Half Changed World

In case anyone was wondering, the reason it’s been so quiet here is that we were up in NYC for much of last week, visiting my family, observing Yom Kippur, and celebrating N’s birthday.  We had a good time, in spite of the monsoon.  Friday we took the boys to the Toys R Us with the Ferris Wheel inside the store.  And Saturday it cleared up, and we visited the Indian museum and rode the Staten Island ferry back and forth.  It was fun, although the ferries don’t seem to have outdoor seating anymore.  The boys loved the big spiral fountain, and had great fun running up to the edge and then dashing away when the water started to spray them.

I was in a real pissy mood last night when we got back from New York.  I think I was mostly grumpy at the fact that I was so tired from our "vacation" and now had a full week of work ahead of me.  Plus my last two evenings of CASA training.  Plus a civic association meeting about the local elementary school, and an open house to look at our options if we decide not to send D to the local elementary school.  Plus doctor’s appointments for both boys.  And then, trying to check my work email from home (so I could make sure that my 9 am meeting out of the office was still happening), I managed to lock myself out of my account.  Ok, I guess I had a right to be a little overwhelmed.

Anyway, I hope to be back on a more regular posting schedule soon.

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."

How Divine is Forgiving?

by Marge Piercy

It’s a nice concept
but what’s under the sculptured draperies?
We forgive when we don’t really care
because what was done to us brought unexpected
harvest, as I always try to explain
to the peach trees as I prune them hard,
to the cats when I shove pills against
the Gothic vaults of their mouths

We forgive those who betrayed us
years later because memory has rotted
through like something left out in the weather
battered clean then littered dirty
in the rain, chewed by mice and beetles,
frozen and baked and stripped by the wind
til it is unrecognizable, corpse
or broken machine, something long useless.

We forgive those whom their own machinations
have sufficiently tangled, enshrouded,
the fly who bit us to draw blood and who
hangs now a gutted trophy in a spider’s
airy larder; more exactly, the friend
whose habit of lying has immobilized him
at last like a dog trapped in a cocoon
of fishing line and barbed hooks.

We forgive those we firmly love
because anger hurts, a coal that burns
and smolders still scorching the tissues
inside, blistering wherever it touches
so that we bury the hot clinkers in a mound
of caring, suffocate the sparks with promises,
drown them in tears, reconciling.

We forgive mostly not from strength
but through imperfections, for memory
wears transparent as a glass with the pattern
washed off, till we stare past what injured us,
We forgive because we too have done
the same to others easy as a mudslide;
or because anger is a fire that must be fed
and we are too tired to rise and haul a log.

From Available Light

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."

After a month of almost no rain, it’s been cold and rainy all weekend.  Yesterday we had one of D’s friends over for a sleepover, and went to the Children’s Rain Garden in Arlington and saw the new Wallace and Gromit movie.  Today, we had pancakes for breakfast, and then the boys ran all over the house hunting rabbits.  We ran a few errands after the friend went home, and then T and I were pretty much wiped.

In the interest of distracting D, and maybe getting him to eat an occasional vegetable, I offered him a new computer game — MyPyramid Blast Off, from the fine folks at the US Department of Agriculture.  In order to make the rocket blast off and travel to Planet Power!, you have to pick an assortment of foods that equals the right number of portions from the different food groups, without overloading your "fuel tanks" by eating too many calories.  Sounds thrilling, no?

D was actually quite intrigued by the game, even though it’s about as basic as you can get.  (I suspect kids in the official target age range (6-12) would be bored stiff.)  The only big problem we had was that it really did require one of us to sit with him the whole time and read the choices, so it didn’t give us quite as much of a break as we had hoped.   On the nutritional front, I’d rate it about a B:

• It did help us talk to D about the need to eat a bigger variety of foods, including some vegetables.  We’ve been floundering a bit trying to explain to him why we don’t want him to eat peanut butter on graham crackers for 3 meals a day, even if it is a reasonably healthy food.
• He was willing to try a carrot stick at dinner this evening.  He only ate about 2 bites of it, but he claimed to like it.  So that’s a good thing.

On the negative side:

• They were pushing the low-fat options pretty hard, including praising a choice of non-fat chocolate milk over the 2% fat milk that we serve the boys.  Given the overall mix of his diet, the fat is a better choice than the extra sugar.
• The options listed for the "meat and beans" category were pretty limited.  They didn’t seem to count peanuts and peanut butter toward it, and they rarely provided eggs as an option.  Those are pretty big sources of protein for our kids.
• There was essentially no discussion of portion size.   And at the "official" portion size, almost anything can fit into a balanced diet — even burgers and fries.  But almost no one eats that little of them at a sitting.

I wanted to thank Jody for her comment on yesterday’s post in which she talks about how Wake County’s desegregation scheme affected her choice of where to live.  I think it’s incredibly hard for people to talk about these issues, especially white people who don’t want to be labelled racist.

It made me want to talk a bit about where I live.  I just looked it up, and as of 2000, the census tract where I live was almost exactly 50/50 black/white.  But I wouldn’t call it a stable integrated community either — almost 2/3 of the population lived in a different house in 1995.  Forty years ago, it was the historic heart of black Alexandria.  Today it’s gentrifying and getting whiter, but slowly.  The change is slow both because there’s a good chunk of public housing in it, and because there are a significant number of older residents who own their own homes and aren’t moving.  But the housing prices have appreciated so much that when the older generation dies, their children are mostly taking the money and running.

We knew very little of this history when we moved here.  Our primary search strategy was that we wanted to be walking distance to the metro, and I wanted to feel safe doing so by myself at night.  We started looking along the Red line, then the Orange line, but didn’t find anything that we liked and could afford.  (And yes, everything was ludicrously cheap compared to what it’s going for now — but it still seemed like a lot of money to us.)  Our realtor convinced us to extend our search to the Blue/Yellow lines, and this was the first house we saw in Alexandria.

So, we weren’t looking at race directly when we looked for a house, but it was only a step removed.  If you look at a metro map of DC, the racial politics of transportation becomes glaringly obvious.  African-American neighborhoods are underserved by metrorail, and the disparity was even worse before the last parts of the Green line were finally opened a few years ago.  There are a few majority-black neighborhoods with metro stations (especially along the eastern branch of the Red Line), but I woudn’t feel comfortable walking alone in them at night. 

Cashin talks a little about "accidental integrationists" in her book.  She focuses on South Arlington, which is the next community over. It has a similar class mix as Alexandria, although it has less public housing and has more of a Latino population, and less of an African-American one.  I saw a lot of myself in the white parents that Cashin talked to and I found it reassuring to hear their stories.

Today’s book is The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining The American Dream, by Sheryll Cashin.  (I had actually requested it from the library, but not started it, when Bitch PhD wrote about it.  Dorcasina is also reading it.)  It’s a very interesting book, but ultimately one that left me somewhat frustrated.

The first section of the book simply reviews the facts about residential segregation in the United States.  Little of this section is new research, but Cashin lays out the facts in a readable conversational tone.  She points out that much of what we consider "integration" consists of small number of well-off minorities living in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, as well as of neighborhoods that are in transition.    Very few whites — and even fewer whites with children — choose to live in neighborhoods that have a significant black presence, let alone that are majority black, even when such neighborhoods are less expensive than comparable majority-white neighborhoods.  (Cashin mostly discusses race in terms of black and white, although she notes that one type of stable integrated neighborhood is the multi-ethnic urban center.)  Cashin also notes that a significant number of blacks who could now afford to live in majority-white neighborhoods have chosen to live in majority-black communities where they are "more comfortable."

In the second section, Cashin makes a case that most of society is worse off because of the persistence of race and class segregation.  The ways in which poor urban minorities suffer have been well documented.  Cashin argues that middle-class whites also suffer because they have to spend more than they can afford and/or put up with horrible commutes in order to guarantee safe neighborhoods and decent schools for their kids.  (These sections echo some of the arguments from Perfect Madness and The Two-Income Trap.)  And for me, the most novel part of the book was Cashin’s discussion of how the problems of urban areas follow middle-class blacks into majority-black suburbs.  She spends a lot of time discussing Prince George’s County, MD, and why it still has mediocre schools and few retail shops, even though it is the most affluent majority-black county in the country. 

I found the third part of the book, in which Cashin discusses her hopes for the future, the weakest.  Cashin doesn’t really have much of a solution to offer to the problems she’s identified.  She calls for better enforcement of housing anti-discrimination laws, which I agree is a necessary, but not sufficient first step.  She supports school choice in the form of charter schools, but not vouchers, and talks approvingly of Raleigh’s busing scheme, but doesn’t directly address the issue that busing was a significant factor in pushing white families out of urban school districts.    She bewails our polarized political environment and the focus on suburban swing voters, but doesn’t discuss how gerrymandering penalizes communities that are geographically scattered. 

I like where Cashin’s aiming at; I just don’t see how we get from here to there.

Update: I really want to encourage anyone who is reading this in a feedreader to click over to the comments on this post and the next one.  If you’re only reading my posts, you’re missing out.

L’shanah tovah.

We didn’t get our act together to hire a babysitter for tonight, so our choices for services were either for me to go on my own while T stayed home with the boys, or for us all to go together and see how long the boys would last.  I like the idea of attending services as a family, but N lasted only about 20 minutes.  D lasted longer– over an hour — but that still meant we left in the middle of Avinu Malkeinu. 

My challah was something of a bust.  Someone told me that you could freeze the raw dough and let it defrost in the fridge before baking it, but I think the middle was still frozen when it went into the oven, and it never really cooked.  How long does it need to defrost?

I’ve got an apple and honey cake in the oven.  I don’t know how it will taste, but it smells awfully good.  It’s a bit of an experimental recipe — I started with the plum torte recipe from Marion Burros, but replaced the plums with apples and some of the sugar with honey.

May you be written in the book of life for a good and sweet new year.

So, I finally got the chance to watch the premiere of Commander in Chief that I recorded last week.  (And yes, I am inordinately proud of having finally figured out how to program a recording using the tv-input card in my computer, since it was scheduled against the new Amazing Race.)  Not planning on watching it again.

Overall the show mostly served as an excellent illustration of Anna Fels’ point about how societally unacceptable it is for women to admit to ambition.  The scenario they spin is that Allen was invited to be VP out of pure tokenism, and everyone knows this, and expects her to step down when the President is incapacitated because her politics and the President’s don’t match.  Well, Kennedy and Johnson didn’t exactly see eye to eye on many issues, but no one ever suggested to LBJ that he not take up the post.  But Allen isn’t even offended that everyone sees her as a token, because she knows she is one.  Not exactly the role model I’m looking for.

Back in the real world, I wish I could summon up more enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate.  I do think she’s running, even though she’s not saying so yet.  After eight years of Bill’s triangulation strategy, and her (appropriate) focus on NY-specific concerns as a Senator, I don’t know what she stands for anymore.  And I’ve never heard her take any ownership of the fiasco that was her health care reform plan, or to discuss what lessons she learned from that experience.

I read last month that Gov. Mark Warner has officially said that he’s not going to run against George Allen for Senate, which leads some people to conclude that he’s running for President.  I think that’s a mistake.  I think he’s been a decent Governor, but he doesn’t have any signature accomplishments to point to, and no one outside of Virginia has ever heard of him.  And Allen is an awful Senator, but the Democratic party doesn’t seem to have anyone else to run against him.  (Yes, it’s an election year in Viriginia this year.  I haven’t been writing much about the race because it doesn’t really excite me that much.  I wish I could summon the enthusiasm about any of the Virginia candidates that my friend Kevin has for Mfume and O’Malley in Maryland.)

John Edwards is clearly running, and he’s saying a lot of things that I agree with.  But the potential candidate who makes my heart beat faster is Barack Obama.  But is he running?   He was just elected to the Senate last year, and after the election, seemed to close that door pretty strongly, saying:

"So look, I can unequivocally say I will not be running for national office in four years, and my entire focus is making sure that I’m the best possible senator on behalf of the people of Illinois."

But, as Eric Zorn argued back in January, political windows like Obama’s don’t stay open forever, and he might want to move while everyone still remembers his convention speech.  And getting down and dirty on Daily Kos strikes me as the actions of someone who is thinking larger than re-election.  (He has podcasts on his website too.)

I know, the election is still over 3 years away.  But it’s fun to speculate.

Yes, that’s my book review in the new Brain, Child.  My hard copy arrived yesterday, and I keep fondling it.

I’ve blogged here about most of the books that I discussed, but it was fun to put them all together.  It was also a lot of hard work; I’m sure I earned less than the minimum wage, even if I don’t count the time I spent reading the books in the first place.  The experience simultaneously reminded me of why being a writer was a childhood dream, and made me grateful that I’m not depending on my writing to support my family.

For those of you who are just arriving here via my "author’s note," welcome.  This is a blog, a frequently updated website, with the most recent postings appearing on this pages.  Older posts can be found either chronologically, or by subject, as listed in the sidebar to the right.  I write about a book I’ve recently read almost every Tuesday.  I write a lot about work/family issues and politics and gender.  And, yes, sometimes I write about my kids.

Comments, questions, suggestions?