Half Changed World

I’ve been cooking (black bean and sweet potato burritos, from  Moosewood Low-Fat Favorites) and listening to the National’s home opener on the radio. 

I actually prefer radio to TV for baseball, unless I’ve got someone to watch with and chat with during the slow bits.  By myself, I’ll turn on the TV, then pick up a book between innings, and forget about the game.  But listening to the ballgame on the radio is perfect for cooking, or gardening, anything that keeps the hands busy but leaves the mind free.

I’m excited to have a team in town.  Oh, I’ll always have a soft spot for the Mets, the team I grew up with.  (I was a fan when they were awful during the early 80s, and was rewarded with that marvelous couldn’t be believed 1986 postseason.)  But it’s hard to be a baseball fan without listening to or watching the games on a regular basis; you don’t know the players, their strengths, weaknesses and quirks, whether they’re hot lately, if they’ve choked in the clutch…  And a good bit of the joy of being a fan is being part of a community, being able to say "did you see that hit last night?" and expecting the answer to be yes.

My husband isn’t interested in baseball at all, and the boys are too young to really follow the game.  But I’m working on them.  I figure they should be ready for their first major league game right around when the new stadium is built.

I got an email from MoveOn this week about the lousy bankruptcy bill that the House is going to vote on tomorrow.

This made me go Hmmm, since MoveOn was very noticably absent from the public discourse last month, when there was a chance that the bankruptcy bill might be stopped in the Senate. Joshua Marshall loaned some space on Talking Points Memo to Elizabeth Warren, and they managed to stir up a good bit of attention in the liberal blogosphere.  But, as Salon’s War Room pointed out, MoveOn wasn’t involved:

"According to Eli Pariser, MoveOn’s executive director, it was because they didn’t think it would have made a real impact. ‘Because of the solid Republican support for the bill, terrible though the bill is, it wasn’t something that we could make a difference by weighing in on’".

But there’s even less chance of moving the House vote, so why is MoveOn getting involved now?

A close look at the email reveals two critical points:  First, it’s from MoveOnPAC, not MoveOn. Second, it’s not asking for members to call or email their representatives.  Instead, it asks for money for radio ads in the hometowns of Representatives who vote wrong on this bill.

So, this issue wasn’t important enough for MoveOn to mobilize its membership, but it is useful as a fundraiser?  Yech.

Today’s book is Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, by George Lakoff, better known these days for his slim spin-off volume, Don’t Think of an Elephant.  In this book, Lakoff attempts to answer the question that I was left with after reading What’s The Matter with Kansas?, namely why are Christian conservatives willing to mobilize to lower taxes?

Lakoff is a linguist, specifically a "cognitive linguist." This means that he studies how the language that we use to discuss things, and the implicit metaphors behind our choice of language, are shaped by — and in turn shape — how we think about the world.  His core argument is that the real difference between conservatives and liberals in contemporary American politics is that they use different models of the family as their central metaphor for thinking about society.  Conservatives use a "Strict Father" model, a metaphor that supports belief in authority, self-discipline and self-reliance, reward and punishment; liberals use a "Nuturant Parent" metaphor, a metaphor that supports belief in empathy, openness, cultivation of interests, promotion of opportunity, and second chances.  Lakoff argues that moderates (and swing voters) are those who apply both models at different times, depending on the specific issue at hand.

Lakoff acknowledges that there’s no real way to prove the accuracy of a cognitive model.  Instead, he suggests that readers evaluate his hypothesis by examining whether the model is a convincing explanation for the world we see around us.  I found Lakoff’s argument a plausible explanation for many aspects of American politics, including many conservative positions that I fundamentally find incomprehensible.  (For example, why do many conservatives feel that same-sex marriage is a "threat" to "traditional marriage"?   Lakoff argues "Metaphorically, someone who deviates from a tried and true path is creating a new path that others will feel safe to travel on.  Hence, those who transgress boundaries or deviate from a prescribed path may ‘lead others astray’ by going off in a new direction and creating a new path.")  I’d be very interested in knowing whether conservatives feel that Lakoff’s description is generally accurate.

The public debate regarding which Lakoff’s analysis seems least illuminating is that about abortion.  Lakoff accurately states that pro-life advocates view the fetus as a human life, and abortion as the destruction of that life, while pro-choice advocates view abortion as a simple medical procedure.  But his attempt to tie these positions back to the Strict Father v. Nuturant Parent models seems both weak, and deeply cycnical: he implies that adherents to the Strict Father model want to punish women for the lack of self-discipline and morality shown by having sex when they’re not prepared to parent, and therefore decide that the fetus is a baby, while Nuturant Parent supporters decide that the fetus is just cells because they believe in sex out of marriage, second chances, and heavy investments in all children.  This doesn’t ring true to me, and certainly doesn’t explain pro-choice Catholics like Frances Kissling or pro-life feminists like Hugo Schwyzer.

As someone who spends my professional life helping improve the research basis for social policy, I found Lakoff’s dismissal of the role of evidence in affecting policy choices both disheartening and plausible.  He argues that there is a small subset of both conservatives and liberals who are pragmatic enough to be moved by evidence, but that most people are too wedded to their cognitive models to listen to any evidence against the policies they support.  Much to my chagrin, I think that’s probably right.  Conservatives like full-family sanctions even thought there’s no evidence that they are more effective than partial sanctions, but because they seem morally right.  Liberals hate marriage promotion programs because they think it’s an illegitimate use of government power, even though the evidence that kids do better in married-parent families is fairly strong.

I want to talk a bit about Elephant, and the political implications of Lakoff’s arguments, as well as of the significance of the two models of families for parenting, but I think I’m going to save both topics for another day.

D. has a bad case of the "I wants." 

We don’t let him watch commercials (thank you TiVo), but he still manages to come up with a long list of toys he wants, drawn from things he’s seen at his friends’ houses, the catalogs included in every toy he gets, and his imagination.

A few of the things he wants are more expensive than I think any toy for a 4-year-old should cost, but most of them are quite cheap, well within what we could afford.  But we don’t want him to learn that he gets everything he wants just by asking (and asking and asking and asking) for it.  And our little townhouse is already being overrun by stuff, which builds up faster than we can get rid of it.

We let him write everything down on a list, but that doesn’t satisfy him for long.  (It doesn’t help that his birthday is in January, so there’s a long dry period between gift-giving opportunities.)  He’s starting to say "I don’t want to put it on the list.  I just want to order it."  We do a lot of our shopping online, so he thinks that’s how to get goodies to come.

We’re actually pretty frugal, and don’t buy all that much, but I realized that he doesn’t see all the fun toys that I drool over but don’t buy.  I’m struggling with how to make this process more visible to him.  It may be time to start him on an allowance, but I really think he ought to be able to count coins first.

Any suggestions?

I realized that I never got around to writing about this story I heard on Morning Edition on Monday.  It’s about a series of radio broadcasts from the 50s, hosted by Edward Murrow, of various people, famous and anonymous, talking about their personal values and where they came from.  NPR is reprising the effort, and inviting people to submit their essays.

I particularly liked this passage from Martha Graham:

"I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit."

The general consensus now is that children with any sort of learning disability or special needs generally benefit from services as early as possible.  But, there’s a lot of variation among "neuro-typical" kids, so it’s not always easy to tell when you should worry.  Under federal law, all states are required to identify and evaluate kids who might be in need of special education or early intervention services. But some areas do it better than others.

Two bloggers that I read are going through this process right now:

• Laura at 11d is writing about her frustration with the process of qualifying for public services in New Jersey.
• TinyCoconut is writing about her ambivalence about getting her son assessed.

We went through the process here in Virginia with our older son, D, who had a speech delay, and had a generally good experience.  Yes, there were an awful lot of meetings — which would have been more than a nuisance if we were both working in inflexible jobs.  But we always felt like the school staff were on our side, and that all the paperwork was because of the law.  (I think we got 6 copies of the 10 page summary of parents’ rights under IDEA.)

D got speech therapy for a year, and progressed so fast that he no longer qualified when reassessed.  I’m still not sure how much credit to give to the therapy, and how much he was just on his own schedule, but he enjoyed the sessions, so I don’t worry about it.  It boggles my mind to listen to our little chatterbox and remember that close to his 3rd birthday, he spoke in monosyllables and grunts.

That said, I actually think that D has low-level sensory integration issues, which didn’t show up on his evaluation.  A lot of The Out of Sync Child sounded familiar to me.  He used to refuse to walk on grass, and still hates sand.  He refuses to fingerpaint.  He’s a ludicrously picky eater, and I think it’s driven more by texture than taste.  (Who ever heard of a 4-year-old who wouldn’t eat plain spaghetti?)  And, at the same time, he will swing longer than any other kid on the playground, and adores to be spun around in circles until I’m ready to puke.

But it doesn’t affect his life or ours in any significant way (as long as we don’t try to go on a beach vacation), so I’m not going to push for a diagnosis.  We keep encouraging him to push his limits, and give him lots of opportunity to run and swing and spin, and I’m not convinced that an OT could do anything more. 

I sat down last night to write my Tuesday Book Review on A Circle of Quiet, by Madeleine L’Engle, but then realized I didn’t have much to say about it. It’s a mishmash of a book, part memoir, part reflections on teaching and religion.  Someone recommended it to me when I was talking about books on being a mother.  (I thought the recommendation was a comment on this blog, but can’t find it any more.)

That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the book.  I did, especially the parts where L’Engle tells specific stories about her life.  It’s somehow deeply reassuring to read that L’Engle wrestled with what we’d today call "work-family balance" —

"I went through spasms of guilt because I spent so much time writing, because I wasn’t like a good New England housewife and mother.  When I scrubbed the kitchen floor, the family cheered.  I couldn’t make decent pie crust.  I always managed to get something red in with the white laundry in the washing machine, so that everybody wore streaky pink underwear.  And with all the hours I spent writing, I was still not pulling my own weight financially."

But I didn’t really have much else to say about the book.  And then today I read (via Mother Shock), the question posed at Literary Mama:

"As a child, were there literary mothers of whom you were especially fond? How did those mothers inform your idea of what motherhood is? How were they the same or different than your real-life mothering examples? Do they have an influence on you now?"

And I realized that the answers that jumped into my head were both from L’Engle books:  Mrs. Murry, Meg’s mother (from A Wrinkle in Time) and Mrs. Austin, Vicky’s mother (from A Ring of Endless Light).  (Do we know their first names?  If so, I’ve totally forgotten them.)

Thinking about what made them attractive, I see that they are both clearly loving mothers, mothers whose children can talk to them about the things that matter, mothers who believe in the redemptive power of hot chocolate, but they also both clearly have a life beyond their children.  It’s Mrs. Murry who makes the children nervous by cooking meals on the laboratory bunsen burner, right? 

It makes me wonder how much of herself L’Engle poured into these characters.  I like that even though they seem like very much idealized figures, they’re not perfect.

In googling to research this post, I discovered that Madeleine L’Engle is still alive, at 86 years old.  In spite of my resolution, I haven’t been writing letters to authors.  But I think I’ll write this one.

I’ve been reading and thinking a good bit about Pope John Paul II’s life and legacy the past few days.  It’s hard for me think of another public figure whom I both respect deeply and thoroughly disagree with on many issues.  Not being Catholic, I was never directly affected by the Pope’s positions;  I can disagree with him without feeling insubordinate or betrayed.

Rabbi Yoffie’s statement for the Union of Reform Judaism sums it up well for me:

"While we had our disagreements – on gender equality, reproductive rights, and the rights of gays and lesbians – we never doubted for a moment that he was a man of profound principle, courage, and vision.  Even when our religious traditions led us to different conclusions, John Paul II always found new opportunities for reengaging in our common purpose of bringing justice with mercy into the human community."

I’m reminded of a passage from Stephen Carter’s book, The Culture of Disbelief, in which he comments on Americans’ tendency to create God in our own image — our habit of assuming that God supports all of our political and cultural positions (a failing equally prevalent among the left and right). He challenges us to allow religion to be more than a mirror that reflects back our own smug certainties. 

I’m signed up for the Cherry Blossom 10 miler tomorrow morning; unless it’s pouring rain when my alarm goes off, I’m going to run it.  I’m undertrained, but I’ll set my watch for a 4 minute run — 1 minute walk cycle, and I should be able to finish it.

As a child, and through college, I was about as unathletic as you could get.  I walked a lot, as do most New Yorkers, but it was a major accomplishment for me to run a mile for gym in high school.  (The next year, I managed to sign up for ballroom dancing as my gym class.)

But in 1996, I took up running, and within a few months I got it into my head that I wanted to run a marathon.   Much to my surprise, I turned out to be not bad at distance running.  I ran 3 marathons between 1997 and 1999, finishing 2 of them in under 4 hours.

I haven’t run very much since I got pregnant with D.  I read all these books about how it’s perfectly safe to run while pregnant.  I think I even read that Joan Samuelson ran 5 miles the day before she gave birth.  But it turned out that running while pregnant was really uncomfortable for me, so I didn’t.  And since the boys were born, I haven’t been willing to carve out the time to do serious training.

Unfortunately, I seem to be really bad at running in moderation.  For my health, 30-40 minutes four times a week would be great.  But without the incentive of a target race, and the structure of a training schedule, it’s just too easy for me to blow off runs when the weather isn’t perfect, or I’m tired, or busy. 

At packet pickup today, I found myself eyeing the race brochures for the fall marathons.  I’d really like to take a shot at qualifying for Boston someday.  But I don’t know how I’d fit it into my life.  It’s not just the time that the actual runs take; it’s the idea of trying to keep up with the boys all day after having done a long run in the morning.

D and I are reading James and the Giant Peach.  It’s his first chapter book.

Well, actually, I read Charlotte’s Web to him when he was an infant, and a captive audience.  But I haven’t been able to get him interested in a chapter book.  I’ve tried both Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, but they both take a while to get moving, and the chapters are a bit longer than his attention span.  (I am boggled when I read Catherine Newman’s essays about reading the Little House books to her 5-year old.)

James is about perfect.  The chapters are only a page or two, and each of them ends on a cliffhanger.  D keeps asking me "what happens?" and I tell him we’ll have to read the next chapter to find out.  He doesn’t seem too traumatized by the parents getting eaten by a rhino, although he doesn’t understand why the Aunts are so mean to poor little James. It’s great fun.