D and I went to a victory party for Chad Goerner tonight at Conte's. Since D's birth, I have been much more politically involved than I was before he arrived on the scene, and one of the results has been that I am now the mother of an unusually politically aware 4.75 yr. old. (During the last Presidential campaign, during a long string of Dean for America Meetups, D turned to me and said, with apparently mounting exasperation, "Is How'Dean gonna be dere?")
One of the other revelers tonight asked D wasn't it fun to win for a change, and on the car ride home he asked me why we don't usually win. I explained that part of the reason it feels like we don't win that much is that George Bush has been the President for D's whole life (!), and he has one of the most important jobs in our country, so he has a lot of power.
D: Why does he have so much power?
Me: Well, for one thing, everything he does is news. If you or I say something, we're just talking to each other, but if the President says something, there are a bunch of reporters there all the time, and they make a news story out of it and put it in the newspapers or on the television or radio. Yesterday he was saying that he didn't think girls should marry girls or boys marry boys, and even though lots of other people think that's ridiculous, it made the news. So that's some of his power.
D: And he has his own airplane, right?
Me: That's right.
D: Then he should have flown right home when the hurricane came!* He should not have stayed on his vacation. I wish George Bush was a two year old. I wish George Bush was a baby. Then nobody would listen to him, and nobody would vote for him. Or if he didn't have a name, then how could he tell people how to vote for him, that would be good. Or I wish he was on Pluto. Then he would freeze to death. No, that would kill him, that would be too mean. He's pretty bad, though. He's like, only 1 good, and Mr. Chad is infinity good. Maybe send him to the North Pole, or Antarctica. Which one is further away?
Me: Well, we're in the Northern Hemisphere, so Antarctica is further away.
D: Okay, send him to Antarctica, then. I'm going to marry a boy when I grow up if I want to, because George Bush is just wrong."
* Note: D's class at U-League this year had several late-addition children of displaced professors from New Orleans, so he really "gets" Katrina.
Today is 6-6-06. My very first car was nicknamed, "The Beast," and I'm well-aquainted with the "number of the beast" hoopla (ref. Revelations 13:18). When I went to get that car registered, finally making it up to the counter after waiting in the switchback DMV line for approximately two years, the following exchange ensued:DMV clerk: Do you care what license plate you get?Me, confused: Do I get a choice? (I had already scoped out the vanity plate options and decided they weren't for me.)DMV clerk: No, not really.Me: So, um, if I don't have a choice, why are you asking me if I care?DMV clerk: [in a whisper] Because this is supposed to be the next one. (Holds up plate emblazoned with the license number CMG-666.)
Me: I'll take it! [Insert sound of the long snaky line of God-fearing Chemung County people behind me gasping in horror.]Apparently the clerk had tried multiple times to assign that plate, but kept having folks flat-out refuse. Contrarian that I am, I thought, "Well, maybe this will lessen the chances that someone will steal it."Not that theft was likely to be on anyone's mind. The Beast was a 1972 Buick Skylark, w/ a massive V8 engine that cranked out horsepower a-gogo. It also guzzled gas like nobody's business; if you went up a steep enough incline at a sufficiently aggressive pace, you could visually observe the gas gauge needle going down.
That's a fully restored and slightly souped up '72 Skylark, probably pretty close to what designers who had trained with Harley Earl had in mind... a thing of beauty, n'cest pas? If only I'd held onto her a few more years. But because of The Beast's strength and power, I tended to drive her like this:
So my car wasn't showroom material, but well-loved nonetheless. Eventually I moved to New Jersey; with new plates, the Beast no longer wore "the mark of the Beast." Still, everyone who ever rode in her called her that. And when the time came -- no functioning heat, scary knocking noises in the engine, etc. etc. I put an ad in the paper saying that she was free to a good home. (Since my chauffeur grandfather had given her to me, it somehow didn't seem right to make a profit on her.) I made sure to hand the Beast along to a mechanically-minded young man with a gleam in his eye, and for several years afterwards I was inordinately cheered by a few scattered sightings of her still out there on the road terrorizing the cars with some book value left in 'em.So I'm not afraid of days or license plates numbered "666." How 'bout you?
Now that the bloom is finally off the Republican rose, Bush is trying to rally the conservative troops by waving the dead-in-the-water Federal Marriage Amendment flag.The only other time we've considered a Constitutional amendment that was exclusive rather than inclusive in nature was the eighteenth (Prohibition). And we all know how that worked out.Feel like screaming? Go ahead. Then take a deep breath and call your elected representatives. Find them here.Take 30 seconds to tell or remind them you're against the Federal Marriage Amendment and against amending our constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Tell 'em I sent you.
It wasn’t really a lie. Or was it? In the moment, coming out of nowhere because that’s inevitably how these things work, it felt like a lie. D and I were complimenting each other on our outfits one recent morning – a happy consequence of owning only one full-length mirror is that preening is a communal activity in our home – and he was particularly taken with my silky rayon pants. (Texture counts with this boy.) “Those are really fancy, Mommy. That’s probably like what you wore when you and Tama got married, right Mommy?”And I said, “Well, yes, a little bit. Thank you, buddy!” It just came out.He’s four and three-quarters years old, and I found, in that moment, that I am not ready. I don’t even know where to begin. He knows about prejudice and discrimination, and loves the story of Rosa Parks standing up for herself by keeping her seat. He knows that in our family we believe that who a person is matters more than what he or she looks like. He knows that different people belong to different faith communities and are differently abled. He knows that families with two moms or two dads are somewhat unusual. (The other day he quite confidently turned to a friend from school in the middle of a conversation about grownup life and said, “Boys can marry boys, it just doesn’t happen that often.”) But I don’t think our son has any idea that many people in this country cling to a “conjugal conception of marriage as the exclusive monogamous union of sexually complementary spouses,” as Princeton Professor Robert George, who helped draft the dead-in-the-water Federal Marriage Amendment, has framed it. How would I explain to our son the existence of strangers who persist in the belief that our family is somehow a threat to them and their way of life? That people are fighting tooth and nail to prevent our family obtaining full rights under the law, as if that would somehow undercut their rights, as if there’s only but so much justice to go around. Our little man has no idea that every year for the last 13 years, as I complete my tax return, I check a box labeled “single” with a wrenching feeling of betrayal in my heart.I don’t think he needs to know. The laws are the laws, but they don’t need to intrude on my son’s happy life just yet. He knows that my partner adopted him – every spring we celebrate “Forever Family” day – and that we had to stand before a judge and promise to take care of him forever, and I think he likes that idea. (In fact, these days if you ask him what he wants to be when he grows up, he’ll say, “A judge. Or maybe a wrestler.”) He doesn’t know that without that adoption our state and federal governments would consider my partner and my son to be unrelated. He doesn’t know that we had to pay hundreds of dollars for a “home study,” in which a total stranger came to our home and asked a slew of invasive questions in an effort to determine our fitness to parent.What D does know is that he is loved, and that his parents love both him and each other. He knows that snuggles are good for all kinds of hurts, that apologies and forgiveness help your heart feel better, and that if you hear a little voice telling you that something’s not right, you should take a moment to think about that. What he knows about marriage is that it is for people who love each other and want to stay together and be a forever family. For us and for our son, marriage is about commitment and warmth. Did I lie?The laws are the laws. But yesterday, New York's Court of Appeals (the highest court in that state), heard more than two hours of oral arguments on four marriage-equality cases. The New Jersey Supreme Court heard similar arguments in February. A decision in either case could presumably come before D’s next birthday. Our son has been to one same-sex wedding (in Massachusetts, of course), so he knows it’s possible. Maybe the next time he asks me about marriage, I’ll be able to give him an answer that reflects our family’s definition, one that I’m not afraid will hurt his heart. An answer that will enable me to buffer the discrimination by locating more of it in the past. An answer that is less about exclusion, and more about warmth.
A huge wind storm downed this pine tree in the summer of 2003, and I remember feeling simultaneously sad about its demise and happy that I'd have a chance to show our little guy the giant from a new angle. My relationship with the natural world is in great shape, and in this, as in so many other areas in my life, I have my parents to thank.I grew up in suburbia. Foothill Road – actually at the foot of a hill – was a street that there was no reason to drive on... unless you lived there. The town, Big Flats, was and is a company town for Corning Glass Works, and there was pretty much no reason for it to be there except for that.My parents transformed our "middle of nowheresville" childhood into a daily adventure by making sure we got out into it. We grew raspberries and blueberries in our backyard. We made regular pilgrimmages to the local Tanglewood Nature Center. In the wintertime, the entire family bundled up and went hiking off into the woods at the top of the neighborhood, tromping through the snow until we were too tired to go on, at which point my father would miraculously build a fire while my mother – no less miraculously – produced hotdogs and hot chocolate from somewhere.Summers saw us heading off for one of the Finger Lakes, where we would toss a series of progressively larger sailboats into the water and head off for an adventure. When my dad showed me that you could actually watch for the wind? Well, there was pretty much nothing cooler than being a seven year-old who could scan the lake, yell out, "Here comes a gust!" and be right.By the time I headed off for college, I understood that the Earth takes care of us, and that it needs to be a reciprocal arrangement. Not because of anything overt that had been taught me (although I did enjoy Earth Science), but because of the examples my parents had set. I didn't even know you could buy strawberries in the supermarket; when I left for college, every strawberry I'd ever eaten in my life had been handpicked by someone in my family.
We are raising our son in small town America. And although he's eaten a few store-bought strawberries, the evidence strongly suggests that he prefers them handpicked. Not to mention organic.
I cried on the way home tonight. Driving home from school. I was listening to the radio and cursing the rain when the news came on with yet another roadside bomb story in what seems like a never-ending line of roadside bomb stories. I listened a little more closely for a minute, trying to figure out if this particular news was news to me: with the time difference it’s sometimes hard to know where yesterday leaves off and today begins. And then I just lost it.Stories about people weeping over a death in Iraq often include some detail of personal connection. The media struggle with the same challenge I faced, trying to distinguish one event from another. The nephew of a guy who swims at the same pool we do. A kid who went to the local high school. The third soldier from this state in the past month. Someone whose mother tried to talk him out of re-enlisting, followed by a sound clip of her trying to make sense of it all, explaining that he died for something he believed in. There’s usually a hook. But this is not one of those stories. I don’t have a reason for why this day, out of all the days since March 20th, 2003, my get-through-the-day veneer just slipped away in the mud.Do I need a reason?* * *
When I lived in Philadelphia – a great town that I would happily return to someday – I learned to keep my guard up. Not a lot. Not consciously. But more than I ever had before, growing up as I did in a town that was smaller than my freshman class at college. Because Philly is a big city, and when you live in a big city, you figure out how to be a little careful. At least I did. And then I moved back to a small town, this time in New Jersey. When I went back to Philadelphia to visit, I had a great time cruising past all my old haunts, proudly remembering back routes I’d devised to avoid the Schuylkill Expressway, visiting with friends, treating myself to my first cheesesteak in years. And I never really knew the extent to which my level of constant, subtle wariness had been elevated during my years in the City of Brotherly Love until that return visit, when I could feel it kicking back in.* * *
The rain let up a bit once I got into Kendall Park. I turned off the radio, wiped my tears, and got home safely. After dinner and games, tooth-brushing and jammies, stories and kisses, I started in on lullabies. My son has been going through a Wizard of Oz phase, and I’ve been teaching him the words to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” because I’ve just had it up to here with “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.” Somewhere, over the rainbow, skies are blue – for a moment, I was flooded with this moment of remembering. I was right back in that fierce protective flare up in your heart that comes when you’re holding a baby and suddenly imagine a room full of generals pushing pins into a map. I could feel my throat tighten and the tears threatening to start up again.My guard against the three-year ache that is the Iraq quagmire will probably go back up tomorrow. I think I’ll feel it.
By night, as you know, I am a lunch-making, laundry-folding, story-reading Mommy. Okay, lunch-making, laundry-avoiding, story-reading Mommy. By day, can you believe it, I am a mildly zany college counselor.
During this time of year, I spend my work days frantically trying to squeeze in as many meetings with families of "rising seniors" as I can, reminding myself as the door to my office clicks shut that every story is a new story, and that just because I've helped folks walk down these paths before doesn't mean it isn't all new to them.
Lately, the hardest part of my job has been the ache that stays with me when it seems clear, even in that very first meeting when everyone's trying hard to smile and keep it together, that there are some families who are in for some rough sailing. Not the ones whose students are maybe not going to pass Chemistry after all. (Although that's a challenge, for sure.) Not the ones who have their hearts set on a school that's probably out of reach. (Hard, but generally a good long-term prognosis.) No, the families that have got my heart hurting are those in which the established parental definition of success seems in direct conflict with the student's developing definition of success. Student is a talented artist; parents won't even consider paying for something as crazily impractical as art school. Student has been swimming competitively all through high school and would like to stop now; parents are adamant that the student "play that card" and talk to the swim coach at every school they visit. Student is openly gay at school, but has begged us all to please not say anything to his/her parents for fear of being disowned.
For as long as we are blessed with the job of parenting, we have known that if we are fortunate, and if the the job is done well, our children will come fully into themselves and go on to live their own lives. In The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran says, "Your children are not your children. They are the sons and the daughters of life's longing for itself." It sounds right, but clearly for some of the families in my office, it is a long way from feeling right. It's so hard -- maybe even impossible? -- to see the world through any lens other than your own. So hard to have all the infinite possibilities of your child's future start to narrow down into finite opportunities. So hard to stand on the shore, map in hand, and watch as the unbidden wind sends them sailing off into uncharted territory.
Several years before I became a parent, I went on an afternoon picnic with a friend and her two school-aged children. Watching the kids play in the sand, I asked her, "What are your hopes for them?" "I'd like for them to become productive citizens," she said. "Well of course," I said, "but I mean what else? Nothing more detailed than that?" "Nope," she replied with a smile.
Almost ten years later, I have finally realized that her response wasn't bereft of imagination. It was, instead, alive with room for growing, for changes in course, for collaboration. Now I'm thinking that the only way to lessen the odds of suffering the kind of heartache I witness and nurse each spring is to consciously work at expanding your idea of who your child might become. Even as every fiber of your being is longing to find an easy, well-trod, well-lit path to nudge them down.
Hope I can do it.
Good thing Tama was the one on bath duty the night THIS breakthrough happened. Because I would never have gone for it. Up until the day this picture was taken, D was a bath boy. All the way. Water on top of his head was a necessary evil to be endured as part of the hair washing ordeal. As you may remember from my previous post on the subject.
But Tama has this great knack for trusting his leadings and instincts whenever it doesn't seem like doing so will result in actual harm, and thank goodness she does.
Tonight, halfway through his shower, D realized that one of his legs had gotten pretty scratched up over the course of his race-running, tree-climbing day. And suddenly the shower seemed dangerous again. "The shower is hurting my leg!" he yelled. On duty on the other side of the curtain, I asked if he would like to switch to a bath. He blinked as if it was an effort to even remember what a bath was, and then quickly said, "Yes, please." He then spent a pruney half-hour gleefully reacquainting himself with his pirates and boats, wailing piteously when it was time for him to get out.
So he's mostly a shower man. But also still a bath boy.
