Half Changed World

My clock radio is set to 90.9, so if I set my alarm for 6:30 am, I wake up to the purring voice of Garrison Keillor and The Writer’s Almanac.  Every weekday, he talks about a few writers who were born on that day, and reads a poem.  Today’s poem was Casabianca, by Felicia Dorothea Hemans, better known by its first line "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck."

It’s a very 19th century poem, lauding the obedience and courage of the young son of an admiral, burning to death rather than leave without permission:

The flames rolled on – he would not go
Without his father’s word;
That father, faint in death below,
His voice no longer heard.

My understanding is that schoolchildren used to memorize this poem and recite it.  (I know I read a children’s book in which the main character recites it.  One of the Little House books?  The Great Brain?  Anyone have a guess?)

Over the weekend, while my parents were visiting, at one point my mother praised N for his obedience, and my father commented that probably wasn’t something he was especially proud of.  I see obedience in children as mostly an instrumental virtue — if I can trust my son to stop when I shout stop, I can let him go further than an arm’s length away.  I find the glorification of obedience for its own sake in Casabianca pointless and more than a little horrifying. 

Annette Lareau has suggested that obedience has become largely a value of the poor and working-class in the US.  She argues that middle-class families in the US typically place higher value on independence of thought, reasoning, and self-confidence rather than obedience.  I was reminded of this reading Cecily’s post today, in which she writes "I will, most likely, never ask my kids to call me “Ma’am.” " as a marker of the cultural differences between her and her siblings.

Any thoughts?  Is it possible to raise kids to be both obedient and to trust their own judgement?  Do you find yourself saying "Because I’m the mother, that’s why"?

Last week, I was reading and I must have made a noise, because T said "what?"  I said, "Nothing, I’m just feeling overwhelmed by the book I’m reading."  "Is it as bad as Bastard Out of Carolina?" he asked, that having set the standard years ago by leaving me staring into space and whimpering as I finished it.  "Almost."

The book I was reading was The Glass Castle: A Memoir, by Jeanette Walls and it is both heartbreaking and challenging.  It’s the story of her childhood with parents who simultaneously opened up worlds for their children — worlds of literature and art, of geology, natural history, and astromony — and who failed at the most basic tasks of parenting — keeping their kids fed and safe.  She writes of her first memory — catching on fire at age 3, as she cooked hot dogs for herself — and of her father giving her Venus for Christmas one year.  She writes of living in a leaking house, without heat, indoor plumbing, or electricity, and of stealing discarded lunches from the trashcans at school.  She writes of riding in back of a U-Haul truck, and of her father yelling at her and her siblings when they finally caught his attention and pointed out the that the doors had opened.  And she writes of her father bringing her to see the cheetah at the zoo, and bringing her up to the cage to let it lick the salt from popcorn off her hands:

"I could hear people around us whispering about the crazy drunk man and his dirty little urchin children, but who cared what they thought?  None of them had ever had their hand licked by a cheetah."

Imagine Angela’s Ashes if, instead of doing her best to feed her family in spite of her husband’s drunkeness, Angela had been an artist who thought it was a waste of time to cook, thought it was unfair to expect her to hold a steady job, and hoarded food from the children.

But what makes the book so wrenching isn’t the depths of the poverty to which the Walls family sank, or even the domestic violence, alcoholism, and mental illness that shadowed their lives, but the moments of beauty and wonder that are interspersed with all of the above.  I don’t doubt that the Walls kids should have been in foster care, but Jeanette Walls makes clear that something important would have been lost as well as much gained.  (The one time that a social worker does try to investigate the family, the children cover up for the parents, fearing — probably with cause — that they’d be separated from each other.)

The other book that I was reminded of was The Mosquito Coast.  If you’ve only seen the movie, you won’t understand why, because in the movie, Harrison Ford’s character just seems like a egomaniacal lunatic.  But in the book, the story is filtered through the perspective of his son, who believes in him.  Like Allie Fox, Rex Walls is a man of a million plans.  (The "Glass Castle" of the title is the house that he was constantly designing blueprints for, even as their real house slid down the side of the mountain.)

The Glass Castle has at least somewhat of a happy ending, as the Walls children move away from their parents and at least three of the four grow into basically happy and functional adults.  (The youngest stabs their mother after an argument, is institutionalized for a year, and then moves away and loses contact with the family.)  The parents continue to live by their "ideals" (or their madness) choosing to live as squatters in New York rather than accept assistance from their children or anyone else.  And ultimately, Jeanette is more forgiving of her parents than I could imagine, accepting them for who they are.

A few months ago, when I wrote about how much (or how little) effect parents have on how their children turn out, Jen recommended a book called The Stardust Lounge: Stories from A Boy’s Adolescence, by Deborah Digges.  It’s Digges’ memoir of how her younger son got into trouble — car theft, running with gangs — how helpless she felt — there’s a great passage where she describes following him through the night streets as he heads out to do graffiti with his friends — and how they eventually made their way through the rough waters of his teenage years.

Digges recounts the conversation with Steve’s therapist that seems to have been a turning point.  Ed, the therapist, says:

"Kids like Steve have come to understand themselves as capable, independent thinkers by the time they reach their teens.  Despite their problems with impulse control, even problems with conventional learning, they believe in their abilities to solve their own problems because — Steve’s an example — they’ve been allowed to.  Or because — like his street friends — they’ve had to."

"After a childhood of being allowed to make his own decisions — after your encouraging him to explore his passions and play them out, even when they were a bit dangerous, even when they involved risk — now you’re telling him no.  That’s all over.  Now he’s got to do what you say, what his teachers say, what the cops say, no questions asked."

"But the stakes are so much higher! He got himself into gangs and guns.  And he’s still just a kid.  He’s failing school…"

Ultimately, Digges decides to back off and let go, to let Stephen make his own decisions — and to let him deal with the consequences imposed by schools and legal systems when he makes bad ones.  Part of the charm of the book is that Digges never suggests that this is the only right approach.  In fact, she never is sure that it’s the right approach, even for her and Stephen.  Even at the end, when he’s going to college for a fine arts degree, she doesn’t suggest that this means the story has a happy ending, only that he’s on an easier path for now.  But she accepts that she’s not cut out out to be a controlling parent, and that Steven can tell she’s faking it when she tries.

Social services programs for youth talk a lot these days about building on adolescents’ strengths, not just seeing them as a bundle of trouble waiting to happen.  Although Digges doesn’t use this language, this is precisely what she does — encouraging his music and his photography even when he’s at his most rebellious, expecting him to act responsibly in caring for their chronically ill dog. 

Perhaps the bravest — or craziest — thing that Digges does is take in one of Stephen’s friends, Trevor, when his own family turns him away.  It would have been easy for her to say, sorry, I have enough on my plate dealing with my own kid and my job and my falling apart house and the tax authorities.  No one would have faulted her for saying, no, Stephen’s peace is fragile enough, I can’t take in a ghetto kid with a whole set of his own problems.  But she didn’t. Perhaps because of Stephen’s difficulties, Digges didn’t have the expectation of being able to control how everything would turn out, and so was open to letting even more chaos — several high-needs pets, a troubled teen — into her life.

I hope I don’t experience the challenges that Digges did, but if I do, I hope I can face them with as much grace as she did.

Today’s book is "It’s a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons," a collection of essays edited by Andi Buchanan, author of Mother Shock.

This is part of her blog book tour, in which different bloggers have been writing about the book each day this month.  It’s been great fun seeing everyone’s different perspectives on the book, from Tertia writing about parenting boy-girl twins to Dawn, who asked Andi some good questions about balancing writing and parenting.  (Go to Andi’s blog for links to everyone who is participating.)

I’m going to start by stealing a question from Shannon, of Peter’s Cross Station, who asked "When I first heard about the project, it sounded like yet another opportunity to make stereotyped claims about gender in children. How have you been able to avoid falling into that old rut?"  Andi replied:

"Well, as I said in my original call for submissions, my whole idea with this book was to refute the gender stereotypes about boys and girls, and to explore whether or not those stereotypes really exist in actual boys and girls through essays by thoughtful writers. For the BOY book, I was specifically looking for pieces that questioned the cultural assumptions we have about boys — whether the essayists ultimately embraced the stereotypes or rejected them was not as important to me as whether or not the writers wrestled with them in the first place. So the BOY book has pieces about a mother being surprised by a son’s love, since what she experienced with her son ran counter to her expectations of what a boy would be like; about a transsexual mother grappling with how to raise her son in the face of everyone’s attitude that her mere presence tips the scale in the direction of him being gay; about a woman nurturing her son’s desire for soft, pretty things, even though a part of her wants to protect him from the harsh, messy world that will surely not be so kind; about boys who defy stereotypes, boys who fit them, and the way mothers adjust their expectations to fit the reality of who their sons are."

There was much in these essays that found me nodding my head in recognition.  I think my favorite essay was "Becoming a Boy"  in which Robin Bradford writes about how her son led her to discover the joy of "boyish" things that she had never done as a girl or woman.  Somewhat to my surprise, the essay that left me looking sheepishly around the metro rubbing tears from my eyes was "The Day He Was Taller" by Jacquelyn Mitchard, which is about her son outgrowing all his clothes and buying himself a suit.

The book is organized into four thematic sections, and I’m afraid I found the first one, about what Andi calls "boy shock" or "prenatal gender apprehension," the hardest to relate to. In response to a question from Sandra, Andi writes:

"[T]he concerns of writers in It’s a Boy were about the otherness of the male gender: What the heck do you do with a boy? Some of the writers in It’s a Girl ask a similar question about raising their daughters, but what prompts that question is not the fear of an unknown gender, but of knowing it all too well."

When I was pregnant with D, we didn’t find out what gender the baby would be until he was born, and I truly didn’t have a preference.  I was under no illusion that I would understand a girl any better than a boy, or be able to provide any more guidance through the treacherous shoals of junior high school.  I may not be able to provide useful advice on whether to report a bully to the teacher or to fight back, but I can’t help with ingratiating oneself with the popular clique of girls either. I sucked at being a teenage girl when I was one; I’m pretty sure I’d suck at being one now if I were pulled back a la Peggy Sue.

It somewhat bothered me that so many of the authors were ambivalent about having sons, and none of them were univocally happy about it.  I asked Andi if she thought this might be because the project was about "women writers on raising sons," and she answered;

"I did worry that perhaps the book would be tilted too much towards the "overly articulate feminist intellectual pondering gender" because it would be written by, well, overly articulate feminist intellectuals who were concerned about issues of gender. But that’s kind of who I wanted exploring the subject — women writers….  And I think even the pieces about being apprehensive about the prospect of having a boy are ultimately about the writers coming to see how their own expectations are flawed, and how they love their child, regardless of gender…  I definitely don’t think writers value boys less. It’s about questioning the cultural assumptions we have about boys and girls and men and women. And questioning things, teasing them apart to find some kind of personal truth, is what writers do."

Given that, I was suprised to read in Andi’s own essay, "It’s a Boy!" this statement:

"We want our daughters to do everything our sons do, yet as mothers ourselves, we know the difficulties and the hard choices they will have to make when they grow up and choose to mother– the career options that dwindle; the daily balancing act that exhausts; the kinds of things our sons will never face, even as they become parents ourselves."

I wish those difficulties on my sons, because the alternative isn’t easy choices, but no choices.  Society has done a much better job of giving both girls and women the option of following either traditionally masculine or traditionally feminine paths than it has as opening up choices for boys and men.

Bitch, PhD writes about We Need to Talk About Kevin:

"The real question the novel wants asked is the question that all parents know and that all children ask: why? In fact, as the novel makes clear, this isn’t just a question for kids. It’s the question we all ask when children turn out "badly," or even when they turn out well: why did we get this result? What did we do, or not do, right?"

I’m currently reading A Perfect Stranger and other stories, by Roxana Robinson.  In "Blind Man," she writes:

"And if you, the parent, have ever allowed yourself small helpings of private pride and satisfaction at your child’s accomplishments, if you have ever stood beaming at a graduation in the June sunlight, swelling inwardly over the award for religious studies and feeling that in some unexplained but important way your daughter reflects your presence, that she represents you and your codes, both cultural and genetic; if you have ever felt that your beautiful daughter was somehow flowering forth from you, so then, when another area of her endeavors is revealed — addiction, say, to crack cocaine — you will also feel the heavy cowl of complicity settle over your head."

And a friend recently forwarded me this quote from Ian McEwan’s Saturday:

"It’s a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children.  You never know who you are going to get.  Opportunities, health, prospects, accent, table manners – these might lie within your power to shape.  But what really determines the sort of person who’s coming to live with you is which sperm finds which egg, how the cards in two packs are chosen, then how they are shuffled, halved and spliced at the moment of recombination.  Cheerful or neurotic, kind or greedy, curious or dull, expansive or shy and anywhere in between; it can be quite an affront to parental self-regard, just how much of the work has already been done."

Is there a base level of functional parenting, above which it doesn’t really matter what we do?  And if this were provable true, would we all be relieved, or disappointed?

Update:  I finally got to the top of the hold list for Saturday, and found out that the next sentence in the book is:

"On the other hand, it can let you off the hook."

McEwan and I are clearly thinking along the same lines.  He goes on to say (and I agree totally): "The point is made for you as soon as you have more than one child; two entirely different people emerge from their roughly similar chances in life."

So here’s the actual text of the new AAP policy statement on cosleeping, pacifier use, and SIDS.  To be honest, my immediate reaction was that I was glad that my kids are past that stage, so I don’t have two more things to stress about.  (We coslept with each of the boys until they were about 6 months old and got too squirmy to be comfortable bed-partners. Both of them used pacifiers minimally but are confirmed finger-suckers.)

I was sort of annoyed by the front-page Washington Post article on it, which seems to blame working mothers for turning to cosleeping because they don’t have enough time to bond with their babies during the day.  It does mention improved breastfeeding and bonding as possible benefits of cosleeping, but doesn’t talk at all about the number 1 reason we coslept, which is that I got a LOT more sleep and was a more functional human being. 

I just don’t think I would have made it through those first few months if every time they fed, I had to get out of bed, go downstairs, pick up the kid, stay awake while nursing him, soothe him to sleep, and then go back upstairs to try to fall asleep again while calculating in my head how soon I’d have to get up for the day.  And we tried the approach that AAP recommends– having the baby sleep in the same room, but in a crib, and it was the worst of both worlds for us.  I woke up every time the baby whimpered in his sleep, but he wasn’t soothed by my presence. 

Interestingly, Sunday’s Post had a front-page article on the health risks of not getting enough sleep.  And the NY Times had an article a couple of weeks ago on a study that found a significant fraction of people with depressive symptoms improved after being treated for sleep apnea.   I think people in general, and doctors in particular, wildly underestimate just how overwhelming the lack of sleep in early parenthood can be.  It’s something that everyone knows about ("baby keeping you up?"), but people rarely take seriously,

I wish the AAP statement had included data on how much they think their recommendations could reduce the SIDS rate so that parents could make some reasonable assessment of the risk.  Following the widespread adoption of the Back to Sleep campaign, the US SIDS rate is 0.52 per 1,000 or around 2,500 deaths per year, about half of what it was before.  I’d have a better sense of how to respond to the recommendations if I knew whether they think these recommendations can drop it in half again, or just by a percent or two.

Update:  The NY Times has a new article on parents who are putting their babies to sleep on their bellies in spite of the recommendations (because they sleep better that way).  It ends with this surprisingly sympathetic quote from Dr. Kattwinkel, chairman of the AAP committee on SIDS:

"There is some justification to mothers who want to accept some of the risk factors and not others," he said. "You can follow all the risk factors and your baby may still die of SIDS. But as a national organization, we need to warn the public about it.  Any pediatrician who didn’t would not be responsible."

Today was D’s first day of preschool for the year.  He’s going to the same school as for the past two years, with mostly the same group of kids, so it was pretty much a non-event for him.  I went in late so I could help take him to school, but 5 minutes after we got there, the teachers were lining them up to head out to the playground and he was off without a backward glance.  I was misty-eyed anyway, looking at the little kids in the two-year-old class, and being boggled at how big D is compared to them, and trying to wrap my head around the idea that he’ll be in kindergarden next year.

Suzanne at Mother in Chief wrote an post last week about the pressure she’s feeling to send her daughter to preschool, as most of her playgroup friends are going.  I’m sure her daughter will be fine either way.  We freely admit that preschool is as much about giving T a bit of a break from D’s constant desire to be entertained as it is because we think it’s useful for D.

Preschool has also helped T break into the social world of SAHMs and their children, which really wasn’t happening before.  They were happy to have their kids play with D at the playground, but no one was inviting them to playdates.  I think women are just very reluctant to invite a "strange" man into their house, or to accept an invitation from one.  And T was more focused on playing with D than with schmoozing up the moms, which made the social connections even harder.  Since D started preschool, he’s invited to many more parties and playdates.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about Stephanie Coontz’s book, Marriage.  Coontz argues that the transformation of marriage from an institution about controlling property, making alliances between families, and ensuring legitimate heirs into an emotional bond sowed the seeds of its destruction.  Once marriage was reframed as about romantic love and happiness, it became harder and harder to argue that people should stay married when the relationship failed to make them happy.  Today, pretty much the only argument that people seriously make against divorce is grounded in concern for the well-being of any children involved.  You almost never hear anyone suggest that two childless individuals who are unhappily married should stay together because they stood up and took vows about "till death do us part."

As I think about it, it seems that parenting may be the only commitment that American society takes seriously, and for which "it’s not making me happy" isn’t a sufficient basis for breaking.  Especially not for women.  Laura’s right that what makes parents happy isn’t always what’s best for the kids, but it’s also true that it’s seen as a sign of moral depravity for a mother to say "ok, this might make the kids a little worse off, but it makes me a lot better off, and I’ve made a lot of sacrifices already and it’s time for them to give a bit."  As Jody said, we still hold mothers to impossibly high standards.

Is parenthood supposed to make you happy?  It’s a fascinating question.  Parenting is often described as a selfless activity, in that you’re expected to put your children’s well-being ahead of your own desires.  But I’ve also heard people argue that the choice is have children is always made for selfish reasons; even if it’s no longer an economically rational thing to do, people choose to have kids because they think it will be enjoyable, or because they want someone to love and to love them.

Obviously, not every moment of parenting is going to be fun.  No one likes having a sick child crawl into your bed and puke all over them.  No one likes dealing with a shrieking toddler in the full throes of the "mines."  No one likes it when your child comes home sobbing because their friend was mean to them, and there’s nothing you can do to fix it.  But most of us would say that the joys usually outweigh the frustrations.

But that’s not always the case.  In her comment on my review of We Need to Talk about Kevin, Mary wrote:

"Yes, parents are supposed to be selfless, never asking for anything in return, just giving, giving, giving — but poeple whose kids don’t have special needs don’t know what it’s like to never get a hand-drawn card, or a picture, or a hug in return. It wears you down. It’s human nature to expect some response when you send love out into the universe, or out into your family. Think about it, if she [Eva] had been married to someone who treated her the way that Kevin did, she would have divorced him, and no one would have blamed her."

Meghan, at I’m ablogging, made a similar point recently about her need for emotional feedback:

"I am the adult in this scenario. I understand that as the parent, I need to be loving and patient and kind and warm even if I am not getting anything but accusing screams and wails in return. I love my daughter all the time, no matter what. I hate to admit that her feedback helps to keep me going. I mean, she is only eleven months after all. I can’t rely on her. That’s way too much responsibility for a child of that tender age.

"But those 5:15 smiles sure make it easier. Just one day without one made me realize how much they help to keep me going."

So parenting is a selfless activity, undertaken for selfish reasons.  It’s often a source of deep happiness and satisfaction, but you’re not allowed to quit even if it isn’t.  And if you complain about the ways that the workplace and society are hostile to childrearing, you’re told that "you chose to have kids" so if you’re unhappy it’s your own fault. 

When I initially heard about We Need to Talk about Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, I had no interest in reading it.  It’s the story of a teenage mass murderer, as told by his mother in a series of letters to his father, and I just didn’t want to go there.  I figured there are enough horror stories in the newspaper that I have to read, why should I read fiction about a Columbine-style massacre?

Then I read flea’s heartbreaking review of the book, and picked it up on my next library trip.  I’m glad I did, as I thought it excellent and thought-provoking, even if it did work its way into my dreams for a couple of nights.

The biggest theme of the book is our desire to find causes for everything — and preferable, someone to blame.  In an odd way, I was reminded of Stephen Mitchell’s introduction to his translation of Job.  Mitchell argues that both Job and his "friends" are stuck in contradictory syllogisms.  Job argues "I am a good person, bad things are happening to me, therefore God is unjust."  His friends argue "God is just, bad things are happening to Job, therefore Job must have sinned."  Mitchell suggests that the Voice from the Whirlwind teaches us that "Job is a good person, bad things are happening to him, God is just."  No therefores.

Eva Khatchadourian’s neighbors blame her for Kevin’s sociopathy.  The parents of one of his victims sue her in a civil case, arguing that Eva was a bad mother, Kevin is a murderer, and therefore Eva is to blame.  At her lawyer’s insistence, Eva’s defense in the case was to argue that she was a good mother, and therefore couldn’t be to blame.  But in We Need to Talk about Kevin, Eva makes a much more disturbing case, admitting her many failures as a mother, but arguing that nonetheless, she was not responsible for her son’s actions.  No therefores.

The chilling part of the book, what makes it a horror story, is Eva’s insistence that even as an infant and toddler, Kevin’s actions are deliberately chosen to hurt others — especially Eva herself.  She believes that his constant crying as an infant, his destruction of her belongings, his delayed potty training are all designed to torture her.  As he gets older, she blames him for a series of incidents of increasing magnitude in which things go very badly for classmates, neighbors, his sister, a teacher.

If Eva’s perceptions are accurate, Kevin is indeed a character out of a horror movie, clever and evil, beyond anyone’s control but his own.  But if Eva is wrong, she’s a monstrous figure as well, projecting her ambivalence about motherhood onto the innocent child and treating age-appropriate behavior as a crime. Her husband is duly horrified when she tries to convince him of Kevin’s malignant nature, seeing her, not him, as the freak of nature.  And so Eva is further isolated, helpless to prevent the tragedies that she and the reader both see coming.

I am struck that, in spite of all of Eva’s protestations to the contrary, flea still believes that she’s a good mother, pointing out that Eva "gives up everything she ever loved, and all of her time and energy and focus trying to crack the impenetrable shell of a hostile, sullen, sociopathic child."  I’m uncomfortable with sacrifice as the right measure of maternal quality.  Moreover, Eva would say that those are all the motions that she went through to play the role of the good mother, precisely because she was missing something underneath.  And she argues that Kevin always knew the difference. 

Today’s book review is my entry in the Daddy Types Baby Book Review Contest, otherwise known as the good, the bad, and dear lord don’t make me read this again.

The Good

Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, by Mo Willems.  I love this book, in which a pigeon employs a series of negotiating tactics to try get to drive a bus.  My son and I usually read it together, with his job being to say "NO!" each time.  At age 4, you get to hear "no" a lot, so he loves being the one to say no.  The line drawing pictures are funny, and convey the pigeon’s increasing desperation as the book progresses.  The book has also provided a means to turn real-world whine-fests into a game, as we point out strategies from the pigeon that D. has skipped (e.g. "You forgot to say that you bet my mommy would let you.")  The bus driver comes back before the pigeon gets to drive the bus — but then it sees an unoccupied truck.

The Bad

My Big Train Book, by Roger Priddy.  This falls into the category of "train porn."  No attempt at plot.  No clever drawings.  No rhythmic language.  Just close-ups of trains.  Red trains.  Yellow trains.  German trains.  Japanese trains.  Commuter trains.  Freight trains.  High-speed trains. 

Dear Lord, Don’t Make Me Read This Again

The Berenstain Bears’ Bedtime Battle, by Stan and Jan Berenstain.  We got this one as a gift, and I hate it.  So of course, D loves it.  I keep trying to bury it at the back of his bookshelf, and he keeps digging it out.

So what do I hate about this book?

• The generic characters, identified only by their roles in the family.  Of course Brother plays with dinosaurs and Sister is scared of spooky stories.
• The way the parents give in to the kids’ whining and foot-dragging.  I’d be happier if Papa only said "Ok, because you asked nicely" instead "If I must" before carrying the little bears up the stairs.
• The way the father is portrayed as incompetant, unable to give a simple bath without putting too much bubble bath in the tub.
• The insipid drawings, which don’t tell any story beyond the text.