Ode to Husband

Some of my favorite writers have sadly lost their spouses, and as writers, part of their grieving process involves writing a memoir of losing their spouse. I have nothing against this whatsoever, and actually love these memoirs. I love histories of marriages (of good marriages I should stipulate having seen enough bad ones in my life). So I generally pick these stories up - Joyce Carol Oates's recent piece in The New Yorker on becoming a widow and the last week of her marriage, to Calvin Trillion's About Alice or Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Must You Go? by Antonia Fraser is the next one on my list (I hear it's one of those books that you don't want to end) as Fraser tells the story of her life with Harold Pinter.
      With the death of one of my uncles and my step-dad within the space of a year, and then the death of another favorite uncle a month ago, I've been thinking about the stories that get created and told within marriages, the kind of stories that end up as family legends and myths, as well as the stories that don't get told - or not until both respective parties are dead in some cases. After reading Oates's piece in the New Yorker, followed by the article in the New York Times on civil unions replacing marriage in France, I started wondering who cares what we call it? Whatever it is, it's sharing a life with someone, and whether it's marriage, being civilly united, or sinful as some conservative consider it (not that it's any of their business), it is significant. I decided it's significant enough that I might not wait for my husband to die before I started commemorating my life with him. I might start celebrating those moments I share with him, when I fall in more love with him, when he surprises me, when he makes me laugh, even when he flips out in asshole mode, storms out of the room slamming the door behind him only to walk back in two seconds later with an apology (well, I don't know if I have to share all those...).
      When I met my husband, he wasn't funny and I considered it too bad. While we were dating, I'd have those moments when I think, we get along great, I love being with him, but he's not funny. Then somewhere along the way, he got funny. He even got funny in that way that sometimes can be inappropriate, in that way that points out a truth that people know or do, but don't necessarily admit.

       We went out yesterday, while the snow was still pretty and ignoring all blizzard warnings about how we should stay inside, or rather, we were heeding the warnings as we were going out to stock up on groceries while we still had the use of a car. Then we decided to drive around a neighborhood or two to help our brainstorm about where we want to live, we stumbled past Grimaldi's Pizza which is notorious for its line down the block and there was no line. We weren't that hungry, but we stopped and ate anyway simply because there was no wait. Then as we drove home (or where we're staying for now) we saw the decreasing visibility, and the beginning of the blizzard. On the radio, we listened to the news, which interrupted the weather warnings to share the story of the Pope's Christmas message and how he condemned the Christmas Day violence in Nigeria and the Philippines. The Pope called the violence "absurd." I asked, is there a kind of violence that is not absurd?
      The Pope then called for an end to senseless violence and declared that today, Christians are the most persecuted group on the planet. Somewhere along the line, my husband picked up a dry sense of sarcastic humor.
     "Well, you know, what goes around..." He said. "You notice he didn't mention the Spanish Inquisition. Or that they KILLED SOUTH AMERICA."

My husband didn't used to say things like this.  But now that he does, I love it. It cracks me up.

       

To Give or Not to Give

Christmas hovers at the end of the week. While this year my husband and I are rather impressed with ourselves for having gifts bought for all of our extended family members and shipped enough in advance that we didn’t have to worry about shipping the boxes priority – in the same week we got ourselves packed to move across the country no less - we haven’t bought a thing for our two-year old son. We’ve barely bought anything for each other.

Every year at Christmas, we have the same conversation regarding gift giving with slight variations depending on our circumstances. Mainly, that we don’t want to give gifts merely because we think we have to, or it’s expected of us, or because the calendar says it’s what we do on this day. We revisit the rules we have for each other when it comes to gift giving occasions: we don’t buy crap or just anything for each other so there’s something to open under the tree, and, if we don’t like what we have given each other, we have to say so, not lie and shove the item into the back of the closet until the next move when we can quietly slide the item into the donation pile.

We have reasons for these rules. One is we have both been the victims of bad gifts, not so much from each other (because we honor the second rule of telling the truth) but from well meaning friends or family members, who do not have our rules, but other rules. Mainly, no matter how bad the gift is you lie and say thank you, and that you absolutely love it. If you tell the truth – so we have learned – the giver accuses you of being ungrateful and rude. Usually a big display of pouting, offence taken and hurt feelings follows after telling the giver in the nicest way possible that their gift, while well meant, was just not your taste or style.

We have a couple of instances that fall into our family Hall of Fame for bad gifts from people who prefer you to lie as you express your gratitude. One year for Christmas, we had friends give us an item for our home, the kind of thing they would expect to see prominently displayed when they came over for a visit. They loved their gift to us, they gazed at it, delighted in it, were awed by it. At one point, after we had done our duty and put it on display, the wife said, “Oh, we so love the traditional styles.”

            “Oh, interesting.” I said. “We’re more mid-century modern people.”

            “The back of it is really nice.” My husband said, “Mind if I turn it around?”

After the couple left, we talked about what we should do. The gift was one of those items that the couple said over and over we would be able to enjoy for years, it could become a fixture in our home, something our children would remember being present in their childhoods. We considered our fate of displaying somebody else’s tastes in our home. My husband and I then did what anyone else would do in our position; we put all of our things into storage, and left the country. Our hope of course is that when we have a home again and our friends visit, they will have forgotten what they gave us or that we can easily claim it got lost or broken in the move.

            We have a few other of instances in our Hall of Fame that generally go along the same lines. Every time after we say our obligatory thank you and we hang up the phone, I turn to my husband and say, “Don’t you ever – and I mean EVER – lie to me the way we just lied to them.”

            Sometimes my husband defends the lying and the fake gratitude. “We have to say thank you and say we like it. It’s a gift. They don’t have to give us anything.”

            Honestly, I’d rather receive nothing.

            There’s disappointment in a bad gift, not just the let down of not receiving something you like, or that someone took time and effort to shop or even make your gift, only to have you not like it, but also the disappointing realization that the person who gave you the gift doesn’t really know you, and because they get offended when you try to convey your preferences, they aren’t really interested in getting to know you. Rather, they prefer their version of you, the person they think you are and the image of you they see in their minds when they think of you. They don’t like it when you try to swap the person they think you are for the real one.

            Alas, my husband and I now bear the task of raising our son in the sticky dance of gift giving and thank-you-saying and even I-know-I said-it’s-wrong-and disrespectful-to-lie-but-this-distant-relative/friend-honestly-prefers-it or this person is okay with you telling the truth and here are a couple of ways to say that you appreciate their effort, but it wasn’t in your style.

            I actually really love giving good gifts, and while the art of receiving bad gifts is kind of one I routinely fail at, I do love spending the time and energy to give a good gift.

This art is one I look forward to raising my son in, because like so many things in parenting, it comes down to compassion and the ability to put one’s self into some one else’s shoes. Giving a good gift means you don’t buy things you like for yourself, but with the other person in mind. I can easily say to my son, “Yes, we now live in Brooklyn and we love it, but that doesn’t mean we should buy Grand Dad that Yankees baseball cap. Grand Dad actually hates the Yankees and is obsessed with the Boston Red Sox. No, we shouldn’t buy that cap for Auntie. While she has lived in Brooklyn for eight years, she rarely watches baseball and has never in her life worn a baseball cap or any article of clothing with a logo.”

            Still, Christmas is just a few days away. While my son has boxes of gifts from grandparents, aunts and uncles, my husband and I have decided to wait on his big gift. Last night, we went to the Brooklyn Holiday Flea Market and bought stocking stuffers for all of us, and engaged in the yearly habit of shopping with the person you’re buying for - waiting until the other had turned their back, realizing we didn’t actually have cash on hand, having to borrow the spouse’s wallet to buy the spouse’s gift and laughing about it all the while. Afterward, with Auntie, we planned our Christmas all day menu, so we can squeeze in all our favorite traditional foods and favorite activities (mainly the Christmas afternoon nap). With less gifts – but good gifts – bought, we’ll have plenty of time and space to enjoy the time with each other.

Home is Where We Are

My two-year old son has the most amazing and endearing trait of honoring his body’s internal clock, so daily around 11:30 am and around 7:30 pm, he tells me that he’s tired and ready to go to bed. Except on this particular night, as my husband loads our suitcases into the car, when my son tells me he wants to go to bed, I have to say no. For mothers, telling your child that he can’t go to sleep is completely counterintuitive. But on this night, we are taking the Jet Blue red eye from Portland, Oregon, to Brooklyn, New York. We are moving. Again.

            Three and a half years ago, my husband and I stood in our kitchen in Denver, Colorado sharing an afternoon coffee press of coffee and talked about what we wanted. We didn’t want to live our lives by default; we wanted to live our lives intentionally, lives that we created. We wanted a child; we wanted to live abroad and travel; we wanted careers we loved.

            “Alright” my husband said. “Let’s go live abroad.”

            And with that, we began our nomadic phase. My husband found work on a project in Singapore. I got pregnant. We moved to Los Angeles for the Research and Development phases of the Singapore project. Our son was born. When our son was 11 months old we moved to Singapore. When the project ended six months later, we moved to Bali. Five months later, we went back to LA, and then up to Portland for an eight-week stay with my family. My husband found a series of projects to work on in New York City beginning in December. We packed our bags once again, having traded our summer Bali clothes in our storage unit for our winter sweaters, boots, and coats.

            So when my son asked to go to bed, and I saw the puzzled look on his face when I told him that we’re not going to bed, I instead asked him if he wanted to go on a plane.

            “Yeah!” He hollered and ran for his coat.

On the plane, he sat excitedly in his seat, buckled in and announcing to all his fellow passengers that we were all on a plane and that we were going to go up up up. As soon as the plane took off and the seat belt light turned off, my son turned to me and said, “I want to go home and I want to go to bed.”

            This began a refrain that echoes over our first week in Brooklyn. As I put him to sleep the first couple of nights in Brooklyn, he said again, “ I want to go home.”

            It is one of those moments that as a parent, I don’t know what to say. I loved our time abroad, the people we met, the experiences we had, and the things we learned – about ourselves, and the world in general. I loved our time in Portland and with my family, but I too want to go home. I want a home; I want our home.

            I try to explain that it will be awhile yet, that we are subletting then we’ll be house sitting for friends, then subletting, then house sitting again, and subletting again. After that we will find a place to live that will be outs.  It turns out this isn’t the thing to say.

            “Home.” He said again, starting to cry.

            “I know,” I said. “This is home for now. Mommy is here, daddy is here, and you’re here, so we’re home. Home is where we are.”  I think of the joke that my husband and I have, that home is where our luggage is.

            But I start to tell my son the things we do to create home where ever we are - that at night, we have a bath, a book and bed. In the morning we’ll have breakfast and play, and before nap time we’ll go to the park or library or children’s museum. I tell him we will play trains and when we go for a walk, we will count the trains, buses and dogs we see just like we did in Portland. I tell him that after nap we will have snacks and teatime.            

            This recitation of our routines becomes the lullaby that ends up lulling both of us to sleep, and I realize too before nodding off, that while I miss my things, my coffee mugs, my books, and the ability to have a magazine subscription, that home is where we are, and the routines and rituals we create with each other.

 

Dancing*

Outside it was raining. Because we live in Portland, it had been raining for weeks. Rain is just what winter looks like in the Northwest. Consequently, chidren in the Northwest don’t spent as much time making snow angels as they do splashing in puddles. Which is what I had planned for the day, that my two-year old son and I would get some much needed exercise, don raincoats and galoshes, take the dog to the park and indulge in the very old Oregon tradition of walking in the rain, jumping in the rain, and getting soaked.

            Yet by 11am, I had gotten distracted. My son and I were still in our pajamas; he played trains on the living room floor while I attempted to catch up on the laundry and clean up the state of general disarray that the house had fallen into. But I was beginning to get stir-crazy. I told myself that I would do as much as I could in ten minutes and then we could go.

            My son had other ideas. He pushed his trains aside and stood up.

            “Dance.” He demanded.

            “But we need to fold the laundry, so we can go.” I said. “I want to get out of the house.”

            “Dance.” He demanded again.

            I looked at him doing his in-place-skip-hop-prance-dance-move-thing as he pointed to the stereo.

            “Okay,” I said. “Laundry can wait.”

            I turned on the stereo, and we danced. Some of our favorites songs came on the Pandora station we were listening to. Songs that I sang to him when he was in my belly, songs my husband put into the mix of music that played in the background when I gave birth at home, songs that my son was born to: The Flaming Lips, Do you Realize, Coldplay’s Strawberry Swing, The Beatles, Here Comes the Sun. As we dance around the living room, I sing to him again.

            He is right, I think. We should dance. Someday, he will be at school and not with me during the day. Someday, he will go racing out the front door to play with friends and not with me. Someday, there will be a second child that requires my attention. Someday, his schedule will be more full than mine. Sometimes, I look forward to these somedays. The someday when I can work and write during the day and not at 4am when my family is sleeping. The someday when I can sleep in and spend the day in bed with a book. The someday when I can take a shower and not have to tell anyone because I am no longer responsible for all of their needs.

            But now, in this moment, as he literally dances circles around me, I am glad those somedays have not arrived yet. I am glad we have chosen to dance.

            Half an hour later, my mom calls to tell me that my uncle has died. He was sixty. The news hits me hard, not just because he was one of my favorite uncles and a person whom I admired, or that with my aunt, he had a marriage that inspired me when the marriages of my parents crumbled and I saw other couples constantly bickering, but because he was sixty. And someday I will be forty, and sixty is not much older than forty. Life just got much shorter and much more urgent.  

            It occurs to me then that the songs I sing to my son are about just this, about how fast life goes, that you never have forever. But I don’t sing then. Instead, I look at my son, and quote Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

            

*This article got picked up another website, the The #life Daily! Yay for me!

After My Piece on Education

One of the things I love about writing in general and writing a weekly article for a website is the discussions or exchange of ideas that come after or in response to what I wrote. I was a bit nervous writing about education, because while it is something I have grown passionate about, I have no formal schooling on the topic. I got my Master's in 19th Century British Literature. I got my Master's partly because I wanted to teach college (at the time I thought I'd go straight for the Ph.d), but mostly because I wanted to spend my weekends in bed in my pajamas reading books that only people in academe cared about. I took one class in pedagogy and sadly, it was rather a waste of time and largely based on the notion that if we just had students free write enough, they would learn how to write coherent paragraphs and papers and so on and so forth. I can't say my experience proved this theory.
        After my son was born, I started researching and reading up on education for his sake. Somewhere along the line I got as concerned about the bigger picture as I was about his education. I started talking to other parents, learned we're all worried about our children's future in the education system, no matter where we're living in the world. I also realized that having received a good education in the public school system as well as college and having taught, that I have high standards. After my education post, a friend of mine who works in education pointed out that the education and curriculum I hope my son to have doesn't exist anywhere in the world. Sadly, she is right.
       Singapore has high scores and is often referred to as having a top education system, but having lived there, I wouldn't put my son in Singapore's schools either. They're heavily focused on math and reading. The notion of the arts is one that is very young in the culture - all the museums are only ten years old. Granted, the country is only forty, but as a result, they are still creating their cultural identity. What they come by naturally follows most Asian cultures- math, competition, pushing children really hard, teach them to mind. Beginning in pre-school, children get an hour of Chinese a day. They place a lot of emphasis on teaching "real life skills"  which sounds like the toddlers learn to balance check books. Really, they learn animals, number, shapes, letters, but on a strict schedule. If at two, your child cannot identify an animal that starts with the letter A, expect a parent-teacher conference.  In many of the public schools, children are not allowed to ask questions. If a child asks a question, their parents are called because their child is being disruptive. Culturally, their strength is and what they bump their heads on, is doing things by the book, not cutting corners, following the rules.
        Western parents often scoff at the notion that Singapore children are not encouraged to ask questions. "How are they supposed to learn?" they protest and rightfully so. What I've come to appreciate about Singapore's system is that at least they are straightforward about this, so if your child is an inquisitive sort, they recommend private education. What I've noticed about Western parents - and schools - is that we say one thing and do another. One mother was so appalled when I told her about the no question thing, she threw a fit. Ten minutes later, she offered me a glass of water and got up to get me one from the kitchen. My son started to squirm in my lap because he was hungry and I started to nurse him. My friend's daughter asked, "What are you doing? Why is doing that?" (Illustrating nicely the lack of breastfeeding around the world but that's another rant), I started to answer when my friend poked her head out of the kitchen and snapped, "Did I just hear you be rude?"
      Alas, it is a sad truth about many parents and schools. We say we want our children to be curious, creative, and know that it's okay to express their emotions, but what we don't say is that most days, whether at home or in the classroom, it'd make our lives easier if kids didn't think for themselves, sat still, behaved, and kept themselves quiet. Ken Robinson asserts that schools educate creativity out of our children. I think he's right and I'd add that I think they also educate curiosity out of them as well.
        Anyway, my husband haven't decided exactly what we're doing for our son's education, except that we're considering all the alternatives before the public schools. In the meantime, I've enjoyed the conversations that have come out of my piece and discussing what we really want for kids. And Cathie Black's fate is in the hands of an Albany judge who's hearing 3 different lawsuits charging that state education Commission Steiner was wrong to grant Black her waiver - you know, the one that said while we require our education Chancellors to have Master's in Education, somehow we'll skip that part because of your publishing history (???).

Public School Heartbreak

The last week of October, the New Yorker featured  a cartoon of two moms sitting, with a child in each of their laps, as they sat on a park bench. One was saying to the other, “We believe in the concept of public education.”  Like all cartoons, it is meant to be funny while revealing something honest, something most of us aren’t willing to admit even though it is completely obvious by our actions that we do indeed feel that way.

                However, I didn’t find the cartoon funny because it captures exactly how I feel. I believe in the concept of public education. I want to believe in it; I want public schools to work. Public education is a cornerstone of democracy; to create well educated citizens and voters, we need good viable public schools. Free good public schools, like good health care, good nutrition, and stable shelter, I believe, is a human right.

                Yet with public education in its current state, I can’t help but want to keep my son as far away as possible from it. In a February 2009 New York Times Op-Ed, Nicholas Kristof called our public education our greatest national shame.  I think he’s right. The emphasis in reading and math simply to meet No Child Left Behind testing demands, and the lack of emphasis on the arts, music, science, and individual creativity is just the least of it. I shudder at the competitive nature, that to get into the desired schools requires either an IQ test taken by a four year old or luck in a lottery, or, as my brother did in Portland, moving to the desired school’s neighborhood when his son failed to win the lottery. I hate that when one child gets into a good school, it displaces another student, potentially into a school that can’t afford to meet his/her needs. I hate that as parents we cannot take for granted that our children will get the education that will nurture their intellectual and creative selves at the public school down the street.

                I have taught University Composition and Literature classes. I know first-hand how ill prepared our students are for college. I used to ask my Freshman writing classes to write a one page free write response to the editorial in the morning’s paper; in response I got blank stares and dilated pupils as anxiety attacks kicked in, even as I remember my eighth grade English teacher Mrs. Larkin asking the same thing of me. I taught Developmental (aka remedial) English classes where I asked students to identify the noun, verb and adjective in the sentence – a skill that is generally taught in the third grade – and was appalled (but sadly, not that surprised) that my students had no idea what I was talking about.No doubt about it: the public schools are failing in a myriad of ways.

                My frustration and concern with our public education was exacerbated In November by New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg’s choice of Chancellor Cathleen Black.  I heard the news on NPR as I drove my two year old son home from the park.  I walked in the house holding my son’s hand but fuming and ranting. My husband suggested I take a deep breath, that maybe I was knee-jerk reacting.

                I can’t say this comment went over well with me.

                My husband generally tries to see the positive in things. He suggests, that maybe I haven’t considered this from all angles.

                I can’t say this comment went over well with me either.

                I explain that Cathleen Black is the chairwoman of Hearst magazines. She hasn’t been anywhere near the public schools not just recently but ever. My husband suggests that in such positions, much like the President, sometimes the skill isn’t so much in having the actual knowledge of what you are supposed to be the expert of, but the ability to have the best and most knowledgeable consultants and experts to advise you on what you need to know. He suggests that those who come from business know this.

                Just then, the story comes on the NPR evening news playing in the house. My husband calmly walks over to the stereo and turns up the volume. Cathleen Black is asking parents and teachers for patience and compassion as she gets up to speed on the issues facing public education.

                “I’m sorry,” I hollered at my husband, “but that comment doesn’t exactly boost my confidence in the woman!”

                “I have to agree you with there.” He said.

                That night I went to bed and thought of how when I was younger I wanted to teach college because of how much I loved my college classes. I thought of how when I was pregnant and found out I was having a boy, I immediately started planning his high school and Liberal Arts college education, that I wanted him to have art classes, world history classes, Women’s Studies classes. I wanted him to have classes that challenged him and taught him how to think. I thought of how while traveling abroad we met other parents from other countries and talked a lot about what we wanted for our children’s education. I realized then that the US is not the only one struggling with finding a system that works and that can possibly meet the needs of all its students.  I realized that my heartbreak over the public schools and Bloomberg’s choice comes from the American belief I was raised with: we are the wealthiest nation on the planet; we can have it all, but we have a responsibility to set an example because people look up to us. With the current emphasis on scores in education, this may be what influenced Bloomberg’s choice. He wanted someone to manage the schools like a business; raise scores, cut losses, make the schools look good on paper and in charts.

                But the public education I want – and the parents I talk to want - prioritizes students. It sees our children as what they are: children. Not a potential score that influences funding. 

Catching Up

And adding in my recent parenting related posts...

Other People's Houses -Brooklyn

When we were looking for a place to live in Bali, we easily looked at twenty different places to live. When I walked into the house that had an oven, I said we'd take it. It was the first oven I had seen in any of the houses we had looked at; indeed, it was one of two ovens on the entire island I heard of. I was thankful for my choice over the next few months as I baked loaves of pumpkin bread, zucchini bread, muffins, and roasted vegetables. Though the house did have its drawbacks: when we took our son to the healer for his chronic constipation that had not responded to ridiculous amounts of fiber, water, prune juice, or rounds and rounds of nasty ass-ed smelling Chinese herbs or homeopathic treatments (though the homeopathics did improve things a little), we learned that his constipation was due to a lack of phosphorus and salt. Oh, and thanks to the house, he had disturbed sleep. Our house was full of wayward spirits. And she didn't mean the rats I caught scurrying in the kitchen. Consequently, part of our bedtime routine became to walk through out the house shouting: "DISPERSE YOU WAYWARD SPIRITS!"

It is baffling for all the ceremonies and offerings purely for the purpose of appeasing and pacifying spirits, that indeed the waywards found their way into our house.

The house we're currently subletting in Brooklyn has no wayward spirits near as I can tell. I suspect this is because the house has its original windows complete with drafts and the waywards have been frozen out. So we're not haunted. The price we pay for this little luxury is the gusts of air that blow past our heads as we sleep.

Yet, this apartment has been meticulously restored. The crown moldings, the chandeliers, the hard wood floors, the porcelain bathtub that is the perfect width and length - Edith Wharton or any of her characters could have lived here. I have realized I grew up spoiled in that I grew up in old turn of the century houses, but the first thing my parents did was update the windows for the sake of their heating bill. In this apartment, you have to stand back from the window, otherwise you get the chill. You shudder, the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, and well, the house might as well be full of wayward spirits skittering about.

This apartment does have an oven, but I don't think it's ever been used. For the life of me I can't figure out how to turn it on. I'm not even sure it's hooked up to the gas line.  Not that it matters because there's no pans for baking or roasting anything. At our culinary fingertips, we have a crock pot, a saute pan and a soup pot. I looked up recipes for the crock pot and came up with little more than recipes for pot roast and chili. For some reason, I thought crock pots were making a come back, but I was wrong about this. It seems outside of the Midwest, people don't really use them or devise new recipes for them.

So I face a new challenge when it comes to meal planning. But if Anthony Bourdain can make risotto  in a hotel room with nothing more than an electric tea kettle, well, then, I probably have enough kitchen accouterments to whip up a Christmas Eve feast. Except by then, we'll be staying somewhere else.

Other People's Houses, But Closer to Home

Or a home.

Like millions of immigrants before us, we have arrived in New York, but via JFK Airport, not Ellis Island.

We flew in on the red eye with five bags for the three of us (JetBlue thankfully did not charge us a dime for the extra bags. They were phenomenal.) and showed up at our sublet for a hot bath and sleep.

Yep. A sublet. We're not home yet. But I think I can see the light at the end of the tunnel to this year and a half of living out of suitcases. We're about six, maybe eight, God forbid twelve weeks away from finding our own home, and having our things actually move there with us.

However, we are subletting a beautifully restored brownstone from a very nice fellow who happens to have a very monkish ascetic aesthetic. There's very little furniture, yet what there is is good quality mid-century modern. He has two twin beds - one in his bedroom for him to sleep on and one as a day bed in the living room. He said, "Two people can snuggle in and be comfortable in a twin bed, but I can bring in a full size if necessary."

Yes, please.

My sister Briana's response was very similar to mine: Yes, but if you're not twenty years old and in your first serious relationship, who would want to? And even at twenty years old in your first serious relationship, sleeping with two of your skinny selves snuggled into a twin bed yielded neck cramps and sore backs.

The other details of the monkish ascetic aesthetic? Communist sand papery one ply toilet paper, thin covers, scratchy towels. I am eternally grateful for this sublet and the beauty of the space, yet my instant reaction this morning while tired, cold, and craving a hot bath and down comforter the way alcoholics crave gin was, "It's beautiful, but it's not home."

As always, it takes a bit to settle into a place, for it to sink in that we're actually here to live, and not just visiting one more place, even if we are literally living out of suitcases (no dressers in this apartment).

As always, I travel with my favorite things, so I can pull them out and place them on shelves and feel a little familiarity in my new surroundings. I lost my truffle salt somewhere along the way (This is kind of tragic given that salt is my drug of choice and I have yet to find a salt shaker in this place, but I learned that the Portland based salt store The Meadow opened a Manhattan store a month ago! How lucky am I?) but of course have my creepy yet cool hands that I love. I pulled them out and placed them on the mantel. After my delicious hot bath and five hour nap. It's home for now.

The Lovely Mix of Old & New

I confess a wicked love for old typewriters. I received my first typewriter as an eighth grade graduation gift from my mother, who thought of the practical uses, that I would use it for all my papers in high school. I did. But I also spent most my free time - when I wasn't in dance classes or rehearsals or reading British novels - sitting on my bedroom floor and typing poems and stories and journal entries and who knows what all else. When I was angry at my parents ( a good chunk of the time like most 15 year olds) I typed list after list of things I hated, things I wouldn't do to my own children (which would be interesting to see now that I am a parent),  the qualities I wanted to have when I was a parent. When I was exhausted from venting and ranting, I'd type a list of the things I loved and was grateful for. It was one of my better self-devised coping mechanisms. There's something gratifying and satisfying about the click-tap-taping sound of typewriter keys. Something about it always makes me feel better.

So being from Portland, where DIY and hacking are both long standing lifestyle choices, it's hard not to love this anachronistic steampunkish mix of old typewriter and Apple computer. When I saw it this morning on NPR's website, I instantly swooned. If I had a home, maybe an office with an old oak desk that would go with my old oak library chair I picked up at a yard sale for $3, then maybe I'd recreate the above.

         Somewhere along the line I loaned my typewriter to a friend, and I never got it back. I still miss it. Even though it's too heavy to put in my suitcase as we travel from place to place as we find a home. Of course now, I want a Olivetti Underwood Manual Typewriter. They sound delightful.

Veteran's Day

Yes, I respect veterans. Yes, I support the troops and think they should be honored when they come home - especially since over 500,000 troops have come home with some form of depression or PTSD. (Personally, I think the lives and mental health of our citizens is too high a price to pay for the wars they are currently fighting.)

That said, Veteran's Day is my least favorite holiday. I find myself sad and snarky. 

And Veteran's Day is one of those holidays you have to be on good behavior, that while you do have the freedom of speech, if you use it on this day, people frown when they look in your general direction. People like spending the day waving flags and thanking veterans for defending our freedoms and democracy. It's not a good day to point out that the notion of "defending our freedoms and democracy" is a cultural myth. That actually, last time I checked, our democracy was not on the endangered species list. That not since the war with England has a single US soldier died for our freedoms or democracy. 

I spend the day wondering, what if we honored education as much as we honored the military?  The immediate answer, of course, is that people would have education enough to know that not a single US soldier has died defending our freedoms since the war with England. 

But really, what if we valued education as much as the military? What if we valued the lives of our citizens to such a degree that we were unwilling to send them into wars (legal or illegal) to have them killed or come home with mental illnesses?  

 What if we honored education (and I mean actual education, not the training that comes out of standardized test constructed curriculum), critical thinking and constructive problem solving skills that we found a way to resolve conflicts that didn't require the military? We attempt to raise our children with the notion that they need to talk - not fist fight - their way through their differences. What if the government was the one who set the example? 

(This is one of my childhood scars, my claws come out at the first sign of the "do as I say not as I do" child raising mentality.)

And, as the old bumper sticker says, what if we valued and funded education to such a degree that it was the military that had to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber?

What if we lived in a world where all countries' military existed to feed citizens, disaster relief and things that forwarded life? What if we saw ourselves as citizens of the Earth, not a country, region, city, race or gang to defend? 

You may say I'm a dreamer; my husband calls me a socialist. I don't think I'm the only one in the marriage. When critics accuse Obama of European-izing the country, we 're both yelling at the radio, "Good!" And anyway, even if I am a dreamer, as John Lennon says, I'm not the only one.

What if we created new conversations for what's possible for humanity? Wouldn't that be worth a holiday?

(Thank you Jerah Marquardt for inspiration)

 

 

Tempering Tantrums

When my son was 18 months old, friends, family members, and other well-meaning people warned us about the tantrums to come and the Terrible Twos. Still enraptured in my son’s perfection, I said, “I hate that term: The Terrible Twos. It labels kids without even giving them a chance. It’s like labeling inner city black kids as troubled or delinquent when they haven’t done anything wrong.”

            “You’ll see.” They said. I, of course, hate it when people say this too. It makes me feel like I’m being talked down to.

            When my sister said that she preferred the term “The Terrific Twos,” because it’s a terrific age and it’s terrifically hard, I agreed with her. I thought it was dead on.

           

Now that my son is two, we’re getting a few tantrums in between all his Terrific Two-ness. One day this week, I served up my husband’s and my lunch in the kitchen and took our plates to the table. My son grabbed his plate off his shelf and threw himself on the floor face down waving his empty plate around and kicking his legs in traditional temper tantrum style as he shouted, “food!” Because my son is a grazer, my husband and I feed him off our plates, so I said to my son, “the food is on the table. Let’s go to the table.”

            He wanted no part of it. More plate waving. More crying. More kicking.

            I looked at him. I asked, “Did you want me to serve your plate the way I did Mommy and Daddy’s?”

            The plate waving, kicking, and crying stopped. He picked himself up from the floor.

            “Yes.”  He said.

            At the table, my husband said, “I don’t know if we should give in to his tantrums. He might think that’s how he gets what he wants.”

            “I don’t think he’s throwing a tantrum to get something or to be difficult or manipulative. I think he’s frustrated because he hasn’t figured out how to ask for what he wants. As soon I guess what he wants to say, the tantrum is over.”

            “I can see that.” My husband said. Then we did as we often do in such situations: we scrolled through the ways our friends and family members parented in such situations. We consulted our examples.

Our options spanned the parenting spectrum. We had friends who when their children threw tantrums, they locked them in the garage, friends who held and rocked their child through the tantrum, others who said, “Throw your tantrum. When you’re done and need me, I’m on the couch.” We had friends who just walked away and ignored the tantrum all together. I have an uncle who when my cousins threw a tantrum, he’d throw an even bigger tantrum to show them how it was done.

But none of these examples fit us. We’re more the type to lock ourselves in the garage if we feel challenged by our child’s tantrum. I maintained that when he’s not sick, hungry or tired, our son’s tantrums are because he’s frustrated he can’t make himself understood, not because he’s trying to be difficult.

In the end, we decided not to follow any of the examples of the people we knew. We decided that in such situations, we should treat our son how we want him to treat other people who are upset, We decided his tantrums could be an opportunity to teach him empathy and compassion, that generally when people are upset, they just want to feel heard.

The next morning, my son woke up at 6am and asked to watch TV.

            “No,” I said.

            His tantrum began.

            “You want to watch TV?”

            “Yes.”  He said.

            “But I don’t want to watch TV first thing in the morning.”

            His tantrum continued.

            “Are you angry and frustrated because you can’t have what you want?” I asked him.

            “Yes,” he said.

            “That’s fair. Can we play trains instead?”

            “Yes.”

            Back in the land of the Terrific Twos, we played trains.

How I Spend November

November, as those close to me know, is National Novel Writing Month. Silly to call it National, as it now exists all over the world, but when it started in San Francisco in 1999 with 21 people the global part seemed far fetched. The gist of it is, as Chris Baty says, to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Baty started it for the simple reason that people always say they want to write a novel (people always say they want to do something) but that they had to wait to retire/the kids to leave home/win the lottery/their vacation time or whatever blah de blah blah excuse (because people always have something that keeps them from doing something).

Chris Baty said bullshit to all you people and your excuses. You need a deadline. And you need a crazy unreasonable deadline. What works about 50,000 words in 30 days is that if you are any kind of normal person with a life it's still a bit of a stretch to write 1667 words a day. Consequently, it means that mean-spirited discouraging editor voice in your head has to turn off and go away so that you can write. Actually, it's not even writing. It's typing. Typing with a purpose.

Why did I start spending my Novembers typing like a crazy person?

In the Spring of 2005, I was finishing up graduate school. In graduate school, while I loved my classes, loved that I had found a way to legitimate spending my Sundays in bed with 19th century British novels and a cup of coffee, and loved (most) my professors, I also struggled a bit. I struggled with that bitchy competitive at all costs mentality (having had papers and ideas stolen). I struggled with who you have to be in academe, that you have to fit into a kind of cookie cutter, and by the end of my program, I realized I didn't fit into that cookie cutter. And when I tried to fit myself into that cookie cutter, I got sick. I had more health issues in my years of graduate school than I had ever had before. I talked about all these things with a glorious adviser as I finished my program. She said, "You know you have brilliant ideas, but your problem is you're just so creative. Your problem is you're just in the wrong program. You should have been across the hall in the MFA creative nonfiction program."

She didn't say such things lightly. She spent most the time I knew her trying to convince MFA'ers to switch sides to the MA program. She told not just one person who wrote to quit. But I left her office with my pen in my hand and thinking, well, then, I should write.

I walked down the hallway and continued thinking, huh, well then. I want to write a book. But writing a book is daunting. You have to be smart sounding for at least 200 pages. I walked into the copy room to check my mailbox before leaving, and ran into a couple of friends of mine who were talking about a writer in the MFA program who had just had her collection of short stories published. But, they said in hushed voices, the stories weren't very good.

All the stories you hear of good writers not getting published, I continually find it baffling when mediocre and even bad writers get published. I asked, well how on earth did she get it published?
My friend said, "They're compelling stories."

I went home thinking of this and that night sat in my bathtub, saying to myself, okay, I can write a book, but I need a compelling idea, because I can write a bad book if the idea is compelling. Then my idea literally fell on my head. In the bathtub. Completely out of no where.

I finished graduate school, moved to Colorado to be with my not-yet husband, went to Africa with not-yet husband, got married, and started researching my idea. In November, I wrote my first 50,000 word draft. Of course I still procrastinated and wrote the last 30,000 words in the last three days (I didn't have a child then). But you write 30,000 words in 3 days - well, you can imagine the typos and the paragraphs without a stitch of punctuation.

I did what you do in such situations: I gave it to my parents, the people who are supposed to love me no matter what even if I write 50,000 words of crap.

I still haven't revised it. Turns out I find revising more daunting than actually writing. Turns out writing is the easy part. And actually, while I still love the idea and can even see the future movie of my book in my mind, I'm not there yet. I'm still simmering on it. In 2006 & 2007, I tried to use the November Novel writing as a outlet for revising and failed miserably. In 2008, I had a baby the week before November started, so I felt justified in taking the month off - and even if I wanted to write, in labor I pinched nerves in my upper arms that left my wrists paralyzed for six weeks. I couldn't even put on my glasses let alone hold a pen.

In 2009, we went to Singapore. In my suitcase, I had a good chunk of my research books and my revision attempts, but instead I started a new novel in November. Not even halfway through the month, I decided I hated that idea and ended up writing a collection of short stories that I've spent the last year revising.

Just before coming home from Bali, I started to realize what was missing from my novel, what I needed to do in order to fix it. I'm a firm believer in simmering and I've since learned that I'm in good company. I met an author who had a story in the Best American Short Stories and she spent five years writing, simmering, revising, simmering some more. Now I think the writing process is similar to parenting, in that when you follow your story or your child's lead, it goes far easier than trying to force your agenda.

This year I have a brand new idea. I'm writing that. Husband still wants me to revise and finish the old one. Of course I will. But not this month. This month I'm typing my 50,000 words while trying to keep up on all the other things I want to be doing and writing. This year - last year too - the writing isn't even about the writing anymore. It's just for the tradition of it. That in five years, we've lived in four cities, and still haven't for sure decided on where to live. How I spend November is the one count on-able thing in my yearly calendar. It's how I cope with all the other change constantly happening in the rest of my life, that no matter where we are, I am getting up at 4am and stealing Saturdays for myself and writing. Typing.

Also While Driving Around With Kent: Fyo Gets His First Lesson in Civics

Fyo loves several things about my sister, his Auntie Sis, but most of all he loves her for her iPhone. When Auntie Sis visited us in Bali, she showed him her "Cowbell" application. He ran around the house tapping on her iPhone to make the cowbell noise. This last visit from Auntie Sis she showed him "Coy Pond" so he could watch all the fish.

Except that when watching the fish, he'd always hit the button to turn the fish off. Sis shortly grew tired of this game, setting him up with Coy Pond only to have him hit the button that turned it off. She moved onto the next of her iPhone applications: The U.S. Constitution.

She started reading Fyo the Constitution. Fyo said, "Sing?".

Sis said, "I don't know if I can sing it. The language is so yadda yadda wadda wadda."

But she did. She sang the Constitution to my son. Kent and I were rather impressed. We joked the Constitution could be the source for a new musical. At one point she paused to point out the beauty of the language and the eloquence of one sentence in particular.

"Listen," she said, "this one sentence is beautiful." When my sister (or anyone for that matter) says such things it makes the heart of the English teacher in me go all a flutter.  She is right of course; the beauty and construction of the language in the Constitution lends itself perfectly to admiring, pondering, savoring and diagramming in order to admire it at a more profound level. Diagramming the sentences in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence is the kind of thing I used to do as a form of meditation (back when I had that kind of time).

Fyo, however,  didn't want any part of the admiring the language. He just yelled, "SING!" So she did. He liked her singing the U.S. Constitution more than he likes my singing of "You Are My Sunshine" or that I love you song we learned from our friend Francesca. He bobbed his head and danced in his car seat the way he does when we play music that he likes.

Lesson learned from Auntie Sis: just like it's never too early to start reading to your child, it's never too early to begin your child's Constitution literacy.

Ah... Portland Hippie Homeless Goodness

Yesterday, after much running around and spending much time in traffic, we pulled in behind this car to park for dinner at Portland's Doug Fir. Maybe it was all the running around with a full vehicle of two dogs, two sisters, two paintings, and a napless child, or maybe it was the running around after too much (or not enough?) coffee on a typical (I find beautifully so having spent the last two years heat exhausted) drizzly dreary Portland day, but it was this bumper sticker that sent Kent over the edge and had him start yelling, "That is the gay gay gay. Not derogatory towards homosexuals gay, but kumbayah gay gay."

Granted, we could have used this bumper sticker earlier in the day, when we had parked the car on NW Broadway to walk over to the block of food carts on 5th and Oak for some lunch. Kent was pushing Fyo in the stroller while I was walking along enjoying my new green shoes when a woman walking towards me got in my face and yelled at me. I don't even know what she yelled; I just knew that it was in my ear. We both continued walking on our way. Kent turned to me and said, "How did you not respond? I would have hit her." But I was too surprised to respond. And really, what do you do in such situations except briefly lament deinstitutionalization. She was clearly crazy, and much like how in The Princess Bride Vizzini says to not get into a land war in Asia, it is equally pointless to get into a verbal street fight with Portland's crazy homeless population. But if I had had that bumper sticker in my hands, I probably would have smacked her with it - though I would have amended it with a sharpie to say, "If you lived in your heart, you wouldn't be homeless."

War Play

One afternoon while we were in Bali, my husband, then 22 month old son and I were playing soccer with our friends, an Australian couple with four children (ages 8, 6, 4 & three weeks older than our son Fyo). My son Fyo learned his love of soccer from our friends the Australians; he fell in love with chasing the ball, then setting it in the grass to kick it. So I was surprised when out of nowhere, he quit paying attention to the ball and instead picked up a stick in the grass and used it as a gun to shoot our friend’s six year old.

My husband and I haven’t owned a television since before we were married. Our friends didn’t own a television. In Indonesia, possession of a gun will get you life in prison. If the gun discharges a bullet, the owner faces the death penalty. I felt pretty secure in knowing that my toddler son had not seen any outside influence where he would have learned such a thing, excepting other children. I felt baffled as I watched what I of course consider my perfect child participate in potentially violent pretend play.

Guns and violence in general makes me squeamish. I don’t like the sight of them. I can’t help but feel sickened when I see children playing with toy guns. I don’t want my son to own a toy gun. I don’t want him to want one.

But I don’t want to be that mother who forbids something and is unwilling to have a discussion about it either. I especially don’t want to be that mother who, when she sees her son shoot his pretend stick gun, flips out in some kind of Mommy Dearest tirade.

In that moment, what I instead do is act nonchalant and as if my son’s gun pretend play is no different than his pouring a cup of tea pretend play.

My Australian friend reassures me that mothers disliking gun play is perfectly normal, but that she’s noticed Americans especially are scared and squeamish around guns. I point out that Americans have earned their fear of guns. As a nation, we’ve faced several tragedies involving guns. She points out that guns are a tool and like any other tool require instruction and respect in handling. I agree with her, but I still can’t help my stomach turning over when I see a gun.

When I get home to my family in Portland, gun pretend play again becomes a topic of conversation between my siblings and I, as the three of us all have sons (not a girl in the lot). My sister points out that it’s unfair to not allow boys to have their pretend play while girls can pretend play with kitchens, babies, Barbies, and princesses as much as they want even as that too makes us squeamish about the potentially sexist messages we may be sending them.

Yet my sister-in-law was raised in Serbia where there is still a compulsory 2-year military service. She was a shooter. She describes the strength, focus, and mindset it takes to fire a gun well. She just as easily could be describing a yoga practice. She did give her son a gun with strict rules for playing with it, and shortly after he lost interest in it.

At my grandmother’s house, my son pulls out the toy box full of toys that my siblings, cousins and I played with, and some of the toys, my dad and uncle played with. He finds the collection of water guns at the bottom. I ask myself if my squeamishness includes water guns – when I remember innocently running around my grandparents yard and shooting water at my siblings and cousins, thoughts of pretend wars the farthest thing from my mind. My son piles the water guns into the back of a dump truck. He isn’t thinking about war either.

My husband and I haven’t talked about how we’ll handle the subject of guns or war play with our son. I suspect gun education is much like sex education, in that it should be talked early and often so it’s no big deal; probably it is also similar to talking about sex in that kids are more aware of your discomfort with the subject than with what you are saying. So it’s my own discomfort – not my son’s pretend play – that I first am grappling with.

Toy Story

My sister, a friend of ours, and I were sitting in a café in North East Portland while my husband played outside in the small courtyard with my almost-two year-year old son and our friend’s four year old son. Outside, they were collecting rocks. Our friend’s son was demonstrating his yoga and my husband, quite the yogi himself, gave him new poses to try.

Inside, over coffee and pie, we enjoyed the break from entertaining the “older” children, and indulged in holding my sister’s seven-month old baby. In talking with my sister and friend, we talked about what we often do together: parenting, education, and with my son’s 2nd birthday at the end of the month, and Christmas just around the corner, we talked about toys.

My sister and I have a fear of battery operated single function toys. We like the classic toys, the wooden toys, and especially the toys that represent our values, those from green companies, or small businesses or etsy shop owners or the ones from our own childhoods that we find in thrift stores or our mother’s attic. We want toys that last, that grow with our children that encourage their intellect and creativity in a myriad of ways. Because my husband, son and I spent the last year living abroad, it was easy to get out of owning any battery operated toys. Or toys with television characters. Or toys that were poor quality that would end up orphaned and scattered in a million pieces with no one remembering what the original function of the toy was.

I look out the window into the courtyard and see my son, my husband, and my son’s new four-year old friend running around and playing chase, when my son stops suddenly to pick up another rock for the collection he has growing in his hands. It’s when I catch him in such small moments that I wonder if he really needs toys at all.

But he does, because I don’t want to spend my life outside while he collects rocks, leaves, acorns and acorn tops. Though I really do love these collections of his, I just need him to play independently but safely inside in the evening when I’m trying to get dinner on the table. So for those moments, I do want the good quality toy that entertains him in a myriad of ways while encouraging his intellect and creativity, but does not make heinous noises that might inspire a parental migraine or the making of a martini.

Our friend is a smart, pragmatic parent who views everything as a potential learning opportunity and conversation with her children. She says, “At some point, someone will give you the annoying single function battery operated toy. Either, you don’t put the batteries in it, or you do, and they play with it until the batteries die, and then you explain that at some point, everything dies (unless you want to teach them how to maintain it). Then they leave the toy outside, and it rains, so the toy falls apart and you explain that things eventually fall apart, especially when abandoned. They get it. And then you no longer have to deal with the annoying sound.”

She shrugs in her matter of fact way. I admire her approach to parenting and agree with a lot of her views. Still, the thought of walking into a Toys R Us for my son’s birthday just feels incongruent to who my husband and I are. Later, we instead opt for the gently used wooden play kitchen that we found on craigslist. My husband brings it home; we don’t bother waiting for his birthday to give it to our son. Within minutes, my son is opening the play oven, the play refrigerator, putting his toys inside, taking them out. He spent the rest of the evening playing and pretending. No batteries required.

Re-Thinking the Over-Thinking

I don’t consider myself particularly intellectual or erudite, but I have always been a library lovin’ card catalog addict kind of researcher. The kind that comes home with stacks of books, knowing full well that I will never get to read all of them and even if I am writing on the topic found within the pages, I may never even crack the spine, or if I do, it’s to skim one paragraph. I really actually just want the books there, in my presence as a form of security blanket. I also tend to think a lot about things- some would say too much, (I’ve been accused of over thinking more than once and by more than one ex-boyfriend) though it is a trait I got to nurture into a reflex-like habit while in graduate school.

When it comes to parenting, I’m no different. I research a lot. I read a lot. I promised myself I would when I was a teenager; that I wouldn’t parent like I was being parented- not that I didn’t have parents who meant well and not that I haven’t learned a lot from the vast amounts of things they did that worked. Yet now as I am writing once a week on my parenting life, I am starting to feel a bit self-conscious as I reveal myself in all my neurosis. I start to wonder if other parents think as much about things. I take comfort in my friend from Australia who thinks about things as much as I do. She has four children. She too battles this, and confides in me, that one of her sons could spend hours watching television and playing video games. She doesn’t want him to; she’s read all the same studies as I have about the potential effects to creativity, the ability to entertain one’s self, or what happens to a child’s emotional development when they learn a lot with no face-to-face interaction. She says to me, “I’ve been told to just let him do as he wants, and that if I don’t let him it’s because I’m too controlling. Is that true? Does that make me too controlling?”

I don’t want to say yes, because I agree with her – I don’t want my son to watch hours of television or play video games for hours either – and I know if I say yes, that it does mean she’s over controlling, it means I’m over controlling too. And I’m guessing – given my added number of things I don’t want for my son – I’m way more over controlling than she is.

And over controlling is just the beginning of negative connotations that I imagine get connected to how much I over think things. Probably I’m overly critical about most of what’s out in the world for kids in terms of education, toys, clothes and videos (I know of only two other parents who dislike Thomas the Train as much as I do). Probably I’m picky – about who baby sits my son, what he eats, what he plays with, what he does watch on TV, or that while most of the children’s programming on PBS is so surprisingly crappy I prefer he not watch any of it, and if he does watch Sesame Street, I prefer he watch the older episodes of Sesame Street, before it got turned over to Elmo and what’s-her-face-fairy-wings.

The scenes in When Harry Met Sally, when Sally orders in her “this, but not this, and that, but that in a certain way and I want it how I want it” way – I’m the parenting version.

Sometimes I catch glimpses of how I must look through the eyes of others, when I share my disappointment in PBS, and my mother-in-law says, “It’s far better than everything else out there.” My father-in-law pipes in, “They’re the only ones not selling something.” I don’t say anything else, except that this is not saying much about the overall quality of children’s television. While in my mind I begin my rant, that after every show on Oregon Public Broadcasting, they show the show’s sponsor. It turns out Chuck E Cheese is responsible for most of the morning’s television. Before OPB, my son had never heard of Chuck E Cheese. I never went there as a child; needless to say that I don’t want him going there either. I start to think maybe I should admit to being full-fledged neurotic.

Then I wrote a post about toys and I wrote it while in one of my moments of wondering is there really just a few of us who don’t want their children playing with battery operated crap? Is it just me? Do people think I bitch about everything when it comes to what’s available for children?

Some might, but plenty agree with me I learned in the days after my post. I don’t know why company is comforting, but it is. I felt reassured again and again as people left their comments. It had me re-think my over-thinking, that maybe it’s not over-thinking, but just thinking and questioning.

Reading: Half the Sky

When I was in Cambodia traveling with my dad, his wife and my then 18-month old son, we took a floating village tour near the small town of Siam Reap. It was our last day; we had spent most our time there at the Anghor Wat temple, but now wanted to see something else. We asked the tut-tut driver we had hired for our stay, how should we spend the last day in Cambodia? The Kampong Phluk floating village was his recommendation.

The first stop of our floating village tour was the village gift shop, full of the same things you see in every other gift shop in Siam Reap, but with the addition of books about Cambodia, and hand woven scarfs and fabrics made by women and girls in the village. On our way to the gift shop, a young boy hopped on board the back of our boat to sell us water and bananas; we didn’t buy any, as we had already bought water. Then, not long after a woman rowed her narrow canoe up to our boat. Laid across her lap was her sleeping newborn. Sitting next to her was her older daughter holding up a bunch of bananas, and next to her was her brother, shirtless - wearing only a snake around his neck. The boy held the snake head up to us; the mother held out her hand.
I looked at her and her baby, as I held my still nursing and napping toddler in his carrier. I gave her a five-dollar bill.

When we arrive at the gift shop, we are helped off our boat by a greeter, who points up the plank connecting to the rest of the boat. We walked past cages of snakes on the ground. Farther ahead is a deck where you can look over the edge and see the crocodiles they keep on the lower level of the boat.
The things made by the local villagers in the gift shop are gorgeous. I pick up a hand woven scarf. As a knitter, I recognize the craftsmanship (crafts(wo)manship?); it is outstanding. A woman comes over and asks me to buy it. I say, but I don’t need it, it’s wool, and I live in Singapore.

Please, she says.

There are two. I love them both and try to think whom I could give them to that doesn’t already own a dozen scarves I have knitted and given to them.

Five dollars, she says.

Five dollars? I ask. Usually, when I say the price back in a question in a tone of utter disbelief, it’s because I think they are trying to charge me the outrageous white girl price. But this time I say it back in the disbelief of how cheap the labor and craftsmanship sells for. I could find the same scarf in the States at Anthropologie or other hip design-y boutique/small business for close to seventy.
I bought one. I’m still sorry I didn’t buy both.

While we were in the gift shop, declining offers of coconuts and the tricks their caged (barely) crocodiles could perform, I lost count of the numbers of boats of children that came up begging. I battled my own inner conflict, that I don’t mind being generous and helping, but I don’t like being constantly asked. I also don’t like the feeling that it’s my dollar they depend on, even as I know it beats the alternative. But this is a tricky line many countries in the third world face, that as their local populations earn a living selling tourists their traditional crafts and preserving some aspect of their local heritage, it also has them put all their eggs in one basket. If tourism stops – much like it did in Bali after the bombings- then the locals are again desperate. Also, Cambodia faces much of what Eastern Europe faced in the fall of communism, that when communism fell, it left economic distress in its wake, which, as history has taught us more than once, is the perfect conditions for the birth of gangs. Capitalism grants the opportunity to make a dollar, but also the opportunity to make a dollar at someone else’s expense, especially in a country, so traditionally sexist a wife is considered defiant if she dares to look at her husband in the face.

The next stop on our floating village tour was supposed to be a school, where you could see the school kids and buy them school supplies, but I didn’t want to see the school kids. I felt like they needed all the education they could get; they didn’t need distractions by tourists. My dad gave the guide money and told him to give it to the school for whatever they needed, but we didn’t want to stop. The guide said the final stop was at the village orphanage. My dad looked at me. I am known for falling in love with random children. And Cambodian children I find gorgeous. They have black eyes, rich skin, black hair. And I know what kind of life await many of the baby girls in the orphanage.

“Dad,” I said. “I can’t go there. If we go to that orphanage, we’ll be spending the next few days at the American Embassy getting my new baby a birth certificate and passport.”
My dad looked at the guide. “Skip it. Please take us home.” He used my son as an excuse, that it had already been a long day.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I thought about the mother with her baby sleeping in her lap, the same way I used to lay my son across my own lap while I read or ate. I thought about the boy and his snake around his neck. My dad thought it was cruel of poverty to put parents into the position of using their children as wage earners. I thought they didn’t consider it cruel at all, but just part of survival and giving them the skills for survival. I thought it was cruel of the floating village to offer to take you to the orphanage. I spent most my night tossing and turning, wondering if I should have gone ahead and adopted a second child without consulting my husband still in Singapore. I wondered if he would have been really mad, or if he would have taken one look at the baby girl and melted – his usual response to when he sees baby girls. I rationalized that I was still breastfeeding so I could have breastfed the new baby-I assumed-girl, I just couldn’t wrap my head around how it could all work. I couldn’t even wrap my head around how I would travel by myself back to Singapore with a newly adopted baby and an active toddling son.
I came home and told my husband about the children I did see, how beautiful they were, but there viewed as unlucky or as ugly because their skin is dark, while white or fair skin is prized. Like in Bangkok, and sections of Singapore, Fyo turned heads and inspired (literally) parades of photographers and admirers. People wanted to touch his head and legs. Waiters in restaurants picked him up and carried him around to show him off to the rest of the staff. He was white. He was a boy, even the first son. He was lucky.

When I told my husband about our trip, the children, the floating village, the poverty, the orphanage, the baby I would have adopted if I had gone. He agreed, saying it was like going to the pound without the intention of adopting a kitten. I said I still felt conflicted, that I only wanted two children, and that because I loved being pregnant, I wanted to be pregnant again, but now I wanted to adopt our third child, a daughter from Cambodia. He laughed at me when I said I no longer judged Angelina Jolie so harshly, that I now saw exactly what moved her and what she fell in love with.

Cambodia is a magical place. It’s an easy country to fall in love with and have your heart broken again and again. There’s beauty in the people and scenery that breaks your heart and there’s hurt and pain and wounds on in the people and literally carved into the landscape that breaks your heart. It’s a country that is just intensely human, in that it continues to deal with the best and worst of humanity; in Cambodia, you are never far from the best or worst of what the human spirit is capable of.

After my trip to Cambodia, I spent some time reading up on the country, the culture, the war, and the history. Sadly, most of the literature on Cambodia is based in the country’s negative experiences, either the Khmer Rouge or the sex trade. However, books such as Louise Ung’s Lucky Child and First They Killed My Father and Somaly Mam’s The Road to Lost Innocence leave one awed by the strength of spirit, that such women not only survived such horrors, but then dealt with them head on to write and tell their stories.

Because of my short time in Cambodia, I immediately fell into Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. The first two chapters begin with Sex trafficking and slavery in Cambodia, but Kristof and WuDunn lead you on a tour through a good chunk of the world, through Asia, India, Afghanistan, Iran. They tell the personal stories of women who have battled oppression in healthcare and education, some of their stories have heartbreaking endings, including girls killed by their own family members or women who were in a hospital, but didn’t have the money to pay and essentially left to suffer. But their stories aren’t just anecdotal; they have the startling statistics to support why it is these stories they are relaying. One of the most quoted statistics is that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century.

I think it is this statistic (but it is hard to choose one that startles me the most) that gets me, not just in the sheer amount of girls, but how until reading this book, most people would have no idea. Yet, thanks to holidays like Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day, there’s not much of a chance of anyone forgetting about the men who died in wars, or that these men are often cited as having died defending democracy (even though democracy wasn’t at much risk for falling out of existence). I don’t want to devalue the lives of men lost in war, but the girls who have died in the last fifty years – when the greatest strides have been made in health care, sanitation and refrigeration (all improvements which should theoretically improve their chances for survival, let alone a healthy one) – they have no holiday. They have no plaque or eternal flame and they have no burial ground included on a list of National Monuments and tourist sites. As Kristof and WuDunn illustrate over and over, the inequality is multilayered and intricate: it is a knot that begs to be teased apart.

It can be easy to get overwhelmed and depressed reading the horrors of what half the earth’s population goes through on a daily basis, but Kristoff and WuDunn include more stories with happy, and even triumphant endings. While they may infer that a society wide overhaul may be beneficial in some cases, they repeatedly find the research that supports an unexpected simple solution that makes the greatest impact. Often, the solutions with the most success are ones you’d never suspect, programs that essentially bribe or pay families to keep their daughters in school, or providing school uniforms for girls. They more often than not point to small things that make a huge difference; what they note over and over again is that focusing on the details is much like adjusting the launch of a rocket a few degrees and completely changing the arc of the trajectory.

They also delve into the complexities of aid work, that while US or European aid agencies mean well, it often complicates situations or makes things worse because of the lack of anticipation of cultural, social, religious differences. The motivations of Western aid agencies do occasionally sound more like those of their 19th century imperialist ancestors instead of the well-meant-intentions of Westerners who do just want to help.

Yet, this is one of the complexities of aid work, in that while it is well meant, it can be demeaning. Much like in face-to-face conversations, when one person just starts offering suggestions or how-to guides, it kind of assumes the other can’t do something. My step-mother often quotes AA in these situations as she says, “Unsolicited advice sounds like criticism.” Some Africans argue that more aid isn’t what Africa needs. Kristof cites, “Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan, complained about the calamitous consequences of ‘the international cocktail of good inentions.” And “James Shikwati of Kenya has pleaded with Western donors: ‘For God’s sake, please just stop.” They repeatedly say that the best solutions don’t come from Westerners, or UN peacekeepers parachuting in with canned goods when there’s not a can opener to be found in whatever country they landed in. (It is funny, Westerners so desperately cling to the fairy-tale-superhero-comic-book narrative arc: there must be somebody we can rescue or save and who will be forever grateful to us for saving them…). The best solutions have come from people within the countries or ex-pats who have spent considerable time in the country and done their homework and who work with the locals. Novelty of novelty, it is partnership – it is the cooperative efforts that so often gets talked about on my son’s Sesame Street DVD that yields the best results, and sometimes, as Kristof and WuDunn say, there are girls they can’t save.

This is the kind of book I do want to read all in one sitting and if I didn’t have a toddler to chase after in the day and if I wasn’t already getting up at 4am to squeeze my writing in, then I’d stay up all night finishing it (I just recently stayed up until 3am finishing The Girl With Dragon Tattoo and paid for it desperately the next day). It’s the kind of book that makes me love reading and has me remember why I love reading. It’s the kind of book that sent me to the library for another stack of books piled high up to my chin between my arms. (In my stack for next up: Greg Mortenson's Stones for Schools and Three Cups of Tea!)

And it’s the kind of book that since I started reading, I haven’t stopped talking about or citing stories or statistics from or bits of perspective or insights. It’s the kind of book I don’t want to stop talking about, an important book that needs to be talked about, much like Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, that sobers and startles and surprises all while simply pointing to what is there beneath our noses, but failed to see, or that we did see, but felt that it was so overwhelming or all encompassing that you don’t know where to begin in grappling with it.

Which is essentially how I felt in Cambodia, falling in love with the country and people, having my heart broken, wanting to adopt baby girls I had never even met, knowing that many of the women there had survived things that no one should and mostly as a repercussion of poverty. I left that country feeling moved in ways I never had before, but also reeling from the intricate-ness of the knot of issues that the country faces. I didn’t know how one would even know where to begin. So I am thankful to Kristof and WuDunn for beginning to tease it apart.