WHERE’S MY CROWN?

My 3-year old granddaughter Aria lives with me.  I am her virtual mom.  She is so into the princess fantasy these days the first sentence out of her mouth each morning is “Where’s my crown?”  She wears a princess crown all day, every day, and usually demands to be dressed in one of several Disney princess dresses we have for her.  Yes, I admit, we have not discouraged this.  We haven’t given it more thought than, “why not?  What harm?”

Where did I go wrong? When I was raising my own children in the 1980s and 90s I was far more conscientious about sending messages through certain toys, movies and television programs.  I had to control even the smallest influence.  “Growing Up Free” by Letty Cottin Pogrebin was my bible for raising confident, non-sexist children. 

What changed?  

The thing that changed was this:  I had three little boys, then I had a girl.  Yes, I became  enthralled with pink and hair ribbons and ruffles, but more than that, it was only too clear after she came that there was a difference between boys and girls.  Differences arrived with them like luggage.  It wasn’t just a matter of superheroes and trucks vs. princesses and crowns; anyone who has raised both sexes knows what I am talking about. 

Now, after watching four children grow to adulthood, I have mellowed.  I am no longer as strong-willed about parenting as I once was, when I believed that as a parent I was in control of how my children became themselves.  Things I was sure wouldn’t harm my kids may have done harm, and things I worried might be harmful probably did not do any damage.  Child development is fluid, like a winding river, and experience along the way is like dropping stones of varying sizes and shapes into the water.  Hopefully, most of those are pebbles of love.

I’ve lived long enough to know being a princess has its benefits.  I am lucky to have a husband who obliges.  So now, if Aria wants to be a princess, it’s okay with me.  

A few days ago at the playground a mom said, “She wins the “best outfit” award for today!”  My heart soared.  I took a photo of this beautiful child with my phone.  And smiled.

IRONY: LET TRUMP WIN






As the desperate powerful in the GOP freak out over their inability to stop Trump, the rumblings of those who support Trump, and Trump himself, indicate there could be violence if the nomination is taken from him. The GOP should give up and stop fighting this juggernaut. It will only lead to worse trouble for everyone, mob violence and worse.  

There is such irony here. This whole crazy GOP campaign is due to the unreasonable and unjustified hatred for our current and our next President, Hillary Rodham Clinton.  The GOP has shot itself in the foot with an NRA-powerful automatic weapon, the Donald.

The majority of the electorate can see that the GOP began with an unprecedented number of candidates to choose from, and allowed the mature, reasonable, experienced, reliable candidates to fall by the wayside. What is left is a man who is just the opposite. His will be a rotten and ultimately losing campaign against Hillary, making it possible for her to win. The definition of irony should now include a reference to the 2016 campaign. Irony.

A Moment With Gary Hart - Remember Him?

At this year’s Ireland Fund Gala in Washington DC, one of the highlights of the evening for me was a few moments with former Senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart.  

Think what you will about how he self-destructed in a very different political time and place, but my favorite line of his during his first try for the presidency during the Reagan years was this:  "Senator, what do you say to those who say you are too cerebral to be President?"  He quipped  "well, we've tried it the other way."

 I had never met him before; now white-haired and a face that could be now called craggy, but still handsome and very gracious.

Me:  “Senator, I wanted to share a little story with you.

Hart: Really?

Me:  I was a campaign coordinator for you in the 1984 primary in New Jersey –

Hart: Oh….(rolling his eyes in embarrassment, recalling his inopportune comments in the waning days of the campaign about being “stuck in New Jersey” – a primary he then lost).

Me:  No, wait, I forgive you!

 

Hart:  Thank you.

Me:  But wanted to let you know we worked hard for you.  I had campaign workers sleeping on my couch and living room floor, and I went door to door – nine months pregnant at the time!

Hart:  Imagine trying to campaign with no money in those days.

Me:  I know!  But also, we had Evelyn Lincoln (President Kennedy’s long-time secretary) to a campaign tea at my house for you.

 

Hart:  She was a lovely lady and I was so touched she wanted to campaign for me.

Me:  She loved you like she loved JFK.

Hart:  Well thank you for telling me this.

Me:  Enjoy your evening, Senator.

A "Gotcha" Question?

A recent article in the Washington Post poses the following: A student asks a teacher if she believes in God.  What is the right response?  As a teacher, I can imagine that awkward moment.

Depending on the age group a teacher is addressing, and the school environment, this can be a “gotcha” question.  No matter where a teacher is practicing his/her profession – in a public, private or religious school -- a teacher must be careful.  She can get into trouble if she answers “Yes” and she can get into trouble if she answers “No.”  She can get herself into even more trouble if she goes into detail on either of these answers.

Either answer given in a public school, runs the risk of someone reacting in the “separation of church and state!” mode.  She could offend the alternative beliefs of a student’s family.  Some parents can be very sensitive to what ideas their children acquire from teachers, so a question like this must be approached in a thoughtful, if not strategic, way.  A teacher is wise to handle the question carefully even if she teaches in a religious school. Parents who pay tuition to send their child to a religious school do so because they have high expectations about the beliefs their child will acquire there – as it should be.  But there can be serious sensitivities in families to any perceived variances. 

I learned this the hard way when I taught in a private religious school.  As a middle school English teacher, I did not recommend any novel to my students unless I was fully familiar with it.  One day, a student asked me what I thought about a specific popular novel I had not read, that was about to open as a movie.  My answer was “I haven’t read it, so I don’t really know about it, but the previews for the movie look interesting.”  The parents of this student came to the director of the school to complain that I had recommended an anti-Christian book to their child.  They wanted me fired.  Fortunately, after my student asked me about the book, I had discussed it with the director, who informed me that it was not a book we should recommend in this school, and I was fine with that.  To the parents, she defended me because she knew I was not familiar with it and had not recommended it. 

It would be unfortunate if a teacher’s fear of offense obstructed the educational value of beliefs discussed in a non-personal, factual way.  For example, in a middle school history lesson about the Crusades, a student asks his teacher:  “Do you believe in God?” in the context of a discussion on the question of whether religion should justify war. The teacher can answer, or not, but then pivot to “what do you think about believers who attack others who do not share their beliefs?”

Teaching, when done well, should establish a measure of trust among a student, his parents, and the teacher.  A teacher can certainly give a simple answer to the question, or to any personal question a student asks, but would be wise to keep the nuts and bolts of her beliefs to herself.  A teacher is a model and influence on her students, and must be thoughtful about what is appropriate for her to encourage them to emulate.

Thoughts in a Quiet House

The house is quiet; the music: new wave

Soothing harp and piano a diversion from other days.

Chirps of birds, bubbles of brooks soften what is hard.

For decades my life has been messy and loud

Inside my head if not inside my house.

As years fly past, I look at the road behind,

Wishing more time was spent hearing life’s music

Too often I forgot about stopping to smell roses.

While I was surrounded by life’s colorful blooms.

Counting each day raising human flowers.

A marvel, what feeding, watering, a soft bed can do!

With tender care, giggles and hugs in return.

Grape juice stains and cookie crumbs.

Clutter of playthings cleared, and then undone.

Little faces and soft little hands

And big, heartbreaking eyes always asking for answers. 

Looking for my ever-present, reassuring smile.

Always ready with embraces of hope and safety.

Hiding tears, be they from joy or fear

Defying bad weather, or other signs of reality.

Then, all of a sudden, a human taller than I

Can tend a garden without my grandmother hands

Reality:  years blown away in the wind.

But my younger self won’t yet agree to yield.

Years may have given me wisdom; now I know

A child resides in all of us.

I still must reach out and try to capture magic.

Like catching fireflies darting around the garden at night.

And life is a lesson in irony:

Now it’s the children who find answers for me.

TELEVISION TRUTH ABOUT MOMHOOD

Almost a year ago, I read a column that got me thinking.  “Issues that go beyond kissing boo-boos” (NYT Critic’s Notebook, April 30,2015) was a great piece about Mom, the popular sitcom that is brilliant in its writing, its humor, its sometimes difficult truths about mothers.  Mom isn’t the only one; television today is blatantly honest to the point of pain at times, about motherhood in the new century.

The moms of television when I was growing up in the 1950’s and 60’s portrayed women who were so inert it is a wonder they didn’t stop breathing. Their lives were never messy.   Lucille Ball was the exception; Lucy’s life was never boring because she had an irrepressible aspiration for more, but that “more” was ridiculous buffoonery played for laughs very successfully  Quite a contrast from the “real” (bland) lives portrayed by Donna Reed, Harriet Nelson, and Barbara Billingsley.

Most of us knew even then that the lives portrayed by those women were fantasy, but it wasn’t acceptable to say so.  Real-life moms of that era enjoyed a different reality, many of them not finding any happiness in changing diapers and making meatloaf in their pressed shirtdresses and pearls.  They were the women who Betty Friedan wrote about in The Feminine Mystique, suffering from the “problem that has no name.”  They were depressed or they were alcoholics or Valium poppers.  They practiced corporal punishment on their kids with hands and belts.  If their husbands hit them they kept the secret because that was just…. life.  They cried in private. They are the mothers who dropped out of high school to get married.  Or they didn’t go to college because they married their high school boyfriends, or they went to college to find and marry a better man.   They were the women who had to give up their jobs when they got married or pregnant.  They lived with husbands who spent more time at their jobs than with their families.  They had more babies than they should have, anesthetized, in hospital rooms without the fathers.  They spent hours sterilizing baby bottles and mixing home-made formula because breastfeeding was considered old-fashioned and too earthy and unsanitary for modern women.  They raised the kids pretty much alone, even if they were married.  Too many were left with nothing when the kids grew up and moved out, or their husbands left them for younger women. Emotionally, financially, they were adrift like a leaky rowboat.

The women of the old TV shows did not portray the truth that Friedan and others courageously revealed.  The next generation of daughters got the message.  They grew up to finish college; they became lawyers and business owners and doctors; they joined the Army or they waitressed or sold real estate, while still running homes and raising children.   They fell victim to the opposite extreme -- the “you can have it all” or even “you had better have it all” mentality.  It was hard, sometimes impossible, and it sometimes drove them to drink, or to affairs, or to divorce.  Now their millennial daughters are looking at their mothers’ lives and wondering what choices should they make?  How can they or should they live their own lives?  

Conservatives who decades later still lament the passing of the 1950's fantasies, are still fighting, unsuccessfully for the most part, to pull women back into dependency on husbands and the kitchen and nursery existence, while these young women -- more of whom are educated and career oriented -- wonder how to structure their world to find a better balance. They are finding no easy answers.  Today, family life is still hard; too many mothers are single, or have children by more than one father, or like me, are grandmothers raising their grandchildren. 

Alcoholism, depression and other domestic troubles have always existed behind the family’s front door.  In the past they just never let us see it, certainly not for laughs.  So we can’t know for sure if Mrs. Cleaver was drinking alone at her kitchen table and worrying about whether Eddie Haskell was a bad influence on Wally, or Harriet Nelson thought about divorcing Ozzie because he was a bad lover, or Donna Reed was self-medicating with pills stolen from her doctor husband because he was having an affair with a nurse.  Family life has its troubles, and over the decades we have increasingly accepted watching truth on television.  We can now speak some truth about problems in families, or make TV shows poking fun at it, which perhaps makes it a little less painful.  That, I guess, is progress.

(My truth will soon be published in my book:  Swimming Lessons:  A Mother’s Tale of Navigating the Mental Illness Tide)