My daughter is not who you would describe as a happy girl, and sometimes I worry about that.
But I know she is also often a loving, creative, and playful person, just not all the time, and hardly ever in front of a camera lens.
Maybe I should instead wonder why we expect our children to be "happy" all the time.
But for now, here's to the quiet, serious kids. You are equally beautiful and don't ever have to fake a smile for the camera.
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Just in case I've only been reporting on the endearing and awesome things my kids do, this just happened:
I have always given my kids a bit of a long leash. No more! I have taken one step closer towards helicopter parenting.
Isaac lied to me!
His class is currently reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for school. Reading comprehension homework questions are now to be answered via class wiki, and he spent a couple hours yesterday and more than one hour today on it, which puzzled me. In the past, these questions are generally answerable in 1-2 sentences, and there are maybe 5 at most.
Of course, I asked him periodically if he needed help. Maybe he was having some trouble with the concept of a wiki? But he assured me over and over that he was struggling a bit figuring things out, but was fine. I wanted to respect his boundaries and have him learn on his own, but I just checked his screen to see what all the fuss was about.
Turns out he was just playing stupid stick figure flash games. He hasn't even finished the reading. ONE MILLION YEARS DUNGEON!!! Or in our case, he has to work right next to me until I can trust him again, which is worse because I haven't showered yet.
I almost died giving birth to that lying son of a gun. Harrumph.
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I feel like I left the readers in a lurch at the end of my little anecdote last week. Reliving the moment when Kevin (who is now the godfather of my children) rebuked me back into existence rendered me incapable of blathering further.
So let's see...I barely got through college. Tim actually helped me in my last semester, being my project partner when no one in my actual class would pair up with me (that is a whole separate can of worms). But Cs get degrees, and I finally received mine the June of 2002.
Nowadays, I am good. I purposefully opted out of the ambitious rat race the Stanford Computer Science department trains you for, but I still have a toe dipped into the pool of technology. Just a toe, though, so I don't get too overwhelmed again. I still get to show by example that whether you're a man or a woman, you contribute your talents and make your own living. I get to work with colleagues I respect and adore, in an industry that fascinates me, earning a decent wage, while I get to be home for my children. It's unorthodox and probably doesn't make sense to my old academic advisor or to anyone really, but this life has its own unique balance and harmony, much like me.
Every time I hear that another observant, empathic, sensitive, beautiful kid gave up after too many battles with the cruelty of others, a part of me also dies. I have felt that viscous sludge of helplessness and loneliness that comes with knowing I didn't fit in anywhere. And I know first-hand that those kinds of kids are experts at concealing their suffering. In the past, I have tried to distract myself from my misery by being the busiest, most helpful, most outwardly happy person in the room. I have at certain times worn the ache like a fur stole, a status symbol of dysfunction, rolling my eyes at those unfamiliar with the DSM-IV and the rest of the mental health world. How ignorant they seemed in their little bubbles of shallow happiness! Other times, I was punk rock confrontational, daring the normal people of the world to label me a freak, then scaring them to pieces with my I-have-nothing-left-to-lose antics. Other times, I would only have the energy to poke at the ache like a downed power line and relish the jolt of fresh pain, occasionally remembering to eat or call my mother and regale her with more stories of how well I'm doing.
I am better than most at recognizing the children who hurt, but am still at a loss at what to do to help them other than offering my story and my shoulder to lean on.
I wonder if all our children would benefit from an emotional intelligence curriculum, taught alongside reading, writing, and mathematics. There is a certain literacy to understanding human behavior...to recognize what you are feeling and how to safely express the feeling, and how to interact with others and their myriad of feelings. Some of it is instinctual, but more and more I see that very important parts have to be learned. For example, it may be instinctual for most children to see a crying face and recognize that the person is sad, but it is not instinctual for kids like Isaac to remember to regularly scan his friends' faces for that feedback. In the past, he would heckle and tease to his heart's content without realizing his playmate's feelings were getting hurt. The friend would then walk away in a huff, and Isaac was left thinking to himself, "Geez, what's his problem?" It took a lot of training to get him to REALLY look at people's faces, to observe, to ask permission, to cooperate, to seek the opinions of others, and he still doesn't do it all the time. It would be amazing if he and his classmates got the same message from his teacher as well. In the meantime, we forge ahead, hoping that he and Emi will be happy and depression-free, but will know who to turn to if they are not.
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Please watch this video!
"To This Day," by Shane Koyczan
Like most good poetry, this video made me realize that I had known this truth, "They were wrong," but didn't have words for it until the poet uttered them for me. Instinctually, the other day when Emi came home in tears because a boy in her class said her pig drawing was ugly, the first thing I asked her was, "Do you believe him? Do you think your drawing was ugly?" And when she said no, her pig was fabulous, I knew deep down she would be fine, for now at least.
Three words form the key to taking all power away from a bully, to know in your gut that they're full of shit. Or at the very least, to briefly entertain the notion: what if they were wrong? What if they were lying just to make you feel bad, and make themselves feel better because of it?
I remember the what if, that infinitesimal possibility that maybe I wasn't a crybaby, or a freak, or a "retard," or a fat walrus (or was it elephant seal?). Most of the time I definitely believed their words. I remember walking on my tiptoes everywhere because a boy once told me I made the windows rattle with every step I took. I remember the day my so-called friend printed and distributed a newsletter about me to everyone in my class, pointing out all of my imperfections, from my belly to my laugh.
But somehow, my soul must have asked at the right times, "Wouldn't it be totally funny if they were wrong?" because I survived all that.
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I talked to Isaac about the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary on Friday evening. I was in the middle of dropping the kids off at my parents' house so Tim and I could attend his office Christmas party, and my parents had the news blaring on the television.
I saw Isaac read the headline on the bottom of the screen, and his brow furrowed. "What does this mean, 20 children are dead from school shooting?"
I sat on the ground and pulled him into my lap. "Isaac, a crazy man with a bunch of guns went into an elementary school this morning and shot people. He shot students and teachers, and they think about 27 people are dead. 20 of them are kids."
"Did they catch him? Is he in jail?"
"He is dead too. The police found him and he's dead. He won't hurt anybody else."
"Okay, that's pretty good I guess."
"Emily, come over here now. Isaac and Emi, I'm going to tell you something that you have to promise never to forget. If something terrible happens at school, if there is a fire or an earthquake or a burglar or a person who wants to hurt people, you need to listen to your teacher, okay? If it's an intruder, your teacher will probably tell you to stay quiet and to hide somewhere, and if she tells you to hide somewhere, you stay hidden until the police come get you, okay? Even if things are quiet."
They nodded. And then I hugged them way too hard for their liking.
That night, Isaac had a pretty cool dream:
Last night I dreamed that in the future, when babies are still in the mama’s belly, that creatures that look like ticks and spiders try to attack the baby inside. But then in my dreams I invented a tiny machine, a tiny robot, that stood at the opening and attacked the ticks and spiders.
Also I wanted to make the babies safer even more, so I tried to make pills that would make a hole or ditch that the baby could hide in inside the mama’s belly, and the pills would put a cream on the baby so that anything that touched it until it was born would get a bruise and limp away. But at first the baby just fell into the hole and cried as it fell in because it was too deep. So I went back and fixed some things and tried again. It took me four times to perfect it. Then when the baby *was* safe, I woke up.
Here are some of my more immediate thoughts during the weekend:
I understand that the US will remain a gun-toting nation for the conceivable future, and apparently yesterday's tragedy is the price the rest of us have to pay for other people's obsessions with them. I get it, and that is why I am choosing not to try to convince any pro-second-amendment folks to reconsider things. If they slept well yesterday, then they won't be convinced ever.
Perhaps I am stuck in the anger phase of mourning, but right now, if I see any of you talking about YOUR precious rights after 20 babies were taken from their families...I sneeze in your general direction and will make sure you have no influence on the minds and souls of my own children....
It's the tone that I object to most, I think. The pro-more-gun-control people are hand-wringing and navel-gazing and wondering about how we as a society can prevent another tragedy like this from occurring again. Meanwhile, some pro-NRA types are making jokes, being sarcastic, toting slogans. I fucking hate that. You are doing nothing for your cause.
Yes, still in anger stage of mourning.
It is now Tuesday, and not a half-hour goes by without thinking about those babies and the adults who tried to protect them. These beautiful souls, whom I never met, yet love and miss as if they were friends, did not deserve to die that day, especially in such a violent way. And I don't know if I handled things well with Isaac and Emi, although they do seem to be acting normally. All tolled, I'm a mess.
My friend, WSJ columnist Jeff Yang, came up with this brilliant comic with his 9-year-old son Hudson, which got published on the NY Daily:
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Today, I took an early lunch break to volunteer at my local Meals on Wheels chapter. Basically, Meals on Wheels cooks and delivers hot lunches and cold dinners to clients in the local community every weekday, mostly to seniors and the terminally ill.
Since it was my first time, I was invited to shadow an established driver/deliverer pair: Abe and Louie (not their real names, although their real names are MUCH cooler). Louie, the driver, was probably in his seventies and walked with a cane, so that made him unable to haul the meals from the van to the door. That job was left to Abe, who was probably pushing 90 and so adorably tiny, I couldn't help but be surprised when he introduced himself to me as the muscle of this operation.
I was always taught to revere my elders by doing things for them, so I hopped around like an overzealous toady, trying to carry things for Abe. To his credit, he didn't seem annoyed when he reassured me he was totally able to handle the coolers himself.
Our route stopped at 6 houses, and my eyes misted over at every stop. Not from pity, mind you, but from being greeted and thanked with smiles of such brilliance and sincerity, I couldn't look at them head-on.
(Let me stop for a second and ask you: when was the last time someone was really, really happy to see you? I know my kids do this sometimes, but coming from people who were not obligated to like me, it felt amazing.)
There were couples who ate their meals together in the dining room, singletons hanging out with caregivers, one young veteran battling cancer. Some houses, I was informed that we were the only source of human contact they will get for the day. I felt honored to be invited into their homes. I fell in love with every single one of them.
At the end of the route, there were a couple extra jugs of milk and juice, and Louie thrust them into my arms, demanding that my kids drink them. I felt my eyes well up in gratitude, and I didn't know why until now: I may not be bedridden or ill, but working from home, I have become a bit isolated myself. Therefore, it is not often that I come in contact with pure human kindness in such quantities. And now I also realize why I felt compelled to sign up for this every Friday morning from here on out: to bask in more of it, and for the opportunity to pay that kindness forward.
Please consider volunteering your time at your local Meals on Wheels chapter, especially as orders ramp up and regular volunteers leave town over the holiday season.
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Lately there have been rumblings in social media by women, mothers mostly, either stating or demonstrating a severe lack of math skills. It usually manifests in tweets or throw-away mentions such as "Johnny needed help with his homework today and I suck at math!" And Johnny is in third grade.
That makes me really worried about the future, because innumeracy is just as progress-limiting as illiteracy. Would anyone humble-brag that they could not parse a sentence in "The Babysitters Club" or not be able to spell the word "street"? Then why is it okay to throw one's hands up and give up on knowing basic mathematical survival skills?
Of course, I do not expect everyone in America to be able to throw down a Riemann summation 20 years after their last math class, but I hope to God that most people, and yes, even housewives (I'm being sarcastic of course), remember how to calculate the correct change when the total is $17.49 and they are given a $20 bill, that .2 == 20% == 2/10 == 1/5, or how to calculate the area of a rectangle when given the length and width.
This is a real-life example from today: an Etsy seller was selling a set of bangle bracelets. Someone asked her the size of the bangles, which is of course a totally reasonable question. The seller responded, "The inner diameter is 2.5 inches."
The original commenter FREAKED OUT, saying, "2.5 inches??? That's like a child size! I could never fit that over my hand! Darn!"
-__- I understand most bracelet sizes are labeled in terms of circumference, so a typical size would be 7-8 inches. Yes, 2.5 inches sounds like a remarkably small bracelet. But people, let's please raise our personal standards to be able to calculate the circumference of a circle when given the diameter. Please???
Okay, had to get that off my chest. :P I understand I must come off as a math snob.
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Emi wanted her and Isaac to dress up as ninja this year, which would normally raise my cultural appropriation hackles, but I let it go. I figured, they're 1/4 Japanese, so I can say it's an homage to their roots, ha ha ha.
Nonetheless, here are some best practices and lessons learned from this year's shenanigans:
1. Ninja were supposedly masters of stealth, and costumed ninja turned out to be no different: there is nothing in the world harder to keep track of than excited trick-or-treating kids dressed in ninja gear after dark. Next time, we are going to wrap them up in triple layers of glow necklaces!
2. Apparently, if you're a grown-ass woman, and you open the door really fast with a huge smile on your face because you are so excited to pass out candy, you will scare the children. And it also freaks them out when you refer to them as their character. Example: A well-intentioned "Hello there, Spiderman!" made a 3-year-old back away slowly and run back to his mama sans candy.
3. After they sorted their haul, I told the kids they could eat 5 pieces of candy tonight, which I thought was rather generous. Emi apparently got a full-size Hershey bar and stuffed it into her mouth before I realized what was going on. Apparently, I was not prepared to deal with a professional.
4. My candy-consumption tolerance has gone down immensely since I was a kid. I've had about 4 fun-sized Twix, and I feel like I can see through time. I AM A GOLDEN GOD!!!
PS: And because I'm a big nerd, here are this year's Halloween trick-or-treater statistics: 119 trick-or-treaters in 119 minutes, 6:25-8:24pm. Busiest half-hour segment was from 7:00-7:30....And at 8:54, college kids asking for candy ruin my beautiful 1 person/minute average. Goddamn outliers!
How was Halloween in your neighborhoods? Do you still get trick-or-treaters, or have the malls taken over candy duty?
This is the first of 30 daily NaBloPoMo posts this month! Thanks for tuning in!
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Apparently, Emi's class was working in stations, and when it came time for her group to sit at her normal desk group, Emi wanted to sit in the seat she usually sat in. However, when she pulled her chair out, another girl slid into it, maybe as a pseudo-musical chairs game. Now, nothing triggers Emi's temper like musical chairs. She hates that kind of clamoring chaos and the jostling and stealing that accompanies it. She got upset.
So I received a call from her student teacher asking for advice on how to handle her, as she refused to do her work anymore, and overall just wouldn't let the chair thing go. So I suggested that the student teacher maybe talk to her about the chair, tell her that it's okay to be upset, but she needs her to move on. Apparently that didn't work, and she started just flat-out saying "No!" to every request, not coming in from recess, not staying in her place at circle time, poking other kids who were trying to do their work, and overall being a butthole.
So Emi's normal teacher waded in, and threatened that they will send her to the classroom next door for a time-out, which apparently usually sets kids straight, but Emi just said, "Go ahead." So, without much choice but to follow through with their bluff, they sent her next door. However, she then spent that time trying to escape from that classroom, which of course isn't safe. That's when the counselor was called in, and Emi was super-defiant to her too, stomping her feet down the hallway, playing with the toys in the counselor's office and not stopping when asked to put them down. The counselor gave her a choice: talk about what happened, or call her mom and go home. Emi opted for the phone call.
I wasn't angry when I picked her up; I was just resigned to picking up the pieces of my daughter's fragile emotional state for the rest of my life. I'll be shaking my head as I bail her out of jail for the first time, shaking my head during her first misdemeanor trial, shaking my head as reporters thrust microphones in my face demanding to know if there were any warning signs of her thirst for crime in her childhood, and why didn't I put a stop to it.
When she saw me, that's when she started to cry. My defiant little girl finally let her walls down.
When we got home, I gave her a snack and made her sort and put away laundry. After a few minutes of repetitive tasks, I could see that she was finally relaxed, and then I conducted the following interview:
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What made you mad?
I pulled my chair out to sit in it, but a girl (maybe ****) went and sat in it instead. And the next chair was taken, and the next. I wanted **** to say sorry to me, but she didn't.
Why didn't you tell the teacher?
Because we were about to do the activity.
But you didn't do the activity, right?
Right. Because it was boring, boring, boring!
And why didn't you come line up when recess was over?
Because I wanted to be by myself.
Why did you start getting mad at your teachers?
Because I didn't want anyone to notice that we were talking. I was a little bit afraid that they might laugh at me. The teachers talked to me anyway, so I felt embarrassed.
Do the kids laugh at you sometimes?
*********** does, because every time I say something to him, he makes a little laugh, and I don't like that.
But no one else?
No.
When were you sent to Mrs. 2's class?
Mrs. 1 sent me to Mrs. 2's class because I wasn't following anything.
Were you crying, yelling?
No.
What were you doing in Mrs. 2's class?
Just trying to get out of the class. Because I was too afraid to say I wanted to get back to class.
Then who talked to you?
The teacher that I went to the office with.
What did she say?
She asked how am I doing. I said no. I did not want that teacher to hear what I say. I was too afraid that she might laugh too.
Do you see how being afraid people will laugh at you caused a lot of problems?
Yes
Are you going to keep not saying anything because you are afraid people will laugh at you?
No
So next time someone takes your chair, what are you going to do?
Sit somewhere else
And if something different happens that makes you mad, what are you going to do?
Tell the teacher
Do you want to get sent home from school again?
No, because I just want to go to Kids Club.
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This is why I do the Proust Questionnaires, people! My kids are naturally reticent when it comes to talking about their feelings; doing mock interviews gets them used to being interrogated and thinking through their responses, reflecting on their feelings, and socializing them to semi-normal interaction.
I showed this interview to the counselor in our follow-up meeting a few days later, and she raised her hand to her heart multiple times. It is one thing to see a child who has leapt off the cliff of rational thought and willingness to listen; it is another to see the same child be able to freely express remorse and figure out her own alternatives should another trigger arise.
She assured us that the suspension will not be recorded on Emi's permanent record, but my documentation of the interview will be.
I believe that now makes her the one to blame if this is truly the start of Emi's mafia career, right?
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Tim and Emi were spending some quality father-daughter time before he left for work this morning. They were putting together a Disney princess puzzle, and discovered that we were missing two pieces. Later in the day, I was clearing the kitchen table when I noticed something: Emi had taken a piece of paper, traced the shape of the missing pieces, then colored them in so she could complete the puzzle.
What the hell. It has never occurred to me to do that before. I'm outsmarted by a 5-year-old.
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