Endless questions
Stopped packing for my trip to read a bit on the internet. It’s Motherlode’s first birthday (that’s the parenting blog on nytimes.com) and the author asked for our suggestions. Most of the comments give congratulations and one or two suggestions, but I, as always, have endless questions:
“I love reading the blog and the readers comments for many reasons. You find smart topics to discuss and your readers are usually civil. I don’t like blogs where people use their anonymity to tear each other apart.
I started reading because we were quite close to having kids and there are so many things I am scared about. Then my husband lost his job and the immediate thought of kids receded. But I still want to prepare myself for the days of motherhood ahead.
A couple things I’ve thought about recently that I would like to see discussed:
1. Sex ed. I feel kind of traumatized by my sex ed and this is actually one of the biggest things that scares me about motherhood. How do you help children to find a healthy sexuality–hetero or homo?
2. That leads to something else I thought of after last week’s NYT magazine–how does one parent a homosexual child fully and with love? What kind of rules? What is similar to heterosexual kids and what is different?
3. Another thing I think about a lot is gender. We’ve discussed this some here, but I think there is always room. Gender norms seem ingrained in our society from the first pink and blue, action figures and barbie toy aisles. But in Victorian times, a largely gender segregated society, boys were dressed in dresses till they were about 5 or so. Children had no gender on some level. Friends will say things like boys and girls are different from the beginning–but is that because they are looking for it? Can I raise a child trying to avoid heavily masculine or feminine stereotyping? What happens if I end up with a girly girl? What kinds of things do parents say or do that leads to gender role expectations? (i.e., my husband drives most of the time when we’re together b/c he’s good at it and enjoys it–but would that communicate to a child that dad is in charge in a way that mom isn’t?)
4. The NYT talks a lot about the educational worries of the upper middle class–like getting into a private preschool in New York City, or talks about the difficulties of inner city and struggling school zones. I’m glad they do and I read these articles. What do middle income types think and feel about education? What choices do they/we make about preschool and public/private school? Are their choices reifying racial segregation or challenging it? I grew up in a small town where a tiny percentage of us were engaged and going to college–how is that experience different for students and parents than a suburban school where most children are going to college or a private prep school?
5. How do you encourage your kids to “be all that they can be” while helping them with realistic goal settings? I sometimes yearn for a childhood filled with lessons and extracurricular activities because I was bored in school most of the time and couldn’t pursue my devotion to acting in the small town. But then I have friends who were just destroyed in high school from having way too many activities and too many expectations placed upon them. I can see myself becoming that parent that gives their kids as many activities (language, art, culture, etc.) as I can b/c I didn’t have those opportunities as a kid.
6. What about religion and moral education? I was raised in a very religious home and am now second guessing a lot of that. But the religious community was very important to me as I was growing up (i.e. I really valued having so many adults in my life that cared about me). How do readers teach moral guidelines to their children? How do they decide what moral guidelines are important? What do they appreciate and/or reject about a religious upbringing?
I have more questions, but I think that’s enough for now! 
Keep up the good work.”
unconditional love
There was a discussion the last couple of weeks in the New York Times about the importance of parents giving their children unconditional love, rather than love based on behavior (in other words, praise for a job well done and condemnation or time-outs for bad behavior may make a child only feel loved when they are doing the right thing). As someone tormented by “doing the right thing” I’m very interested in this discussion.
Here is the original essay, which is too vague and difficult to understand for what is a true paradigm shift. Here are readers saying I don’t get it! (including me–I was quoted in the original post…wow new media is so immediate. Me quoted in the nytimes, sort of).
Here is one horrible, blatant effect of parents not offering their love to their children.
Johnny said his mom has made it very clear that he’s not allowed to bring a boyfriend over to the house. “She’s like, ‘O.K., I accept you, but you better not bring any of those people around,’ ” he told me.
That’s one of about 50 “rejecting behaviors” identified by Caitlin Ryan of San Francisco State University, who has spent the last eight years studying the link between family acceptance or rejection of gay children and their mental health in early adulthood. (Ryan found that teenagers in “rejecting families” were significantly more likely to have attempted suicide, used drugs and engaged in unprotected sex than those who were raised in accepting families.)
And here is a wonderful discussion of preschools that are structure around teaching internal self-control to children, instead of other directed, reward and punishment style control. I certainly think that controlling my eating internally, instead of externally by dieting or peer pressure works a lot better for me. (The article is written by the journalist exploring the Harlem Children’s Zone, which came to my attention first by a story on This American Life and then when Obama applauded it).
A quote from the last article that I liked:
“But in fact, very few truly pleasurable moments come from complete hedonism. What Tools does — and maybe what we all need to do — is to blur the line a bit between what is work and what is play. Just because something is effortful and difficult and involves some amount of constraint doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.”
trip plans
I asked you awhile ago whether I should go on a crazy trip to Europe or not…and most of you remained silent, though one kind soul told me to go, go, go!
Well, a new hiccup has arisen. I thought E had gotten a sense for the craziness of the plan (that was a large part of the point–that it was utterly irresponsible. Well, not a large part. The play was the immediate impetus, and our friend in Germany…I already missed seeing one friend in Germany–she’s back). Anyway. E has now declared the trip irresponsible. My sensible half already agreed with him, so now the wild and crazy bit has 1.5 people to fight, instead of just .5. I’m thinking now of making my trip to NYC for a conference a bit longer than necessary and doing something fun while there. It won’t be quite the same as seeing John Barrowman in La Cage…but it will still be very fun. NYC is inexhaustible, I imagine. And there are so many things I haven’t done because I’ve been in archives while things are open.
Upsies and downsies and daisies
Been an up and down week for me. Monday I thought I had lost my brain. I literally could not think. Could not figure out how to approach my conference paper. Tuesday I had four appointments between doctor, grad school, therapist, and advisor. The advisor said something straightforward and helpful so that I can now work on my conference paper. My brain is back, for the most part, and I have half a conference paper drafted. I’d have more, but I seem to have spent all of today getting a job application out. It was mostly just trying to move slow enough so that I caught the typos and the bad printing jobs. I read through my writing sample from last year, added a few new tidbits, and caught some typos (I read that thing so many times last year–how could there still be typos??). I was happy to add in the tidbits, because I think they show off some of the ways that my material is unique. However, I still think the piece doesn’t really pick up till the middle, but that I need the first half for context. But will people get to the middle? Probably not. *sigh* Well, we can only try and hope.
I never really thought I was a “moody female” but goodness, I had some mood swings to accompany all of the above. Starting therapy is more difficult than I thought. It’s ripping out some emotions in me that I was fully aware of without yet dealing with them. So I have to sort of sit and sigh and control the desire to cry after the meeting, in preparation for the next item on the agenda. One problem with having the therapist on campus, even though it is nice to have it all right there.
I finished David Sedaris’ “When You Are Engulfed in Flames” and loved it. He has a particular dry, dark, self-loathing perspective that just fits so well with my own. His description of the horror of going out to eat with Hugh (they’ll have to talk about something!), and his competition with the elderly couple next to them is hilarious and so good to hear.
I also finished Not That Kind of Girl. I am still mulling over it. Somehow I wanted some kind of manifesto that would tell me it was ok to drop the God of my childhood, but it is not that kind of book at all. Rather it is about a conscientious woman trying to be true to herself and her upbringing. Other than the fact that I married young and she didn’t, and that she’s a lot cooler than me (knows a lot more about music, for one), I often felt like I could have written the words she did. I feel comforted to have some of my impulses explicated in better prose than I could, but otherwise feel no soothing. I guess I will have to continue to battle my demons on my own. In church this week, the pastor talked about “Exile.” It was both exciting and depressing. One, because he recognized that life is not always hunky-dory for Christians, nor that we should expect immediate deliverance. Yet at the same time, by the end, he had fallen back into the everything-needs-to-be-ok to be a Christian thing. Sometimes I think it’s ok to dwell in exile, but he concluded with the hope that we would all be out soon.
I’m listening to Home now by Marilyn Robinson. At one point the black sheep in the family asks his sister if she is waiting to save his soul, because he always expects that someone is. That is how I feel with conversations like Exile–that someone is always waiting for me to come back into the fold. But what if that is not the best choice? What if the fold doesn’t, in fact, exist? What if there are other options? I was hoping that Carlene Bauer would give me another choice, but her ultimate conclusions seem no better honed than my own. She chooses what she does for her own sanity, but not because she seems to truly believe it is the best choice. Rather, she too, is always waiting to be yanked back into the fold, but is just a tidge bit more ok with walking outside of it than I am.
Anywho, a quote from Bauer about what I mean above when criticizing the “Exile” sermon.
Until then, my teenage soul–suspicious of Cheerfulness, though still reflexively respectful of authority–would feel increasingly uncomfortable in the presence of the official soul. The official soul, as transmitted through church and Christian paraphernalia, was upbeat, incurious, happy with its lot. It did not have any heroes other than the ones who appeared in the Bible, and it was content to hear the same stories about these people over and over again. it described pain and suffering in such a way that a person might think alcoholism or the loss of a child were no more inconvenient than a tussle with the flu: after it passed, you could stand in front of the congregation on Sunday and testify that it was all better, and God was good. As far as I could tell, that was the only story told by the official soul, and the real and true sadnesses had been excised for a more mellifluous account. Which made it seem as if there were things you couldn’t talk about in church, or with people from church–what made you laugh, why you cried at a movie, what made you angry, or what books you read that hadn’t been written by C.S. Lewis, A. W. Tozer, or D.L. Moody. Church was supposed to be the most important thing in life, but so much of life was left out, because so much of its trouble was assumed to be conquered. My pastor mentioned Kierkegaard in a sermon only once, and it would be a long time before I discovered that there was a storied Christian who suffered from, and so in some way sanctioned, depression, rage, sarcasm, and despair–the diseases that took hold in adolescence, for which church offered no cure. (Not That Kind of Girl)
I also finished God Says No a bit ago and will blog on it when I have come to some conclusions…or maybe I won’t.
One must wonder why I am reading all this while I have a bazillion things to do on my diss and conference paper and everything else. It’s because I have to. If I don’t, I just spiral down into a pit in which I obsessively worry about my diss without anything actually happening (or end up spending my time wandering on the internet…some of which feeds me and some of which does not).
more criticism of tv
As you know, we watch way too much tv in this house, and by default and by interest, much of it is quasi-cop shows (there being really very little else now on tv, except reality tv which, if it features true creativity and is available online, also gets a viewing). But of course, in the back of my mind, there is always disgust at the way these shows distort the way society is while subtly converting public expectations of societal morality. Randy Cohen, the NY Times ethicist, has a nice encapsulation of this problem, though I don’t think he goes far enough (he criticizes the cop shows for giving all good public works to the men and women in blue, but then goes on to suggest other hero-worship gigs for other professions).
Slowly
Slowly, slowly loosing the weight I gained when I first went on anti-depressants (about 40 pounds). Yesterday the exercise pants I bought this summer almost fell off while I was on the treadmill–dah! Stupid things have a drawcord for show rather than function, so I couldn’t tighten the waist ban. I put on my more expensive running pants just now and they feel like they actually fit, instead of being too snug like they have for 9 months or so. My running top still shows off my belly more than I’m comfortable with when I move (I bought it on the sales rack, so to be honest it never quite fit right). Getting closer! I hope. It’s a combo of steady exercise, including weight-lifting, not being hyper about what I eat, but focusing on fiber and vegetables and fruit, and taking a metabolism boost. I’m sure I wouldn’t have lost anything without that last bit. I’m also sure I’d loose faster if I could lose my addiction to sweets.
Also on the good side, I watched some ankle exercises on nytimes.com and they are strengthening my ankle remarkably. It feels firmer than it has since the surgery eight odd years ago. Phew!
analysis of contemporary tv
This is a really thought-provoking criticism of current network tv patterns. We watch a lot of network tv in our house–because it’s on the internet and we don’t have cable, so I’ve seen all these shows. The current ouvre of geeky-smart male leads with quirky humor attracts E, and sometimes me. And some thing’s twitched in the back of my mind about the gender dynamic, but I hadn’t thought it through. This post does an excellent job. A taste:
In effect, father and daughter replace husband and wife, offering a new couple that gets rids of the sort of things that make trouble in a real heterosexual marriage, particularly in the wake of feminism Without a female authority figure at home (Mom), we get a family that boils down to the big sexy in-control male figure and amusingly willful yet ultimately sweet subordinate female figure.
…
For one thing, both Lie to Me and Castle belong to a larger pattern of shows that pair men who possess almost supernatural powers with feisty, street-smart professional women who are never quite able to best them.
…
we can now enjoy the sight of an ass-kicking woman (it helps if she’s beautiful, of course) without there being any real threat to male supremacy.
Read the original post. The argument works best in whole.
Coates on crazy right wingers
Coates is not surprised by all the criticism Obama is attracting from the right. He’s actually a little “giddy” as he says. It’s worth reading the whole post, but this last paragraph caught my eye:
[Unlike the strange unelected leadership of Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, who provide perfect foils for the right wingers,] Barack Obama, bourgeois in every way that bourgeois is right and just, will not dance.He tells kids to study–and they seethe. He accepts an apology for an immature act of rudeness–and they go hysterical. He takes his wife out for a date–and their veins bulge. His humanity, his ordinary blackness, is killing them. Dig the audio of his response to Kanye West–the way he says, “He’s a jackass.” He sounds like one of my brothers. And that’s the point, because that’s what he is. Barack Obama refuses to be their nigger. And it’s driving them crazy.
It’s about time.
I love the description of Obama, but I also love Coates, son of a black panther and a man with his rebel chops, saying there are good things about bourgeois. Maybe I live in the 30s. OK, I know I do, and many of my folks rip the hearts out of bourgeois for living their lives and not caring about shit, and I keep wondering if that is me. Of course, Obama is a committed intellectual on overdrive. Just reading his autobiography exhausted me, and he left out a lot of the tedious hard work he clearly did in there.
I don’t know if that paragraph makes sense.
I do not do what I want to do
But it does suggest that we should hesitate before dismissing such desires as selfish or irrelevant. Perhaps the good life doesn’t require constant warfare. Perhaps people are better off if their multiple selves establish a truce, respecting one another’s different strengths, and working together to satisfy shared goals.
wandering
Wandering thoughts of mine:
I drove to campus today and was amazed by the burgeoning change in season. MOst of the trees are still green, but the green has dulled just slightly, like it has been ever so slightly dusted. This may be the cause of some bare limbs scattered through the trees. There is one type of tree that seems to loose it’s leaves before fall, before changing, they just suddenly disappear. Then too, every so often a red or yellow leave or cluster of leaves will appear, hidden behind or around, or brazenly trotting forth. The biggest change, though, are the grasses. Suddenly they are brown. Now wild, unwattered grass, is really only vibrantly green at the beginning of the summer or just after heavy rains. The difference today was that the tall grasses had dried out. They dry out in all different colors–deep maroon, sunflower yellow, and brown being the most common. Then, too, the sky was that dusty blue that I always associate with fall, even though we have rain as much as we have blue skies. It is never as clear or piercing blue here as it is in Arizona, but it is like the sky is happy to be blue and overseeing the change in seasons. Fall always makes me happy too.
Evidently my computer is broken again. The wireless hardware broke. It’s still under warranty, so I just have to decide when is a good time to take it back.
Saw my advisor today and he gave his stamp of approval to my travel plans. He also told me he loved and hated my last chapter…loved some of the anecdotes that I too am particularly fond of, but disliked the organization. And said I am missing some historiography (not in so many terms, since he hates “historiography” that is there for its own sake, but he is right that I was so focused on my own little world that I wrote nothing about what was going on in the broader new Deal). He suggested I turn the anecdotes–that is too self-effacing a word, they are much more than anecdotes– into an article, which I’ve been wanting to do for months now (I have sort of, but it is an extra long article that some people who may or may not publish a book out of a conference I went to last spring are considering. One of them suggested that I break the article in half). But then he suggested submitting it to a journal I already submitted my other article to.
My advisor is always full of advice, but one thing he is not full of is effective ways to shrink a project down in size. But I warned him that the last two chapters, which will be done sometime in the next month or two weeks, will be horrendously slapdashed, and he seemed ok with that. We talked through my thesis and he agreed with some of my conclusions and suggested others, and shot down one. I feel closer to being able to craft a coherent thesis for the first time in this whole process. I am sooooo glad I applied to jobs last year b/c now I know what I’m doing, but I am also sooooo glad that I stopped in the middle because I feel so much more ready now.
