Annals of Successful Parenting: News and Confessions

Summer ended before I was ready. I know, officially it's still summer for a little while. But this summer ended too soon. It was full of fun things. One of the funnest was this, seen as we inched through traffic to the beach in August:

Look closely. This Harley-riding dog wears goggles. 

With stuff like that in my life, you can see why I wasn't fully prepared for the start of school. In fact, confession, I wore pajamas to school carpool drop off that day. That means I am fully a suburban mom. Better late than never. Readers, I have arrived.

🏘

Is this truly a wonderful thing? I don’t know. It’s not as if I have been up and dressed every morning at seven twenty-three for the mad dash to the high school. In fact, the only reason I haven’t done drop off more often in my pajamas is that the husband is the morning carpool driver. So while I may lord it over y’all that I haven’t dipped and lowered myself to driving to the high school in my pajams, it’s simply because I haven’t had to leave the house most mornings to do that drop off.

Until last Thursday. And I felt something slide into place. The last piece of the puzzle that is suburban motherhood.

A pause to contemplate all that means.

Car culture. Complacency. A measure of comfort. Also, rushed multitasking frenzy and a soupçon of guilt — the environment, consumption. The contradictions of modern life.

So the high school student is in her last year of high school, and the college student is in her last year of college. I have been a suburban mom for ten years. Mind. Blown. 🤯Before that, I was an urban mom. In many ways, I liked that better. My stroller was my wheels. This had downsides. There was no walking to school drop off in my pajamas. There was no driving to school in snow and rain. And when I needed an X-ray for what turned out to be pneumonia, I had to walk to the hospital.

Anyway, it took me ten years to do drop off in my pajamas. I take pride in that. And in my defense, drop off was at six forty-five that morning, because the high school senior plays trumpet in the pep band, and the pep band was to welcome the students to the new school year.

Speaking of new school year and students, I am into my second year of teaching first year students at a small college nearby. I have joined the ranks of adjuncts, which I feel is analogous to being a scab during a strike. I am working for an insultingly small amount of money. And I feel bad that I am called by the honorific, "Professor". What does this do to all those Ph.Ds looking for work in academia? How are they to succeed at their careers? This adjunct thing seems like yet another way our culture has succumbed to an economic, short-term, profit-based mindset, rather than a people-based one. Seems like key to failure as a society.

What am I teaching my students, you may wonder? I am teaching their required first year seminar on how to write at the college level. Or how to write at all, apparently. There are many sections of first year seminar, since every student is required to take the course. So each section has a theme and mine is Defining Success. It turns out that I have a lot to say on the subject. But of course, as a teacher, I aim not to do all the talking, but to lead my students to their own conclusions.


Anyway, in other news, I have been enjoying the sidewalk in our neighborhood. The Australian Labradoodle doesn’t. Well, he does sometimes, and sometimes he doesn’t. The times he doesn’t are those times I attempt to walk him on the sidewalk when he is expecting to walk on the other side of the street as we used to do, when we had to walk facing oncoming traffic. He only wants to walk towards oncoming traffic in other words. He is a rule-abiding dog. Now it's all gone to hell, from his perspective. We might be walking one direction. We might be walking another. Either way, it's the same side of the street. This is not how we do things, in dog brain. So many unsniffed scents and uneaten blobs of grass cuttings on the other side of the street that he can’t process in his own special ways.

It's tragic.

Sometimes I cross the street just to let him have his way.

I have a another confession. I put away my snow shovel yesterday. Are you temporarily dizzied trying to calibrate the season and the shovel? No, you are not crazy. Yes, my shovel has been on my porchlet (or is that porchette? porchini? covered entry?) since last winter. So sue me. My neighbors have had a Halloween skeleton hanging from their front door light for about eight years. At least I got my snow shovel stored before I need it again.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print right now.

Is any of this about success? You decide.

In case you missed my podcast interview, which is indeed all about success, here is the link:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/319835/1431364-challenging-failure-with-hope-perlman

🥰

And now, I am off to the Global Climate March, Albany site. 🌎

The Just World Hypothesis, and Annals of Successful Parenting

Hi Readers,

Chitchat about the weather, etc. So much has been going on. I’ve been turning the heat off, then on, then off, then on. Fan in the window. Fan out. Window closed. Birds too loud. Birds on the pillows. (Well, so it sounds.) Rain, then sun, then clouds, clouds, clouds. Sweaters packed away in lavender for summer. Sweaters needed. That’s spring in the Northeast. Flowers and rain. Hot at night, cold in the day.

I’ve finished my book draft and reread it all, making notes for revision. This is the good kind of writing, the making it better kind, not the figuring out what I’m trying to say kind. That part sucks.

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about. It’s the Just World Hypothesis. This is a theory developed by a social psychologist Melvin Lerner that says that humans have a powerful intuition that people get what they deserve. I.e., the world is essentially just. If good things happen to you, then that proves you’re good; if bad things happen, well, you deserved them. This is where blaming the victim comes from. In a just world, and here I am extrapolating, if something awful happens to someone else, that awful thing suggests the person is sub par somehow. And if something good happens, then they are being rewarded for being good.

I was reading about this in a very interesting book about fear-based parenting. Fear-based parenting is what most of us parents are doing these days, to one degree or another, according to the book. The Just World Hypothesis is a cognitive bias that colors our perception of events. It’s part of what makes us fearful. We want to prevent bad things from happening to our children, who are, let’s be clear, offshoots of us, because a bad thing happening has an associated taint on our virtue.

I couldn’t help thinking about how this bias relates to our culture’s extolling of wealth and fame and prestige and all those trappings of success. You can draw a straight line from there to there.  And those trappings of success relate to greed and materialism. The need to prove we are successful is powered by fear that unless we amass some amount of these things, we won’t know that we’re good people. We must scramble to amass amass amass to show ourselves and others that in this Just World, we are the Good.

In recent years, I have become acquainted with some purported Christian teachings called the Prosperity Gospels and Dominionism. These teachings are the Just World Hypothesis in Sheep’s clothing. If you have wealth and so forth, it is because you are godly. This by the way, according to Stephen Cope, a writer and yogi and generally wise guy, is also an association you find in Hindu mythology. The equating of godly with goldlyness.

It’s really an endless cycle of misery we step into when we buy into this cognitive bias. And of course we would much prefer that there is a Just World than that there isn’t one.

Yet it was not always so.

Reading about this bias made me think of Boethius. I heard about Boethius during my Junior year at Oxford, where I took a tutorial on Chaucer. My teacher—don, in Oxbridge talk—was an unfriendly woman who was unimpressed by my grasp of Middle English. Her attitude was opposite to that of my main don, who offered me Earl Grey tea and told me I had a nice, intuitive approach to essay writing.

Anyway, Boethius, wrote in about the 6th Century C.E. One of his most successful tracts was a letter from jail. He went on trial for something—heresy, perhaps—because he was a Hellenist and Christian mix. He wrote this philosophical treatise in which he talks to Lady Philosophy about his misery and bad breaks and losses of fortune and material wealth and all the trappings of success. Lady Philosophy tells him that the Wheel of Fortune rules the world. We all ride on it. Sometimes we’re up, and sometimes we’re down, and it’s really nothing about us. We don’t add blame and shame to the burden we carry if things don’t go our way. Failure says nothing about our virtue. Furthermore, because we can’t count on Fortune providing all those external signs of success, we need to live in accordance with more abstract and noble values, such as virtue. That will make us happy.

This wheel of fortune idea, which predated Boethius, became known as The Boethian Wheel of History, and this book, called The Consolation of Philosophy became a best seller in late Ancient and early Middle Ages. Chaucer talks about it, which is why scary don lady had me read Boethius.

Boethius was executed, by the way, for whatever he did to piss off whomever he served in the late Roman Empire. Nevertheless, and most appropriately, his words lived on.


Somewhere along the way came this shift to the idea that dominates our culture now. That if something good happens to you, it means you deserve it. And if something bad happens to someone else, then they deserved that, too.

With an attitude like that, no wonder we’re all anxious and stressed out.

Here’s something I’ve been doing. I spent three days at training for my upcoming job teaching writing to first year students in college. That’s going to be exciting, and maybe the pay will cover the new outfit I bought to attend the training. But, hey, it’s a job, and it will count on a resumé, and at this point, with two teenagers in my house, it seems appealing to know I’ll have 18 other teenagers captive to me starting shortly after Labor Day. They’ll have to listen to me, or they’ll fail.


Here are things that have been happening. The other day the 19-year-old came home for a brief visit before she heads off for a ten week summer internship in particle physics. When we arrived home we discovered the 16-year-old in a tree. With a boy. Or, to be more specific, two bikes were in the driveway, and after a brief look, we saw four legs dangling from the maple tree.

The boy soon rode off on his bicycle, which was when I realized he was biking without a helmet. This caused me to yell after him and generally embarrass the 16-year-old. Then I discovered that she had biked with him without her helmet. This occasioned further yelling. Dignified yelling, I hasten to add. Yelling that sounded jokey but wasn’t. You know, things like, “Sure, it feels good. Until your brain is smushed by a passing car.” And, “Yeah, a helmet flattens your hair, and you look dorky; an accident could flatten your head and then you’ll really look stupid.” That kind of thing.

I told her that unless she wore her helmet, I did not want her to bike with the boy again.

She says she won’t.


I choose to believe her. I have no choice.

Anyway, I suggested she invite this fellow over for dinner, along with some of her other friends. We’d have a nice, friendly dinner, lots of fun. In the background, I would have a couple screens set up, you know, just casual, playing videos, since videos catch the attention. Videos about birth control, sexually transmitted diseases, drugs, alcohol, bike safety, vaping, juuling. That kind of thing. Maybe some Beyoncé or Childish Gambino thrown in to break things up.  I thought it sounded nice, welcoming, and friendly. Also laid-back.

Did I forget anything? Please alert me in the comments. Thank you.

Now the 19-year-old is gone. I am left to experience the inexorability of time. It’s a cliché, and also true. Boethius might talk about wheels of fortune that have a kind of inexorable randomness, but the wheel is a reassuring thing, promising return. Whereas time is just moving forward, moving forward.  Time moves in linearity, never mind what those physicists say. That’s why it’s inexorable. Whether I am tied to the track like a damsel in distress, with tight Kewpie doll curls and mouth moving out of alignment with the subtitles, or watching in horror from inside it, makes no difference to the inexorable train of time.

So, you know. I’m feeling as if I need to find a way to make a mark, to be of use to people. To be needed. It’s not all over, the being needed by the children. It’s just moved into a phase where they don’t know they need me. And I really, really like it when they know it. However, time and all that. Change occurs and one must adjust. I’m needed now to keep an eagle eye on bike helmets and legs in trees. I take what I can get.

I wonder if there is a way to incorporate bike safety into my first year seminar with my captive audience. Will it fit with the Franciscan themes I am required to teach: heritage; natural world; diversity; and social justice? I will find a way.

Annals of Successful Parenting: Amtrak and Ben Franklin

Hello, Readers. As we limp into the home stretch of this difficult year, I am inspired to think about goals and resolutions for the next year, which may be just as difficult, if not moreso. Sorry to be a downer. All this drivel is to get to something. Last week The New York Times published a quick and easy read on New Year’s resolutions that I thought was helpful for those who want to make some. I am not sure I do. I have done so in the past, and some of them are still with me. The kind of resolution that works for me is a a low-threshold resolution. That’s a resolution that has a low threshold for fulfillment. 

For example, several years ago, I resolved to do a little yoga every morning. We’re talking a little, tiny bit. We’re talking five sun salutations. Five sun salutations take less than five minutes. I figured if I gave myself something very easy to accomplish, I would be less likely to avoid it. I also told myself to do these five sun salutations first thing, before putting on my glasses. And I have. Sometimes I do more than five. Sometimes I do a lot - but not often. But I almost always do those five. I never wake up dreading an involved routine that causes me to go right back to sleep. I can always say to myself, “It’s just five. It won’t take but a few minutes.”That’s what I’m talking about when I say a low threshold for fulfillment. 

It’s been several years now, and the number of days I’ve missed my morning yoga is very few. (Usually when I’m traveling and the carpet in the hotel room is very groady.) 

Anyway, if you’re into setting goals, this little article has good advice. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/smarter-living/how-to-stick-with-new-years-resolutions.html?smid=tw-share

But are you into setting goals? 

Or are you into evaluation and reflection and thinking more about how to be than what to do?

In that case, I have just the thing. Advice from the founding father of self-improvement, Benjamin Franklin. While on a voyage from London to Philadelphia, where he eventually became the famous Franklin we see on the one hundred dollar bill, young Ben devised a Plan for Future Conduct, which consisted of four elements. He was wordy, but I’ll be brief:

1. Be frugal and pay all debts.
2. Speak the truth and aim at sincerity in word and deed.
3. Work hard and don’t be distracted by “any foolish project of suddenly growing rich.” 
4. Speak ill of no one.

Rather puts my five sun salutations to shame, doesn’t it?

These four rules are appealing; yet I break them regularly. Then there are times when I don’t break them, but apparently, I should. For example, just the other week, the 10th grader and her friend had plans to travel by Amtrak to NYC to visit some other friends. Unbeknownst to me, although it should have been knownst, because I had once before looked into Amtrak’s rules for unaccompanied minors, there were Rules About Travel for Unaccompanied Minors. In this instance, however, the friend had purchased the tickets, so there was no fine print. 

So, I walked with the girls up to the gate and immediately, an Amtrak employee smelled an under 16 year old. Or something. I don't know exactly how, but we attracted attention. An Amtrak agent asked them how old they were. The 10th grader’s friend said she was sixteen, which she was. And suddenly, yep, I snapped to and recalled that small print about sixteen being minimum age for unaccompanied travel on Amtrak. So anyway, the Amtrak agent had apparently been around the block or spent some time with a fake ID, or had been trained, and she says to the friend, “When’s your birthday?” The friend produces this date via smooth mental recall.

Then the agent turns to the 10th grader and me and asks, “How old are you?” The 10th grader looks at me, hesitating, and I look at her, and the agent looks at me, and I say the fateful words, the words that lead to burocratic nightmare, the words that lead to Christmas razzing by family and friends and family. “She’s fifteen. She’ll be sixteen in February.”

Which meant paperwork. Paperwork naming an individual eighteen years old or older to meet her at the train, and to put her on the return train. This worked out okay on the journey there, because an eighteen year old happened to be meeting them at Penn Station. The requirement proved problematic for the return trip, and I’ll just say it involved my sister-in-law (SIL)and a lot of texting and the husband having to call an Amtrak 800 number because my SIL was not on the form, and Amtrak wouldn’t take the husband’s word for it over the phone, and fifteen minutes on hold and my SIL having to spend an hour plus of a busy Sunday waiting around for an Amtrak agent to personally transmit the 10th grader and her sixteen year old companion to the train. 

Why didn’t we just lie? I’m sure that’s what you’re asking. Because everyone else asked it. I have been the object of ridicule by family and friends and family and family for not lying. And I ask myself the same. I had a very well-thought out defensive answer at the Christmas dinner table with my BIL and MIL, and parts of it are true. To wit, that when confronted with the question of age, I thought, “I cannot lie in front of my daughter. That teaches a bad lesson,” and then when I looked at her, I realized she could not lie in front of her mother, because that gives the wrong impression. So we were trapped. 

But also, I did not lie because I was caught off-guard and just blurted out the truth, as I tend to do. I’m a fan of honesty. 

I have something in common with Benjamin Franklin, it seems. So I can’t really have done wrong. 

Furthermore, both girls were nervous about taking the train to Penn Station. I think they were secretly relieved to have the escort to and from the train. I base this on their completely benign facial expressions throughout the whole thing. Nary an eye roll or a disaffected hip thrust. 

I know I was relieved about it. 

The real lesson of this story is that if you have to fill out a form at Amtrak, and the agent, sotto voce, tells her co-worker to stick around because she hasn’t done one of those kinds of forms before, make sure she confirms everything with her coworker before you leave, stupidly imagining that the agent has done it correctly. Because, let me assure you, she has not, and there’s nothing more unmoving than an Amtrak agent at Penn Station in New York. 

So, if you choose to adopt Benjamin Franklin’s Plan for Future Conduct, be sure to leave a little extra time when traveling. Or do what he did, and bend the rules, and intend to stick to it, but forgive yourself when you do not. 

Or, make your own plan, and set a low threshold for success. 

Meanwhile, onward to 2018. May it be a good year. May we all be involved citizens working to create the world we want. And may we be in agreement about what that world is. 

Annals of Successful Parenting: Writing

The 10th grader is annoyed with her English teacher, Mrs. Bombadoodle. Annoyed is perhaps too mild a descriptor. She’s been fulminating against Mrs. Bombadoodle. Mrs. B is requiring from her a five paragraph essay of 800 words, comparing and contrasting The Odyssey and The Wizard of Oz (the movie). She’s been complaining about how she can never write only eight hundred words and how unreasonable that is. And she can’t get started. She had to write one paragraph for homework the other night. Then she has the weekend to finish the draft of the essay. Then she will have to rewrite it and hand it in. This job feels impossible to her. 

This is one of those parenting moments when my desire to be Supportive Parent runs alongside my Beleagured Writer. Supportive Parent would listen and say, “Oh my. My, my. You can do it.” Beleagured Writer would say, “Uh, yeah. That’s called drafting, revising, and editing. That’s called writing.” Educators call this “the writing process.” They would, wouldn't they? 

It just so happens I am reading Draft No. 4 by John McPhee, which is about writing. Honestly, I have been mostly a fiction writer, and John McPhee is a famous nonfiction essayist whose work has been often in the New Yorker. By which I mean, in a roundabout, indirect, and therefore perhaps poorly executed way, to say that I haven't read all of his work. However, he is a professor of writing, and he's written a book about his writing process. I have been struggling with my writing, and when I struggle, I dip into inspiration via other writers’ books on writing. The eponymous essay has a great section on writer’s block and self-doubt. In short, the message is that he suffers from it, mostly during the time when he’s trying to write the first draft. Best of all, for this Beleagured Writer, he says that anyone who doesn’t is not to be trusted. I would insert a quotation here, but I’m writing from an undisclosed location apart from my book. Namely, from my father’s apartment. Furthermore, I smell like rancid body lotion, which is not pleasant. While packing, I tossed into my suitcase a hotel bottle from my stash. Apparently, it turned. 

McPhee also says that writing is all about revising. This is my truth, too. Once something is on the page, it is much less frightening and daunting to work with. But getting started. Oh my word. 

And then he has a great passage about trying to write and not being able to, and so writing Dear Mom, and then complaining all about what you’re trying to write but can’t. And then cutting out the “Dear Mom”.

That made me laugh, because he wrote it funny, and it is funny and well-written. Also, it reminded me of probably the best writing advice I got in college. Perhaps ironically, this advice came not from a professor, but from a classmate in my dorm, Darlene. One day, I was whinging about having trouble starting a paper, and Darlene, who was from some place in South America, and had creamy skin and soft brown eyes and hair with bangs that fell over her eybrows, and long limbs and delicate fingers, but whom I had never thought of as any kind of writer, said to me that she just wrote her papers in the first person. “What?” I gasped. I had never considered anything so informal, schooled as I had been in the thesis, supporting statements, conclusion five paragraph essay format. The ten commandments of school essays. First person and flow and informality in an academic paper? What about topic sentence, quotations, and references? 

“There aren’t as many “I’s” as you think,” she told me. “You can just take them out afterwards.” 

Darlene wore pleated jeans. They were fashionable back then. We agreed that our desert island makeup would be mascara, definitely. Darlene had a handsome boyfriend named Peter, who also had dark hair and eyes. I believe they got married. 

When a professor later told me I wrote well and my essays had a nice intuitive flow, it was because of Darlene. 

As for which part of me wins the race with the 10th Grader, Supportive Parent or Beleagured Writer, let’s just say I offered the comment that being forced to write with limits can be helpful.

I added, “It’s all about revision,” which was not what she wanted to hear. So it made me feel better to learn from John McPhee that he told his daughters the same thing. It is all about revision.

And where I am I with my book’s revision? I’m at the stage of avoidance. John McPhee also cops to it in his book, thanks God (as my sister the psychoanalyst says). And he told his daughter to put her draft away for a little while and then go back to it. That is what I told the 10th Grader. She listened, although I must admit that she had already decided to take a break. “These things need to sit for a while,” I said. She was halfway up the stairs by then. 

They need to marinate. I believe in steeping, the subconscious, the unconscious. I believe, as John McPhee says in his book, that while I’m not writing, the work is still percolating in the background, maybe even working itself out. 

And I said it first. 

At least in my life. 

The tenth grader turned in 900 words. We shall see how strict Mrs. Bombadoodle is. Writing is about rules, as so much of life is, and also about knowing when and how to break them. 

Annals of Successful Parenting - Hazards of Success

Since last I wrote, we have successfully deposited the college student in her dorm. We have successfully provided the bed with the following supporting materials: a mattress topper, a mattress and mattress-topper allergy-barrier cover, a mattress pad; and sheets, a duvet, and a fuzzy blanket. We have met the roommate and found her nice. We have met the college president, who walked through the halls as we were unloading, all of us sweaty in the very humid, hot, unair-conditioned dorm. Within moments of arrival, the college student soon had her wall decorated with strings of lights and a collage of photos. Not a one of her family, I will mention. That’s okay. I’ll sit in the dark. (You’re supposed to say that with a Yiddish accent. “That’s uhkay, I’ll sit in the dahk.”)

As we were leaving campus, we passed a trio of mother, father, and new college student laden with bags and bins from Bed, Bath, and Beyond. The mother snapped a photo of her daughter and said aloud, sort of to us and sort of to the trees, “I’m leaving my firstborn at college. How is it possible?”  Her plaintive, confused voice could have been mine. “I just said ‘goodbye’ to mine,” I said. Then my voice cracked and I pushed my sunglasses up my nose. What else was there to say? There were many of us bewildered moms and dads and sad siblings orbiting the campus that day. 

This is the fruit of success, Readers. I say this with bitterness. Bitterness - because “they” all say that success can be empty. There are several reasons for success to be empty. There’s aiming for the wrong things, things that won’t actually bring fulfillment, things like money or fame or, you know, objects. We’ve had that drilled into us, after all. Rich men and camels and eyes of needles and heaven and such. Success can bring money, but money doesn’t buy happiness. Although, up to a certain point, in fact, money does buy happiness, it’s just that excess money doesn’t. But I digress. 

Other ways success can bring emptiness include an all-too-human tendency called hedonic adaptation, a tendency for people get used to their circumstances, good or bad.  I suppose it’s a type of regression to the mean, returning to a base level of happiness, which is a tendency of organisms, which we humans are. We seek homeostasis, right? This adaptation is good when you’re in a concentration camp, for example, because it allows you to endure and ultimately survive - unless you get killed, I mean. But in regular life, it can mean that once you attain a longed-for, worked-for goal, the happiness it brings you pales. For example, for years I wanted an agent. Now, I have an agent. This was super exciting for me for awhile. Now, however, I’m anxiously awaiting the next step: the publisher. (Please send good vibes, even if you don’t believe in sending good vibes) 

And then there’s the dubious success of raising children who leave. Literal emptiness. Which brings me back to my favorite subject, myself. How am I feeling? Last week, a friend invited me and another friend out for a “sad moms coffee.” We met when our children were toddlers in preschool. One sad mom summed up my feelings about the college student’s departure perfectly. “I know my child is where he is supposed to be, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But I am mourning the end of his childhood.” 

Naturally, this coffee event ended in tears. No, it didn’t end in tears, because we are not total idiots. It contained tears, though. 

And yesterday, the first day of school in our town, a friend texted me after her two kids got to their first days of middle and high school, that she understood how I must be feeling about the college student being at college and the 9th grader starting high school, because she was so sad and crying. I texted back with attempts at sympathy, saying something about how every life landmark our children reach creates mixed emotions of pride and nostalgia, but really, I couldn’t help adding, “Yeah, we’re gonna get old, mama.” Which is what this is all about, isn’t it? I mean, not about the getting old, which we will be lucky to do, but about the end result of all this life: death. 

This may have something to do with the well of hypochondria I’ve fallen into this week. There was a tooth scare (it’s fine), and a pulled muscle in my torso somewhere that I know is from the insane amount of weed-pulling I did this weekend but that I fear is something ruptured or malignant.  Even a mosquito bite on my neck that flares up when I watch TV has me twitchy. I kid not. Zika? Malaria? 

Man, success sucks. 

Now, perhaps this post is not as uplifting as I might like it. So, I offer this tidbit of wisdom from the definitely wise Pema Chodron. It's something I'm working on right now. Perhaps you should, too. 

SEEING CLEARLY"Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives. It’s about seeing how we react to all these things. It’s seeing our emotions and thoughts just as they are right now, in this very moment, in this very room, on this very seat. It’s about not trying to make them go away, not trying to become better than we are, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness."Pema Chodron.

Being Okay In the Moment

I have Olympics fatigue. If I see one more car commercial, I’m going to scream. And where is the footage of the Decathlon and Heptathlon? And why do women get “hept” and men get “dec” athlons? And why do beach volleyball playing women wear wedgie-bikinis?

I’m also thinking ‘bout Aly Raisman. Gymnast extraordinaire. The one right up there with Simone Biles, just under her on the podium, usually sporting silver to Simone Biles’s gold medal. Thinking about her parents. Have you all seen the footage of them watching her compete? It’s hilarious. It’s also so painfully relatable. Sports being a metaphor for life and all, that is parenting in the proverbial nutshell: You want to be there for every moment with your child, to support her, to root for her, to encourage her to go out there and take risks, but you suffer. Her parents looked like they were ill from strain. They were twisting around on their seats, especially Mama Raisman (actually Faber), who was weaving and wringing herself like a white flag of surrender hung out in a storm, battered by the wind, pelted by the rain, shredded and weathered by the seasons, but hanging. I totally related.

Well, what did you expect, Readers? I’m at a moment - that’s Moment with a capital-M. My elder will be leaving for college in nine days. It feels like the end of something. Even though I know we will see her again, it feels like a change. I remember when I left for college. I didn’t think it was really going to change things, but after the first summer, I never went home permanently. So I am having this Moment. 

Another thing Aly Raisman has me thinking about is mudita, a Buddhist term interpreted as wishing well for others. Rejoicing in others’ good fortune. I think Aly Raisman has exhibited mudita towards Simone Biles, who is the only one on the US gymnastics team who performed better than her. Sure, maybe it’s easy for Aly Raisman to feel - or, let me be clear, appear to feel - happy about the little Tide Pod’s extraordinary accomplishments because her own have been quite amazing, too. 

But I could see things turning dark for Aly Raisman. After all, this is her second or third Olympics, and she is in her prime, and here comes this first time Olympian with her unbeatable degrees of difficulty in her routines and her plethora of lucrative product endorsements (Tide, for example). Aly could go dark. She could go all, “Why me?” She could get all in her own face for not being just that tenth or two of a point better. She could wallow and wail about all her effort and being thwarted in her “quest for gold,” as I can just hear that suit-wearing Bob Costas saying. 

But she does not appear to be at all frustrated. She appears supportive and encouraging and - dare I say it - proud of her teammate. She seems not to take losing personally, as indicative of something she lacks, but rather to see Simone Biles’s success as reflecting on Simone and not on her. She doesn’t seem to be zero-sum about things, even though there is a zero-sum quality to a competition. The gymnast seems to feel comfortable with herself. 

Earlier today I was talking to a friend who said, “I’m thinking about being okay in the moment and okay with what I’ve done.”  Good idea. 

When you can do that, you can have mudita for your teammates. When you can do that, you can say you have done the best you could for your soon-to-be 18-year-old-college-first-year child. When you are happy with who you are and what you’ve done in the moment, you have succeeded. 

So my Moment requires preparing for change. Change is constant, as they say, and yet I've always approached change like a maniac holding onto a slender tree trunk caught in a flash flood. That is, I try to avoid it. Well, that's where I am. I'm experiencing that and trying to be okay with it. Being present is one of the elements of my scaffolding of success, and right now, that's my focus. I'm feeling a bit like Mama Raisman (actually Faber) looks while her daughter performs. So be it. I'm hanging in there. It's what's required of me right now. I'm kind of okay in a difficult moment, and when I look at my daughter, of whom I'm so very proud, I'm okay with what I've done.  

And yes, I would like a gold medal. 

Annals of Successful Parenting: Submarine Parenting

So I have exciting news! On Sunday, I’m going to meet Gretchen Rubin. That’s right, Readers. This is the scoop I had for you. Me, moi, I’m going to meet her and talk to her for a few minutes about success and happiness. The Venn Diagram of these two subjects has a big overlap. 

Happiness is Gretchen Rubin’s bailiwick. She’s the Martha Stewart of Happiness. I don’t know how she would feel about that nickname, but it’s apt. She’s all about the practical application of everything there is to know about happiness, just as Martha is all about the practical ways to make yourself live the Good Life. GR’s all about taking what research has shown about happiness and showing us how to make our lives happier. She’s written several books, in case you didn’t know: The Happiness Project, Happier at Home, and her newest one, Better Than Before. She’s been on Oprah’s show “Super Soul Sunday,” and now she has a podcast, “Happier,” with her sister. She tells you all about it on her website.

In other news, blergh. I have a skin cancer on my neck that I have to get removed. It’s not serious, but finding out did throw me for a few hours. Make sure you get those weird moles and skin tags checked out, Readers. Especially ones that suddenly sprout. 

That was a little public service announcement for you, Readers. Now, on to more Annals of Successful Parenting: 

If I’m not supposed to be a Helicopter Parent, and I’m not a Free Range Parent, then what am I supposed to be? A Submarine Parent, says Marie Schwartz, CEO of Teen Life. Who is she and what is that, you ask? Well, I had this unusual experience. A few weeks ago, after I posted a piece in the Huffington Post about being neither a helicopter or a free range parent, someone contacted me through Twitter and said, “you mean like a Submarine Parent?” Next thing I knew, she was suggesting I interview her client for my blog. My first impulse was, “Who me? I’m not qualified. I’m not a journalist. I’m a humorist.” But then I thought, heck, why not interview this person? She’s got something to say about success and parenting, after all. And I’m going to lean in. Also, what is Submarine Parenting? 

So I did. And she was really nice. Very gracious. Her name is Marie Schwartz, and she started her company TeenLife in 2006. She worked full time outside the home and was looking for summer activities for her teens. They had outgrown their summer camps, but they needed something to do. So she researched all kinds of programs, academic, community services, arts programs, and came up with a list. This list she shared with other parents she knew, and the rest is history.  After a couple of years of running this list part-time, she decided to make it her full time job. Now TeenLife operates in most major cities in the US, and is getting interest from other countries as well. Pretty impressive. The listings are available free for students, parents, and educators. Check it out. www.teenlife.com.  

Eventually, I asked her about Submarine Parenting. “Raising kids is like building a boat and then launching it,” she said. So if the kid is the boat, the parents are the submarine: the submarine is there, under the surface. The kid knows it’s there - that is crucial - but the submarine stays out of sight and out of the way unless there’s a distress signal. 

This philosophy underlies Teen Life. She thinks that to raise successful kids, parents should provide opportunities for them to experience things that take them “out of their comfort zone.” Ideally, before leaving for college, students should have “at least two weeks” away from home. The goal is to help them prepare emotionally for life when they go away to college and beyond. According to the Jed Report, 60% of college students wish they had been better prepared emotionally. That means giving them opportunities where they have to deal with other people’s negative emotions (and their own) and advocate for themselves. Opportunities that help them feel confident that they are competent. 

So what do you think, Readers? Submarine Parenting? Is that the solution? I like it. I like the term. I discoverd that Marie Schwartz didn’t invent it. It seems to belong to Silvana Clark http://www.silvanaclark.com and dates to 2010. Anyway, it’s a Millenial term. I think it is a synonym for "intuitive parenting," another supposed Millenial parenting style.

http://orig03.deviantart.net/63c8/f/2014/085/c/1/periscope_by_makahilahila-d7bsp7b.png

I like it, although I can see the point my friends have that it has a creepy, lurking feel to it. 

I’m all for sending the kids away for at least two weeks. I think it takes at least that long for them to adjust to being away from home for the first time. Both my children have been away. The senior has been away for five weeks every summer since the summer after 6th grade. The 8th grader has been away twice. The first was somewhat disastrous, as she sees it. She went to a rustic camp during a particularly rainy summer, and spent three and a half weeks slogging around mud and using outhouses. I remember cringing when other kids would talk about their summer camps - how they went water-skiing and sailing - and she talked about swimming in the lake and the rain, picking vegetables, and digging trenches. 

But even though she now says it was awful, she was so proud of herself when we arrived to pick her up that I felt it was worth it. Since then, she has been away to a less rustic camp, a theater camp, with electricity and plumbing - and she’s going back this summer. 

Anyway, since I had a very competent entrepreneur on the horn with me, I pressed her on the subject of successful children and successful parents. Marie Schwartz weighed in to say she feels successful, “if I have a kid who’s really passionate and motivated about what they are doing.” What they are doing, she adds, should pay “a living wage.”  They should also know how to manage their own money and have good relationships in their lives. 

For herself, she defines success as “doing what makes you a better person.” She also thinks success is being a good role model for living with “passion and drive.” Agreed. “If your kids want to hang out with you , you’ve done something right.”

Amen, sister. Time will tell. Right now, I’m not so sure how I'm doing in regard to this definition of success. But I do like a periscope.  

Annals of Successful Parenting: The Null Set

In my Annals of Successful Parenting posts, I’ve danced around the topic of successful parenting, but I’ve never tackled head-on what successful parenting might be. Except to point out the two facts of parenting that I know for sure: 

1. Children are exquisite instruments of torture, fine-tuned to each parent. Just a couple examples: Say you’re an introvert with social anxiety; your child will be an extrovert who is miserable every time you stay home; or, just to pull up another random case, you are one of those people with a (completely rational, mind you) terror of vomit. In that case, your child will be a spewer.  One of those kids that gets a stomach virus once a month and regurgitates every forty-five minutes for twelve hours straight - all of them at night. I don’t think I need go on. You all know exactly of what I speak. In fact, why don’t you tell me how your children have morphed to torture YOU?
2. Parenting never ends, is largely unrewarded, is considered both very important by anyone who is a parent, yet completely worthless by our existing social structure; and so it seems as if the intersection of parenting and success must be nil. Or null. I’m talking Venn Diagram here.

This is no way to live. We need recognition. I learned that from Mr. Dale Carnegie in How to Win Friends and Influence People. At what point can you declare your parenting has been successful? When the child graduates from high school? When he graduates from college? Which college? When he gets a job? What job? When she produces grandchildren for you? Where’s her partner in this? When those grandchildren graduate from something? You see where I’m going here? Meanwhile, until some societally sanctioned outcome occurs, are parents to labor totally in the dark as to their children? 

The answer to that last one is, in short, yes. Of course. I mean, the labor the parent undergoes to bring a child up to that first societally sanctioned endpoint is gargantuan, takes about eighteen years, costs nearly three-quarter of a million dollars, and is largely unrewarded. 

Unless you look at successful parenting another way. Which, as I mentioned recently, regarding definitions that appear definite, I’m very happy to do. And really must do. Parenting is a terrific example of how success is both an outcome and a process. Parenting never ends, so if success is simply a particular outcome, such as getting into college, that is, as I’ve said, a very long time to wait to feel successful. But if success is a process as well as an outcome, then there are many ways to feel successful as a parent. And I’m not just talking report cards and roles in school plays and things like that. Those are also achievements of a singular, granular nature, gratifying but fleetingly so. No, I’m talking about something else. 

Now the other thing wrong with all those examples listed above is that they have much to do with the parent feeling successful because the child has achieved something tangible - but very little to do with whether the child feels successful. And that’s what really counts, isn’t it? Isn’t it? People? Am I right?

So, you want to feel successful along the way, while you raise the child. Otherwise you are in danger of projecting all kinds of goals onto them that are really YOUR goals. To avoid this fate, success can’t be about outcome only. It has to be about process. What is the process by which you are a successful parent? More important, what is the process by which you raise a successful child? I’d say it’s by helping your child handle life. 

Because really, what do we (and here I will revert to “I”, because I’m not going to try to speak for you, Readers) actually want for our children? I want my children to discover a passion, to find a way to work related to that passion that pays them money. I want them to be resilient, to be good citizens, to have well-balanced mental states, to accept disappointment without being crushed, needing extensive therapy or meds long-term, and to have several deep, meaningful relations with others. I’d love for them to fix the environment, or the political system, or to make great art, but I’m trying to be realistic. Today. I’d also like them to produce grandchildren and live near me and want to keep in touch. Not to mention to eventually rue the tight-mouthed way some of them have to speak to me nowadays - you know what I mean, don’t you? The speaking only when spoken to and answering by moving the lips as little as possible. Yes, I would like them to rue that.  

So then, how to achieve this ambitious list? Helicoptering? That keeps them close - at least for awhile. It could backfire, though, and send them reeling as far away as possible. Free range? That encourages their independence, which could actually work in your favor, via reverse-psychology, and encourage them to settle close by. 

Tune in next week, when I tackle this question, with a little help from a professional. 

Annals of Successful Parenting: Modeling

Oh, hello, Readers. It's kind of grim out there, don't you think? Shootings and bombings and bombast and rain. Well, I don't want to be grim. Or deep. One commenter on the blog said my blog was the deepest she'd seen in a long time. I suspect it wasn't actually a compliment - although I took it as such for an hour or so. It might actually have been code for, "Wow, this blog is a slog."

So let's talk about this photograph of the big glass and the little glass. Also, yes, of the speck of something on my counter, and the slats of my appliance garage. I have an appliance garage. Isn't that funny? Just forget the slats and the speck. Look at the big and little glasses. Mamma and baby. This is a snapshot of something that cut the grimness for me. It's cute. Not because it's objectively cute, but because it reminds me of something cute.

See the big glass? It's mine. I keep a big glass, usually with water, good old H20, next to the fridge every day. Lately, little glasses have started to appear next to my big glass. Someone in the family, one of the offspring, has picked up my habit. That's cute, don't you think?

Or maybe it's not so cute. It's certainly illustrative of the corollary to the maxim, "Do what I say, not what I do." The corollary is something like, "Kids learn from what you do, not from what you say."
In this case, no harm done. I'm demonstrating that you don't need to take a clean glass from the cupboard every time you need a drink of water, as well as the importance of regular hydration.

Now if you're peering closely at my glass, you are correct, that is not water in there. It's kombucha. This weekend I had coffee with someone who didn't know what kombucha is. My explanation wasn't very enticing: fermented tea and something about The Mother, which is the starter for the kombucha. Just as sourdough bread has a starter, kombucha has one, too. The bread starter is fermented yeast. The kombucha starter is fermented tea that turns into really a very disgusting, mushroomy-looking thing. You can make kombucha. After every batch, just like sourdough bread, you have to save a little bit of starter - The Mother - to make your next batch. I know this because once we had a hipster twenty-something stay with us. She was perambulating around the country with a jar of kombucha and a camera. When she left, she left me the recipe for kombucha, as well as a jar of starter in the fridge. It was not pretty. It looked like a giant fungus, which I believe it indeed was.

The husband took one look at it and said, "What is THAT?"
"It's The Mother," I said. "I don't know what to do with it."
"Throw it out," he said.

If that wasn't a deeply symbolic conversation, I don't know what would be.

So I buy my kombucha bottled. It's kind of fizzy. I like it mixed with seltzer. I drink it and I feel like I'm being productive. It has lots of probiotics, which are very in, hip, and now - and also very 1970.

This weekend I also had coffee with someone who didn't know what absinthe was. Okay, it was the same person who hadn't heard of kombucha. I was like, you know absinthe: the green poison - wormwood? Toulouse-Lautrec? French Impressionists? Paris, 1880s? Oscar Wilde?

This was during a conversation in which my companion told me she was pretty naive and always had been. By the time we got to the question of absinthe, I believed her. But then I thought about why I know what absinthe is, and I thought about how, in high school, I used to say - rather, I used to pronounce - "I may be innocent, but I am NOT naive."

I'm sure I was extremely irritating when I said that. I know I was not entirely correct in that self-assessment.

Pondering what I've modeled for the offspring besides saving glassware and remembering to hydrate. Scary.

Annals of Successful Parenting, Volume: I Forget

I think we’ve visited our last college. Vassar. A gorgeous day, a gorgeous campus. By now, I could run an information session for any liberal arts college on the Eastern Seaboard. Not that Vassar is on the Eastern Seaboard - at least not technically. In spirit, though, it is definitely a fine little ship docked on the Eastern shores of our great nation. 

My she was yar

Vassar: My she was yar. That’s a reference to Katharine Hepburn in one of the best movies ever, The Philadelphia Story, which pretty much sums up the Eastern Seaboard experience. Or at least the WASP version. (And is there a more important version?)

Anyhoo, as I was saying, I could run an information session, but I wouldn’t trust myself to run a tour, because walking backwards is not recommended if you don’t know the campus. Although now that I think about them all, on one of our tours, the tour guide announced that at that particular institution (Small Liberal Arts College in the East - SLACE) the guides do NOT walk backwards, but walk forwards - yes, for safety reasons, but also to emphasize the forward-facing attitude of that SLACE. 

Gag me. 

No, really, do, because I’m about to spew a generic information session, from the diversity of the student body to the “holistic application process” to financial aid "meeting one hundred percent of demonstrated need" and believe me, if I hear it one more time, I may actually die of boredom. 

However, I have enjoyed hanging out in the student center of whatever SLACE we visit. It’s always fun to observe the clothing and footwear on the students. Yesterday netted some white platform sandals over black tights on one, a pair of floral combat boots on another, and a totally nondescript looking boy accessorized with black cat ears, a little black nose, and whiskers. “Possibly a furry?” the Senior suggested. Hard to say. I'm not even sure what that is. He wasn’t wearing anything furry. All he reminded me of was the phase that the 8th grader went through when she was in pre-K of wanting a little black nose and whiskers on her face every morning before school. I complied. Sometimes you need a little mask to get through the day, I guess. 

Better than a drink, right? 

Speaking of which, we dodged a bullet regarding teen drinking this past weekend. The husband and I left the Senior at home alone while we went off to visit friends in Boston. The 8th grader went to a friend’s house. So it was a ripe set-up for a "Risky Business" teen blowout party. I felt obligated to leave my child alone at least once before she goes away to some SLACE. 

Before we left, we brought the her to tears with stories about how you can die from alcohol poisoning, and Roofies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flunitrazepam), and not letting drunken teenagers into our house because we could be held liable for anything that happened to them. When we returned, the house was in excellent order. In fact, in better order than we left it, thanks to some of the Senior’s friends, who know how to, say, fold blankets and comforters - something the Senior seems to have avoided learning. (She is so busy, after all. Not my fault at all, at all..) She told us she had nothing to drink at all, at all. And we believed her. 

As a fellow mom recently told me, she has been so overwhelmed of late that she has decided to consider everything a success. And so it is, Readers. 

Annals of Successful Parenting - Tuning in to the Program

Warning: This post is full of delaying tactics. The meat starts about halfway through. But if you like my nonsense, please read all the way through.

I am trying to get with the program and eat at regular times, but this morning I ate my second breakfast - excuse me, I believe the technical term for the ingestion I undertook at about 11 a.m., following the inadvertent Zumba class is “refueling”. That’s what the nutritionist said. MY nutritionist. 

That’s right. I consulted a nutritionist. I consulted a nutritionist about The Uninvited Guest (mentioned in this previous post). Actually, that’s not really true, although the Uninvited Guest was a prod. The real reason I consulted a nutritionist was that I wanted the 16 year old to consult one, because she dances two to four hours a day six days a week. She’s the one who really needs to refuel. And I wanted someone besides me to tell her that Goldfish are not nutritious. Knowledge is power, as my longtime friend - let's call her A - tells me, when I tell her things like I can’t look at my bank balance. (No longer true, A). I don’t know why I’m writing to A. A never reads my blog. She will never even know I mentioned her. Knowledge is power, but when it's your mother who's imparting that knowledge, it just seems to have a little less oomph.

But anyhow, knowledge IS power, and another one of the bits of knowledge I’d like her to have is how to avoid that dance world cliche of an eating disorder. “Her” meaning the 16-year-old, not A. 

So I figured, if I was taking her to a nutritionist, I might as well take myself, too. And so I did. 

And now I’m under strict instructions not to go any longer than five hours between meals. 

Bwahahahha. Excuse me while I fall off my chair laughing. I’m not sure I’ve ever gone that long without eating - except at night. Which, come to think of it, causes me to wonder if I’msuspposed to get up and eat a midnight snack? Maybe a meal between my first and second sleeps?

Okay, I’m just playing with ya. I know that’s not it. 

By the way, the Zumba class was inadvertent because I don't intentionally go to Zumba. I went to NIA, but the NIA teacher was away and the substitute teacher they got was a Zumba teacher. It was fun, actually, and had lots of Bollywood in it. I definitely needed that refuel afterwards. 

I have to go to the dentist. My tooth has been aching, off and on. I wasn’t sure if it was a cracked tooth or that I was clenching my jaw. Then I got a bad cold last week and couldn’t breathe through my nose and my teeth stopped hurted. So obviously, I had been clenching, but no longer could. See, there’s the silver lining. 

On the down side, last week I had a bad cold and so, despite by operating theory that it’s almost always better to exercise, I didn’t. Last week was just not one of those times when it was better to exercise. 

Okay, Readers, I can no longer delay getting to the reason for this blog post's title. 

In further news, I am a terrible mother. Yes, I am. Here’s why. The other day, I picked up the 16-year-old from a sleepover. After she finished giggling and hugging goodbyes to her friends, she slipped into the car and said, “This whole time I’ve been freaking out because XXX of five sauce was performing last night at Wembley Stadium and he got burned by some falling debris and I’m just so worried. He’s supposed to perform again tonight.”

Translation for those of you who don’t know what five sauce is: A popular - wildly popular - band comprised of 4 cute young men. One of whom had facial burns now. A band, mind you, playing across the sea. A band called Five Seconds of Summer (5SOS - five sauce).

Readers, I know about teenybopper love. I really remember the stomach-churning love feelings elicited by photos in Tiger Beat of (and here I further date myself) Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett. I really do. Reeeelllly. 

So did I bring up those old feelings and really get into empathy mode with my daughter, who has spent I don’t know how many hours hunched over YouTube videos of Five Sauce? Did I accept with kindness and generosity this information she shared with me that was obviously very important to her?

Hint: No, I did not. I just could not. It was these words, "This whole time I've been freaking out." Something curdled in me. Had she really been freaking out about this transatlantic incident during that whole sleepover, which included actual, live boys for the evening portion? Really? 

All I managed was a matronly, “Oh dear, that’s terrible,” which lacked all intensity of inflection that might have saved me. I kind of flatlined it, in truth. And then, because the image popped right into my mind, I said, “Michael Jackson’s hair caught on fire once. He was okay.” 

Silence. That blistering silence that radiates disapproval engulfed me. The 16yo turned on Spotify and filled the void with music. 

“It’s not that I don’t care. I mean, I’m sorry he got hurt and I hope he’s okay,” I tried to recover my humanity. Then I turned to her, “But you do know you don’t actually know them?” I said. "What happened with the guys at the party?"

Glare.

Yeah. That was smooth. 

At home, she bounded into the house ahead of me. When I arrived in the kitchen, she was telling her father about the burned sauce. 

“Wow, that is terrible,” he said, inflecting. “Is he going to be okay to perform tonight?” His voice rounded the curve of the question on an upnote. Inflecting further. 

At least she has one good parent. Damn him. 

Other news, that may or may not be good, is that I discovered chocolate ice cream made out of goat’s milk. Although I am lactose intolerant I can tolerate goat’s milk products, digestively speaking. It is delicious. This is small consolation. 

And yes, I know it seems ridiculous now, but Leif Garrett and Shaun Cassidy were really cute.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/c4/98/96/c49896d37510eed7443ba57b7e6e3d62.jpg
Leif Garrett

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N7LCvMQxHU