimes life seems like that too: an aleatory entangling of false starts and missteps. I once read a definition of omniscience that has stayed with me: God's omniscience means that he could see the traces of each step a person took, all through each day of her life, and look at the resulting shape to say, "Ah, yes: that's Jamie." In the middle of the seemingly purposeless back and forth and up and down, we are known, and loved.

So I drink my coffee, doing my best to keep it off the address book's pages this year, and I say a prayer for the people with whom we walked a little way: that the light of God will encircle them, and that the love of God will hold them close.

--

*That is a joke -- using a SAD light is like weight training for the pupillary constrictor muscles, and my kids approach me with shielded eyes when they need something while I am sitting in front of it, but OH it makes such a difference in my mood.

For Whose Sake?

"The true burden of environmentally induced cancers has been grossly underestimated," according to a report from the NIH National Cancer Institute.

You might recall that I spent half of my childhood in Raleigh County, West Virginia, home of the mine in which 29 men died in 2010. (My high school pal Chris took this picture for the NYT.) The explosion was caused by blatant safety violations; an independent investigation laid the blame at the feet of the owner, Massey Energy.

Don Blankenship, Massey's CEO, was in the New Yorker earlier this week. He set up a nonprofit, see, and with staggering irony called it And For The Sake Of The Kids. He used this organization to buy himself a state supreme court justice, contributing $3 million dollars to the campaign of one Brent Benjamin. 

Benjamin did not recuse himself from hearing Blankenship's case when it came before the court. Can you guess who won?

Hint: not the kids.

I have posted before about the impact of toxin exposure on West Virginia kids. This time I have been thinking more about my friends from high school. The newspaper kids and the yearbook kids used to hang out together. One of those boys died recently after a long battle with cancer. The yearbook editor has been Facebooking her breast cancer treatment. Another Facebook friend is relieved that her breast cancer is in remission, but she has such extensive nerve damage from chemo that she can't walk. Trying to be upbeat, she shared a story about trying to drive her wheeled cart through Walmart and crashing into a display.

I'm not laughing.

Exposure to mining waste is associated with a significant increase in cancer risk. Don Blankenship's corner-cutting has real costs and he is not being held accountable for them. West Virginia wants to call itself "open for business." That shouldn't have to mean "closed to the sufferings of its citizens."

Sane Mom Revolution

Bearing is trying to get a #sanemomrevolution hashtag to go viral over on Twitter. If you have tales to tell of successful adventures in kid independence, take 'em to Twitter and hashtag away! 

I was trying to think about what to share, but no good tweets were springing to mind. I think my problem is that it doesn't really seem revolutionary to me to let my kids have some independence. I made a flow chart to illustrate my thinking (click to enlarge):

(The flowchart could be a problem if this hashtag actually goes viral. Y'all don't need me to tell you that the hail thing is a joke, but strangers on the internet get a little crazy sometimes.)

I was thinking about how our kids expect to get themselves to and from sports practices if it's feasible, and about how they're not afraid to take the city bus with a sibling, and about how my 9yo frets over polluting cars and prefers to walk, and about how I plan for the 9yo and the 5yo to walk to and from school this fall without my supervision.

But maybe my best argument today for a Sane Mom Revolution is this: my two teenagers, now 14 and 17, were slouching in front of screens this afternoon when I said, "Hey, did you guys want to see that Shakespeare tragedy? This matinee is your last chance. You'd have to go right now." I kid you not: they jumped up and put on their shoes. My oldest said, "What's the best way to walk to that building?" and then answered his own question. They marched over to the box office and bought their own tickets, and I have every confidence that they are sitting quietly through the performance right now.

It might not be Shakespeare for your family. (Okay, it probably won't be Shakespeare, because I know we are a little weird about Shakespeare. When we told the 5yo she was too small to go this summer she wailed, "But I loooove Shakespeare." Also, totally unrelated to the rest of this post but right on topic for this parenthetical comment, how cute is this picture?) Anyway-- maybe the leisure activity you hope your kids will enjoy as adults is running or biking or museum-ing or coffeehouse chess or something entirely different. Or maybe you just wish your kids could run down to CVS and pick up a new toothbrush while you cook dinner. Entertaining oneself in the real world, running errands capably alone-- these are important life skills that do not descend on kids like an anvil made of competent adult-ness. It used to be completely normal for kids to walk themselves to the ice cream store, allowance in hand.

Let's make it normal again.

Yes and No, Redux

Years ago, when this was a different blog, I wrote a post called Yes and No. I've been thinking about it here and there this summer, lazily drafting a post about things I always say yes to. Yes, you can always have a band-aid, even if your injury is invisible to the naked eye. Yes, you can check out whatever you want from the library (but OH you guys, I am rueing this one today, when the library is telling me I owe fines for Barbie The Cheerleader Veterinarian Talks About Clothes With Her Slender White Friends Again). Then I got stuck and asked my 14yo, who reminded me: Yes, you can always have a piece of fruit. Yes, I will (almost) always knit you that _____, whatever it might be.

That could easily be a Mama Wars kind of post, right? Not my intention, friends. We all have our stuff that we say yes to and our stuff we feel guilty about saying no to. I rarely say yes to requests to bake cookies and cupcakes, because baking them means I will eat too many of them (the guiiiiiiilt! will my children grow up to say, "My mom was an awesome baker but she would only bake for us on birthdays/name days"?). I could go on; I won't.

Tonight after the CSA pickup I was hanging out on the playground with Stella. A couple of other families were there too, including a mother with two boys who looked to be about 1 and 10. She was conspicuously sweet to the little one, and conspicuously frustrated with the bigger one. Her frustration was cloaked in middle-class positive-discipline lingo ("Now, Benedict, you need to make independent good choices!"), but there was a worrisome current of rigidity running through it. For instance: at one point he was running in a nearby field with a couple of his same-aged friends when she summoned him back to the playground. "I didn't see what you threw, Benedict, but you cannot throw anything unless you want to sit right here next to me."

Which-- dude. Ten-year-old boys, as a general rule, like to throw things. Telling a 10-year-old boy he can't throw anything at all, ever, not even in an open field with lots of safe throwing material lying around, is about like telling him he needs to work harder at his levitation because surely he can get around that pesky law of gravity if he just keeps trying. 

We were there together for about 30 minutes, during which every interaction they had was negative-- every single one. When he was playing elsewhere she was talking about him to her friends, and every single comment was negative-- every single one. He was an especially active kid, and I get that it's frustrating to have a kid who needs regular reminders about civilized behavior. At the same time, his behavior was never unusual or dangerous. I also get that it's frustrating to have a mom who tells you every other minute that you're doing it wrong. At one point she said, "Benedict? Benedict! When I call your name you need to respond to me right away!" He still didn't respond. I wanted to say, "Perhaps he's not responding to you because he knows you're going to correct him again." I wanted to say, "Did you ever have a brother?" But maybe I could have just said, "How has your day been today?" Maybe I am doing that thing again where I extrapolate unjustly from limited information.

As I sat there I was trying to pray, for her and for all of us intermittently frazzled moms. The thing I want to remember about tonight is that you can choose your words attentively and still trumpet your vexation; you can modulate your voice carefully and still send a message of rejection, just as surely as if you shouted it. The thing I most hope my children will take with them when they leave my home is an inner certainty that they are loved unshakably. We can all draw our yes/no lines in different places, but I think our most important responsibility as mothers is to say an all-caps YES to a kid's fundamental identity. The person you are at your core, the person God made you to be: that person is loved forever.

I was drafting this post and my 14yo came over and said, "Remember when you read me The Two Towers aloud while you knitted and knitted?" He hugged me and told me how loved it made him feel. (If you have a 14yo boy, you will probably know that this is not an everyday occurrence.) The surge of gladness it brought me (and the relief, since I'd been fretting about the ways I am like the playground mom) felt like an answer to the prayer I'd been saying all through the evening: O God, let them know that they are loved.

Five is easier than two.

Over on Facebook I left a comment about how it's easier to have five children than it was to have two children. When I had two, I was worried and frazzled a lot of the time. The toddler wanted that baby to go right back where he came from, things were often tense between Elwood and me, and I could never seem to finish the dishes before 11:30 at night. We have our struggles these days, but the kids are reasonably kind to each other, Elwood and I genuinely enjoy each other, and the dishes are always caught up. (The basement is a mess and Stella's fingernails need trimming, but...I'm working on it.)

What changes?

You learn how to be a mom. Recently two colleagues were talking about the wretchedness of the newborn period: it was so repetitive, so unrewarding, so miserable. I enjoyed that stage immensely with my three youngest, and I think part of it was feeling more competent and less worried. I had learned how to nurse a newborn, how to change an epic diaper, how to accept the reality that tiny babies generate an astonishing volume of laundry. I was in a better spot to enjoy those newborn noises and fleeting smiles, to see the goodness in meeting simple needs. The same thing is true of later infancy and toddlerhood and the preschool years: it's easier to enjoy something you already know how to do.

You learn how to be a wife. Adding a baby to the mix was a strain on our marriage, and adding a second was even harder. While I am not holding up our marriage as any sort of model, I do want to say that it works much better with a large family than it did with a small one. We have a division of labor that works for us, and, more importantly, we sincerely appreciate each other. In late 1999, when our second son was tiny and things between us were fraught, it would have been hard for me to imagine how affectionate and encouraging Elwood would be in 2014. It makes an enormous difference in my peace of mind and in the climate of our home. (Because it's easy for me to be envious of other people's happy lives as seen on the internet, I will mention that we have been through a couple of rounds of marriage counseling, and we still have some unresolved crud.) (Also, superstitiously, I fear this post will mean we are about to have a ridiculous argument about something minor that sparks a three-day coolness between us. "Happy" still means far, far from perfect.)

You learn how to be a homemaker. Last week the boys were having trouble finding clean socks, but it was the first time in a long while. (It was time for a Target run -- too many socks had sprouted holes at once.) When I had two small kids, I had to do the housework myself while keeping them from trashing the parts of the house I wasn't actively trying to put to rights. These days, I have to be disciplined about making sure their jobs are done (and done to a reasonable standard, because their idea of "wiping down the bathroom" still diverges from my idea of "wiping down the bathroom"), but less of the physical work of running a home rests on my shoulders. I fold less laundry with five children than I did with two. (And my sloth is less of an issue than it used to be. It is a little embarrassing to admit that I had to go to such lengths, but it made a world of difference: I made a promise before God that I would prioritize prayer, dishes, laundry, and meal prep above goofing off on the internet. If I slip up, I take it to confession.)

They learn; they teach. When a new mom is struggling to nurse her baby, it's hard for her to imagine the future. It's hard for her to see that her baby is learning at every feeding. It's not just that she has to figure out a magic solution: her baby is wired to grow and learn and feed successfully. They can figure it out together, given time and patience. In the same way, it was hard for me to see the future when my oldest was having 45-minute tantrums over trivial things. I learned a lot about managing tantrums, sure, but he learned even more, proportionally speaking. First he learned not to hit his brother, and then he learned how to be kind (not just not-hitting) to smaller children. And his example was such an important help to the younger kids. Older siblings can be even more effective teachers than parents, because they're respected peers rather than authority figures. If I eat squid happily, it's because I'm from Planet Grownup where everyone eats weird things and pretends to enjoy them. If the big kids eat squid happily, then squid is less like alien food and more like cool-people food.

You gain perspective. For the six weeks that it took my oldest to smile at me, I had a hard time seeing him as a person. I mean, don't get me wrong -- I didn't think I had given birth to a llama or anything; I just couldn't imagine that he was something beyond a bundle of needs. I couldn't have predicted that he would grow into the whip-smart hilarious irreverent 6'1" guy he is today: it seemed approximately as plausible as his growing up to be a llama. Having watched Joe grow from a boy who took over the homily so he could talk about King Kong into a boy who asks me to read him the Old Testament for comfort, I don't worry so much when Stella starts singing Let It Go during the Lamb of God. (I shut it right down, but I don't worry that it means I have failed to transmit the importance of the Mass. Or at least not very much.) It's important to take the long view in motherhood, I think-- to remember that your task is to obsolesce, to prepare your kids for adulthood and for heaven and not to obsess about micromanaging childhood.

Just last weekend I was fretting about Alex, who wants to travel to Chicago with a group of college-aged boys and no chaperone. How much independence is healthy for a 17yo? How much supervision is necessary? They're not easy questions. In the middle of my tizzy I had a glimpse of golden certainty-- that the Lord loves Alex more than I do, and has good plans for him that I cannot predict or understand. My job is not to stand wild-eyed with a metaphorical broomstick in hand, swatting away hypothetical evils. My job is to love with open hands-- to pray, to teach, to hope, to wait, and to love some more.

Like shining from shook foil

I used to think that developing a "teaching philosophy" must be the worst, most painful exercise in educator-ese, but then a teaching philosophy snuck up on me.

I believe that the glory of God shines out from the whole created world. I believe we see "through a glass darkly" in part because the glass is covered in divine fingerprints, in questions whose answers reveal Truth and Beauty as well as truth and beauty.

I believe St. Thomas Aquinas spoke a beautiful truth when he said that God calls us out of double darkness, out of ignorance as well as sin. I believe that growth in knowledge is both an obligation and a joy.

I believe it is important to keep the obligation and the joy in balance. Real learning is work, and we do our students no favors if we pretend it will always be fun. But OH my friends, we have been given minds made for learning and a world that tells forth the goodness (and creativity and purpose and wisdom and whimsy) of a living God. Real learning should also bring us joy.

I believe the first teaching philosophy I ever heard (way back in 1985, when we performed Up The Down Staircase in high school) might be the best. It is surely the most succinct: Chaucer said of the clerk of Oxford "and gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche." I believe that a good teacher must first and foundationally be a joyful learner, someone who can delight in discovering more about her topic. I believe joy is catching. One of the great rewards of my job is hearing from students who say, "I thought this class would be boring. But you have changed my mind and now I want to learn more."

Why am I telling you this? Because my sixth-grader's social studies teacher told them that they should expect to find their unit dry and boring. She said they didn't need to remember the material after the test was over, that the purpose of the unit was to teach them how to learn rather than to impart actual content they would need to retain.

This would bother me in almost any context. But she was talking about ancient Greece.

Homer: dry and boring. Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Sophocles: dry and boring. Thucydides: dry and boring. Plato: dry and boring. Joe is my military history buff -- he has spent hours poring over diagrams of Thermopylae and Salamis. "Mom," he said in pained tones, "she told us about Salamis and she said, 'All you need to know is that the Greeks won because they had faster ships.'"

Reading the ancients was one of the unexpected pleasures of my undergrad career -- peering inside the minds of people who long ago returned to dust. They had thought and written and eaten and laughed and desired and fought and prayed -- and then died. But I could still hear their voices.

Of course it's fine with me if my son's teachers do not share my belief that creation sings of the goodness of God. It's a public school. But it seems to me that a teacher's duty is to observe the world with interest, to watch for connections, to be enthusiastic about her topic. Enthusiasm is contagious.

Apathy is contagious too.

The Unrecorded Life

For as long as we've been attending the kids' school concerts, I've been wondering about the people recording school concerts. "Who," I would think to myself, "is going to watch that? Isn't it bad enough the first time through?" Clearly I'm in the minority. At the last junior high concert I attended, it seemed like every single family had at least one member charged with getting video of the proceedings. And I'm sure you saw the picture of St. Peter's Square in 2013 vs. 2005.

The first part of my question is this: why the emphasis on creating visual mementos? Do families really go back and watch the performances again? Is there something more special about having one's own photo or video of a famous event like the papal election? Are there lots of grandparents who enjoy cellphone videos of concerts that are kind of painful the first time around? Even when the events are non-painful, I still find it puzzling. Part of the magic of live performance is its evanescence -- the short-lived connection between an actor or musician and his audience. 

The second part of my question is this: does recording an experience alter the experience itself? If a person is shooting video, does the focus on framing the shot and panning smoothly leave a person with less capacity to pay attention to the present moment? I know it can change the experience for some audience members -- last weekend my son ran the lights for the high school musical, where a mom was recording each of her son's numbers on her iPhone. This is a recent phenomenon, seeing a performer on stage at the same time that you see the performer on the iPhone screen at the front of the house, a little oblong of light amid the darkened rows of seats.

Because I've been writing recently about being judgy, I should probably spell it out: there's no judginess lurking behind these questions. As long as people aren't blocking anyone's view, or making recordings after being asked not to make recordings, I don't have any objections. It's just foreign to me.

Somewhere there's a C.S. Lewis quote about two men watching the sun go down. One of the men is engrossed in the experience itself, while the other is inwardly watching himself watch the sunset. (Anybody know where that comes from? I can't find it.) I often watch myself watching -- planning a blog post about the sunset, thinking of a pithy Facebook status update about the sunset. "Stop that," I tell myself sometimes. "Be right here." Sometimes it works, for a little while.

For a long time, I think, the effects of self-watching were mostly confined to the self. With the spread of social media, it's a different story. There's a constant temptation to create a curated online life. I keep asking myself, "Am I being real, or am I buffing the image I'd like to project?" My pal Jenny talks about trying to teach her daughters that it's silly to envy a Facebook profile, which may be widely divorced from an actual messy life. It doesn't seem to be working, she reports.

One of the Mason-Dixon Knitting bloggers described a game she played with herself, trying to remember the unrecorded events of babyhood. It's a hard game for me too. I go back to my archives all the time and unearth fun stories I had completely forgotten. If I don't write it down, if I don't take a picture, will the memory fade? If we don't record the junior high band's rendition of Frosty the Snowman, will it be as if it never happened?

(That last is a chance I'm willing to take.) 

To its knees

When the Columbine shooting happened I read the news coverage obsessively. We were living in the UK at the time, but the London Times covered the event at length. I would read and sob and read and wipe my nose and read and wonder why on earth something like this had happened. I remember talking to my friend Carlene, another American mother living in Edinburgh. Carlene had married into a Scottish family and she brought up the 1996 Dunblane massacre. She said, her eyes wide, "It brought the country to its knees."

The killing of 5- and 6-year-old children in Scotland brought about big changes. Schools became more secure -- schools here will doubtless be encouraged to do likewise -- but the commission that investigated the massacre recommended changes to UK gun laws. As a result, more than 160,000 weapons were surrendered in the couple of years following Dunblane.

Of course it's not just about guns; it's also about mental illness. The NHS is not what you'd call an exemplary system for those with mental health problems, but it provides a safety net that is simply unavailable here in the US. It's possible to get phenomenal mental health services here if you have deep pockets. It's equally possible for someone with treatable mental illness to go off the rails because he wasn't wealthy, because he didn't have insurance, because he feared the "pre-existing condition" label up until he wasn't really capable of thinking rationally about his condition.

It is baffling to me that these ideas provoke as much antipathy as they do in the US-- baffling that the assault weapons ban expired in 2004 and has never made it to the floor for a vote since then, baffling that the idea of a public option to provide basic health care to mentally ill individuals inspires such wrath and doomsaying.

The next school shooting -- and it is not a matter of whether, only of when -- will doubtless inspire even more calls to Do Something. Surely it is not so very hard to see what we need to do. One of the things that still chills me from the Columbine reporting was the reaction of the killers to the destruction they had wrought. "Look at that kid's brains!" they said enthusiastically, according to one of the survivors. The thought of a kid so far gone into darkness that the sight of a fellow student's exposed brain tissue aroused only excitement -- it's horrifying. And yet for a wide swath of America the idea that we should separate the mentally ill and the assault weapons is apparently viewed as an unconscionable assault on freedom.

I am not proposing a UK-style ban on handguns. Still, the reality is sobering. We have had too many school shootings for me to count here in the US.

There has only been one Dunblane.

Who stops his ears

Eight years ago I held a small body in the palm of my hand, the baby I miscarried near the end of my first trimester. Last week I was grading projects in which my students described congenital anomalies and to my surprise I found myself leaking slow tears into the keyboard. I was remembering that little body, delicate and still. His tiny ears were set low on his face, right down at the angle of his jaw. This is a marker for a bunch of bad things: chromosomal anomalies, various syndromes, teratogen exposure.

I was so sad -- so sad. We named him Dominic. Our priest came and blessed a little patch of ground next to our apartment for the burial. I will never stop missing him.

In the brouhaha over the election he seems to me like an emblem for what's wrong with American politics. One side argues that the continued existence of babies like Dominic should be at their mothers' discretion. The other side thinks that they ought to be born, but insists that the idea of communal responsibility for their complex medical and developmental needs will lead us straight to godless government and financial ruin.

I am so tired -- so far beyond tired, actually -- of hearing that I should go along with one of these errors for the greater good.

Heather King's writings on the American political system have spoken to my heart. I have been studiously avoiding political links on Facebook all through the election season, but what did I do on Sunday night? I shared a link to her recent post. Some part of me said, "Hey! Let's offend everybody, all at one time, by sharing a link that compares Obama and Romney to Hitler and Goebbels!"

Monday morning I woke up and said, "What was I thinking?" I deleted the link. Somehow, though, it was still floating around FB later that day. My friend Patrick saw it and declared King's thoughts on contraception "one of the most disturbing things [he'd] ever read." (With his permission, I'm pasting his whole comment down below in the comments on this post.)

The idea of contraception as morally problematic is regarded as a wacky one these days, the furthest purlieu of the bleak hinterlands inhabited by hardcore fanatics. It attracts derision and disbelief. In the first year that I was blogging I wrote about controversial things like abortion and Church teaching on contraception. Is it sensible or cynical that I don't touch those topics these days? I can't say for sure. What I know is that if you spend your twenties and thirties saying "Yes! I will be open to life!" you'll probably be too busy in your forties to argue about it online.

So I'm not really interested in arguing. I am only here to say that I am grateful for the Church that challenges me to say yes: yes to serving the least of these, yes to growing in the greatest of these. Yes to the crazy idea that fertility is a gift to be welcomed and not a scourge to be subdued. In the comments on that Shirt of Flame post Heather King responded to a man whose reaction was much like my friend Patrick's. She said, "when sex isn't open to life, something gets torn, something gets divided."

In my twenties I used to say that it damages the integrity of the sexual act, this idea that we can separate unitive and procreative purposes like bits of velcro. I used to talk about how empowering I found NFP. I used to say, a little smugly, "Humans are not baboons, with uncontrollable urges driven by estrus." I don't say those things these days -- in part because I'm rarely trying to persuade anybody these days and smug is something I try hard to avoid, and in part because NFP is harder in my forties than it was in my twenties and thirties. 

I have learned, though, that things worth doing are often hard things. My finding them difficult doesn't mean I have the freedom to give up on them. I don't say that lightly or smugly; I say it a little wearily. When I write about my Dominic I am keenly aware that it is easy to love the remembered baby and to mourn what might have been. I can only guess, from years of working with disabled people, at the difficulties of the might-have-been scenario. I have seen enough of those difficulties not to trivialize them.

At the same time, I have seen enough of difficulty to say that fear of difficulty should not be a barrier to doing God's will. As my spiritual director reminded me this evening, we don't count the thorns when we look at a rosebush. Life's not about the thorns. Instead it's about Jesus, who calls us and equips us to offer the greatest of these to the least of these. Jesus, who did not wave a magic wand to eliminate suffering but instead suffered with us. Jesus who is with us in the mucky mess, mysteriously enlarging our capacity for love and trust. Jesus, bigger than the brokenness and surely, mercifully, eternally, bigger than this broken political system.

Lighter

So you guys, I have a confession. All of that fitness stuff I've been doing this summer? Part of my motivation was this class reunion. I mean, a big chunk of my motivation was that I wanted to keep up with my running group, and I wanted to work on strength training to see if it helped me avoid joint pain this season, and it has, which is fantastic, and also I like being able to open jars all by my own studly self. But that wasn't my only motivation.

In high school "thin" was part of my identity. When my BMI eased up to 17, I was aghast. Since then I've gained 25 pounds, 10 or 15 of which I need for things like strong bones and normal ovarian function, and 10 or 15 of which are a perpetual vexation. I envisioned myself (okay, preposterously, but also persistently) walking into the reunion and hearing whispers along the lines of "That Jamie Most has let herself GO."

It turns out that (a) two months isn't enough time to make big changes in a body plodding through its fifth decade. And (b), the thing about high school reunions is that everybody else has aged just as much as you have, so they're almost all carrying some extra poundage and they'd rather chat about how you've managed to have five -- FIVE?? really, five?!? five as in one more than four?? -- kids than about what size pants you're wearing these days. The comment I heard most often was "You haven't changed a bit." Which is ridiculous (do you know what my HAIR looked like in high school? before I discovered gel? when I blew it dry every day? I have pictures; I refuse to share), but I'm not complaining.

I'd spent so much time thinking about my teenaged body that I hadn't given much thought to my teenaged psyche. Last Saturday, though, I met some friends at a state park for a picnic lunch. A few minutes before I had to go, one of them said to me, "Jamie, I have nightmares about you."

I assumed it was a joke, because I am awfully bossy with an obnoxious streak, but he wasn't smiling. He said he still regretted being so mean to me in our geometry class. He said he had liked me, and he had wanted to be cool and flirty, but instead he had just been mean. He mentioned an incident I didn't even remember. He looked stricken.

It brought back a welter of memories. One day he tied a length of broken cassette tape to my belt loop, so that when I marched down the hall to the cafeteria it unfurled behind me, yards and yards of it, like a tattered sail. I was mortified, in the way that only a 14-year-old can be mortified. I felt so lost that year, uncertain why I was so lonely. By graduation we were friends, though, and I would never have expected to hear him sound so remorseful.

"All forgiven," I said. He looked grateful, and relieved.

The exchange reminded me of the relentless soul-sucking stupidity of high school -- the posturing, the gossip, the putdowns, the casual ugliness. I am so grateful, thinking back, that I don't live like that these days. I can tell the people I love that I love them. I can know that I am loved in return. My friends are usually careful about gossip. I no longer worry about being trapped in a coal country small town for the rest of my days. I have learned that I would rather be kind than dazzling, and that the laughter that follows a joke made at another's expense is a uniquely unsatisfying kind of laughter. (Candor compels me to admit that the tone of voice I use to admonish a child to be kind to a sibling is not always what you'd call a kind tone. Working on that one.)

If you'd told me in high school what my waist would measure after 25 years and 5 children, I would have been appalled. I would have envisioned myself as something on the scale of Jabba the Hut, doomed to a life of muumuus and self-loathing. I wonder if my high school self would have believed what I could tell her: that her post-pregnancy ribcage would no longer fit in that prom dress, but that it would hold a fuller heart -- a heart less afraid of what other people might think or say. I wonder if she would believe this thing I know to be true: that she could gain 25 pounds, and still feel a thousand pounds lighter.

Back on the horse

I remember a college acquaintance opining that safer playgrounds were to blame for the decline of hardihood and determination in American youth. It is, of course, a bit ironic for a 20-year-old to be griping about the moral failings of American youth, but it is an argument that has stayed with me. His idea was that kids used to be able to take risks on the playground, but that increasingly playgrounds were being redesigned with added padding and less dangerous equipment.

Twenty-odd years later, it's even more conspicuous. My kids gripe about it too: one of the playgrounds near our house is much less fun than it used to be. They took out the merry-go-round; they took out the funky metal spider you could climb all over (rickety, blazing hot in summer, covered in peeling paint of uncertain vintage). There's one of those green and beige plastic structures in place now: safe and boring.

For years I have wanted my kids to play hard on the playground: to get stronger, to figure out new skills, to wear themselves out so they would take longer naps. (Wait, perhaps I shouldn't admit my secret agenda.) I have rolled my eyes inwardly at parents who seemed to want to control the playground experience. "No, no, Sadie!" they say. "We go UP the steps and DOWN the slide." Isn't it more fun to go up the slide and then down the slide some more? Is there a rule against going up the slide? Aside from the Big Rule, of course: Don't Be A Jerk. If someone's waiting to go down the slide, or heading up the ladder in preparation for going down the slide, then you don't go up the slide. If there are littler kids around, you are vigilant about their safety even if you have to slow down your own fun. Courtesy trumps fun. But fun is the reason we have playgrounds, isn't it?

And then. Friday. My little guy's little body, the body I bore and nursed and diapered and tended -- motionless after that horrifying thud.

I would insert a joke here about bubble wrap, but I can't even joke. We're scheduled to go back to that park for swim lessons tomorrow, and I don't want to go. This is the wrong thing to take from his accident. Even as I was biking home that day, grateful for a fast bike and strong legs and good health insurance, I thought, "This should teach me not to be so fearful, because it's so easy to fear the wrong thing and the actual disaster always takes you by surprise."

I think I need a little more grace to absorb that truth.

Pete's doing well. He has some nasty bruising on his knees and a still-sizable lump on his head. He complains of intermittent headaches. But his memory is just fine -- he even remembers the accident now -- and he's managing perfectly well with Tylenol. So maybe the thing to do tomorrow is to follow his lead, to see if he wants to visit the playground again. And maybe duct-tape his bike helmet in place.

Discuss

I have posted before about our efforts to teach our kids to navigate the world independently, and our occasional encounters with people who seem to think that navigating the world independently is a skill kids should develop spontaneously at approximately age 19 after having been bundled in body armor and bubble wrap up until that time. This week, though, I am bumping up against the edges of what I'm comfortable with myself.

We have one car, and we mostly like it that way. To clarify: my husband loves it that way, and I think it works pretty well. I've been making intermittent second-car noises as the kids' schedules get more complicated, but they remain intermittent.

My oldest son had a school activity on Saturday, and he had plans to go bowling afterward with friends. "I'll have the car," Elwood told him, "so you'll be on your own getting home. Get a ride or take the bus." Alex called me at 7:00 from a friend's phone -- his battery had died. In five more minutes he was going to cross the street and catch the next bus, he told me.

I thought this was a terrible plan.

It wasn't just any street; it was the big six-lane road with some of the heaviest traffic in town. I don't like crossing that road on foot myself, and the thought of my kid doing it after dark made me very uncomfortable. Assuming he froggered safely to the other side, he'd be walking through the mall parking lot (did I mention it was already dark?) to wait an indeterminate length of time at the bus stop (in the dark). In the event of a parking lot hit-and-run or skeeviness at the bus stop, he had no phone.

"Can't you ask a friend to drop you off at the bus stop?" I asked him, thinking even as I asked that getting in a car with a teenaged driver is about the riskiest thing he does in life. Nope, he said. Everyone else was heading in the opposite direction. I spluttered a bit, weighing the options. Should he call a taxi? Should I calm down and trust him? "Mom," he assured me, "I know how to cross a street."

He made it home quickly and safely, though I still have a little knot in my stomach as I'm typing out the story. And then tonight the very same question came up again. He was walking to a Boy Scout meeting in our neighborhood. Elwood thought it would be fine for him to walk home alone afterward. I didn't want him walking in the dark. "This is Gladlyville," said Elwood, "what's going to happen to him?"

This is where my risk assessment skills break down. In the moment I said lamely, "Someone might pick a fight with him? And knock him down?" He is man-sized these days, almost 5'11", and I don't have the worries about someone physically overpowering him that I do with, say, Petely -- the meek and small-for-his-age 6-year-old. Elwood rolled his eyes. "Yeah, maybe," he said. "That's a remote possibility." What, really, are the hazards? Is walking home at night really any different from walking to the bus stop before sunrise? Are all the good mothers walking their high school freshmen to the bus stop?

I don't know, but I still have a little knot in my stomach.

It is absolutely clear to me that my children should feel comfortable walking to and from school in our quiet and pedestrian-friendly neighborhood. It is equally clear to me that they should feel comfortable walking or biking to friends' houses, even though that's not a risk-free undertaking. I am certain that it is a valuable life skill for my kids to get themselves home from soccer practice on a well-traveled bike path, even though I had to sign a waiver for my 12yo to be permitted to do so in the fall. I reject the oft-espoused idea that parents can't be too careful: of course you can be too careful.

The end goal is to raise kids who make good decisions about keeping themselves safe and who are not hobbled by unreasonable fears. When my son goes off to college in a few years, he will be walking around at night and will need good judgment about how to do it safely. Needless hand-wringing from me will not aid in the development of good judgment.

I'm wringing my hands anyway.

Read this book: Raising Elijah

Back in (oh dear) March I requested and received an electronic review copy of Sandra Steingraber's Raising Elijah. I galloped through the book, taking notes for my review all along the way, but I never wrote it up. Why? Because it's about a divisive political issue, and I don't talk about divisive political issues very often.

Steingraber's previous book, Having Faith, looked at the effects of environmental toxins during pregnancy and lactation. I read it when I was six months pregnant with Joe and spent the ensuing weeks flipping out about toxin exposure. Her new book looks at risks faced by children beyond toddlerhood, and it is equally flip-out-inducing. Maybe that's the most important thing I have to say here: you should read it and see what you think. Read it and see if there's anything you want to change, because if enough of us want to make changes that will protect our kids, maybe we can do something about it together.

I'm finally writing this post today because it is [was] the feast of Christ the King and I am thinking about our obligations to "the least of these," and because there is [was] a horrifying story in today's NYT Magazine about the after-effects of fracking -- which, incidentally, is discussed in the final chapter of Raising Elijah. (And also because it's NaBloPoMo.)

Steingraber's book winds through an alarming array of topics of particular interest to parents. There is a chapter on the carcinogenic properties of pressure-treated wood (which is probably an integral part of at least one playground structure near your home), one on the relationship between toxins and asthma, one on the neurotoxic properties of environmental contaminants -- their possible role in ADD/ADHD and autism spectrum disorders.

She writes about the discovery that the kitchen floor in her home was actually a triple-decker terrine of toxicity: when she and her husband decide to replace the vinyl flooring (after you read about the explosion at the vinyl plant you'll never think about vinyl, or freight trains, in quite the same way again), they uncover asphalt tile (necessitating emergency asbestos abatement) atop lead-painted hardwood. It's a story that makes a person say, "When are we going to figure this out? When will we stop building our homes with substances that harm our children?"

In frequently lapidary prose, Steingraber urges us to protect our children. Here is the thing that deterred me from writing this post: many of the women who read here are Catholics who tend to vote Republican. On that end of the political spectrum, there's a tendency to argue about the existence of climate change and downplay the importance of environmental issues -- the issues that Steingraber labels "the great moral crisis of our day." Many of you who read here will have a very different idea about the great moral crisis of our day, and will be saddened to learn that Steingraber is open about the abortion she scheduled when she learned that her first baby had multiple anomalies. But I think there is an important truth submerged in those colliding narratives of crisis.

In this country at this time, there is a strange alliance between pro-lifers and pro-industry forces: the politicians more likely to support legislation that restricts abortion are generally less likely to support legislation that requires external regulation of industry, including the chemical industry. Does that really make sense? Environmental contaminants play an important role in fetal anomalies. Fetal anomalies play an important role in late-term abortions. What if we could protect the least of these and steward the earth more wisely at the same time? We say that we believe God knits us together in our mothers' wombs. Why, then, are we silent about the substances slashing savage steeks through his handiwork?

When I was pregnant with my oldest son, I worked with a woman from a small farming town. She was also pregnant, as were two of her neighbors. She was broken-hearted when both of their babies were diagnosed with multiple anomalies incompatible with life. "Why?" she asked her OB. "Is it something in the water?" "Oh, no," the doctor assured her. "It's just one of those random things." Given the stats I later encountered on reproductive toxicant release in that region, I am disinclined to believe it was "just one of those random things." We mothers clutch our vigilance like a totem; during pregnancy we take our folic acid and we steer clear of unpasteurized cheese. But the reality is that we need systemic changes if we are to shield our children, born and unborn, from harm.

Steingraber proposes three changes in Raising Elijah: she encourages each reader to plant a garden, to use a reel mower in lieu of a gas-powered mower, and to line-dry clothing. (I tell myself, in the immortal words of Meatloaf, that two out of three ain't bad.) She acknowledges that to some readers these suggestions will seem ludicrously difficult while to others they will seem ludicrously inadequate. Wherever you fall on that continuum, I suspect you will find her book intriguing and provocative. Read it, and tell me what you think.

Disclosure: I received a free .pdf of Steingraber's book. I was not compensated in any other way for this review.

Apples Aren't Enough

When I picked Petely up at school today he had an apple in his hand. The principal gave it to him, he said, because it was Walk To School Day.

It seems like a reasonable idea: encourage kids to be active and independent, encourage parents to cut their consumption of fossil fuels and reduce traffic around schools. But I am thinking about all the factors that prevent kids from walking to schools, and an apple is looking like a pretty lousy incentive.

In the past couple of weeks I've been driving waaaaay out on the edge of town,where I bumped into the district's newest schools. I knew their names but not their locations, and I was surprised (and disappointed) to see that they are in completely unwalkable locations. One of them is surrounded on all four sides by cornfields. It is the utter opposite of a neighborhood school -- I spotted a lone farmhouse within walking distance, and the road is busy enough to render walking imprudent.

If we want kids to walk to school, they need neighborhood schools, and sidewalks.

This has been the least stressful soccer season ever, because two of my three players can bike to practice. It's still a bit of a scramble to get everybody to the right spot with the right gear, and to figure out dinner timing, but I can't tell you how nice it is not to be piling all the kids in the car every evening at 5. One surprise for me was how much my 9yo appreciates the independence. "It feels really good to get there on my own," he said. Today my oldest said something similar about getting to school on his own: "I really like the freedom."

If we want kids to walk to school, they need room to discover the pleasures of small freedoms.

I've posted before about my neighbor issues; they have brought home forcefully the reality that the culture has changed. People have the idea that we need to protect kids by driving them around instead of letting them be alone on foot. (In other words, by increasing their exposure to the most dangerous activity the average American child engages in.) Just this week at preschool I overheard a mother talking about her grade-school child. He was having a hard time on the bus, she said. It's only two blocks, she said, so it wasn't really onerous to drive him. She didn't like that option either, but she didn't know what else to do.

If we want kids to walk to school, the adults have to be sensible about relative risk.