Occam’s Razor

Real Life 101, Lesson 9: So you want to be a parent

This is the ninth in an indeterminate series of entries that provides my “real world” lessons to young adults. It is my conviction that these lessons are rarely taught either at home or in the schools. For those who did not get them growing up you can get them from me for free. This is part of my way of giving back to the universe on the occasion of my 50th birthday.

Young adult, you may think that it would be fun and inspiring to have a little baby of your very own bouncing on your knee. There is no question that little babies can be awfully darn cute and that parenting can be a very fulfilling role. Arguably, there is no calling nobler or more daunting than being a parent. The survival of our species literally depends on the willingness of people like you to procreate.

Parenting though is far more than procreating. You should be willing to hang in there for eighteen years, but the reality is that eighteen years is just a start. You need to be able to make a lifelong commitment to your child. You may ditch your spouse at some point but you must never ditch your child. Your child will always need you on some level, even when they are middle aged like me and carry a paunch around their waist.

Being a father or mother is not that hard. It can take as little time as thirty seconds to start the process. Being a parent on the other hand is the ultimate roller coaster ride, and to succeed in parenting you have to hold on until you are dead. My father is age 81 and he is still teaching me lessons. Granted when your child is age thirty or so the work tends to go down quite a bit, but do not assume that at some point you will be all done. Parenting is a lifelong commitment based on a unique and unselfish bond of love.

It is understood that these days parenting is optional. This means you do not have to be a parent, but if you choose to have sex then you better use protection or be sterilized. Do not depend on the rhythm method. Many of those parents who did try it found out, like mine, that it did not work all that great. I am the fifth of eight Catholic children. No form of contraception is foolproof. Even vasectomies have been known to reverse themselves all on their own. Here are the only ways known to guarantee you will not be a parent:

• Women can have their ovaries and uterus removed
• Men can have their testes removed
• Celibacy

A prerequisite for parenting should be to first have your own cat or dog. It does not matter which, but if you cannot make a ten or fifteen year commitment to an animal that only needs you part time, you should not be a parent. If after a couple months or years you find yourself taking Fido or Mittens to the animal shelter, it is time to be sterilized. You should not be a parent.

Assuming you pass the first test, there are two things to think about before getting into the parenting business. The first you will hear at your local Planned Parenthood and is absolutely true: every child should be a wanted child. If you do not really really want to be a parent, you just should just say no. The second is a corollary of the first: you must have a realistic capability to raise your child to at least the same standard of living as you now enjoy. The consequence of the latter point means that your life and job needs to be reasonably settled and you have the means to care for the child. This also means you must have a job that has health insurance.

Here is how the parenting experience will be for you: I haven’t a clue. Parenting is life’s ultimate crapshoot and it can explode all over your face. If you think about it logically, no one would ever be a parent because the odds that you will screw up your child are too large. Moreover, you will screw up your child. The only question is the degree that you will screw them up. You will screw them up for two reasons: you are not perfect and your child will not be perfect either. Actually there is a third reason: you have never been a parent before. You can and should get parenting education before you have a child, but each parenting experience is unique. Just as you can improve the odds that you can drive a car by reading the instruction manual first, parenting education will tell you what you need to do. It will not do much to help you deal with the stresses and feelings that come with being a parent. Some things cannot be taught but can only be experienced.

Parenting can be simulated. I applaud those schools that simulate parenting by giving you a simulated baby to carry around for a few days. They are programmed to wake you up at inconvenient times around the clock and you have to do certain things to make it happy. A few days of this makes most teenagers want to defer parenthood for years. Of course, this kind of inconvenience is the easy part, because you also have to attend to the costs of having a child. If I were dictator, as a requirement for a high school diploma I would require the successful completion of a parenting course. It would include a week spent in a day care center changing poopie diapers and dealing with children going through their terrible twos.

I am probably making parenting sound like a real bummer. It can be. As I said, parenting is a roller coaster ride, full of many extremes. There are awful bone-crushing lows. There are also exhilarating highs. Strangely enough, there are also placid periods. Things rarely stay the same for long though. Children grow too quickly. Most parents have zero time for reflection because they are too busy dealing with the reality of life with children. That is why I am helping you out by giving you time to reflect now.

I am almost nineteen years into my parenting experience. In two days, my daughter sits down for her first college course. My parenting journey is not over yet by any means, but I have come to some tentative conclusions. It has been said many times before but it is true: parenting can be (but is not necessarily) the most rewarding and selfless thing you can do in life. I can guarantee one thing: it will be the biggest learning experience of your life. After experiencing it first hand, you should feel something like awe at your own parents. Maybe they screwed you up a bit but as you will experience just hanging in there at all borders on the miraculous.

You will never know for sure if you are cut out at the parenting business, but once you have started there is no going back. A child will pull you in more directions than you can possibly imagine. Most parents though adapt with time. You may find it easier to go with the flow. Be pragmatic and just accept that your universe is being fundamentally reordered. A relaxed attitude with your children, if you can manage it with all the inevitable chaos, is probably healthy for you and the child. Children know when they are loved, and if so they will respect you and accommodate you.

When the bulk of parenting is behind you, if you are lucky, the experience becomes somewhat nostalgic. I love my nearly nineteen-year-old daughter very much, but I cherish my memories of her at certain ages more than others. In my opinion, age four was my best year of parenting. There are times when I wish children could be like pets that stay at the ideal age forever. For better or for worse, they keep maturing. Therefore, I cherish those memories of our 4 AM feedings alone in the library while I watched the fog roll in out the window. I cherish reading Dr. Seuss to her as a child and feeling her snuggle close in my arms and her eyes light up with the story. I cherish seeing her perform in her first school play. As a parent, you have a unique privilege: to witness first hand the development of a child from birth to adulthood. They will not remember most of it, particularly the early years, but you will. With luck near the end of the experience, you will say with satisfaction, “I wasn’t a perfect parent, but I did a good job, and I consistently loved my child.” It should be that and “Whew! What a ride!”

August 24th, 2008 at 07:31pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | no comments

Advice I dare not utter

I will be as discrete and obscure as possible in this post. It is possible but extremely unlikely that its subjects will read this post. I am willing to take that risk because I feel better saying my peace at last somewhere. If I cannot utter it aloud, then I can at least write it somewhere. A blog is probably the appropriate place. Moreover, by publishing it here perhaps some will see themselves and do a midcourse correction.

I acknowledge that I, like most people, have huge blind spots. Particularly when it comes to parenting, my experience has been mixed, as has been documented in blog posts like this one. Every child is unique and no one style of parenting will fit all children. I like to think I have been a good father but I can hardly be objective. There is no real measure of successful parenting, but our daughter, age 18, seems reasonably well adjusted. As best I can tell, she harbors no particular grudges toward either my wife or I. We get along well and still do things as a family. We talk freely and exchange regular hugs. Our daughter does not smoke, do drugs or hang around with bikers named Thor. While it is too early to say for sure, I suspect we are doing better than most parents are. Our daughter is unlikely to be an Ivy League scholar, but I see nothing that would lead me to believe she will not eventually find her way into a successful, meaningful and independent life. I am sure she will have challenges and slip-ups on her own path. After all, as I once noted, failure is extremely useful, providing you learn from the experience.

Having given all the requisite disclaimers, both my wife and I knew this girl was going to have issues from the start. It was not because she was a particularly unusual child; it was because her parents had adopted parenting styles that left us both alarmed. A few years after their daughter was born they paid us a visit. We prepared a nice meal for their family only to find out that, well, C would not eat it. You see, C only likes X and Y, and not just any X and Y but X made with brand Q and Y made with brand R, which meant that Mom had to run to the local Giant and stock up on C’s special food. Moreover, it had to be prepared by Mom is a certain way and cut just so. Then she would eat it. She might even finish it.

She was not beyond getting the occasional timeout, but she was allowed unusual freedom for a young girl. For example, it was okay for her to use crayons on the walls, provided they were washable crayons. Her Mom would simply come by with a sponge every once in a while and remove her markings.

As for affection, the good news is that her parents loved her. The bad news is that her parents loved her. Gosh, how they loved her, devoting their complete attention to her whenever she made the smallest request, always in a cheerful voice, always in a tone that sounded like half baby talk and always with lots of hugs and kisses. As for praising her, they excelled in that. She was nurtured with the finest children’s toys that they could find. She had every childhood opportunity to explore her creative side. Hand me downs were not for her. God forbid she should wear clothes from a Wal-Mart. They shopped in stores like Baby Gap instead. She was trained by her mother to be a clotheshorse.

She is a naturally brilliant person, perhaps helped by her parents’ genetics. Her father has a PhD. Throughout school she excelled and routinely brought home all A’s. Mom and Dad were thrilled. She was lavished with praise and privileges.

Eventually she reached her teenage years and expressed the usual interest in the opposite sex. Suddenly, Mom and Dad who had been so encouraging were watching her like a hawk instead. She was kept out of the dating pool until she reached what she felt was an advanced age. They made sure she was closely chaperoned and were very strict with her curfews. She did not seem to mind too much. She filled her bedroom to overflowing with stuffed animals and furry cats and lived in what seemed like an extended childhood, if not infancy. Thanks to her excellent scholastics, she earned a full scholarship to a state university. Her parents bought her a brand new car so she could commute to class.

C is now twenty. She lives in her own apartment that she shares with a longhaired boy about her age. This longhaired boy though is a step up from the last one, a true bad boy James Dean type. Perhaps that is some small sign of progress. She still has her scholarship but since her parents did not approve of her lifestyle choices, they repossessed her car and ended all financial assistance. She gets by on her scholarship and a part time job. She works as a waitress in a restaurant that features nearly naked women who poll dance. Her mother and father spend much of their waking hours distressed over their daughter’s choices and hoping she will see the light. She showed up briefly in their house for Thanksgiving and Christmas but her estrangement is obvious.

They have not asked for my advice so I have given them none except for one small suggestion: if her daughter would consent to it, they might want to try family therapy. I have no idea if this will happen or not. Other than that, I simply offered them a shoulder to cry on should they need it and bite my tongue.

Here is what I would tell them if it were my place. There is a reason that your daughter is hanging out with men you do not approve of. There is a reason she is working as a waitress in a topless joint instead of at a Burger King. There is a reason she seems to go for bad men. It is because the two of you modeled the plastic parenting of Ward and June Cleaver combined with the 1960s “freedom to be the person you want to be”. The result was toxic. Mostly you smothered and micromanaged her. You wanted her to grow up to be like you and emulate your values. You were directing strong parental rays at her that said, “You must grow up to be a syrupy and surreal adults just like us.” Only, she could not utter her horror at the idea aloud. She did not know how and you were so nice all the time that she would feel like a heel if she did.

She is a young adult now. She can do what she wants and what she really wants to do is make you feel the pain she repressed because she was smothered, overly praised and micromanaged through her childhood and adolescence. Moreover, her actions, no matter how much they appall you, are necessary for her to find out who she is. She is finding herself by trying on a lifestyle that bears little resemblance to the one she knew. That is why she is attracted to bad boys.

How long will this go on? It will go on probably until you treat her as a human being who has dignity and not just the right, but your permission to make her own choices. It is obvious you do not agree with her choices. She is feeding off your energy and anxiety. Her life will probably look a lot like it currently is until you come to grips with a few things. You cannot change the way you raised her. However, you can love her.

You can love her by neither condemning nor approving of her behavior. You can love her by loving her in a way that will be meaningful to her: expressing unqualified and compassionate love for her and by acknowledging that despite the best intentions, you probably made some major mistakes raising her. Right now, your love has all sorts of strings, implicit and explicit, attached to it. She is discovering what it is like to not be like you, but she still does not know who she really is. To find her real self, you can help by lowering the voltage. You do this by both letting her make her own choices and turning off the parental guilt rays. If asked, express confidence that while her adult life may not be as you modeled it for her, she will always be okay and loved in your eyes.

My belief is that after a couple years of this she will likely lose her attraction to bad boys. She will move from rebellion into true personhood. You need to give up the role of being her parent. If you are lucky though and can win back her respect then there may come a time when you can be her coach. A coach does not make choices for someone, but helps them think through various alternatives and encourages them to be their best. This is the proper role for a parent of a 20-year-old young woman. When you decide you care more about your daughter as a person than that she model your values, that is when your relationship will truly begin to heal.

January 24th, 2008 at 10:17pm Posted by Mark | Advice | no comments

A birth experience (1989)

This blog entry was written before there were blogs, or even a web browser. In fact, the Internet was largely unknown when this was written. Its closest equivalent at the time was an entity called Compuserve. It was written in January 1990, approximately four months after my daughter Rosie was born, when I was still very sleep deprived from all her midnight feedings. Somehow, I found the time to write down the story of her birth, with the intention of making sure she finally read it by the time she became an adult. It existed on my home page but like most children, she never bothered to look at my home page, so she never read it. I wanted to make sure that she did read it eventually, so I slightly revised it and presented it to her last Friday on the occasion of her entry into adulthood, her 18th birthday. Here it is.

Our daughter Rosalind was born on Thursday, September 28th, 1989. I wanted to capture my own memories of her birth while the images were still fresh in my mind. I am doing this as a gift for Rosie. I hope someday when Rosie is old enough she will appreciate reading about her birth. So, Rosie, this is my gift to you, though it may not be read for fifteen or twenty years.

Pregnancy

First, I want to tell you how I felt about you, your mother and the whole pregnancy process. You were conceived, we think, on January 9th, 1989. You were certainly conceived in love. Our original plans for 1989 were to consider having you sometime the following year. Your mother did not want to be pregnant during a typical hot Washington summer. We wanted a final memorable year as a couple. We had plans for a driving tour of New England for the summer. Neither of us regrets having you. We both were ready to have you. I was 32. Your mother was 29. We had been together for more than five years, and had been married for more than three years.

We discovered your mother was pregnant in late January. A home pregnancy test kit showed that she was not just a little pregnant with you, but very pregnant. Any shade of blue in the test tube would have indicated pregnancy. You presence was a deep, dark shade of blue.

For your mother pregnancy was a nuisance, a pain, a joy and more, all at once. I managed to stay fairly cerebral through the entire pregnancy. I found myself treating your arrival in rather abstract terms. My main concerns were financial. I was not sure how we were ever going to be able to afford you and a house at the same time. I had just changed jobs a few weeks before you were conceived and I was not at all sure I liked the job. Now suddenly my wife was pregnant and I had to make sure we had the resources to afford you when you came. We did without a lot of our usual luxuries in 1989. We saved our money. A lot of pet projects never got done. The built in bookcases in the library never materialized. A new vanity in our bathroom also suffered under the budget ax. But by the time you were born we had several thousand dollars in a baby fund to make sure we did have the money we needed to care for you.

We also busied ourselves lining up childcare for you. There was never much of a question of whether or not we would have to send you to day care. Your mother would have to go back to work since it took two salaries just to keep up payments on the house and car. In the Washington area at that time the general wisdom was it was never too early to sign up for childcare. Childcare was difficult to find, and very expensive if it could be found at all. And it was particularly hard to find someone who would take an infant. After a babysitter across the street moved out of town, we decided to put you in PALS Early Learning Center, where you started in day care. To give you some idea of how difficult it was to find day care we had to put a deposit for you at PALS back in May, more than 4 months before you were born.

We also both were careful to monitor your mother’s diet. I nagged your mother constantly to eat healthier foods and I made sure she got several large glasses of milk a day. It worked. You came out a big, healthy baby. In a way, we were busy parenting you long before you were born.

You should also know that while you were in the womb you were a very active baby. Many times during the day, you would continue kicking spells that would drive your mother to distraction. She enjoyed entertaining her friends by showing them the ripples from your kicks on her belly.

Toward the end of her pregnancy, things became very difficult. Your mother was hospitalized twice before you were born. The first time was in late August. She was sent to Fairfax Hospital to be monitored because she was contracting every two minutes. She had to take medicine every six hours for several weeks to stop the contractions. Although only in the hospital for several hours, it was a fright to both of us. Because of the rest, the doctor ordered for your mother, she was forced to stay home from work from that point on.

On another occasion, about two and a half weeks before you were born, the doctors were so concerned about your mother’s swelled ankles (an indication of possible toxemia) that they sent her to the hospital again. This time she spent a whole weekend there. For a while, it looked like she was in labor. The labor turned out to be false. A sonogram did reveal that you were a girl. Both of us were pleased at the thought.

Labor

Your mother’s labor did not start in earnest until shortly before three in the morning on your birthday. The night before your mother said she felt “funny”. I was very skeptical that this was the real thing, even while she sat in the bathroom passing large amounts of cervical mucus. You were still a week early and we had been through false labors before. And your mother had passed mucus before too. But your mother had little doubt. The contractions she was feeling were not only powerful, but painful, radiating down the sides of her body.

By four a.m. we were both concerned enough to call our Health Maintenance Organization, Kaiser Permanente. Your mother was experiencing contractions three to four minutes apart, but their duration did not usually exceed 45 seconds. Kaiser told us to call back when the duration lasted a minute. They never got that long. By the time they reached 50 seconds I called Kaiser again. Fifteen minutes later, they called back and told us to get her to the hospital. We were both feeling scared and relieved. Both of us were anxious for you to come into the world. Nine months seemed like forever; it was hard to believe that you would shortly be in our arms and we would have a family.

We left the house around 5:25 in the morning. There was a hint of the winter to come in the air. The windows to the Sprint were covered in a cold, heavy dew. A couple of more degrees and I would have had to scrape off a layer of ice off the car windows. We had little packing to do. The labor kit and hospital clothes were in separate bags. With the car primed with quarters for the toll plaza, we hurried down the beltway to Fairfax Hospital, where you were born. I remember being surprised to find so much traffic well before six in the morning.

We arrived at the hospital’s Emergency entrance just before six a.m. It was a fairly quiet at the hospital. I had imagined things were always hopping in Fairfax Hospital’s emergency room, but there were only a couple of people there. Leaving the car your mother discovered that her waters really had broken; her jeans were soaked. By six a.m., the wheelchair had arrived and she had been moved to the Maternity Ward. She was placed in Labor Room 2. Our excitement was tempered by having been through this twice before. Your mother joked with the nurses that this time she was really here to deliver a baby.

In the labor room, your mother was quickly immobilized. A fetal heart monitor was placed over her abdomen to monitor your heartbeat. But it seemed impossible for Fairfax Hospital to leave it at that. All sorts of tubes and needles went in and out of her body. There was an IV in one arm to keep up her blood sugar. A catheter. A strap across her abdomen to measure uterine contractions. An armband to automatically measure her blood pressure.

Your mother’s contractions became more difficult and closer together. Every hour a physician or nurse would come by to see how dilated she was. This is a measure of how wide her cervix was open. For a while, things went very well. Your mother was three centimeters dilated when she came in, and by noon had made it to five centimeters.

Around ten in the morning, the contractions got to be very hard and very painful. Your mother really wanted to have you using natural childbirth techniques we learned in Lamaze class. As her coach, it was my responsibility to work her through a series of breathing exercises that were supposed to lessen the pain. Even with all the practice, it was tough to use these techniques during actual labor. Contractions continued every three to four minutes. It was hard for her to sustain that level, especially since she had not been allowed to eat at all. Her obstetrician, Dr. Henry Grimm, recommended that she be given an anesthesia and your mother finally agreed. She was given an epidural. This is administered with a needle that was placed near the bottom of the spine. The relief was nearly instantly apparent. Instead of an exhausted wife with a pained look on her face, your mother seemed very normal, almost as if she wasn’t it labor. I was glad to see her out of pain. She read the paper and worked on crossword puzzles.

Still, there was reason for concern. As the afternoon began, Dr. Grimm became concerned because your mother was “stalling”. Thanks to a new internal fetal monitor (attached directly to your head through the birth canal) and internal uterine contraction device we discovered that labor was no longer progressing. Your mother had stalled at 5 centimeters dilation and her contractions didn’t look like they were going to be powerful enough to push you out. To complicate matters your temperature and heart rate were going up too, since you had lost all the amniotic fluid when your mother’s waters broke. By three p.m., it became clear that labor would have to be induced. We conferred with Dr. Grimm who recommended that you be delivered by Cesarean Section. This meant that you would be delivered through the abdomen rather than the birth canal. We were both upset with the idea because we both wanted you to be born naturally. By four p.m., we agreed that a C-section was the way that you would have to come into the world. In one way, I was relieved. I knew that this long pregnancy process would soon be over, and that we would have you in our arms. At that point I think even your mother was relieved that labor would come to an end.

Delivery

It didn’t take too long to prepare. There was a short wait since someone else was ahead of your mother in the operating room. I was instructed to get my “scrubs” from the nursing station. I ran back to the Father’s dressing room and put on my outfit. The mask seemed to fog up my glasses every time I exhaled. By five p.m. your mother was being wheeled into the delivery room.

I had to sit out in the cold hallway for some time while your mother was prepared. She had to be given more anesthesia. Now she could feel no sensation at all below her waist. After what seemed like a long time, but was probably only ten minutes, I was allowed into the operating room. I found her just about ready to be opened, and in good spirits. Your mother was joking with the nurses and anesthetist.

It turned out that I had a much better view of your birth than your mother did. They put up a little border that kept her from seeing pretty much of anything. I took my station by her head and gave running commentary. I expected to perhaps be a little sick but never even got lightheaded.

The room was bright, but cold. The air conditioner was down way too low. It felt like it was sixty degrees. There was a machine that made an annoying squeak every couple of seconds. The doctors and nurses worked quickly. I made a point of not trying to see too much, but I watched as they cut into your mother, first on her outer skin, and then into the uterine muscle itself. They used a clamp to pull her skin apart. I remember being surprised at how tough her skin was. They were pulling her apart with the force of two people having a taffy pull. There followed more cutting and more pulling and more clamping and more annoying sounds from the squawking machine. The nurse called out your heart rate and your mother’s blood pressure.

For a moment, they could not even find you. “She’s much further down than I expected,” I remember Doctor Grimm saying and I watched his gloved hand go deep into your mother’s abdomen. I tried to report what I saw to your mother but there wasn’t much to see. The hand went in and out a few times and I could see blood on the doctor’s glove. The machine with the squawk still made its annoying sound.

“She’s a big kid,” the doctor said and he now worked rather quickly. He pulled up with both his hands suddenly and there you were, or rather, your head. All I could see was a head covered with a lot of hair. So far, you were silent, but you seemed very pissed.

“I can see the head,” I told your mother. “Black hair.”

And then, quickly, with a loud squish and you were out. You almost seemed like an albino you were so white, which made your black hair all the more starting. “The baby’s out,” I told your mother. My own heart was racing and I found myself suddenly on the edge of tears.

I watched as they clamped the umbilical cord and then severed it. You spoke; you cried. “You have a little girl,” the nurse said. Somehow, I snapped a picture. In an instant before even your mother could see you they had pulled you over to a side table. They gave you an APGAR test (to measure your physical strength) and put you on the scale. Somehow, I took another picture as they weighed you. “Nine pounds and one ounce the nurse said.” You were crying. Your irregular but persistent little shrieks filled the room. Instantly a lump formed in my throat and I found tears in my eyes.

It’s hard to describe the power of those few minutes. Nothing really prepared me. Perhaps it is so powerful because it is nature’s way of preparing the father for the considerable work ahead. There is this overwhelming feeling of joy, such as I’ve never known and have never experienced since. At the same time I felt such a pity for you, being newborn, and the pain and difficult times that were ahead. And I felt more than a little terror, for neither of us were certain we were up to the challenge of parenthood. From a biological point of view, this was a climax, for we had succeeded in reproducing ourselves. Maybe it was this primal release I felt. All I wanted to do was to hold you in my arms and tell you I love you. But for the moment I could not do that. Instead, they wrapped you tightly in a receiving blanket and you were brought down next to your mother. There were tears in her eyes too as she saw you for the first time. “Oh, she is so beautiful,” your mother kept saying. And then, it could hardly have been a moment, mother and baby were moved away from each other.

The doctors were already working hard stitching your mother back together. There were certain things that had to be done first, such as removing the placenta and any remaining amniotic fluid. There was no place for your mother to go, but they were about ready to take you into the post labor room. “I’ve got to go with the child.” I told your mother. “One of us should be with her.” Your mother understood and I hurried as I followed you into the nursery just down the hall. You cried all the way.

Recovery

A nurse immediately took over. You were not happy at all about what was happening to you, but they took excellent care of you. There was so much that you needed to have done so quickly. You were cleaned up, not well enough to remove all of the cheesy material that was on you, but enough to get the amniotic fluid off. They put a vitamin cream in your eyes. Using a razor blade, they made a small cut in the heel of your right foot and got some blood samples. They also put a thin tube down your windpipe and removed an impressive amount of fluids from your lungs. You could hardly breathe without coughing. You screamed at the indignity of it, but within minutes, you seemed far better.

Finally, gratefully, you calmed down. You had the warmth of a heat lamp above you to bring your body temperature up to normal. And your eyes were open, but just a sliver. Perhaps you could tell there was light out there; I doubt you could see much else even if all that cream hadn’t been in your eyes.

Me? I was making a blathering idiot out of myself. After being instructed to wash my hands with a special soap, I was allowed to touch you. I touched your hand, gingerly at first and you instinctively grabbed it. I kept saying, through my tears, “It’s all right, Rosie” and “There’s nothing to worry about. Daddy’s here and Daddy love’s you.” The nurse asked if I was all right. I told her I would eventually calm down.

After being stitched up, your mother was moved into the recovery room, which was just across the hall from the nursery. I kept running back and forth between you and her, hoping that your body temperature would get high enough so that you could come across the hall and be with your mother. Eventually they wheeled you across the hall for a visit. You were very quiet and taking in your new environment with a very intense look on your face. Your mother got to see you for a good long time. We could not believe how beautiful and small you were. Your mother made some phone calls: collect to her Mom, to Jane, to Aunt Sharon. The word went out that we had a new Rosie in the family.

Your First Days

You were born on a Thursday but your mother was not released from the hospital until Monday morning. You spent most each day next to your mother in her hospital room, and spent the night in the nursery down the hall. We learned how to feed you and how to change you. Your mother offered you her breast, which you took, but it was still too soon for her to produce milk. Within a day, a flush had come over your face; for about a day you looked like a sunburned Indian. But by Sunday the flush was gone and you were a happy, healthy pink little baby again. You came home from the hospital Monday morning. Grandpa and Busia arrived that night and stayed for a week while we settled into our new roles as parents.

That is your story, as I recall it. It is now nearly four months after your birth. You have kept us so incredibly busy that I have tried to finish this many times and have not been able to. But you are growing sweeter and more gentle every day. You see the world with exploratory eyes now, and you smile and love as if it were instinctive. We have endured many sleepless nights, but you are worth it. Now you are becoming a bit more controllable. You feel a part of the family. It makes me feel so happy that you feel this way. We love you Rosie. Happy birthday!

Love,

Dad

October 4th, 2007 at 09:06pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | one comment

Sort of Enfranchised

If my 50th birthday in February was a big deal because the number was a very big and very round then arguably my daughter’s 18th birthday tomorrow is a much bigger deal.

My turning 50 included neither new responsibilities nor privileges. Perhaps AARP membership could be construed as a new privilege. However, the AARP no longer requires you to be age 50 to join. On the other hand, when you turn 18 then like it or not you become a (mostly) official member of the tribe. Should you transgress the law, there is no juvenile court for you. At age 18, while you cannot drink you are free to do other arguably stupid but legal things like smoke with impunity.

It used to be that at age 18 or so your parents were helping you pack your bags. Often you would move from your parents’ house to the local YMCA or YWCA, which was something like a community halfway house. There you could find single room housing, people about your age with perhaps some sense of morality, some older adults to keep an eye on things and cheap weekly rents. While you established yourself in the adult world, you had some structure. I imagine there are still YCMAs that offer such a service, but I do not know of any. Our local YCMA is merely a health club. Moreover it is hardly restricted to young Christian males. Old men, women and children can hang out at our YMCA. I am not even sure you have to attest to being a Christian in order to be a member. One thing is for sure: our local YMCA has no SRO housing for young adults.

When I turned 18, while I could probably have survived on my own, it would have been a rough and angst filled transition. Today, modern life is both more complicated and more expensive. In addition, young adults have upgraded both their expectations and lifestyles. Since they are used to convenience, they expect convenience. Since they never had to pay the freight to live a convenient life, they expect that their parents will help subsidize their transition into adult life. Generally, we parents, out of parental love but also out of necessity, have bought into this new vision. Sending your young adult off to college with a couple lockers stuffed with clothes, knickknacks and a thick collegiate dictionary is no longer enough. Today’s collegiates require ATM cards, health insurance, prescription drugs, and laptop computers and maybe even a car. These may not actually be essentials, but the likelihood of their failure appears to increase if they do not have them.

If there is good news for this change of life, it is that you are finally allowed to vote. My daughter has registered to vote for our election this November. Although she accompanied me many times when I voted, she may find the actual voting process underwhelming. She may want to vote for a new president. Instead, she will have more ponder more prosaic choices, including who should be Clerk of the Court. In addition, she may discover that being one voter among millions generally means your vote does not matter too much. If you want your vote to matter, it is better to move to a swing state like Ohio and Florida. She will learn that attempts to change the course of government mostly fail. They may bitch about things, but rarely does this mean they will vote out the incumbent.

When I turned 18, I was fully enfranchised. My new privileges included the right to buy out all the booze at the local ABC store if so inclined. Since that time, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers have succeeded changing those laws. While newly liberated adults like her can vote, they cannot legally imbibe. I hope I am not the only adult to be troubled by this inconsistency. If we are going to prohibit drinking until age 21, it is far more honest to also raise the voting age to 21. In addition, some states have other asterisks next to this change in life. For example, here in Virginia while our daughter can get a driver’s license, she must get a certificate from a state approved driving school before an examiner will test her. A year from now when she turns 19 this will no longer be an issue.

Therefore, tomorrow she really becomes a qualified adult. Although she has committed no transgressions, she is an adult under probation. She has all the responsibilities of full adulthood without necessarily all its privileges.

For her parents there are some benefits to her change in life. She becomes responsible for her actions, not us. However, there are also downsides. She is harder for us to declare as a dependent. It is more difficult for us to tell her what to do, and likely counterproductive should we actually demand it. There are both legal and natural forces at work. These forces are impelling her to take full responsibility for her actions and her life, whether she is ready or not. For my wife and me these are reminders that parenting is a limited mission. Our daughter, while much loved, is really a passenger on our train. We have punched her ticket. The train is slowing. She needs to get her off the train.

As a young adult in her gap year, she now often navigates by herself to the local Books-a-Million. While she shelves books for a bit over the minimum wage, she ponders what she really wants to do with her life. Our evenings, which used to be consumed with monitoring her homework and Internet usage, are starting to become quieter. The cat, who is very bonded with our daughter, pouts because his human is spending more and more time away from her. Meanwhile, I am envisioning a much quieter and lower-key life in my near future. I am seeing a time when her bedroom morphs into a guest room or a study. Indeed, I am seeing a time when our house goes on the market and we retire to some place smaller. I am seeing my wife and me with grey hair, living in a retirement community and going to Elder Hostels. While this vision still seems quite a way away, what is new is that we can see it clearly now.

Our cat will not be happy by our daughter’s change in life but he will adopt. My wife and I will experience a mixture of feelings, but will move toward acceptance. Our lives will continue to intersect with our daughter’s, but invariably we will see less of her. There may come a day when we call her regularly just to find out what is going on with her. There may come a day when our relationship devolves into occasional Thanksgiving dinners and exchanging Christmas cards.

We have to let her go. She has to let us go. That is just the way it is. Meanwhile, we can expect measured steps by her toward self-sufficiency and many more evenings and weekends free of the distraction of supervising her life, while not entirely free about worrying about her choices.

September 27th, 2007 at 07:46pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | no comments

Unlamented

Las Vegas attracts many of life’s losers. If people are going to gamble on living then why not die here in this neon filled city that epitomized the extremes of American living? In 1998, my wife’s father, a man who I never met, died indigent and homeless here in Las Vegas.

His death was suspected for many years but for a long time could not be confirmed. He had a habit of disappearing for a few years then reappearing. When he reappeared, it was usually not a joyful experience. Generally, he was petitioning his siblings for two things: money and shelter. He must have been something of a smooth talker because over many years he talked them out of thousands of dollars. They wanted to believe in his rehabilitation. He promoted cockamamie business schemes involving their money, all of which eventually failed. About this time that he crept out of town.

Around the year 2000 after many years of no one hearing from Bob, one of my wife’s aunts entered his name into the Social Security Death Index. When his name and social security number came up positive, some basic facts about his death were gleaned. Date of death: September 14th, 1998. Age: 67.

Earlier this year I happened to speak to one of his sisters, my wife’s Aunt Pat. I informed her that her brother had died. She expressed neither surprise nor sorrow. However, she did take the time to get a copy of the death certificate, and she sent me a copy.

The death certificate filled in a few holes about his last days. He died at St. Rose Dominican Hospital in Henderson, Nevada. Henderson is a town just outside of Las Vegas. His place of residence did not list a street address, but Searchlight, Nevada was listed on the death certificate. Searchlight is a town of about 500 people an hour’s drive south of Las Vegas. There is not much in Searchlight, but it is the birthplace of Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Bob must have died indigent because the Clark County Social Services Department was listed on the death certificate where his parents’ names would normally be. The certificate showed he was never married but here too the facts were incorrect. He was married to my mother in law for many years. In addition, he sired not only my wife but also my brother in law. He died of “end stage cardiac and pulmonary failure”. In other words, his heart stopped, but he was likely suffering from some form of congestive heart failure. He was reputedly quite obese as well as an alcoholic.

Among his entire family, including his former wife (my mother in law) there has been a noted absence of curiosity about Bob. When I broached the subject with them, what I usually heard was that he was just a bad man. The less said about him the better. Yet I found myself wanting to know more about Bob. For better or for worse he help shaped the woman I married.

My wife essentially grew up without a father. In the first six years of her life, her father did live in the household. However, he was not the nurturing type. My wife does not remember much about him in part because she was so young. What she does remember is not flattering. He was loud. He and her mother argued a lot. Perhaps that is how she acquired her introversion. Perhaps it was safer to be alone in a room reading a book than to deal with the ugly reality of two parents yelling at each other.

By early grade school, her mother and father were divorced. Her mother had custody, but her father had informal visitation rights. Her father’s idea of daughter-father time was to take her to bars to meet his friends. Since her brother was nearly ten years older than she was, she spent much of her formative years living with only her mother. There was no June Cleaver mother waiting for her after school with milk and cookies; she had to work. In the mid 1960s, she was the only child of divorce in her entire class and felt its stigma.

Trying to know her father so many years later is a challenge. Bob apparently was loud. He argued a lot in front of the children. At times, he had trouble maintaining a job. He was obsessed with his son excelling in sports, but not enough to bother to attend any of his games. My mother in law claims that he never physically abused her, but her son remembers differently. He recalls one episode when he was so angry that he put his fist through a wall. For a day or two, my wife was an innocent six-year-old girl embroiled in a nasty marital dispute. Her father essentially abducted her for a few days. Her brother, then sixteen at the time, threatened to kill their father if he ever showed up in their lives again. Apparently, he took his threat seriously and disappeared. He reappeared only to sympathetic siblings that hoped for his rehabilitation.

I had this image of Bob as fat, a drunkard, coarse and abusive. However, a discussion about Bob with my mother in law this week (we were in Phoenix, Arizona) portrays a somewhat different man. He did not always drink to excess, but when he drove a beer truck, he had more opportunities to imbibe, so that may have started his addiction. That and perhaps his loveless marriage seemed to tip the balance toward dysfunction. I imagined him running around with other women but that was not the case. He wanted to desperately to save their marriage. My mother in law wanted it to end because she was not in love with him. Much of his emotional abuse was manifested as reckless attempts to keep their marriage together. He had a hard time coping with the reality that there was no way he could win back her love. Moreover, my mother in law was doing quite well in the workplace by the standards of Flint, Michigan. She could provide for her children on her own income. She was eventually able to purchase her own home and even furnish is with brand new furniture. As she entered her teens, my wife had a home in the suburbs at last with her own bedroom and supportive neighbors. My mother in law made the best life she could for her daughter.

Nor was Bob a bad provider. He managed to stay employed in decent blue-collar jobs throughout his marriage. It appears that the divorce and his messy abduction of my wife triggered a long descent. He lived in Denver for a while, close to one of his sisters. I have heard that he probably had adult diabetes. He may have lost a leg because of his drinking. He sounds like a man who was probably clinically depressed for much of his life. Like most people born in the 1930s, he chain-smoked.

Talking with Aunt Pat I learned something of his family of birth. He was raised in a poor North Carolina household. The family eventually moved to California. He grew up in a family full of marital strife and high drama. Perhaps I assumed he was a philanderer because he had the opportunity to learn it from his father. His father and mother eventually divorced. Bob became the family’s black sheep. Aunt Pat was pulled toward the other extreme. She embraced religion. Now in her early eighties she remains a devout Adventist who despite her background managed to add a PhD to her name. Pat also sponsored my wife for several months when she moved to the Washington area. Were it not for Pat’s loving heart, I would never have met my wife.

Only my mother in law offers a different perspective of Bob from the other stories I heard. He was a good provider when they were married to each other. He only actually hit her once, and he just pushed her. She was not physically injured. She just did not love him. She wanted to be free of him. In particular, she wanted to follow her infatuation with the man who was her boss.

It appears that their divorce instigated Bob’s long, slow and painful downhill spiral. Eventually he ended up homeless in Searchlight, Nevada. He ended up sick but made it to a hospital in Henderson, Nevada. He died there ignobly and most likely alone. With no one to claim his body, the Clark County Social Services Department took up the slack. They paid for his cremation. His remains are now deep in a county crypt somewhere in here in Las Vegas. They can be released to the family if sufficient documentation is provided and for a $200 fee.

While I am forwarding these details to Aunt Pat, I doubt anyone will claim his remains. No one mourned his passing. In fact, everyone seems glad to know that he has exited this world. With Bob gone, their lives became just a little less stressful too.

I wonder how long the Clark County Social Services will hold on to his remains. We arrived in Las Vegas today, where my wife and daughter will attend a convention. I was going to try to track them down along with any records maintained by the county that may exist. However, after a couple phone calls I know not to bother. There is no place to go to see what is left of my father in law. There is no county crypt with his name on it that I can photograph. They will not even release his records, not even to family. It is prohibited by HIPAA regulations. There is a possibility that I could retrieve his hospital records, if a local probate court grants the writ, but it is unlikely it would shed much information about the last years of his life.

Therefore, I fill in what I can with sketchy information, anecdotes and a certain amount of reasonable conjecture. I should be angry with my father in law too. I should be angry at his abduction of his own daughter. I should be angry at how he used her, a vulnerable child, as a pawn in a larger personal war. Nevertheless, I am also now aware that in many ways Bob was acting out the behavior he witnessed inside his own dysfunctional family.

I do not know how long Clark County in Nevada will hold his remains. They will likely not stay in county custody forever. Perhaps in fifty years, perhaps in a hundred, Bob’s remains, like the many of indigent homeless men and women who have the misfortune of dying out here in the desert, will be unceremoniously dumped into a county landfill. After all, there are plenty of new desperate and homeless people in Las Vegas. Others wandering the streets here tonight are doomed to also share his fate.

Everyone just wants to forget about Bob. Perhaps I should too. Perhaps instead of keeping his death certificate, I should throw it out with the garbage. “Every man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind,” the poet John Donne once wrote. My Unitarian Universalist values call me to respect the inherent dignity and worth of every human being including less than stellar humans like my wife’s father.

It is nice to know that Bob was not entirely a bad man. Most likely, he was just a lost man, who never knew love and consequently did not know how to show it. It is good to know that he loved my mother in law in his own inept way, even if she did not feel the same way. It is good to know that even though he never paid child support, he helped support his family for a number of years. It is also sad and a bit pathetic that his life devolved the way it did.

This leaves only me, lamenting only not knowing the man who sired the woman I love. I wish I could have a conversation or two with him and hear about life from his perspective. It may be that after such a conversation, like his son, I would want to kill him. Instead, I feel an unrequited mild curiosity. It might be the hardest thing I would ever do, but if he were alive here in front of me, I would try to give him a hug. Somehow, I do not think he ever received one.

There is just a cardboard urn of his ashes somewhere here in the Clark County crypt. There they are likely to remain forever unclaimed.

July 13th, 2007 at 01:37am Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Life 2007 | no comments

The Graduate

Time sneaks up on you when you are a parent. One day you are changing your daughter’s diaper and the next she is on a stage being handed a diploma. You stand there applauding, tears streaming down your face and hoarsely shouting her name to ten thousand attendees. The principle shakes her hand with his right hand while giving her her diploma with his left hand.

It is strange and surreal. You would feel like singing “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof except you are too choked up to sing. Also, there is the constant drone of Sir Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” from the school orchestra. Still, you would sing it if you could, for you are filled with a powerful and bittersweet feeling. Your heart just aches for the love you feel for your child, now a woman.

Is this the little girl I carried?
Is this the little boy at play?
I don’t remember growing older
When did they?
When did she get to be a beauty?
When did he get to be so tall?
Wasn’t it yesterday
When they were small?

Your heart also aches in sorrow, for the bridges of dependency you know you must slowly burn as your daughter to transitions into an adult. You want her to stay at home forever, playing video games, attending sleepovers and going to Girl Scout meetings. Instead, you realize that part of the parenting experience is behind you. You now express your love by letting her go. Now comes a time when love will look a little sterner and at times a little heartless. Every bird reaches an age when the parent unceremoniously kicks the hatchling out of the nest. So too do you realize that it is your solemn parental duty to do the same, perhaps not by suddenly changing the locks, but by sending your daughter out to get a real job, and to learn to do things like paying rent. Since she has elected to take a year off before going to college, she has to get a job to stay at home. After she turns eighteen, our daughter will start paying us rent, $200 a month to start.

When not overcome by emotion you sit there in the George Mason University Patriot Center, one of ten thousand attendees and are a bit mesmerized by the size of the crowd and the enormous Class of 2007. For our daughter Rosie is a graduate of Westfield High School in Chantilly, Virginia. To say she is one of many is to put it mildly. There are over seven hundred students in her graduating class. It will take a full hour for all the graduates to get their diplomas. Principle Tim Thomas’ arms will be sore for a week.

The number of graduates may be huge, but I am feeling wistful anyhow. This is the sort of high school graduation that I wanted but I never received. Instead of a huge auditorium, my class graduated at the Daytona Beach Kennel Club. Unlike my graduation, where a thunderstorm took out the lights for ninety minutes, this graduation proceeded like clockwork. And unlike my graduation where a fair number of graduating seniors smoked reefers in the darkness while they waited for the lights to come back on, at this graduation the mere failure of the men to wear black pants or the girls to wear a black dress and heels was sufficient grounds to be thrown out of the ceremony.

Yes, it may be corny, but an orchestra has to play “Pomp and Circumstance”. Of course, there has to be brief speeches by the principle, the class historian, the class president and the class valedictorian, none of which really inspires anyone, particularly the graduates. They are more focused on the all night party at the school that will follow graduation. Still, these things are necessary. It is how the reality of graduation sinks in. Anything less and the ceremony is stripped of its meaning and dignity. Still, these graduates are not without a sense of humor. Despite stern admonitions and a pat down of students before graduation, two inflatable beach balls were tossed among the graduates while diplomas were handed out. In addition, despite stern warnings not to do so, a few yahoos in the audience used their air horns anyhow. No graduation is complete without it turning into something of a popularity contest; you can judge a graduate’s popularity by the volume of cheers he or she gets when their name is announced.

Nonetheless, my daughter’s graduation was still deeply satisfying for this parent. I found myself crying at strange times, like when the orchestra struck up a tune from West Side Story but the graduates had not yet filed in. Perhaps it was the jet lag (I had arrived home from Denver, at 1 AM, and was up at 6:30 AM). Perhaps it was the wedding I attended the day before. (I was crying through that too.) On the other hand, perhaps through my daughter’s graduation I was vicariously experiencing the graduation I wanted, but was denied.

It was likely all these things, but mostly I was feeling obnoxious pride at my daughter’s accomplishment. She may not have been class valedictorian, but that was an unattainable goal among 700 plus students anyhow. For now, her proud father was simply awed that she had survived high school and eked out a better than B average. That is no small accomplishment in the 21st century and in a high school ranked 128th in the country. Despite her inexperience, my daughter adroitly dodged all the teenage minefields in front of her. She could have become drug addicted, hooked on tobacco, pregnant, in a car wrapped around a telephone poll or acquired some social disease. She rebelled by truly being different, even among her peers. Not many freshmen would join the Gay-Straight Alliance, or go on to be its vice president. While mostly she navigated below the radar of the preppy and popular, when she stood up, she did so for things she believed in: like civil rights for those whose lifestyle offended the majority of Virginians. How could I not feel pride in a young woman whose values are that well grounded?

As one of the speakers said, graduation is really the end of the beginning, as in the end of childhood. Now our daughter begins a strange and much different chapter of her life, where she navigates regularly to a job, does things she does not want to do for eight hours at a time, smiles when she does not want to, pays rent and learns to live within her means. Perhaps she will learn some other lessons, like what it feels like to be fired, laid off or to make a catastrophically bad choice that eluded her in high school. She will have that right in September when she turns 18. She tells me that one of the first things she plans do when she turns 18 will be to register to vote.

That is how we all learn, of course: by making choices and observing their results in the often nebulous minefield called reality. She is bound to stumble and she will have to learn how to recover by herself. Perhaps this year off from education will be the best education she will ever get. For the one course they cannot teach you in high school is how to navigate real life. Some things cannot be taught; they can only be experienced.

I expressed my confidence that she will make these choices wisely. I too must learn some new skills. I must learn to keep my lips buttoned and to give advice only when asked, and maybe not even then. Our daughter remains leery and cautious about engaging life, but she is not dysfunctional. She remains a nerdy, eclectic but sweet young woman, much like her parents. Her sense of caution will serve her well. She will sort it out in her own way. Her choices may surprise us and occasionally disagree with us. However, those choices will be authentically her own.

We have released the tether and she is unmoored. She is trying out the oars of her life tentatively. Ever so slowly, she will recede from our view.

June 19th, 2007 at 10:42pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | no comments

A daughter grows up

I am always a bit leery to write about my family members. I am afraid that I will say something in my blog that will inadvertently hurt them. Therefore, when I do write about my family I am circumspect. Still, they are my family so they cannot help but loom large in my thoughts. So occasionally, I will invite the reader to get some insight into my family. Today, I give you a picture of my daughter on the cusp of adulthood.

In fact, on occasion, I have said things in my blog about my daughter Rosie, but little of it was meaningful. I described her as a polysexual (a word I think that I coined) a couple years back. She was just fourteen when she announced to my wife and I in a matter of fact tone that she was attracted to both genders. I also once pondered mistakes I made parenting her. Other than these instances, I have written little in my blog that gives you a sense of the wonderful young woman that is my daughter.

Now Rosie is sixteen and a junior in high school. She is taller than her mother. Prior to adolescence, she struck her two introverted parents as inexplicably popular. Her many girlfriends were a constant presence in our lives. It seemed like almost every other weekend she was at a sleepover at some girl’s house. She rarely needed or bothered to call up her friends. They sought her out. She was not popular in the traditional sense of the word. There are no yearbooks in grade school, but if there were, I doubt her class would have been voted her most popular. Rosie is the antithesis of perky. For whatever reason though, she effortlessly attracted a devoted group of followers. Without intending to be the leader, she became one to her friends. She carried with her both imagination and an intangible energy. Girls who wanted more of these traits in themselves were drawn to her like moths to a flame.

Adolescence found Rosie getting in touch with her introvert. She still has good friends, but they are a smaller and more eclectic set. They meet mostly online now. Her friends include a few really unusual, somewhat bizarre, quite skewed (but not dysfunctional) harmless young men. You might say they are the out crowd at school. She still claims to be a bisexual, but seems to be in no hurry to try sex, drugs, cigarettes or, for that matter, heavy romantic relationships. She is comfortable with whom she is, and who she is does not resemble many of her peers.

I still think she attracts a certain kind of person who is also turned off by peer pressure, but not as comfortable in openly expressing it. When they see her, they see something of a model on how they would like to be: a genuine and unapologetic non-conformanist. She has her own tastes in clothes and music and they rarely intersect with those of her peers. She likes some popular music, but her favorite music tends to be rather obscure stuff she found on the Internet. She is comfortable with less trendy forms of music, including musicals, folk, jazz and classical music.

There are times I think she might be a Goth, since she is usually dressed in black. However, she is not the type to dye her hair jet black. She wears no makeup. She makes sporadic efforts to clear up her acne, but usually she is indifferent to it. Adolescence is usually a time of pulling a way. Yet at this stage in her life, she seems comfortable emulating her geeky parents. For both my wife and I are comfortable in our own non-conformanist skins. For her a pleasant day is spent in the sanctuary of her bedroom. Half of the time, she is chatting online with friends. The other half of the time, she is writing. For like her mother and I, she seems to have the gift of words. For now, she writes mostly fan fiction. She even has her own web site full of fan fiction that she has written. Her friends are some of her more enthusiastic readers. They participate by providing artwork for her web site, and hang on her latest chapters.

For most of her life, academics have been her biggest challenge. It was not that she was stupid. At every conference we had with her teachers she was singled out as one of the smartest and most interesting children in the class. Rather, her challenges were organization and being able to focus. We tried every approach we could think of and nothing worked. For a while there I had regular nightmares of her spending her adult years placing smiley face stickers on customers entering the local Wal-Mart.

Now, at long last, she is cruising academically. We are not entirely sure what did the trick. It could be that she finally realized that independent living was right around the corner. We do know that things started improving shortly after we found Peggy, her life coach. Perhaps parental guidance can be counterproductive at a certain age. Her coach works as a partner, rather than as an authority. Just last week we reached a welcome milestone. Her latest report card arrived with all A’s and B’s on it. I used to dread the arrival of her report card. Now it is almost a happy experience.

At sixteen, it is too much to expect her to figure out what she wants to do with her adult life. She is definitely thinking about it though. For now, her goal is to study overseas. Since she is one of the top French students in her school, she would prefer to study in France. To help her discover if this is something she really wants to do, we are planning to take a trip to Paris this summer. One thing is for sure: she is not terribly enamored with her own country. She talks about giving up her American citizenship for French citizenship. I have to remind her that things are not that wonderful in France. Young adults have been rioting in the streets. Youth unemployment hovers around 20%. Then there are the sectarian problems with Muslims and other immigrants who live what amounts to permanent second-class citizenship. Nor, if truth were told, would I be that happy to have her across the pond permanently. She is after all our only child. We know she has to leave home sometime. We are hoping if she must go to college in a foreign country that she will pick Canada. Quebec might be a more pragmatic (and less expensive) place for her to get a degree.

She has a hazy idea of a career in translation. She wants to see the world, and being multilingual might provide the opportunities she wants. Her choice strikes me as reasonable. Moreover, it is likely to pay much better than being a Wal-Mart greeter. Still, I wonder. I suspect that her real calling will be in the arts. Someone who can write so beautifully at age sixteen is likely to want to continue it as a passion into adulthood too. She has done her share of Community Theater, and has sung in a few chorales. For much of her life, I heard more singing from her than I heard from most birds. It is hard to imagine that side of her will disappear in adulthood.

I expect that she will experience some significant potholes as she transitions to adulthood. Her remaining time with us is now rather short. There is still so much to teach her. She needs many more driving lessons. I need to teach her money management skills, so she does not spend her adulthood in debt like so many these days. She needs a job beyond babysitting to see how the world of employment actually works. In addition, she needs to have some understanding of how expensive it is to live in our modern world. Perhaps this will encourage her to pick a profession that pays more than a bare living wage.

She enters her adulthood in a vastly more complex world than the one I knew at her age. There are so many more choices and as a consequence, many more potential pitfalls. If she has floundered in some ways until recently, it was probably simply because it is so tough to master all the necessary skills to succeed. She is now making sound choices. Now she carries a pervasive sense of inner confidence. Moreover, she seems to be a genuinely happy young woman. Rather than being rebellious, she is sweet and affectionate. She may be happy holed up in her room, but when she is out of it, she talks to us freely about her life. She remains as affectionate as a young woman as she was as a child. We can still hug each other freely. She radiates honesty and projects a sense of inner harmony.

She will still need some guidance, and she still is a bit nervous holding the tiller of her own life. She is nearing the edge of the harbor where she has spent her life. She has navigated in the shoals long enough. She is almost ready to handle the breakers.

April 18th, 2006 at 09:53pm Posted by Mark | Life 2006 | no comments

My Father the Boy Scout

I have written many words chronicling my mother’s sad decline, death, funeral and burial. Such a seismic event in my personal life could hardly go unnoted in my blog. Even though I have accepted my mother’s death, I am sure I will never be wholly over it.

I have spent less time talking about my father. Thankfully, my father is still among the living and in decent health for a man of 79. I am optimistic that his grandchildren and we his children will have him for many more good years. My father is always a delight to be with. He exudes healthiness and the joy of living. Now that my mother his gone, he is reveling in the pleasure of his retirement community, which keeps him happy and fully engaged. A naturally affable man, he is very much at home in his relatively new digs. He makes friends easily and rarely lacks for dinner companions. His social life has become so busy that I cannot always be worked into his schedule.

Having read a number of books on relationships and marriage dynamics, it becomes a bit easy to typecast my parents. My mother was the emotionally expressive side of the marriage. My father was its logical side. While my mother was emotionally expressive, she was also introverted. My father, logical as you would expect of someone who made engineering his profession, was the more extroverted. It made the dynamics of their marriage interesting.

Certainly, I was blessed with a wonderful mother. I am equally blessed with an outstanding father. Even with our jaundiced childish eyes, it was not too difficult to see that my mother had issues. However, it is almost impossible to find anything imperfect about our father. He is a tough act to follow. Each of my brothers and sisters (as well as myself) tries to emulate him in our own ways. I think we all understand that while we are all good people he has definitely won the Gold Medal. Maybe we can hope for a Bronze Medal out of life.

To enumerate his many good points is to in some way understate them. And though he seems surreal to describe, he is entirely real and fully human. My father is the perfect boy scout all grown up. Do you ex scouts remember your Boy Scout Oath? My father emulates it.

Trustworthy. With my father, you could give him a million dollars in cold, hard cash and be completely confident that he would not abscond with even a nickel of it. With how many people could you truly say that? Would you even trust your spouse with that kind of money? If my father had not been an engineer, he would have been natural fit as a banker. Customers would be lined up around the block.

Loyal. No one could doubt my father’s loyalty, and certainly not to my mother. He reeks of loyalty. While she doubtless drove him to distraction many times, he was endlessly and doggedly loyal to her. He cared for her until he was physically unable to lift her anymore. During her decline, he tended to her numerous and complex needs day and night for months on end. Total fidelity is a natural fit for him.

Helpful. He is wholly incapable of not helping a stranger in need. During my mother’s sad decline in the nursing home, he chatted up and lifted the spirits of everyone at her table. He tutored one of the nurse’s aides working there in math in his spare time. Heck, I still do not understand how he tutored each one of us children in so many life skills. He had eight children and he taught all eight of us to drive. Moreover, he is an excellent teacher. I cannot shift lanes without signaling. By instinct I leave at least ten feet between me and the car ahead of me for every ten miles an hour that I am driving. Yet driving is just one of numerous and time consuming skills he helped us master from tying our shoes to learning how to tie a necktie.

Friendly. The best way to imagine my father is to think Mr. Rogers. No, really. That’s him, except for the cardigan sweater. He prefers flannel checkered shirts. My Dad is uniformly friendly with everyone he meets. His friendliness is utterly sincere and totally innocuous. Wherever he lived, he was the block’s Mr. Wilson. Unlike Mr. Wilson, he welcomed attention from children. They were drawn to him like moths to a flame. You expected him to fix the bikes of neighborhood kids. Like us, they came to watch him at his workbench, but what they really came for was to talk to a man who would listen to them sincerely and with an open heart.

Courteous. Complements are second nature to my father, yet every complement is completely sincere. No meal is too ordinary not to be mentioned for praise. He looks for the best in everyone. Any old lady trying to cross the street had a ready and unsolicited volunteer.

Kind. My father goes out of his way to help people. He is uniformly sympathetic, humane, tolerant, generous and liberal with his time and energy. When he lived in Midland, he usually spent a day a week driving older people to and from their various medical appointments.

Obedient. My Dad is one of an achingly small number of people who scrupulously obeys the speed limit and all the traffic laws. A deeply religious man, he follows the Catholic Church’s commandments to the letter.

Cheerful. There are people who have learned to fake cheerfulness. With my father, no faking is necessary. He is the original Good Humor Man. That is not to say that he is always happy. Dealing with my mother’s decline was very stressful. Occasional stress fissures could be seen in his personality. Nevertheless, he is never deliberately mean. It takes huge painful events to strip away his cheerfulness, but they rarely lasted for long. Cheerfulness bubbles out of him irrepressibly.

Thrifty. My Dad always lived within his means. He was not a tightwad, but he lived prudently, almost frugally, taking only what he needed. He is the type to save old screws or wires in case he might need them later. He never carried a credit card debt. He had one auto loan in his life and so disliked the feeling of being in debt that he saved up and paid cash for all his other cars. He is not a man impressed with status nor felt the desire for lavish things. Suits off the rack at Sears were plenty fancy for him.

Brave. At the start of his marriage, he helped manage his new mother in law, who was suffering from a debilitating mental illness. He did this while managing an infant and holding down a full time job as the sole breadwinner. At the end of his marriage, he dealt adroitly with my mother’s many difficult issues, while consistently attending to her varied needs around the clock. In the nursing home, he visited her twice a day like clockwork.

Clean. Dad is always gentlemanly and never lascivious. The engineer in him would no more tolerate a smelly body than he would a poorly designed circuit.

Reverent. My father’s faith in God is simple and almost feels naïve. Attending mass weekly is a given, and he will gladly attend more often if the opportunity presents itself. He is utterly sincere in his religion. We were all raised to be good and devout Catholics. It is a mystery why with him for an example so few of us did not follow his chosen faith.

With my mother’s death, I now realize the time we have left together is limited. Each remaining visit feels both special and blessed. I am grateful beyond words to have this man for my father. I feel privileged to have him in my life, still puttering around, smiling so sincerely, generous with the complements and utterly in love with life.

January 10th, 2006 at 10:08pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | one comment

Needed: A Leave Sharing Law for All

When it comes to giving employees time off, American employers are way behind the rest of the industrial world. American employers are not required to give employees any vacation. When I worked for Montgomery Ward I was entitled to a week of vacation a year. Considering how little they paid me I was amazed they gave me any time off with pay at all. At least it didn’t cost them much.

The de facto minimum vacation for full time salaried workers in the United States these days is two weeks. Some employers force employees to draw from a block of leave to be used for both sickness and vacation. Longer-term employees usually get three weeks of vacation a year. But from inquiring my friends I have found that it is pretty unusual for any private sector employee to accrue much more than three weeks of vacation a year these days. Non-profit and educational organizations are often the exception.

Other countries are much more progressive than the United States. Argentina, hardly one of the top industrial economies, mandates a minimum of two weeks of vacation for each employee. The European Union requires at least four weeks of vacation, but it is often more depending on the country. For example, France requires at minimum of five weeks of vacation. Spain requires at least thirty calendar days of vacation a year.

Federal employees like myself have what now seems to be very generous leave policies. During the first three years of employment you earn four hours of leave every two weeks, which translates to about two and a half weeks of vacation a year. From years four through fifteen you earn six hours a pay period, or close to four weeks a year. If you hang in beyond fifteen years you earn European levels of vacation: eight hours a pay period. This is a bit over five weeks of vacation a year. But federal employees also earn sick leave: four hours every two weeks. Unused sick leave accrues from year to year. Because of my accrued sick leave from over twenty years in the civil service I am well prepared financially for a long-term medical problem.

However not all civil servants are so fortunate. I have an employee who is dealing with major medical issues in his family. The situation is unlikely to improve in the short term. Not surprisingly he has exhausted all of his sick and annual leave, yet still he has to provide care to his very sick wife and manage his children. Fortunately the Family and Medical Leave Act allows him to keep his job while he take care of his family. But for most employees this would also mean his income would also stop.

Fortunately the federal government goes the extra mile and offers civil servants leave sharing. Basically it allows employees who are dealing with major life crises and have exhausted all of their leave to petition their colleagues for help. Those coworkers who choose can give the employee some of their leave.

This is one of those progressive and painless ideas that should be law. In our increasingly expensive world many people are living closer to the margins. Such is the case with my employee who bought his first house only a few years ago. He has just started building assets. I encouraged him to apply for leave sharing and he eventually agreed. While there is no guarantee that other employees will donate their leave, he is well known and respected so he is already getting significant donations. And unfortunately he will need it and more. I am hopeful that the many generous employees where I work will keep contributing their leave to him until his crisis has finally passed.

Leave sharing in the federal government is not automatic. A physician must document the need. The employee must apply for it. And the employee’s supervisor has the right to reject his request. Of course few supervisors are so heartless. The leave can only be used to deal with the care he needs for himself or his family.

What leave sharing amounts to is a fairly painless way for someone dealing with major family problems to keep their financial head above water. Even with leave sharing financial solvency is no guarantee. Major medical issues often bring hospitalization and other costs that can leave an employee deeply in debt or even in bankruptcy. But having a steady income coming in during the emergency and the promise of a job when the crisis is over can be a godsend.

I had one coworker who donated his leave to my employee immediately. He told me that a few years ago he had major back problems. They had him immobilized for many months. He burned through all his leave too, even though he had plenty of it. He too had the leave sharing option and fortunately his coworkers came through for him too. He told me he would have become bankrupt now without it. Now that he is in a position to return the favor and he does so gladly. “I donated some of my hours,” he told me. “And I will give him more leave if he needs it.” I agree. And so will I.

Not surprisingly, leave sharing was not an idea that came out of a Republican administration. Rather it was an initiative of President Clinton. It was an outgrowth of the Family and Medical Leave Act, passed into law by a Democratic Congress back in 1993. The following year Clinton issued regulations that created the federal leave sharing program. At the time of course there were the usual blathering that the FMLA would leave the United States less competitive. Happily twelve years later the skeptics have been proven wrong. The public has warmly embraced FMLA. Those employees who work for progressive employers that offer leave sharing have even more for which to be grateful.

I hope some future (and doubtless more progressive) Congress passes a universal leave sharing law. It is really a no-brainer. By keeping many people out of bankruptcy, it is good for the nation’s creditors. It saves the government money by keeping many of these people off welfare roles or from drawing food stamps. And in fact it really doesn’t cost employers anything. Leave costs just shuffle from one employee to another. It usually saves employees money because long term employees are more likely to have leave to donate, and they tend to cost employers more money. But most importantly leave sharing can be an enormous source of comfort for people who already have their hands full dealing with tremendously challenging personal problems.

June 30th, 2005 at 08:50pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2005 | no comments

Is too much freedom unhealthy?

Perhaps it is the recent death of Pope John Paul and his firm, never varying approach to morality that has me thinking. Or perhaps it is that our daughter, failing in a number of classes in school, is now getting the service of a life coach to try to get her life organized in a way so she can actually succeed. But I’m beginning to wonder if too much freedom for an adolescent is a bad thing.

That’s not to suggest that our 15-year-old daughter can do whatever she wants. We have rules and she largely abides by them. It is true that we often get a load of snarkiness in return. But she is definitely not doing drugs, tobacco, alcohol or sex. She is not in trouble with the law. Like me she is wary of pretty much anything that might cause her to lose control of herself. At the moment her only crucial problem is her schoolwork. Bringing home consistent D’s and F’s in subjects she doesn’t care about (currently Algebra, Chemistry and World History) — and largely because she can’t/won’t remember to either do/turn-in her homework — is her problem. It is one that we’ve been trying to solve since at least fourth grade. I won’t get into all the details of how we’ve tried and failed over and over again. (And yes, she’s been tested for ADD.) Let’s just say that busy public school teachers often don’t help in solving the problem. Our daughter is one of many they manage. They don’t usually have time to work with us week to week while we try to track assignments. It’s like trying to pin the tail on a donkey when you are in the other room. Now in high school her teachers are more inclined to laugh at us as we try to hold her accountable for their assignments than anything else. She was supposed to master that phase in Junior High. And yes we acknowledge our share of fault. We’ve tried lots of different strategies with little success but after all we are her parents.

So our daughter often says she has done her homework when in fact she hasn’t and it is often impossible to know for sure. What I do know is that she can find plenty of far more interesting things to do than homework and studying. Principally, like many teens, her social life is now online. Most of her online friends are also people she knows from school. IMing and downloading music seem to be favorite activities.

Things were simpler when I was growing up. I know instinctively that if a tool like the Internet had been available to me I probably would have been lured by it in deference to doing boring things like studying for an upcoming exam. Particularly if I found things on the Internet I really liked my grades would have suffered.

Even back in the 1960s though my parents had some pretty old-fashioned ideas. These are ideas that now in hindsight seem pretty smart. For example, they limited our TV watching to one hour a night if we had school the next day. Oh, how we hollered! But on the other hand with our list of choices tightly constrained it was a lot easier to spend our free time reading books than watching Star Trek.

But there was a downside to all that discipline. We felt very much under their thumbs and chafed at it. Probably most teenagers would do the same regardless of the degree of discipline imposed. But it seemed pretty heavy handed to us at the time because naturally all our friends got to watch all the TV they wanted. We were considered freaks and our parents just didn’t care!

On the other hand, our family really succeeded. I didn’t do a scientific study of where all our friends are today. But I will note in a family with eight children we have three with PhDs and three with Masters degrees.

But we are told that freedom is a virtue. George W. Bush unilaterally invaded a foreign country to liberate people. If freedom is good then by implication choice is good too. And how can people know what they want in life if they don’t have the freedom to try various things and see what fits?

So that is sort of the philosophy that we brought to our own parenting experience. Admittedly I am more inclined toward limiting freedom with my daughter than is my wife. Her experience growing up was a lot different. Her mother was a hands off mother. My wife was naturally intelligent. She never worked very hard at her studies but she consistently brought home A’s. So over time we groped toward a spot in the middle of our philosophies. It became something like this: if our daughter’s homework was done then she was free to spend as much time as she wanted pursuing her interests, providing they were neither dangerous nor illegal.

I would like to think that our mixed experience was one of a kind. But talking with fellow parents who are using similar tactics I find that their experiences are quite similar. Of course there are some children who naturally embrace learning. But there are also lots of children like my daughter who are intensely interested in those subjects they like, but cannot find the wherewithal to pay attention and excel in those subjects they don’t care about.

In my spare time I teach a course in Web Page Design at a local community college. Maybe it is just community college students, or maybe it is a pervasive trend, but my younger students in general just don’t seem willing to invest the time and energy it takes to succeed in the class either. The odds improve for those who are foreign born. Orientals and Indians in particular seem to have the educational ethic. But about a third of the class will withdraw or switch to audit when they discover the class requires real study. Others will skip lots of classes. Like my daughter they will be scattershot about turning in homework, even though they get credit for turning it in. When it comes time for exams, it is clear that about half the class never bothered to study. Since I always review for exams you would think they would at least take notes during the review. But mostly they sit there without taking notes. Some of them zone me out.

It takes discipline to focus on that which doesn’t particularly interest you. I am afraid we’ve filled up the lives of our children with too many potential distractions. The aggregate seems to be a sort of addiction. From their perspective instant gratification online is a powerful allure. Things can always be put off until tomorrow.

And yet we also live in a frighteningly more complex world. Some of the skills that children learn today, such as multitasking, may be very valuable in the 21st century workforce. But these skills are only as good as their ability to maintain focus on a task. I don’t see a lot of that happening in today’s youth. I think my daughter is a case in point.

Perhaps that’s why I shudder when I imagine my daughter in the real world. To her life is a la carte.

I wonder if I should have sent her to parochial school. Maybe she would have gotten a heaping portion of Catholic guilt like I got. But likely she would be better prepared to survive in the real world than she is now. There is still time to learn these lessons before the real world delivers them unwelcome on her doorstep. Will she, like so many of my students, just get by? Or will she find the right stuff within her at last to compete effectively in the world?

Right now I don’t want to know the answer.

April 4th, 2005 at 10:01pm Posted by Mark | Philosophy | no comments