Occam's Razor

She took her final exam today, the very last exam for her very last class in a journey that consumed five years (two in community college) and three at Virginia Commonwealth University. “She” would be my daughter, age 23, who now merely needs to wait for the mail to get her diploma for a bachelor’s degree in English. Despite some prodding, she doesn’t want to attend her own graduation.

Which means she is mostly home now and we will continue to pay the rent on what will likely be her empty room in Richmond through the end of July. She needs to find a job but if her experience is like mine it may be a year or two before she finds a “real” job, assuming there are real jobs for people with English degrees. There are a few of them out there, and I am not talking about “do you want fries with that” jobs at the local Burger King. A real job for a while though might be working at a Costco or Wegmans, where they pay a living wage, which would be great because I don’t want her to get too attached to her old bedroom. Rather, it’s time for her to move out once and for all.

It’s hard to say how long that will take but I’ll lay odds somehow a year from now she will still be inhabiting her bedroom. Young adults today are painfully aware of the true cost of living, which is much higher than it was when I was a youth. This may be because so many things are assumed: the car, the smartphone, health insurance, high speed Internet and they are used to mom and dad paying for them. I don’t care if $12 an hour really is a living wage these days; that probably won’t buy you all of the above, even with a roommate or two.

What she wants to do is goof off, sleep late, stay up all night and when not distracted by things on the Internet write the great novel that probably won’t get sold, at least not without a whole lot more pain and suffering. Fortunately she is a bit more realistic now and is sending out random resumes, which suggests intent to find a job but not necessarily serious commitment. She could live a lot cheaper, assuming she lived alone, by settling in Richmond where she just finished her degree. But the jobs would pay a lot less and she seems happy to be home on a more or less full time basis. She actually cleaned her room and removed heaps of trash off her desk the other day. Either she is trying to get her life in order or she is planning to start a new burrow. Time will tell.

We’ve suggested some employers that might hire English majors. A friend at my church works for Motley Fool, and they hire English majors. Except she knows nothing about personal finance other than living on our money and making her allowance stretch until the end of the month. She wants to learn less, although I have provided a couple books on personal finance as a “gift”. The headquarters of Learning Tree in nearby Reston is near us. They teach mostly leading edge technology courses to people whose employers have deep pockets. They need people to write content for their web pages and course curriculum. And I have another friend whose office is always willing to hire college graduates, providing they want to learn the business of making specialized contact lenses. She worked there briefly out of high school and found it didn’t agree with her. I doubt she would want to give it another try.

Still, it is an accomplishment having a degree of any kind, and getting a degree in English is more interesting than it seems. She wrote a thesis on arguably the world’s worst English poet, William McGonagall. She learned a lot about Old English, and obscure Scottish literature. She interned at a Richmond publishing house and worked with female prisoners at a local jail teaching creative writing. Mainly she had the university experience, such as it is today, minus the fun stuff like sororities. She is not social enough for that stuff. She had the usual mixture of brilliant and mediocre professors, ate in the dining halls, learned that parking tickets cost real money, and that you can have really crappy roommates.

We learned that college education today is very expensive. Once we entertained the idea that, as parents with one child, we could send her to a private university. What a crazy idea! Her bachelor’s degree took a year longer than we budgeted. We paid for two cars, only because she wrecked the first one driving home with a homeless kitten. The expenses added up quickly. The nearly final total according to Quicken:  $116,238.05, or $36,238.05 more than the $80,000 I thought we were going to spend. And these are just the direct costs. It’s amazing anyone can afford to get any kind of degree these days. At least she graduates debt free. We were her scholarship fund.

Parenting is not over. Now comes the coaching phase, followed by the nagging and heaping on the guilt phase if necessary. The job hunting is still poor, and bad in particular for English majors with lackluster GPAs. At least here in Northern Virginia the unemployment rate is relatively low, but the mere hassle of commuting around here will probably ensure that she calls someplace far away from here home eventually.

A new adventure called real life awaits her. “What’s it like, dad?” she asked me some weeks ago. “Well, it’s not a lot of fun. But you get used to it.” And really, that’s about the most honest thing you can say about adulthood. I wish you the best, kid, but it’s time for you to cut the apron strings and fully direct your own life. Hopefully, we gave you enough of the tools to make your life meaningful but for the most part the rest will be up to you.

There are children that are a chip off the old block, and then there is my daughter. Physically she has many of the attributes of her father (me). She tends toward being tall, with bigger feet and the proud Roman/English nose sported by my side of the family. However, she has never seemed to take after her dear old dad. Her room and car are usually a mess. Whereas I put my dirty dishes in the dishwasher and clean the kitchen counters after a meal, the best I can hope for is that she washes a pan or two and her plate and silverware end up at the bottom of the sink. Whereas I spend my leisure time reading news online or various political blogs, she is reading reddit.com and LOL Cats. If she shares interests in common with a parent, they seemed to be my wife’s, who is also looking at LOL Cats. My daughter likes most of the same TV shows my wife does. That is because my wife introduced her to them.

But lately there have been some weird signs from daughter-land. The other day I heard the theme music from the TV Series The West Wing emanating from her laptop computer. “Hey Dad! Guess what? I am on Season 1 of The West Wing!” she exclaimed. “And I really like it!” This got us into a deep fan discussion. Who is her favorite character? What episode does she like the best? When she got to the famous Christmas episode in Season 1, perhaps the best show in its entire seven seasons, she was crying at the end, just like me.

All this may have something to do with the fact that she is 23 now, and on the cusp of graduating from her interminably long quest to complete a bachelor’s degree. I was hoping her degree might be in engineering, like her father, but it’s in English. However, in retrospect, maybe she takes after her father here too. My bachelor’s degree was in communications. It wasn’t until the 1990s after ten years of doing IT work that I got a masters degree in engineering like my father.

My daughter and I are both creative writers, as evidenced in me by nearly ten years of writing this blog, and evidenced by her in various stories, none of which have yet been published. But just as I had (for a brief time anyhow) a literary agent about the time I graduated, she has one already, and her agent is reviewing her novel. It may suffer the same fate as my attempts to sell fiction did, but maybe not. For one thing, she is a better writer than I am. Her dream of making a living from writing fiction just might be realized. She promises her mother and I a chalet in Switzerland when she hits the big time, like JK Rowling. Meanwhile, of course, we subsidize her modest lifestyle, which includes tuition at a state university, her rent, her car and her living expenses. She dreams of an apartment and a cat of her own. Right now she has roommates.

Her interest in The West Wing truly surprised me, but it should not have. This is because she has become a politically active creature, just like me. She has not joined the Young Democrats or anything, but she did make a point to vote this year, to the extent that she drove home from Richmond to make sure her vote was cast. She is passionate about gay marriage, health care for all, and most issues of concern to liberal Democrats like me. Of course, her mother is as well. So she gets that from both of us. But my wife will largely ignore the front pages of newspapers. She is delving into the details of current political issues, albeit via reddit.com rather than The Washington Post.

Most surprising of all is her new interest in classical music. Four years ago we took our last family vacation to New England. One night we ended up at Tanglewood to hear the Boston Symphony. It was the first time she had been to a classical music concert. She hated it. Her eyes rolled toward the heavens and could not wait to leave. At university however she is enrolled in a music appreciation course, and has been studying composers even I have not dabbled into, like Bedrich Smetana. However, even before her music appreciation course, she had been online downloading classical music. Maybe she took up my suggestion that it facilitates studying, since there are not usually any lyrics to distract you. I find that we are getting into rather deep conversations about classical music composers and their strengths and weaknesses. I am astounded by how quickly she is mastering this genre. For example, we can contrast Beethoven’s influence on artists like Brahms and Wagner. A couple of weeks ago she even joined us for a concert by the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra, in part because her class required going to a live performance.

For a girl who rarely got A’s in school, we were often frustrated that her natural intelligence rarely translated into high grades. I still have no idea what kind of grades she is getting, but I do see evidence that her natural intelligence is coming out. I see it in her writing, in our conversations, in her term papers, in her ability to handle complex reasoning and exercise critical thinking. In this sense she is more like her mother. She picks up knowledge more indirectly than through studying, and most of it gets filed away for later use.

Her cautious nature may have come from me. Her friendships tend to be relatively few but deep. She mostly keeps her mouth shut in crowds but expounds at length in small groups. She tends to be firm in her opinions and can justify them at length.

On the cusp (we hope) of surviving independently, I still hope that she will embrace financial prudence. So far there is little sign that she will, but I do think it is getting observed and perhaps filed away for future use. She seems to be aware that her education is not just chance, but involved a great deal of planning, mostly by me. The one course she never got, and which is not even required in either school or college, is financial literacy. Trying to engage her on the topic usually leads to rolled eyes. Soon as she tries to make her income as an English major cover her life’s expenses she will have no choice. Toward that end she will find a couple of books under the Christmas tree on financial literacy that might help her. I’m not sure whether she will take the time to read them, but I am hopeful that she will.

Overall, I find myself warming to her more as an adult than I did as a child. I have always loved her of course, but she rarely seemed a person that I could relate to. More recently I am seeing that there is far more of me in her than I suspected, and it is mostly (I hope) the good stuff. I hope it rubs off. Life is far more complicated for her generation than for mine, and she will likely need every bit of her wits and her intelligence to thrive in this resource-competitive 21^st century. Maybe I am guilty of wishful thinking, but I think that she eventually will. In time, I expect that I will learn some new tricks from lessons that she will teach me.

The carpet in the lobby may be stained, and I may have had to wait twenty minutes for the truck to actually arrive, but the rental price was right. The Budget truck started well and drove smoothly, but with nothing in its cargo bed, any minor perturbation on the payment made the cargo hold rattle and my teeth grate. Happily, once the 10-foot truck was loaded with cargo, and with our GPS moving me southward toward Richmond, the rattling ceased.

If only I could say the same for the signals coming from my bladder. Loading the truck largely by myself was hot and sweaty work. I kept drinking glasses of water to quench my thirst, but on the two plus hour trip to Richmond, it all decided to come out, requiring frequent pit stops. While my wife and daughter sailed ahead in our daughter’s Honda, I ended up spending time at places like a Virginia Welcome Center on I-95 instead. At least I got to park in the truck lane for a change.

The truck’s cigarette lighter apparently wasn’t working, so the GPS was running on its battery. As I approached Richmond, it warned me of its low battery. I turned it off and followed signs. Once fully downtown I turned it back on and hoped it had enough juice to get me to the townhouse on West Marshall Street where my college bound daughter was to take up residence. I made it just barely. My wife accidentally left her cell phone at home, and I hadn’t written the address down elsewhere. Whew!

My wife and daughter were waving at me from down the street; I went too far and had to double back. Richmond doesn’t believe in many two way streets, so there was some jockeying and red lights to deal with before I parked the truck in front of my daughter’s new abode. Two young men, her new roommates, were ready to greet me and to help haul her stuff inside.

I was nervous about my daughter rooming with guys, but I shouldn’t have been. Mark prefers to spend most of his time in his room with the door shut. Occasionally you can hear his dog yapping and scampering through the floorboards. David was genuinely glad to see Rosie. They got along when first introduced the month before, and I knew he was safe because he was the son of a friend of my wife’s from work. Both seemed impossibly young (did I look so young when I was 21?), but David was a bit on the scruffy side. Both were quiet types, which meant this parent didn’t have to worry about loud boozy parties and drugs from the residents of this house.

Boxes were unloaded, torn open and in many cases their innards were assembled into things resembling furniture: a sort of a desk, steel shelving that would also act as something of a room divider (since my daughter got part of a large living room for her “bedroom”), and something to go behind the loo to hold toiletries. There was also a bed frame to assemble, a foundation encased in plastic and large plastic containers full of the accoutrements of living. Walling off the living room violated the rental agreement, but we were allowed to put a pole across the width of the room, some eleven feet, to provide some semblance of privacy for our daughter. This required some innovative amateur engineering. The steel shelves provided some privacy and storage space. Two long PVC pipes held together with a pipe connector had to be carefully cut, lowered into place and held level with a rope connected to a ceiling hook. Black sheets stitched together with a needles and thread went over these low-tech curtain rods, providing a virtual wall. Eventually the boxes were disposed of, the floor was vacuumed and our nearly twenty one year old daughter tried to settle into her first new bedroom in more than seventeen years.

A few blocks away is her real destination: Virginia Commonwealth University. Her townhouse and neighborhood turned out to be in better shape than I anticipated, given my exposure to too much substandard campus housing. The kitchen looked nearly new. The neighborhood was full of townhouses, most of which were rented by fellow students. However, turn the corner and there is a rougher looking commercial neighborhood. Turn onto Broad Street and you find more than a few scruffy homeless types smiling nicely while begging for spare change.

The sun was steadily sinking when we finished. Before leaving, we made time for a last supper of sorts. Bringing David along, we found a local pizza joint. It had Formica-topped tables and a counter where food was ordered. We ate greasy pizzas and chatted. Over dinner, our daughter’s parents (me being one of them) expressed our nervous worries in a seemingly endless series of nags and reminders, while David smiled and remarked how familiar it all seemed to him.

With dinner beginning to digest, we were back at her new townhouse and giving her hugs goodbye. We took deep breaths and started the engine of our rental truck. As we left, we watched her through the front window of the townhouse. David was already chatting with her, easing her nervousness. David, we could tell, was a good young man. He would find a way to take her gently under his wing, but as a peer, not an authority figure. David, we could see, was her bridge into the next phase of her life.

It was hard not to reflect and fret a little as we drove back north on I-95 to Northern Virginia. Speaking of fretting, our cat Arthur was not happy to be left alone all day. He stared at the door waiting for Rosie to come in. We let him sit on our lap and talked to him, but he seemed to know that his well-ordered world had been disturbed too. To bring some predictability to his life, he went back and sat on his special spot on the living room carpet. Wearily I returned the rental truck to a dark rental lot, putting nearly $50 in gas in it and dropping the keys in its after hours box.

Before bed, a shower was required, no matter how tired I was. I was returning to something that used to be normal: a house where the lights went off when we went to bed and where our daughter naturally fell asleep when we tucked her in. It felt momentarily weird, then gratefully normal.

Each day since we moved her in on Monday, we have fretted a bit about her. We have checked up on her on occasion with an email, but we are also feeling more settled ourselves in our new empty nest. For the truth about childrearing is that if you love them, at some point you have to send them packing. We did, with a lot of love, some stifled tears and great gobs of money.

The house is definitely quieter, and we will treasure those weekend and semester breaks when our daughter deigns to visit us. Nevertheless, we will also be appreciative to have our own couple space again. For the truth is that no matter how much you love your children, you don’t own them. At best, you only rent them. The rent is very high, and the work to raise them is often hectic and at times overwhelming. You know you won’t have turned out a perfect young adult, but perhaps on reflection you can say you did pretty well. You realize, it’s okay to have this loved, cherished and sometimes annoying person spend a couple decades with you and then let them go. It may feel more traumatic than natural, but it is natural.

The parenting role is never entirely over, but a transition is underway which is ultimately good for both parent and offspring. It is as it should be. The new silence in our house is a bit peculiar, but it feels sort of welcoming and well deserved.

I plan to sleep in very late on Saturday.

Polls indicate that a majority of Americans believe the word “marriage” should be reserved for a legal covenant between two people of opposite sexes only. Curiously, polls also show a majority of Americans are comfortable with two same sex partners having all the privileges of marriage as long as they don’t call it marriage. What is the difference anyhow?

As best I can figure out, same sex couples figure the difference is like having “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites. Calling a legal relationship a different name when it is the same in every other way but the sex of the participants in their eyes suggests that their relationship is not as worthy of sanction as those between two people of opposite sexes. It’s like getting a silver medal when you earned the gold. For many heterosexuals, I think what really makes “marriage” a special word is that traditional marriages come with the potential of parenthood and this is special enough to make the distinction unique.

Not any more, obviously. My wife is a friend of a lesbian couple and one of the wives is pregnant. Naturally, she did not invite a male to have intercourse with her; a willing donor provided semen, which she obtained from her local sperm bank. Most kids get only one mother. This one will have two, which is twice as much of a blessing, I guess. What is noticeably absent though is the father. Does the absence of a father deprive the child of something important? For that matter, does the absence of a mother also deprive the child of something important? Do two mothers equal one mother and one father? Do two fathers equal one mother and one father?

These were questions I didn’t know I was struggling with until last night. After our traditional Thanksgiving Dinner featuring a potpourri of friends and family, the topic of two same sex parents came up. At our table were many of my wife’s friends from the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. I was washing dishes and minding my own business but listening to their conversation. As it turns out, I am perfectly okay with gay marriage. I think any two people of legal age who want to get married should have the privilege. They can have “I’m married” stamped on their foreheads if they want to and I would have no problem calling them Mrs. and Mrs. Jones or Mr. And Mr. Smith. Where I have some hesitation is when it comes to two people of the same sex raising their own children together. Is it a good or a bad idea?

Before I knew it, I had joined the conversation and stated an opinion that for me seemed almost right wing. Since the topic was in the context of two women, I said I thought the presence of a strong father figure was important for raising a healthy child. The same is true with a mother, of course. As proof, I pointed to the District of Columbia where black fathers living at home are almost an extinct species. Single mothers are raising the vast majority of black children in D.C., sometimes with the assistance of their grandmothers because the fathers long ago abandoned the mother. In D.C., a black child is lucky to see his real father on occasion, and even luckier if he is actually providing child support. Many of these youth have no idea who their father is, or if they do, their only memory of him is a distant one.

What is the impact of being nurtured without a strong father figure? Arguably, at least in D.C., it is devastating. How many of these youths who are currently doing drugs and getting involved in gangs would be doing so if they had a father in the household? It is hard to say for sure because I doubt there is much clinical research. I do think it is reasonable to assume that the incidence would be much lower.

I have not had the privilege of having a son, but I do have a daughter. I do know there are plenty of studies that suggest the presence of a strong father figure is a critical factor among those girls who grow into leadership roles as adults. I am not entirely sure how much of my daughter was shaped by my presence and nurturing these last twenty years, but it must be a large amount. How could it not? How would my daughter be different if my wife had been a lesbian instead, had been in a gay marriage, had been artificially inseminated and raised her with her loving partner of the same sex? Would something important be missing from my daughter as a result? Perhaps I overvalue my role as a father, but my guts says yes: a good father is necessary in raising happy and healthy children of any gender, as just as it is important for a child to also have a nurturing mother.

Obviously there are many bad marriages out there. There is no guarantee when two people get married and have babies that they will have the right stuff to raise their children into healthy, sane and productive adults. My suspicion is that children raised in dysfunctional marriages are probably healthier without that stress. With roughly half of marriages dissolving, one would have to assume the odds for children in traditional marriages are at best 50/50. Many, many factors influence children throughout childhood and adolescence, but it would seem obvious that parents are their primary influences. The health of the marital relationship should correlate closely to the likelihood of raising mentally healthy and fully functional children. That seems to be true on my block, where I spent the last sixteen years. The adult children who are now doing best tend to be from families with strong and nurturing parents. The struggling children seem to be from those that were rife with marital discord.

Like it or not, children will inculcate behavior modeled by their parents. My question: is there is something critical about having parents of the opposite sex to raising healthy children? Today, gay and lesbian couples no longer have to feel like parenting is off limits to them. What we do not really understand yet is what the long-term effects of children being raised by same sex couples will be. A correlation is made harder because there are so many bad traditional marriages out there too. It appears that even though I have some concerns that children raised by same sex couples may be missing something important (although I am not entirely sure what it is) it is happening nonetheless, and social scientists over the coming decades will have an opportunity to study its effects.

It could be that a child is raised by two people of the same sex will do just fine if both are positive and nurturing influences in their lives. They may grow up to be more tolerant people than they otherwise would be, which sounds like a good thing. Sons though may need to observe and pick up crucial male bonding behaviors from their fathers. It may be that the absence of this factor makes them less functional in society compared with others raised in traditional marriages. The problem is less acute for girls, since the number of men in gay marriages raising girls is much smaller.

I do know that in the District of Columbia, we seem to be raising an angry and dysfunctional generation of young men and women. There may be many factors causing this horrendous outcome, and poverty is certainly one factor, but the lack of strong and healthy male authority figures in these households is obvious. The problems in these communities were not nearly as bad when there were more intact marriages among African Americans. To me it seems reasonable to infer that if this can happen among African Americans, it can happen within any ethnic community.

The example in D.C. suggests to me that when it comes to parenting, we should proceed with caution. Our children should not necessarily become victims of a vast social experiment because newly liberated gay and lesbian couples also want to raise their own biological children. We do not fully understand the nature of nurturing, but I strongly suspect is not solely a feminine or a masculine thing. The masculine element exhibited in the role of a father seems to also be critical, for both boys and girls.

The cry to save the word “marriage” may at its root be nothing more than an inchoate feeling among many of us that we are playing with dynamite. The lessons in D.C. and many inner city communities ought to be red flags for us to think through the consequences of our actions before plunging headlong into them.

According to recent polls, more than a third of parents say they are unlikely to have their children vaccinated against the H1N1 (Swine) flu, which is now raging across the United States. This news comes despite other polls where fully three quarters of Americans agree this flu is a serious national health problem.

As a parent, I have to shake my head. These parents are either wacked out, dreadfully misinformed or simply don’t give a damn about their children’s health. I will go with the assumption that most parents love their children, so I will assume most fall into the “dreadfully misinformed” category. Who knows what paranoid fantasies these parents are conjuring up about this shot? Perhaps they are thinking their kid will be like that 14-year old girl in England who died after getting vaccination for the HPV virus. They might have missed the evidence that her death was wholly unrelated to the vaccination. Or maybe these parents are just paranoid tea-baggers, convinced that the government is intent on killing their kids. This may be a sizeable crowd but I would still have to lump these into the “wacked out” category.

Some others may have heard that you can catch the flu from getting a flu shot. Now this is possible, though unlikely. You are only at risk if you opt for the nasal spray rather than an injection. To work, the nasal spray must use a live (but mutated) virus. It is unlikely you will notice anything, but if you do, you are most likely to get mild cold symptoms. On the other hand, it could also be that you just happened to contract some other flu or cold at the same time.

However, if you get the flu shot in your arm, you will be injected with a dead virus, which means there is no possible way it could give you the flu. Nor can it happen to your children. They may not like the momentary sting of the injection but that is a silly excuse not to get them a shot, and borders on child abuse.

What we do know is that H1N1 flu affects children and young adults disproportionately. They are much more likely to get it, and they are much more likely to have a more severe case than the rest of us. I have had two cases of it in the class I teach at a local community college, and in both cases, the student was out for more than a week. I know a few adults who have had H1N1 and they reported mild fevers and a quick recovery. It is believed that this is because the virus is similar to one that went around three decades ago, so they have a partial resistance. In any event, this flu is now definitely in the pandemic stage. It exists in most communities of any significant size. In many communities, hospitals are setting up triage tents outside the hospital to deal with the deluge of cases. It is expected to peak over the next month or so and then slowly taper off. The only real question is whether the flu will get to you before you can get the shot. That depends on your carefulness and how fast (or whether you choose) to avail yourself of a flu shot.

I have a good reason to delay getting a flu shot. Because I am middle aged, if I do contract it, it is likely to be mild for me. Although I hate the flu, I would be happy to let young adults, children, pregnant women and other highest-risk groups get their shot before me. (At 52, I have reached the age where I am at some risk of death from the flu, so an annual flu shot is recommended.) What I do know is that there is a shot available for every man, woman and child in the United States. It’s already paid for. If you get the shot from your local doctor or drug store they may charge you a small administrative fee, but it won’t be for the shot itself. They will receive it for free. If you are bothered by an administrative fee, assuming it is charged at all, make an appointment with a local public health clinic and get it free there instead.

There are other specious worries about this flu shot. For example, some worry that because it was manufactured outside the United States the quality control will be bad. This is not a problem. The FDA has a long established process of rigorously monitoring vaccine production. The vaccine is outsourced mainly because our drug companies say it’s not profitable enough for them to manufacture it. Frankly, you have a much higher likelihood of being hit by lightning than being the victim of a badly manufactured flu shot. I wish our food supply were as well regulated as our flu shots. We’d never have to worry about getting sick from E. coli or other nasty bugs.

Others simply trust to luck. They figure they won’t get it, so why get a shot? And if they are lucky, surely it must rub off on their kids too! The problem with this philosophy is that it is stupid. Just because you don’t get it this year doesn’t mean you won’t get it, or a variant of it, in the future. Moreover, flu shots help you build up a natural resistance to these and other common bugs. As I found out, the flu typically puts you out of commission for a week or so. In many cases, it also puts you in the hospital (and leaves you responsible for hefty hospital bills). In extreme cases, it can kill you. Ordinary influenzas kill about 20,000 Americans a year, or about 55 people a day. Through October 3^rd, the Centers for Disease Control reports 147 pediatric deaths from the flu, most attributable to the H1N1 virus. Are you willing to let your child be another victim when you can prevent it at no or little cost?

I already have scheduled my annual flu shot for next Thursday. Fortunately, my employer provides it free of charge at our convenient clinic. It makes sense for them to do so; this way I am more likely to stay productive. As soon as I can get a H1N1 flu shot without impacting those who need it more, I will get it as well.

Once upon a time, I was childless and stupid too. I trusted to luck until the flu took me out of commission for a week. When it did, I vowed if I could get a flu shot once a year, I would. Not only was the experience humbling and scary, it had a huge impact on my life. Not only did my work suffer, but many others had to pick up my slack while I was down. Not all influenzas are preventable but many are. Prevention requires mindfulness that to a virus you are no one special, just another host to breed baby viruses. If you can get the shot, be proactive and schedule it every year. Also, do common sense things like wash your hands regularly.

Of course, our precious children should not be allowed to opt out of the shot. They are supposed to be guided by loving and responsible parents. If the polls are right, at least where it comes to their children’s health, more than a third of America’s parents are being irresponsible.

Don’t let your kids or yourself be one of the statistics, dead or suffering pain needlessly when it is cheap, convenient and wholly preventable to avoid it. Get the whole family immunized. Perhaps you can do it all at the same time, so when your children become adults they will see the flu shot as an ordinary and important part of raising a healthy family.

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!”

I will be as discreet 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.

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. Your 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

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.

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.