License To Love

About License To Love

In the movie Parenthood, Keanu Reeves' character says of parenting, "You know, Mrs. Buckman, you need a license to buy a dog, to drive a car - hell, you even need a license to catch a fish. But they'll let any #$%$@#$%%! be a father."

I've always wondered why the only thing required to show that we are ready to take a new baby home is proof of an infant car seat.

Wow, we're pregnant!
Could I possibly get any fatter?
Push! Arrrrrrrggghhhhhh!
Congratulations! You have a baby boy/baby girl/squalling red alien/milk-sucking parasite/lifelong obsession!

Then, the rest is up to us. No license, no training, no degree, no residency require to operate a child.

The physical stuff is the easy part.  Any roob can learn what a new baby needs, because largely, if you do something to it and it makes a loud noise, it's not the right thing, so you try something else until the critter stops turning purple from screaming, and your ear drums move back into your head.  Even as the child ages and requires different things, you can figure out it's physical needs fairly easily. Change it, bathe it, hold it, feed it, keep it appropriately warm or cool. Daycare workers with very little education can take care of the physical needs of a child.

It's the more complex stuff that, unless we come from very deliberately raised families, we know little to nothing about.

When it comes to capturing the hearts of our children -- teaching them how to stay even-keeled, logical, loving, and training their minds to be disciplined and turned toward goodness  -- that's where most of us  need some training.  This does not come naturally to a lot of us, certainly not to me.  It requires patience, wisdom, and a view of the big picture that we may not even have. By the way, I am not claiming to know much.  I am just claiming to know a little bit more each year than I did the year before.

The truth is: there is no license to be had that entitles us to love a child, because you can't license something that grows from within, that takes so much deliberation, and care, and wisdom, even though you can develop "parenting skills." Good parenting is not just a measure of skills that you can pick up in a magazine or class, although they can help.  Nor is it a measure of education, or even intelligence. It is a measure of wisdom.  An eighth grade dropout can be a better parent than an Ivy League Ph.D. 

Raising up a child right requires constant vigilance as to the state of the child's heart, and a willingness to go deeper into the finer points of parenting, such as discovering what lights your child's fire, and then supporting her in keeping it lit. All children are different, and siblings often have subtle differences in needs.

Is he more sensitive than his sister? If so, you need to be more gentle with jokes and teasing, or tease in a different way, or model gentle teasing so he can see it is okay.

Is she too serious and gets bogged down with her struggles instead of seeing the joy in life?  Then you need to model joy, and find a way to lead her down the path to it.

Or is she bent on playing all the time? If so, you recognize that she may learn best during play, and help her set some goals and work/play ratio guidelines, without simply nagging and ridiculing her to be someone who she isn't.

Is he shy? Then you need to know when to push him forward and when to recognize that the social thing he did just required herculean effort on his part.  You also need to recognize when you are coddling his shyness and not let it turn in to an excuse for bad behavior.

Does he like argumentation, debate and discourse?  He may have a natural instinct to ask "why" when you require something of him, without intending to be a brat.  As soon as you are sure he will do what you ask without questioning him, and he isn't challenging you, you may adapt your parenting to include after-the-fact discussions of "why" that his siblings may not even be interested in.

Parenting to keep the hearts of your children "simply" requires constant tweaking, assessment, reassessment, and for those of us who do it, prayer. You don't need to raise perfect children.
You don't need a soccer star, or valedictorian, or varsity quarterback, or even a child who goes on to college.  You just need to raise a child who is better than you, who more often than not, thinks about the impact of his actions on others, who inspires others, and who lives a life spreading love, not hate.

Easy, right?

A Real Pain in the Neck

Last week I experienced the most recent in a series of terribly painful  neck episodes, whereby I could not sleep without narcotics, drive a car safely, get up from a lying position without cradling my head, or carry on a civil conversation for the better part of a week.  When I get like this, I have an almost constant need to talk about my pain. See?

I was popping Darvocet whenever I didn't have to operate an automobile, alternately chuckling like a monkey and weeping during inferior television shows,  living with either an ice pack or heat pack on my neck at all times, and wishing my children would go away and ask somebody else the infinity + n number of questions they ask during the course of a day. If I could have moved fast enough, I may have even been led to kick the dog.

Darvocet is not my drug of choice.  My drug of choice is a fat bout of exercise, but you can't really exercise when simply waking up makes you want to cry. Due to biopsies taken from an endoscopy and colonoscopy the previous week that left vague  parts of my guts a little bit raw and bloody, I was only allowed to non-aspirin products, so it was Darvocet or nothing. (*I know -- it sounds like I am falling apart, but it's actually a long story and I have promised people who know me to never mention "gluten" in my blog, so I won't mention my own Adventures in Endoscopic Theater. Also, no one can ever write about getting scoped better than Dave Barry.)

But, back to the Darvocet. Darvocet reveals to me the house gnomes that  live in the darker corners of our home, and also lets me see music even better than I used to see it as a child.  Plus  I dream about famous people when I take  Darvocet, and the whole next day after one of those chalky little suckers, I feel like I am floating about an inch off of the floor. It also provides the added insight of letting me understand how the English language sounds to someone who does not speak it.

I must not take Darvocet unless someone else is home to help with the children.

So, for the first time in several years of putting up with it, I addressed the Neck Thing, partly because I don't at all like Darvocet, and partly because the pain was so intense that I was starting to think about whacking my own head and neck with an aluminum baseball bat, just to stop it from hurting. That made no sense and scared me into finally seeing to a doctor.

She walked into the exam room while I was sitting carefully in a chair with my head resting back on the counter. I made eye contact with her by grabbing my own hair and lifting my head into an erect position.

"Were you in an accident?"

"No.  It just does this about four times a year."

"How many?"

"Four or so.  Maybe more.  Sometimes less. " I shrugged. "I did a lot of Aikido, running, and jumping off of really big hills on my mountain bike.  I'm figuring this is my penance for having fun in my youth."

"You're still in your youth. This is not normal, you know. Did you drive yourself here?"

Then came a muscle relaxer which made Darvocet feel like Necco Wafers, the X-Rays and the adventure of a lifetime -- an event more exciting than 10th grade Band Camp, more adrenal-draining than an Immelmann loop, more claustrophobic than being buried alive in an avalanche, only colder -- getting stuck in a malfunctioning MRI machine.  Stay tuned for Trapped! One Woman's Journey to Hell and Back.

Blog Writing Course

Not that we don't have an excess of blogs out there, but I have revised my previously snobbish viewpoint about blogging, which was this: blogs are a pointless display of internet preening that may people would be better off walking away from, and should choose instead to invest their time in a good bible study, or perhaps some space-saving, closet hydroponic vegetable gardening.

I now think blogging is like government education to the Democrats -- everyone should suffer under one, I mean, everyone deserves one, and even if you've never blogged before, you can and should give it a try. On the palest end of the spectrum, it's interesting, and at the darkest, deepest end, it can become a nearly life-sucking obsession, but you don't have to let it get that far.  Temperance is as much of a virtue as patience.

If you would like a blog, but don't know what the heck to do to get one started -- trust me -- there's more to it than just writing it -- you might want to take this blog writing course. This eight week course is a  hands-on, simple way to learn about blogging, and even the most dense of doofi can get a healthy little blog going in just a few short weeks, as well as learn the finer points of blog promotion and social networking. It also gives you a built-in group of peers who will read your stuff and help you feel like you are not writing in a vacuum.

I'm not advertising this course for personal gain.  I took it and it helped me.  Look what a blogger I am!

It's Not My Fault

"It's Not My Fault" is a favorite escape application commonly used in various circles of buck-passers, especially government school administration employees and politicians.

It is also an essential tool for the chronically lily-livered, and an easy phrase for children to parrot -- if you let them get away with it even one time the phrase will be psychologically imprinted on their little souls like a cop-out tattoo, which they will then use forever in a variety of serious life situation.

"It's not my fault he's crying.  Joey threw the sand at my face first."

"It's not my fault!  That teacher is crazy and didn't tell me about the homework assignment."

"You didn't tell me to turn down the stove.  You just said to watch it. You're the one who ruined dinner."

"It wasn't my fault. He didn't tell me he had a gambling problem when we got married."

"Fat genes run in my family."

"I'm sorry.  It's school policy, not my rule."

It's not my fault. I don't like using it, and I don't like hearing it.

Sometimes I think it, though. I haven't posted for nearly two weeks, although I wanted to, and if I wanted to I could claim that it was not my fault.   Due to an error on Typepad's part, which involved them thinking that my account should be suspended, then suspending it, then apologizing for it and sending me emails saying my account was reinstated, and then not reinstating it, over and over again, I was locked out from posting for two weeks, which I suspect may have put a dent in my massive Google ranking.

I could have been writing and saving up posts, but I wasn't. I was busy muttercussing Typepad, writing them emails with an increasingly large number of "all caps" sentences, and eventually, researching other blogging platforms.  I didn't make the best of my time.

How do you grow bold kids who either take responsibility for their contributions to less than perfect life events or suck it up and fix "it," even though "it" really wasn't their fault?

You speak the truth. Make them apologize and ask forgiveness when they screw something up.  Don't make excuses for bad events in your own life.  Apologize and ask for forgiveness when you screw something up.

I'd like to say not posting for two weeks wasn't my fault, but it was. I was the one who signed up for Typepad.

The Starbucks Virus vs. the Idealist

I had some Starbucks today, which, as a rule, I tend to stay from unless I am in an airport, which I almost never am due to an active and profound terror of flying.  This terror, which to me is clearly rational and not at all vague, stems from a deep understanding of exactly what it would be like to get cavity searched, then locked up with a hundred strangers and a few snotty "air servers" and a possibly demented  or drunk or food-poisoned or aneurysm-prone pilot and hurling myself in a metal tube far too many feet above the earth to make it down safely if something went wrong. I know what this would be like. I know how the air would smell, I know the sounds the engines would make.  I know what it would feel like when the nose dips down and we start to plunge to the Earth where we should have been all along. I can see  the expressions on the faces of the people around me, and I believe I know the things that will go through our minds when we first understand that we are going to crash. I can picture my family members playing and replaying my last cell phone message, my daughters doing their own hair for their proms and my son, who has Asperger's Syndrome, being globally misunderstood for the rest of his life. 

Just to prove how absurd I am let me tell you this: my obscene, adventure-squelching fear of flying can't keep me from putting people I love on an airplane, such as my bifurcated children, who are hurled very far away in stranger-filled metal tubes to visit their father several times per year. You'd think, since it is so frightening to me, that I would want to keep my children from it, but I don't. Actually, I can't. They have to go, even when they cry and ask not to, so I sit in the airport with them, missing them in advance, sneaking a nuzzle of a thin little  neck,  squeezing a bony little shoulder, watching the airport light  play off of their perfect features, and trying to teach them my love of people watching to pass the anxiety-riddled time. Essentially, I am consumed with emotion and fake everything, clutching a hot Starbucks to try and take take my mind off the fact that I am putting my young children in a metal tube going in a direction that is away from me.

Let me make it perfectly clear: I don't, as a rule, consume Starbucks products.  For one thing, Starbucks coffee, when ingested by me, drives my heart to sing with such a feral syncopation that it makes me want to call a cardiologist. And second: Sarbucks is a virus. Starbucks, like many other massive retail businesses that selfishly repopulate themselves at the expense of small businesses around the world, is the economic equivalent of the Asian Carp.

Someone once thought the Asian Carp was a good idea. Someone, without foresight thought it would be beneficial to bring the Asian carp, a fish that can grow to 100 pounds and still eat 40 percent of its body weight in plankton per day, to catfish farms in the US to put a damper on the algae overgrowth.  What it did was put a damper on native fish species, becoming a plague of the North American tributaries, eventually  putting smaller fish out of business all over the continent. Sound familiar?

I did once give a Starbucks card to my father as a gift, as I thought it might help him pick up better chicks than one can find in  Eastern Pennsylvanian bars, but under nearly all other circumstances -- I can't abide a Starbucks. I don't want a cappi-frappi anything, and I don't want to pay $4.50 for something that put Ma and Pa's Coffee shop out of business and left Ma and Pa with nothing but days filled with the Game Show Network, SHARE food, and bus trips to the library.

Here is something else I'll reveal: It is hard to live as an idealist.  I'm all about yearning for things to be as they should be, not as they are, which makes it hard to embrace progress, technology, and "the moment."  I can't live in the moment, standing in line at Starbucks and forking over what could be tuition money for one of my children, when I could be having a cup of plain coffee in Lester's, the diner I used to go to before it changed to try and act more like Starbucks, or at home at the kitchen table with my own children, when they are with me.  I can't be blase about putting my children on a plane to visit their own father for nearly every day of every vacation, whether they want to or not. Constantly packing suitcases and saying goodbye to friends who can't include them in their summer or Christmas plans, travel during the holidays without their parents, and constant texting and phone calls when they are gone is not a good way to live. It's just not right. There is a lifelong burden that comes with living as an idealist, and living as a divorced idealist is a special kind of hell.  Things should always be better, people can always be better, I could always have have done better, and although I am no longer surprised when people don't do the best that they can, it still hurts to experience it.

Change does not always equal progress.  Someone once thought that expanding Starbucks past Seattle was a good idea.  Someone once brought a barrel of Asian Carp over on a boat. Someone one thought divorce was something kids could just "get over."

Guerrilla Homeschooling

If you are not careful, homeschoooling can be expensive.

It is easy to be lured by the latest piece of software that others are telling you will make a long-lasting difference in your child's education, the newest book that just happens to be on sale on Amazon.com or the "complete program" that will make your homeschooling life easier and prepare your child for an Ivy League college. Plus, that impressive homeschooling library looks so good when people come over.

Couple this with a common reduction in income -- most parents who stay home to homeschool are not generating a lot of income anyway-- and you can find your already tight purse strings stretched by a desire to buy much homeschooling " stuff." Be careful. Don't be a sheep.  It doesn't have to be this way.

Here is how to homeschooling the Guerrilla/Bare Bones way -- spending $100 or less per year per child.

What you need:

a library card
a way to get to the library
a sack to carry books home in
paper and pencils

Examples of how to do it:

Go to the library as often as you can. Check out books on whatever subjects interest you and your child. The library can also lend videos, music, books on tape, computer software, and even copies of art to hang on your walls for a time. Read books, ask lots of questions about what your child read.

Use the internet to look up a Freecycle group in your area and use Freecycle for school supplies, old electronics to take apart, and materials for crafts and projects. You could also go to Amblesideonline and use their entirely free curriculum, including copies of e-texts to supplement your homeschooling, or give you a guide to follow if you feel that you need a guide.

Check out books on birdwatching and then go watch birds.  Let your child draw pictures of the birds he sees, labeling the anatomy. Use this to fuel a study on anatomy, or ornithology, exploring it as far as your child is willing to go.  If he likes art, draw the birds in detail.  Let him draw many, then have relatives over for an art show.

Get as involved as the child wants to get with every subject he shows an interest in.  Often subjects act like springboards for other subjects.

Go to free concerts, free cultural events, and and free community lessons. You can often barter services for tuition for a local class. Ask local theater groups if you and your child can see a dress rehearsal for free in exchange for a written review. Although a review written by a child is likely to be worthless to a theater company, they will often support a child's interest in theater and say yes. Have the child write the review, and then send it  along with a thank you note to the theater company.

If your child is interested in computers, dig some out of people's trash.  Let the child take the computers apart. Support him putting them back together again. Get books from the library on computer hardware and design and go through them together. Use the internet together, letting the child research topics he is interested in. If he likes writing, let him start a free blog.

If your child is interested in gardening and plants, ask people whose plants you admire for clippings and old plastic pots.  You can create a beautiful hobby that enhances the home and opens up a portal to the study of biology with just a few clippings.

Cook together.  You have to cook anyway, so why not teach your child?

Even long after the child can read well to himself for entertainment, read aloud to him.  Pick books that are just out of his "reading reach" and give him the gift of literature and your time.  Encourage him to draw, build models, legos, or do another hobby while you read.

Then, take the money you didn't spend on textbooks and workbooks and pay your rent, start a college fund, save for some land, or travel together. 

What matters to his education isn't the money you spend, but the  love, interest, and intellectual support you provide.  Being available emotionally, intellectually, and physically are worth more than the most expensive private school tuition.

Miss Suzy's Glossary

If you find any words in my posts that you believe should belong in the glossary, please email me or leave me a comment.  This is an expandable list, with, it seems, a theme.  Who knew?

birth an alien, verb: to have a bowel movement

doofus, noun: a foolish, stupid, or otherwise incompetent person

doofi, noun: plural of doofus

grow a trail, verb: to have a bowel movement

knick-knack, verb:  to spank, or otherwise aggressively admonish

jabberwockies, noun: the news media

lay wolf bait, verb: to have a bowel movement

mutter-cuss, verb: to say in complaint, under your breath, sounds and words that convey displeasure

paddywhack, verb: see "knick knack"

take the Browns to the Super Bowl, verb: to have a bowel movement