My small town has a bad reputation in the county as being fairly whiny.

This reputation is sort of deserved. Let me pick an example that is safe for me to hold up to laughter, as I've personally uttered all the words on both sides of the controversy. It's not about the specific reality, it's all about how the ideals of a better world are being betrayed by some hypothetical action. Clearly, for many issues, you can betray a world free of hatred and full of natural goodness no matter what you do.

There is a lovely hillside next to my daughter's school. We parents sit on the hillside and watch as the kids form their own society and experience a bit of self-directed behavior (which is very rare inside the school walls).

This being a forested bit of land, there's a tendency to have giant pieces of tree lieing about. The kids being descended from forest dwelling primates have a tendency to pick up the sticks and start whirling them about most happily.

So 1/2 the parents are all "Oh, jeez, don't they know about bullying in schools? The violence of these big boys, they are scaring the little kids, I can't believe this is going on in Takoma Park!" Then on the days when people start to get the kids to limit the stick whirling, the other half of the parents are all, "Oh, jeez, don't they know about the loss of freedom that our kids suffer from in this over worried society? We need more nature and running and why do people have to be so freaking worried about every little thing? Do we account for the cost of never risking a bit of ourselves when we rule out anything that might break a bone? "

Both sides agree that some stick swinging is a bit much and that some stick swinging is fine, and that people do need to wander about in nature more than they tend do in our strange society, and that gangs of bullies picking on girls and small boys shouldn't be a permanent feature. Ahh, but it is so much fun to throw our stones next to the stick swinging children.

Posted by Chris at 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've had lots of caterpillars to interact with, and it's been a lesson in life and death. My son is at the age where he loves playing with bugs, but is only starting to conceptualize the difference between a dandelion tuft blowing about on the wind and an animal insect that is self moving. So he plays happily with the bugs, and occasionally they get smushed, most often by accident but sometimes out of curiosity. A few nights ago he and a friend were bringing one into show to my beloved life partner, when the caterpillar fell and alas was trod upon by the friend. Quite visibly smushed, to my son's great upset.

So last night, as we're coming in to get dinner going, he had brought a caterpillar in the house. As the adults were toodling around getting dinner ready, all of a sudden, I heard a very painful yowl go up from the kids, perhaps two yowls. It wasn't just run of the mill outrage over one sibling slight or another, the anguish sounded worth my moving from the kitchen. When I got there, my very upset daughter was holding the caterpillar and my son was wailing that she had stolen his caterpillar. It turns out he had 1/2 crushed the larva, and she was yelling that he was going to kill it. I said that it was a caterpillar that he had brought into the house. She said that it needed to go back to nature and that he was going to kill it. This sending of dead life back to nature has been a big theme between she I and for years, but I had to confess that her brother was just learning about bugs and their being alive and dying and so on, and that it was just part of being a small human that some bugs do get killed. She furiously gave it back to him and was so horrified at what I said that she retreated to her room for a good long time. My son was meanwhile yelling that he hadn't killed it and he wouldn't kill it and why wasn't it moving! After she left, I said that she'd been afraid that he'd kill it and that if it wasn't moving, perhaps it was already dead. He put it with great gentleness and concern on the ledge under the window, and I said that it might not be moving because it was scared that we were going to eat it or because it was hurt. We had a brief discussion about whether my son could eat the caterpillar (where I wasn't really sure about that; on the one hand, yuck, on the other hand, I'm sure our ancestors would have eaten some caterpillars, on the other hand, we just had aerial spraying to kill the caterpillars). So we let it alone on the ledge for a while, and it uncurled a tad and then appeared to die, which my son seemed to accept. When my daughter recovered from my apparent casual acceptance of the hecatomb of insect deaths perpetrated merely by young humans, she opened the window and returned the dead bug to nature.

So I thought it was over, with this interesting intersection of concern and inexperience and my own muddled thinking tossed in as well (at some point I had told my daughter that when she was 3, she'd killed a number of bugs as wells, which came out a bit meanly).

The next morning, now 24 hours after the spraying, my daughter and I were walking to school and she noticed a lot of dead caterpillars. I confessed that it was probably due to the spraying that the helicopters had done yesterday (oddly for some reason not attributing it to the nature of big humans) and that a lot of caterpillars had died. So we had a long talk about this spraying and killing. We had hiked last summer on the Appalachian Trail where gypsy moths had denuded a lot of trees that were very palpably dying, and while the moths where so thick in the air that you couldn't avoid them landing on you. So I explained that the spraying was to protect the trees from this one type of caterpillar. She asked the obvious follow-up question about other sorts of caterpillars, and I had to confess that many fine local caterpillars died as well.

In these beautiful spring days, in the midst of such bounteous scents and breezes and growth, death is not absent.

Posted by Chris at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Each spring I expect to be ecstatically happy, as the tedium of days inside give way to the wonders of a new spring. However, it seems each year that I just barely make it through the winter, and emerge, pale, irritated and desperate into the long awaited spring days, curiously out of sync with the explosion of life around us. I thought I'd be frolicking, but instead I'm irritable and aware of my own pent up neediness rather than embracing the external moment. I want to sip coffee and chat with adults at the park, not run around and remind my son of how we cooperate and share and use our words. I want to sit and watch him tire himself out, not run with him, or worse yet, fling him in the air in his much beloved rough housing. So our interaction is far from graceful, me (complaining, I mean talking, as rapidly as social custom allows to my fellow adults, and receiving gratifying stories of winter's exhaustion in exchange) ignoring him until he finds some way to make himself unignorable (grabbing the leg and pulling, yelling, getting into a fight, he knows the drill). Then I dash off and play (in the dazzling sunlight, which warms despite my self-pity) for a bit. Then he and a companion find the fun in looking at ants for a while, and I slip back to ask about a pregnancy or tell about a plumber or whatever.

At least we, like the bean plants my son planted at school, are rapidly transforming from our tired winter selves into tan, confident and fun parents again, with sleepy outdoorsy children replacing the irritated, cooped up indoor children of the last few months. (At least my kids get tan; I'm apparently in some radical fringe group that doesn't worry about the sun that much until high summer or until outings that are longer than 4 hours; I feel a bit of a base tan is good protection for the July days, and have never insisted on hats except for myself).

Thank God, I find myself gradually getting caught up on that apparent need of mine to talk to adults, as I get tanner and my son remembers the outdoor playing protocols, and rediscovers the great joy of finding new sticks, rocks and spiders (and continues to explore why we can collect sticks and rocks but not spiders). The tension gradually drains out of the days as the strength returns to our limbs, and we make ready for the great mulberry feast that nature is preparing for us.

See you outside; if I'm staring down with a frown, keep yelling until I glance up and smile a hello.

Posted by Chris at 08:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After my last bragging post, I've been thinking about the issue of changing the world a lot with courage.

I'd like to point out that Rosa Parks, having prepared herself and being a part of a community seeking to change the law, took advantage of a quotidian moment to resist a blatant and pervasive injustice in such a way that the sympathy of all the world was swung to her cause. She was prepared, and she had friends.

But more relevant than that, I have to say women's work is not respected in this society. For millenia, women themselves were disrespected as part and parcel of the disrespect for women's work. In this country at this time, forty years into the current wave of feminism, we have the possibility for women to be respected but only as long as they don't perform women's work.

And yet, as it has been for millenia, women's work is in fact important, and worth doing. Leaving aside, as I must, the most miraculous bearing of children, I say that the careful rearing of children and of tending to the hearth is the core of our civilization. And yet the women's movement continually is forced by the patriarchal structures to accept a dilemma between careers and children. It takes time to notice that this choice is only a choice for women alone if one accepts sexism. When we assume that the care of children is of importance to all persons, and persons of all genders, then many of the dilemmas of the mommy track and the mommy wars are seen as false dilemmas, merely examples of sexism in its current phase. I've lost track of how many NPR call in shows I've heard where people talk about the trade offs between having kids first and then having careers or establishing a career first, then pausing a bit, and having kids, and then trying to resume their careers. It is rare to hear a call for fathers to demand more flexibility and time from their workplaces. I know that not everyone even has that choice, but even in my very well educated, rich and powerful neighborhood, it's not common to hear child-care treated as the joint and mutual responsibility of the responsible adults. On the radio, I haven't heard people pointing out that when men lawyers demand time off for their kids, the women will have an easier time making partner (or whatever the specific translation is). And this is true despite the rise of stay at home dads as a conscious subgroup of parents, and despite the fathers around me being vastly more active and involved than I recall from my suburban youth in the 70s.

So those of us laboring in the trenches of diapers, tantrums, the teaching and learning of language, of negotiation, of the world's causes and effects, and of the utility of calmness and kindness, are in an unusual situation. Things are undoubtedly changing. Every one certainly gives lip service to the importance of kids. But at the time, we are raising kids and are not respected as workers. People say, "oh, that must be nice" and then five minutes later "what do you do with all your time?" People constantly say of a person spending their time and attention on child-rearing ("child-care" as the phrase goes) that they are not working. Fie on that.

So, after congratulating myself for being a man and rearing these fascinating but unruly kids up, I realized that I need to beg congratulations for all my fellow workers in the fields, playgrounds, and grocery stores. Anyone who is working hard to raise kids well is stating the importance of women's work; and as that work is valued more, the genders will become more equal in the wider world of paid work, and our society will become more peaceful and more able to care for all life.

Change a diaper and change the world. It'll be particularly useful for men as a group to embody this truth, but everyone currently rearing children is shaping a better future for our entire society, and they benefit from societal recognition of the utmost importance of their labor.

Thanks everyone, for populating my future and my children's future with kind and intelligent people instead of dumb mean people.

Posted by Chris at 07:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My daughter was recently studying about Rosa Parks at her school. I've always found the sort of courage which Rosa Parks epitomized to be the highest form of courage; the one form to which all people can aspire, and which if even 10% of us mustered the world would continue to transform in marvelous ways. However, I was taken aback at a question she asked me. She asked, "Dad, do you do any work like Rosa Parks, getting bad laws changed?"

My answer wavered between lameness and non-lameness, but I was ready with my answer, and explained how the part of the world I am trying to change is that women and men should be free to do whatever work that they are best at, and that for that to happen, more fathers need to be doing the work of raising their children. We've had conversations about how in the past, men had to do certain jobs because of being men and women had to do certain jobs because of being women, instead of each person having the full scope of human action open to them. In a way, I've been waiting for someone to ask me this question for years.

It was my son's question that really made me laugh. A few days later we were talking about him missing his mother, who was at work (which we've visited a few times, so he knows the building). He said, "Dad, when you worked in that building, where was that?" My daughter and I started telling him about the AOL buildings, and she told him about going to "boring" meetings there. So then he asked, "when you worked at that building, where did you wash the dishes?" He's heard the story of how I worked at a building similar to what mom does now, and he clearly has learned that a large part of my labor is washing dishes.

So after I finished laughing, I figured that my answer to my daughter was indeed true enough. We went on to a have a good conversation about cafeterias and how I wasn't allowed to wash dishes at AOL, but that I "did stuff on computers."

Posted by Chris at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My daughter had been rather indifferent about riding bikes for a while. She had a glamorous two-wheeler bought by my mother for a few years, but has been rather steadfast about not having the training wheels taken off (since a brief attempt last summer). However, recently a neighborhood kid who is younger has mastered the two-wheeler herself, so it became urgent to be rid of the training wheels.

Unfortunately, both of us were fairly nervous about this transition. I didn't really learn how to bike without training wheels until I was eight or so, and I'm not someone that bikes currently (basically out of fear that I'd be killed within a year of biking in DC traffic). I actually asked my working beloved life partner to do the task of helping our daughter with the bike riding, but the neighbor kept riding her bike around and the urgency required us to take action. I also have had times when my daughter was nervous and I've gotten a bit exasperated or nit-picky ("Look, if you just pedal harder, you'll have an easier time of keeping your balance." This is a perfectly true statement, and it often has the effect of pissing my daughter off enough to give up the bike riding altogether for that day).

Continue reading "Bike riding for nervous parents" »

Posted by Chris at 09:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My son (like my daughter before him) attends a co-op nursery school. This means I spend a fair amount of his pre-school time at the school, cleaning, conflict-resolving, playing, and so on. At this particular school, it also means that I spend a fair amount of extra time with parents from the school performing various administrative functions. These functions are sort of inherently unpleasant, extra work on top of our crazy lives taking care of kids in a worried, industrial, and child-unfriendly society.

But there is a miraculous effect that comes about from combining these two tasks.

Continue reading "Adults and their kids" »

Posted by Chris at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fear is a definite part of being a parent. However, I think that for me, my relationship with my kids has been the first one where fear is not a part of the relationship for me. It's a subtle but profound thing.

I'm one of those folk that aren't really that optimistic about other people. Whenever I get into an elevator, say, and there's a person in the elevator, I go through a sort of assessment process: "Was I polite on entering the elevator? Do they look kindly? If they freak out, what would I do? Should I comment on the weather or something?" It's the sort of thing that makes society go around, but for me there's always a consciousness of not trusting the other person.

And I just don't feel that fear with my own kids. At times, I'm anxious if I'm doing things as well as I want to, but I don't fear that they will harm me. Perhaps it is just that I don't fear; as I know they will hurt me. Heck, my kids have periodically freaked out totally and thrown things at me and tried to hit me, but it is so plain that this malice is not personal, but is impersonal, towards me as their parent, as the no-sayer or as the safe person for dealing with strong emotions; the sting of your 9 month old hitting your eyeball with his fist in the middle of the night is much more like the pain of hitting your thumb with a hammer than having some stranger bump you carelessly on the sidewalk.

Recently, I have been noticing how I have freed up by this lack of fear. In tending to the children or playing with them, I am free and spontaneous in a way that is really refreshing. Not worrying about whether I'm doing the right thing or whether I'll make a good impression, I can just sit down and play with various types of lego houses. I've spent hours and hours for years and years just joining with the kids in mutual attempts to have good days; we don't worry about what observers are thinking (I haven't got time to indulge my worries, and the kids don't have the same suspicion of people that I have), we just come up with stories, go to a park, eat meals, just thing after thing after thing. Sometimes I'm tired and I take a break from pushing the swing; sometimes they are tired and I carry them a bit. Without fear, I find that these problems are easy to solve; even a tense and angry three year old calms down eventually with a calm parent (I had typed "quickly" but these are three year olds - mine have had 45 minute tantrums when they even turned aside comfort, but "eventually" is still true in my experience - eventually the most deranged three year old will calm down).

This life-style has started to build a habit in me of responding naturally rather from calculation. I've noticed that when adults start to treat me meanly, that rather than fall into my pre-child tense calculation about whether I can stand to speak up or whether I should just ignore it, I am much more likely to immediately and lightly let the other person know that they missed something, just as I've done thousands of times to the clear but a bit rude efforts at communication from my kids. And when I get upset, I am much quicker to notice it, and, rather than waste my scarce time on feeling guilty for being someone who can be upset, I just wait for it to pass and then carry on. (When I do spend time worrying that I shouldn't get upset, I'm much more likely to lock myself up solid with tension than if I just realize that upset is a part of life; being a parent makes this fact of life very obvious even to me).

Some of this change also comes from having to speak up when it is for my kids. If it's just for me, I'll just eat a burned and tasteless bagel, but when my daughter really wants a spoon of the right size for her, I'll ask and ask again until we get one. And I spend many many hours providing words for my two kids to find the opportunity to communicate that our preschool assures us lies behind conflict. "OK, [Son], [daughter] said that she is sad because you threw her new toy and it might have broken." "Is there anything you can say to her?" "Do you still want to borrow it?" "Can you promise not to throw it again?" "OK, [Daughter], son says he'll be careful and he's asking for another chance, what do you say?" (I don't always have to say all the lines, but I often have to be able to grease the wheels when the two of them get stuck). So my habitual experience of meanness now isn't that it's mean, but that it's time for me to roll up my sleeves and seek a mutual solution that could be ennunciated.

So I've written a lot about beneficial it is to rear children; this experience of relating without fear is a specific way that has helped me tremendously.

Posted by Chris at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One never knows why things occur. I noticed when my daughter was 3 that I talked with her a lot less than the other people I was hanging out with. I attributed that to our gender differences (that year I hung out with moms mostly, (my main pal, a stay at home dad, having moved to the supposedly beautiful Madison , Wisconsin, when my daughter was 2)). I called my parenting "Parenting by Following Around" which was we'd just walk around our town, and I'd mostly follow behind and offer assistance as needed and a few explanations and answer any questions. And like any good three year old (or thereabouts) she had what seemed to be like a huge number of questions. But when I'd walk with the moms, they'd be talking like twice as much as I. I didn't notice that I was ignoring questions, but figured it was some mysterious gender difference here the moms somehow encouraged more conversation or gave more open ended responses instead of trying to scale down some quantum mechanics answer to why the sky is blue. But it seemed fine, and we had a lot of fun walking around town.

However, now I'm with a different child, and I have found that now my parenting is called "Parenting by Conversation." But what has changed? Not my gender. We have less time, so we don't spend so many hours walking around the town (have to rush to school, rush again to school, rush home for homework, etc.) (I'm using "rush" here somewhat loosely - if you actually saw us walking home, you'd pass us.) And my son doesn't walk nearly as much as his sister did at the same age. But oh my, we talk a lot. He does the "why" thing that you read about. (Which I always imagined would be a fun challenge, and it is right up until your brain runs out of neurotransmitters or whatever that is.) He has me tell stories over and over, and tells me stories over and over. We can spend literally hours just talking about airplanes, baby airplanes, momma airplanes, daddy airplanes, all the airplanes we like and all the airplanes we don't like; the airplanes traveling and needing to use the potty and then the planes reading a book, etc. etc. etc.

So it seems that some things vary because the children themselves are different. If you follow the connection to the child you have, you'll end up meeting the specific needs they have without necessarily even knowing what that need is. You just know the days are good, that the child mostly chooses to follow the routine they have, that your gut is relaxed. And the system (not my system, but the system of human life) works. It is a great pleasure to partake in.

(The "Parenting by Following Around" phrase was a take off on the slogan used by the head of my department at work for years, "Management by Walking Around" - he'd just walk around and see people in the hall and find out what was going and and what problems there were).

Posted by Chris at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I just realized that with yourself, there are some things that you can change by trying to and some things that you cannot change by trying to and must figure out how to work with them. For instance, I can write a blog entry when I want to. I can't really make myself (I conclude) stop losing my keys when I'm exhausted or anxious. I have to make sure I usually have multiple copies of my keys.

However, that is also how it is with other people. There are some things you can ask people to do or not to do, and it's possible that they will be able to do it. There are some things, however, that they won't be able to do even if they want to as well. I can ask someone to pass me the salt or excuse me to go to the rest room (now that the baby is 3, anyways), and you know, it happens. But I can't really stop the war on Iraq. I can't even get fellow anti-war folks not to go around pissing off other people that might join the peace movement.

And the really funny thing is that this is also how it is with inanimate things. There are rocks I can just pick up and move, and there are mountains. (We spent a long time throwing rocks today into Sligo Creek after swinging large). My son got to explore the difference between rocks he can move and rocks he can't. He even got to dig up a rock that he didn't expect to!

I think part of the trick of keeping a group of heterogeneous people functioning smoothly (aka keeping the family within shouting distance of happy) is knowing clearly the difference between things that can be done and things that can be adjusted to. Hungry baby, not going to fix on its own. That first whiff of poopy diaper means a diaper change is needed. Hungry 7 year old, that's often a bit negotiable. Tired and upset working partner comes home, gotta go get the cheese and crackers, and perhaps a cocktail (how is it that "cocktail" makes me feel much more grown up than "poopy diaper"). Toddler starts to make barfing noise, the next day or so is revealed in its inexorable reality. Toddler insists on carrying five toys to the grocery store, often that's negotiable. Daddy has had 3 hours of sleep due to internet time wastage, and I'm not going to be telling made up on the spot stories. But I might be able to summon up a cheerful sound in my voice as I read a favorite story book.

You get the point. Same principle as the difference between a "check engine" light and a flat. Ignoring the flat causes as much trouble as freaking out over a light when you are late for cooping at the nursery school.

Posted by Chris at 08:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One way I am easily able to drive my hard-working beloved life partner crazy is by making a statement along the lines of, "Of course, [the son] and I aren't really two separate people." She finds this sentiment to be a sign of enmeshment and lack of boundaries, which does often cause parents to inflict their own problems onto the new generation. Note that every stay at home parent I've brought this up with has the same story to say about their working partner; gotta love them but they just live in some other world.

I just can't see the toddler, even as he is separate enough to choose an object to throw at me, climb the stairs by himself, throw it in my general direction (without hitting me, as I think he could were he so inclined), and then climb back down the stairs to continue sulking (that the TV was turned off by me), as completely separate from me. He has feelings separate from me, but we seem to share general levels of tension and relaxation. He has his food preferences separate from me, but we are often of one mind about eating. He has his wild stories to tell, but the conversations ramble back and forth between us so smoothly that there's not a clear difference between helping him finding the words he's looking for and sharing some funny twist that I just thought of and laughing at one of the fresh insights I enjoy from his mouth and mind.

He's three now, and so is much more separate. When he was fifteen months, we were not two. We were one integrated human system, with two brains but one reality indivisible. I'd know far before it would happen if he was thinking of running far from me or if he was sleepy (or if he was sleepy and yet unable to fall asleep). During those days, we'd nap together, eat together, walk together, and interact for endless hours together. Of course we knew each other well.

And there is a certain skill in interpreting body language and emotional states that being a parent has really sharpened for me. I was a computer programmer, and a sort "just IM me" kind of person, always looking at the detailed words that were uttered, separate from any sort of human context. Inconveniently, however, babies aren't born speaking. Nor even with much ability to analytically assess what is bugging them. They just cry like hell when they need to. Even a crinkly sad face is highly motivating to a parent. But the informational content of the uttered words is too low. You have to start looking, with your eye. And listening with your ears, not your speech-processing centers. Luckily, we turn out to be biologically adapted to understanding our young. And it turns out that after a few weeks (or is it months? I forgot) you can tell the difference between "I'm tired" yelling and "what a day!" yelling and "food! Now!" yelling. Even as they get some speech, they aren't really in the "fact" based community, so you end up having to watch for the rubbed eyes and the clock. You practice, you serve meals that are ignored, you have babies falling asleep while driving to the class, you have playdates that have multiple instances of hitting.

You keep watching, and at some point you realize that you know that your kid is feeling a bit feisty and is going to want to run across the street without holding hands. And you know precisely which mornings you can leave the house without food and which mornings you'll regret leaving without that snack (this isn't really mystical, just things like some weeks they eat 8 meals a day and some weeks they eat like a bird; however it is, there you are and you know it well). You start to catch yourself accepting or rejecting offers for the child because the answer to the question is as obvious as the sun shining in the sky, as obvious as your own hunger or fatigue. You can stand talking to an adult, and reach down with your hands to prevent a shove in just the same way you catch yourself about to trip (umm, at least you can do that 90% of the time).

You get to watch them when they realize they don't have to tell you the truth, that it's a choice, and you see just how they alter their voice, and how they stand a bit askew. (At that time, you feel their pleasure with the cleverness of their story and their courage at choosing to lie.) When, years later, they try the lying with such greater verbal sophistication, the voice and the stance are still as loud to you as your own nervousness when you lie (yes, it's true, I do sometimes lie; no, it doesn't work out well).

So the data you have about these small people is much closer to the data you have about yourself. Not complete data, but much more intimate than with people you meet as adults.

And the parent and child are not two in a more dynamic fashion as well. There is a constant flow of attention, of moods spreading and changing. Karen Miller has a lovely statement that the ironclad rule for raising good kids is to be good. And there's nothing that will discourage flexibility in toddlers more quickly than being inflexible. Hang on to your way, and this other way rears up. It's not like suffering alone with your inflexibility, it's like suffering with a giant fun-house mirror of your own inflexibility. But it's not like being with adults, because you can just laugh and throw up your hands and say some new thing like, "Can I help you somehow?" or offer one minute before the dreaded diaper change, or some open response. Sometimes merely enjoying a slow breath and then repeating the exact same words is enough. And voila, a flexible child appears, ready, no eager and excited, to work together. Errors are never so quickly left behind (if never so frequently stumbled into).

--Chris, who has thoroughly lost perspective, and is standing in amongst the weeds (and sees a wondrously balanced ecosystem that is ancient, marvelous, and of this very moment).

Posted by Chris at 01:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Early childhood is a time when friendship is very important; parents find friends with a desperate happiness not at all like the way in which workers build up friendships over coffee and joint work; realizing what "totally dependent" and "twenty-four hours, seven days a week, for decades" mean, as well as "responsible" while coping with the enormous physical strain of no sleep and a needy being that can't ask for things engenders a bit of desperation within a few months. Eventually it seems like the new people we are raising are starting to want friends and playmates and starting to notice the trickiness of getting along with other people.

At first, when you just have one little baby, it's pretty easy to make friends with other new parents. The babies aren't going to object to other babies, and honestly the whole world wants to be nice to a person holding a small baby. I'm generally a wall-flower at parties (unless I can find one interesting person to have one long conversation off in a corner), but I felt like a rock star at parties with my little beautiful baby who just wanted to be carried around and look at stuff.

And there are more deep friendships. When my oldest daughter was 0-2, I was a devoted regular at the excellent story time at our local library. The adults I met there are some of the deepest friends I have (I had "closest" but that's not it - perhaps we never talked about anything but babies, but the friendship was made under the skin); I am forced to fly out to Wisconsin periodically to meet one family. Whenever I run into one of those folks, whether or not we still see each other regularly, a big smile breaks across my face. The people that smiled on me even when my daughter didn't want to listen to the story but wanted to hand all the books to me, that shared food with us, and offered extra socks and great advice, I stand ready to help always.

But as the children grow, friendships get more complex. Unlike in the office, the friendships aren't just between two individuals, now that the kids can get along with one another or not. There are people that I like very much and had many many hours of enjoyable conversation with that I can't see anymore, because there were just too many ugly episodes of kids not getting along and begging to stay home. It's not the sort of thing I can bring myself to talk about, and so the playdates just sort of fade out without much comment.

If you try to schedule dinners with all the parents involved, the equation gets even more complex. Schedules and diets need to be compatible, the other parents have to get along somewhat, the kids have to tolerate each other. These dinners can be great islands of happiness and success in a season of arguing and crankiness, but they can also be humiliating failures as your family displays whatever flaws it has while children scream and adults look on in mute horror.

Some people get really offended that aspects to hanging out at the park that are like junior high school dances. Pairing off for car-pools or weekly play-dates at pre-school. The engaging conversation about twins that is abruptly dropped when a better friend shows up. People who you introduce that then start swapping childcare. I had a very happy day once, when I was working part time and at home part time, I met in the park two other parents that were working part time and at home part time and had similarly aged kids; we rapidly exchanged stories and phones numbers and shortly had determined that there was zero overlap between our at-home schedules, and it we'd never see each other again, as indeed we never did.

There's also the work. Parenting friends will bring their kids over to your sick house and listen to your tale of woe when you are having a rough month and feed you cheesy toast and comment on your essential goodness, but are also quite likely to enroll their kids in classes and schools and arrange nap times so that your kids and their kids can never again see each other. So it's deep intense connections that are always subordinate to the work.

The hillside outside of my daughter's very good school is the perfect antidote to the amazingly rigorous day the kids have to survive. We tend to be fair weather participants only, but 30 minutes of running wildly through the patch of woods with only vague parental supervision grants the autonomy, self-directed behavior, and "loud is OK" experience that isn't permitted inside. But, I've noticed a really funny thing. The moms on the hillside are mostly people I've known for years, many from that crucible of the library baby time, or neighbors or people from the cultic preschool I love. But for some reason, while I've had in depth one-on-one conversations with most of the moms, I almost never sit down in the cluster of moms, or if I do, I bring along a book or a toddler to occupy me. When the group thins out, I'll talk to one or two of my old friends. I don't like the whole group things. So while I'm sitting there talking to my toddler sitting off from the group of talking parents, I'll often notice my daughter in the woods, standing off from the group of playing children, watching the play (as I indeed often listen silently to my friends talking). But still she generally wants to go, and I do get some relief from the isolation of hours alone with a small child by sitting near the other adults. But my daughter and I, we are definitely cut from a similar block of personhood when it comes to socializing in groups. This perhaps also explains my somewhat lame responses to "so-and-so won't-play-with-me-at-recess/is-being-mean-to-me/is-teasing-me" conundrums. My honest response is that when one is 18 and can choose with whom to associate much more than is allowed in 2nd grade, life becomes much more interesting and pleasant. I try to come up with some helpful process of dialog and problem solving for the current unavoidable reality, but my heart's not in it. Kids are mean, sorry about that.

So while I've forged some very deep connections with these enormous groups of people called families, I've also had to cut dear friends off without a word, I've failed to make the whole realm of human friendship look 100% great, and I've apparently helped in the upbringing of another person who doesn't leap into big groups easily.

Posted by Chris at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Three years later and we triumph at wacky hair day.

My eldest is in her third year of public school. The public schools here are a massively organized thing, and it takes a while to learn all the ins and outs. They have something called "spirit week," which I only experienced in high school when I was growing up. But things have changed.

In kindergarten, I didn't realize that it was wacky hair day until alas too late, and we didn't have hair that was at all wacky (well, I put in a largish prime number of pig tails, which lasted about 10 minutes). Last year, I tried hard for wacky hair that did not stay wacky very long at all (probably about 10 minutes, but her hair was combed very well, and my pig tails had gotten a bit tighter in the intervening year). In first grade, I did have a brief epiphany where I realized that getting ready for wacky hair day was more like getting ready for a wedding than our normal morning hair brushing routine is.

I went all out this time buying hair care products in the days leading up to wacky hair day. I even had to turn back from the temptation to buy various serious hair dye products, as I knew that somewhere in there was a line between wacky and excessive.

My daughter's hair was spiky when I dropped her off, and when I picked her up, she smilingly showed me the still standing spikes.

Credit to her for the the realization that cute is part of wacky.

Posted by Chris at 03:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

When you sit down at the end of the year and attempt to tote up the accomplishments, the stay at home parent has an invisible list. What the children do isn't the parent's accomplishment. The fact that children grow and increase in wisdom and experience isn't the parent's accomplishment, and in fact occurs for most children no matter what environment they are growing in. I personally find our family to be a bit more flexible and calm having a person just watching out for the kids, able to incorporate sicknesses or school closings without too much angst. But "a bit more flexible and calm" isn't an accomplishment.

The kids and I spend hours in conversations that range from momma crane nursing the baby crane to airport luggage games to why we aren't going to eat ice cream right now to where big sister is at school, touching on innumerable details: why DC has black squirrels, why we sometimes do and sometimes do not pick up trash in the street, why we always try to pick up toys when we finish with them, why it is getting dark so early, why the clouds go by so quickly on a blustery winter morning, conversations that include all of human existence given enough time (can you tell my youngest is three this week). It takes a lot of slow thought to answer the questions in a way that is understandable, that answers the original question, that shares my love of how the world works, that refers to similar recent conversations, and that is opened ended enough to continue the conversation and teach the back-and-forth dance of human conversation. Too much orbital mechanics and that chance is lost. Too much thinking about a blog entry during the child's talking, and that chance is lost. But keep the balance (work on the blog entries while the baby crane is having another piece of tinker-toy added with 100% of the child's attention; use globes and repetition to get the point of orbits across; enjoy the moments (already fading before my eyes) of cuddly lap time; find the way to calmly prevent hitting or retaliatory toy theft at a playdate, without tipping the pre-schooler into abject sadness and powerlessness over the situation, helping the right words to be found, said, and affect the playing. Do this close, precise, error-prone work and it does seem that something happens. Am I claiming credit for the amusing joke my son told to our visitor this morning? No, I was as delighted and surprised by that as the guest was (ok, probably more delighted). But is it fair to say that in these conversations nothing is accomplished? That does not feel like the correct answer.

I don't think there is anything wrong with day care; I wish the people in day care received something like 100% of the money and respect that they deserve rather than 25% or whatever it is (and I do mean the current people working in day care doing the work that they already deserve respect for). I think providing abundant excellent day care would be the smartest thing we could put our money towards as a society.

However, I'd still want to be with my kids myself mostly. I remember as a child feeling a certain ineffable comfort in my mother's presence. I seem to find a similar comfort when my daughter runs into my arms after a day in second grade and when I pick up my son from the few mornings of pre-school he enjoys so thoroughly that he immediately falls asleep after. In all my jobs in my life, I have only benefited from rolling my sleeves up and doing work myself, no matter what the work was. That wisdom I want to be visible to my offspring, visible in such a common and invisible part of their lives that I don't have to teach it, it's transmitted the same way that culture has been transmitted for the hundreds of thousands of years that we've been transmitted culture, in the same way that our nervous systems expect to receive culture: up close and personal from the old generations to the new. I'll allow some modern neurology experiments to operate on my kids (TV, ubiquitous plastic, artificial lights, giant houses with beds in different rooms), but I can't bring myself to leave apart from me these people that are at once of me and are not me, with so much less experience and power than I have.

This issue has come up because I had a relative recently tell me that I had accomplished nothing in the last year. This comment was made in the context of my spending my time, effort and attention as a stay at home parent. The thoughtless dismissal of the labor involved hurt me, but it wasn't the sort of insult that makes you question if you are doing the right thing. It was the sort of insult that makes you aware of how difficult it is to explain what goes on when you read Mummies in the Morning 10 times in a two week period, or how baby squirrels verses momma squirrels has been a running theme while walking outside recently (the younger child calling most of the squirrels babies and the older child more accurately calling them all mommies or daddies, deferring to the younger's language if not his facts). Even the importance of providing food that will be criticized or ignored and then eaten is either just seen or not seen. One could write an essay or make a movie about high cuisine in a great feast (Babette's Feast or Like Water for Chocolate). The heights of cooking are transcendent. But most of life is reheated beets, black beans for which there weren't even an onion to sauté, fresh rice and a few left over pieces of pizza. It's just sitting around, sharing our good things and our bad things from the day, enjoying this life (thank heaven for sour cream) despite the chaos and confusion. No thing was accomplished.

* PS Standard disclaimer about how lucky I am to be able to do this. It is a profound blessing for a man to live at a time when this choice is even available.

Posted by Chris at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Merry Christmas and Good Luck Shopping to All!

The theology I find important about the "Christian reason for the season" is fairly simple:

1. There is nothing about our human nature, body, existence, whatever, that is incompatible with God.

2. Birth is miraculous.

Posted by Chris at 09:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Now that I've discovered that people are commenting on these (at times) and I should mark them as not being spam and read them, I noticed some interesting comments on the Santa Lies column.

I'm not sure I have a strategy for talking about G-d except to answer whatever questions arise totally honestly and seriously, which involves a fair amount of "I don't know." I happen to have fallen in with some Zen folk and am taking rather delightedly to the idea that in our relationship with G-d it doesn't matter very much what we think or believe; our thoughts are not what is important to G-d; indeed G-d's perspective on our thoughts is likely to be a rather unattached perspective.

So I have a few different tactics when talking to the kids:

1. What is important is how we act, not what we think.

2. Stories can be important without being true in a literal sense, because they show us things about people. (We do have various books of bible stories for toddlers, which we do read (with a bit of tweaking from the reader to improve the implicit theology)). We also read books of folktales and Greek mythology (and Buddhist tales as well), and identify the bible stories as being more historical or more like the myths that our community uses to illuminate the world.

3. G-d is never ever apart from us, not for one second.

4. Worshiping in a community is an opportunity. At our church, anyone may receive the bread and wine, and both kids seems to accept this offering without necessarily liking the more boring bits of the liturgy. The kids would still rather stay home than attend, but they will as adults have the ability to hear a liturgy they've heard since the very beginning. If they become Unitarians anyways, that's fine.

Posted by Chris at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I just read a lovely post by Stephanie about the end of her son's Santa Claus belief, and was inspired to share my own hard boiled policy.

One of my earliest memories of betrayal was arguing with a boy in kindergarten about the reality of Santa Clause. As a faithful Episcopalian, I went to the mat, as kindergarten arguments go, for his reality. I went home, and described the debate to my mom, who let me in on the truth: I had been lied to, by my parents and by society. Arg. It is mere coincidence that I did not at that moment abandon all belief in goodness.

So when my beloved life partner and I started with kids, having a skeptical child has more or less been a deliberate goal. I used to play games where I'd say silly untrue things to my daughter (very difficult to hit the right level, so that she was neither completely believing what I was saying nor angry that it wasn't true). Also, I have a strange speech habit where I substitute one word for another without even really noticing it. For example, I often say "blanket" instead of "towel", which to me are closely related concepts anyways, but my daughter is always correcting me. So she has years of experience with having her authority be fallible. And I also try as much as I am able to not lie outright to her, about anything, and to answer any question she has. I'll omit much of relevance, of course, but that's how it goes with parents.

But she never had a year when she understood what the Santa thing was about, and was told that it was literally real. Not that she hasn't enjoyed setting out food for Santa and writing notes. The policy has worked out better than I'd have guessed, as she is both informed and also able to enjoy the magical mythical aspects fully (and I have said that Santa is a story that people love because it shows the wonder of giving and receiving). Of course, this is a person who can spend hours playing games with her tiny tiny dolls. She'll be playing with them as I re-tidy the kitchen or whatever, and I'll here a faint, "Daddy" from where she is sitting, and I'll say "Yes?" And she'll say "I'm not talking to you!" with some exasperation. It is tiny doll #1 talking to tiny doll #2.

The thing I can't decide about is my son. He's just three, and someone has been telling him the stories about Santa. He's not as skeptical as my daughter was. (People over hear my daughter and I negotiating on some point or other, and they often tell me she'll be a fine lawyer.) I do play the games about joking, and he's a big joker, but he's just got a certain willingness to believe in wild stuff that she didn't have. So I'm finding myself wondering if I should bring up Santa's factualness if it doesn't come up spontaneously. It seems like that would be a spoil sport thing to do, but then I don't want to get into keeping the truth from him, to the extent that he even cares about the truth.

For he, at three, isn't really even in the "reality based community" yet. You can't find out what happened in a literal sense by asking him (which makes for some interesting occasions when he and his sister have fought in ways that sound like the rules of fighting were violated, and he's clearly not answering factually, and yet just my asking him what happened seems to be an essential part of a just environment; so I'll be like, "What happened?" to him, and his sister will try to quickly tell me her side of it, and I'll say, "I'm not asking you, I want to hear from him." And he'll make up some wildly improbable story, and then what can I do? "Is this fight so serious that we need to get out of the bathtub? [No!] If I have to help out once more, then we are getting out."

So does he care about Santa? Will he be arguing with someone about Santa's reality and be upset if he was tricked? And will my friends that are protecting their kids' ideas about Santa Claus be horrified by this post?

Posted by Chris at 10:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I expected that having kids would make me vastly more sentimental. I've always been pretty sentimental (and I am much more likely to cry at tire commercials or funny you tube videos) since having kids.

However, in fact, I recycle art and drawings with a light heart. The reason sentimentality can't overwhelm one as a parent is that the kids you love keep disappearing. I sat next to a 6 month old baby recently, all proud with her sitting up and ability to reach out and touch things. I remember enjoying that time, but I haven't had a baby in the house in some time. What I loved about my six month old was gone and replaced with things to love about an aspiring crawler, which was replaced by the cool dangerousness of an accomplished crawler, which rapidly disappeared into a walker, ... and so on.

I find that if I just stack all the art up in a box (after taking it off of the wall) and waiting a while, I am no longer so interested in the art - the artist has moved onto such new and complex stuff in the meanwhile, that I can take a few representative samples and drop the rest into the paper stream. Recycle these splashes of color? Why, haven't you seen the latest picture with circles and lines in it? Seen that subtle commentary on our family complete with some of our lovely birds that live in the bushes?

I loved my 5 year old but she is gone, gone, gone away. Currently we have a seven year old sharing her wit and wisdom. I've been in many conversations about whether it's the "Terrible Twos" or the "Terrible Threes," but in fact I don't really see what a stage is like until it's disappearing already. Aside from the fact that it doesn't make anything easier to think "I really like this about three year olds" or "I don't like this about three year olds," the change is just so constant that with only two kids you never can really know if there is a difference between stages or between your two individual kids or between their genders or whatever. As my second child goes through the same number of years of life that his sister went through before, I find that my seeing of his life often has an implicit comparison to it, while his big sister continues her push through the edge of my parenting experience and skill.

I don't even know if my kids have a favorite breakfast, much less what it is. I give them a choice each morning from the standard and currently available breakfasts (despite a dietitian's instruction that a special distinct cuisine for breakfast is a bizarre modern innovation, we stick with toast/eggs/cereal/oatmeal/pancakes and keep the sandwiches/pasta/candy for later). But I'm often surprised by what they choose. They'll have only oatmeal for months but then spend a week back at eggs, then have a week with different things each day, including oatmeal. This year is the first that my three year old is venturing to ask for different food than his big sister (he's always actually eaten different stuff, but he used to loyally ask for the same as her). The choices change, but I'm not sure what they change with. I can only hope that hunger has something to do with it.

I do get funny stares when we travel and people ask me "What is their favorite breakfast" and I have no reasonable answer. They seem to assume that as a stay at home parent, I should know their favorite breakfast. Can I start to deconstruct the notion of "favorite breakfast" as though this question is a good opportunity for some philosophy? Should I share the ocean of observations I have, and how I'm not sure the question has a permanent answer? Should I just immediately ask the kids what they want? Ask the host what the choices are?

What they want is unique to each situation, and how they are is constantly changing; my adult stiffness and ostensible "favorites" have to stretch constantly to keep up, or I find myself trying to insist that we do something again that was fun four months ago; "What do you mean, you don't want to go to the underdog park?". Not that I don't know that a back-hoe will always delight my son and a horse will always delight my daughter and that a trip to the potomac for catching fish will please us all. But no doubt in a year or two that'll have changed as well. I wonder what it will be like to have loved all these different people by the time they are 18. I smile wistfully when I see a baby, but I find myself so fascinated by my son's current burst of linguistic growth that I don't miss his old self when I am with his current reality.

Posted by Chris at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When each of my kids started pre-school, there was a phenomenon that I found surprising. They started to get sick. A lot.

Continue reading "Cold Season" »

Posted by Chris at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My fellow blogger and physical acquaintance (been missing the drama classes, I must say) Stephanie has "tagged" me with a "meme." These are blog-speak for "chain letter with interesting sequelae" but it's the first time this happened to me, so I'm game.

Rules

1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and or weird things about yourself.
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

I probably can't come up with 7 random people, but I can find 7 blogs I have on my bookmark bar.

My wife has been a politician until last week, so my sample will be biased towards the ok to talk about in public.

1. Simon Donaldson once said I had a good proof.

2. I personally helped to design and implement a feature to a software product that was excoriated on comp.risks (sending one's forgotten password unencrypted in an email to an AIM user that forgot their password).

3. The foreign languages I've studied in school (and once could read at least as well as a first grader in that land) were Attic Greek, Classic Latin, and Old English.

4. The live musical experience of my life that I'd say was the most mind-blowing was the World Saxophone Quartet. They managed a density of amazing musical complexity that rivals a good six part fugue, and were cool to boot.

5. I am secretly pleased when my daughter gets the same criticism in school that I got (slow in the early grades, and had to take remedial PE in first grade). I try hard to not be convinced that this means she is fated for scholastic greatness.

6. My high school (where I learned that money and happiness are effectively unrelated) was mentioned by name in the Preppy Handbook of the 1980s.

7. When I turned 30, I shaved my head bald. I just turned 40 last Friday and I may well do it again.

Blogs I'm reading:
Hard Core Zen

Momma Zen

Post Secret
Physics Blog

Barbara Ehrenreich

Hurricane blog at wunderground

Global Warming Science Blog

These are all big established blogs that have never heard of me and would be annoyed if I tagged them, so I won't be mentioning it to anyone.

Posted by Chris at 07:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)