Alina's Adventures

The rise of forced birth and the shame of female bodies.

I stand by my choices and honor the choices of others.

I didn't want to write a book about miscarriages, terminations, adoptions, trafficked bodies, and pregnancy-- but I could not stop. The stories kept coming. 

My home state of Alabama is a hub for gun rights, recreational violence, and misogynistic billboards that strip the personhood of women. It comes as no surprise:

Bei Bei Shuai, 34, has spent the past three months in a prison cell in Indianapolis charged with murdering her baby. On 23 December she tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison after her boyfriend abandoned her.

Shuai was rushed to hospital and survived, but she was 33 weeks pregnant and her baby, to whom she gave birth a week after the suicide attempt and whom she called Angel, died after four days. In March Shuai was charged with murder and attempted foeticide and she has been in custody since without the offer of bail.

- The Guardian

A female body is punished for failure to make her body a good house. Meanwhile, in Alabama and all across this country, corporations secure more rights to dump and damage the environment, to poison the groundwater that causes birth defects and countless cancers, to get away with mangling fetuses and sickening children leaving citizens powerless. Power-less. Unable to stop them. 

Why are the crimes of the rich being leveraged against the bodies of the poor? 

Why should anyone pledge their allegiance to a flag that represents the reign of bad stewardship and lack of corporate accountability?

National Advocates for Pregnant Women’s one-of-a-kind study identifies hundreds of criminal and civil cases involving the arrests, detentions and equivalent deprivations of pregnant women’s physical liberty that occurred between 1973 and 2005, after the decision in Roe v. Wade was issued. In each of the 413 cases, pregnancy was a necessary element and the consequences included: arrests; incarceration; increases in prison or jail sentences; detentions in hospitals, mental institutions and drug treatment programs; and forced medical interventions, including surgery. Data showed that state authorities have used post-Roe measures including feticide laws and anti-abortion laws recognizing separate rights for fertilized, eggs, embryos and fetuses as the basis for depriving pregnant women – whether they were seeking to end a pregnancy or go to term – of their physical liberty. The findings make clear that if so called “personhood” measures are enacted, not only will more women who have abortions be arrested, such measures would create the legal basis for depriving all pregnant women of their status as full persons under the law.

The study found in a majority of cases, no adverse pregnancy outcome was reported and that where an adverse outcome was alleged, state authorities were typically not required to provide expert testimony or scientific evidence to prove that the pregnant woman’s actions, inactions, or circumstances would or in fact did cause the alleged harm.

The study documented cases in which fear of arrests and forced interventions deterred women from seeking help for themselves and in some cases for their newborns. These findings are consistent with the medical and public health consensus that punitive measures, and the legal arguments supporting them, will undermine rather than further state interests in child, fetal, and maternal health.

This study found that far from protecting patient privacy and confidentiality, professionals in the health care system were often the people gathering information from pregnant women and new mothers and disclosing it to police, prosecutors, and court officials.

National Advocates for Pregnant Women

I am a mother like any other shuffling between head lice and heart ache. Nothing about this choice is easy or predetermined. Every step we take is a gift and a source of wonder. 

If you'd like to hear voices tied to wombs, consider picking up a copy of Stories to Read Aloud to Your Fetus, my hybrid poetry collection published by Finishing Line Press. 

Love, always, Alina.

Cultivating empathy for the dyslexic child.

When she was a toddler, we used to joke, "Prophet help, Prophet help..". Because she always wanted to help. And she still does.

Reading Robert Frank's The Secret Life Of A Dyslexic Child and imagining how the words jumble and rumble for Prophet as she reads or speaks or tries to understand directions. 

How does it feel to have a bibliomaniac mother who loses herself in books and novels? How does it feel to watch others delight in the written word? How does it feel when family or friends ask what books you're reading-- given your age? How does it feel when people say, "oooooohhh", and change the subject? How does it feel to be the target struck in the center of their ooooh?

Set apart. Ceaselessly self-conscious. Fearful of frustrating others. Angry at your inability to control how the world perceives you. Lonely. Despairing.

The emotions run the gamut from tears to rage, and I think we do a better job of soothing a tearful child than honoring the humanity in an angry one. Robert Frank encourages us to let our child know it is okay to feel furious or sad. Denying the existence of those feelings- or suggesting there is some way to be the kind of person who doesn't get angry- is counterproductive and reduces the likelihood that your child will trust you enough to share her emotions.

I want Micah to share her emotions with me. Most importantly, I want her to share her worst emotions with me. Not her sunny, happy, look-mommy emotions which make the world a brighter place but her impossible, threatening, throat-clenching emotions which make the world a darker place for her. Because these are the emotions she most needs to share. These are the emotions that feel like prison until we can sort through them with someone we trust. 

She is confident on creative, tactile terrain. Like designing her derby doll at the Druid City Brew Pub.

Since Frank can speak about dyslexia from the first-person, we are offered a glimpse into how it feels to navigate a dyslexic world. A few insights from the book followed by my applications: 

"...even though he doesn't know this himself at a young age, he wants his parents-- and everyone else in his world-- to know that his dyslexia is real, and it's not going to just go away."

I told Prophet that her dyslexia is part of how she was made. That our culture values literacy, and this says more about our culture than it says about her.

That she is more valuable than our culture, and that she needs to believe this because it is true. No matter what others say. Her dyslexia can no more be "fixed" than the color of her eyes. 

"I encourage you to take the competition out of the learning process or your dyslexic child may always feel intellectually inferior. Encourage your child to think of her own strengths rather than dwell enviously on the strengths of others.... Learning should not be about competition; the current sensibilities toward that kind of thinking are especially detrimental to kids with learning disabilities."

I told Prophet the she is learning to read at her own pace, and that her relationship with written text is not anyone else's relationship with written text. She does not need to read like other people or enjoy the same books as other people or compare her reading journey to that of others. Her journey is her own, and no one else can map it for her. 

"One of the most important things you can do is to help your child find ways to tell others about his dyslexia."

I told Prophet that fear is always the enemy of our best self. Fear lies to us and teaches us to hide. Eventually, if we take fear too seriously, we becomes the patrons of fear, inventing apologetics for fear.

Eventually, if we hide the truth long enough, we become liars.

We talked about how confidence, and explored how to communicate our own strengths and weaknesses to others in a way that helps them listen. How it's better to laugh at the ways of the world than cry-- but that, often, we may have to do a little of both.

I told her about my challenges with calculus and how thinking about it competitively made me feel like a failure. Even though I wasn't a failure. Even though all I was doing was learning, which involves making mistakes and moving forward. Learning is all about failure. I told her if she wanted to remember anything from our conversation, then it should be this: Fools never fail. Wisdom is what grows in the richly-composted soil of many, many lessons and mistakes. The sturdiest plant, and the wisest mind, is one nourished on past refuse and error.

"The best way to deal with academic competitiveness is to counteract it with your own family's outlook on the value of learning."

I told her that it wasn't fair to tell people she couldn't read (which she says to others regularly). The right thing to say is that she's learning to read. That is the true and honest answer. 

A few additional things I learned which gave me awesome opportunities to seek insight from Prophet about her experiences and how they did or didn't match up.

1. Dialing a phone number can be hard for dyslexics. And kids who reverse numbers will often make the same reversal mistake again and again. Like a loop.
2. Standard forms and permission slips look like a minefield to dyslexics. All the fine print and instructions can be quickly confused or muddled. 
3. When a dyslexic person hears a long list of items or directions to follow, the information may become mixed up in her mind. What looks like hesitation to follow instructions may actually be an attempt to sort the various pieces of info in her mind. Similarly, she might have trouble relating chronological order. 
4. It's easy to miss the point or purpose of a story or what has been read. In a classroom setting, this can be especially alienating since you realize that others understood and you are left with an anxious blank.  
5. Prophet has a hard time retrieving information she has filed away in her brain. Rather than offer a simple answer, she usually weaves a web of associations and arrives at the "correct" answer by process of elimination. Frank explained that this challenge also occurs with properly recording and organizing materials in folders or notebooks. 

I sit in the yard and draw up various game plans, though no game plan will resolve her feelings or make the dyslexia less punitive in our uber-literal, success-driven culture. 

As she works her way through piano lessons, where musical notes alternate with letters and numbers and changing signs, two large black crows exchange carcass data overhead. The crows overheard.

She enjoys reading to Gnome and cousin. When the book is very familiar. When the words have a rhythm she can memorize.

Signs of dyslexia (Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity)
What does it feel like to have dyslexia? (ICM)
How it feels for a dyslexic to read (Thoendel Learning Center)
Through your child's eyes (Understood)
Two poems about how dyslexia feels (The Guardian)
ipad apps for dyslexia (Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity)

A handy list of notable dyslexics to inspire and encourage

Pablo Picasso, Spanish artist & sculptor
Leonardo da Vinci, artist and inventor
Thomas Edison, discoverer of electricity
Richard Branson, entrepreneur
Sally Gardner, children's book author & illustrator
Ansel Adams, photographer
John Britten, inventor
Jack Horner, paleontologist
Lewis Carroll, author & mathematician
Terry Goodkind, American author
Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, Inc.
Rebecca Kamen, artist & sculptor
Walt Disney, 
Albert Einstein, Nobel-prize winning physicist
Anthony Hopkins, British actor
Mirelle Mathieu, French songstress
Paul Oakenfold, music producer
James Russell, scientist & CD inventor
Erin Pizzey, founder of Women's Refuge
Chuck Close, contemporary artist
Hans Christian Andersen, fairy tale author
Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of telephone
David Rockefeller, American business executive & philanthropist 
John F. Kennedy, US president
Eileen Simpson, noted memoirist
Avi, Newbery Honors winning author
Nikola Tesla, scientist & engineer
Gustave Flaubert, French author
Roberto Bolano, Chilean poet and writer
Philip Schultz, Pulitzer-prize winning poet
Pierre Curie, Nobel-prize winning physicist
Ted Turner, president of Turner Broadcasting
Henry Winkler, actor & children's author 
Rehn Guyer, American toy inventor
Joss Stone, British singer
Frank Woolworth, founder of Woolworth's
Dave Pilkey, creator of Captain Underpants
Molly Sliney, champion fencer
George Bernard Shaw, playwright
Zhang Shang, dissident & human rights activist from China
Benjamin Zephaniah, British-Jamaican writer & dub poet
Bob Weir, Grateful Dead guitarist
Florence Welch, British singer of Florence & The Machine
Woodrow Wilson, US president
George Washington, US president
Agatha Christie, mystery novelist
JF Lawton, screenwriter
Richard Ford, Pulitzer-prize winning author
Henry Ford, entrepreneur & automotive innovator
Erin Brokovich, environmental hero
WB Yeats, Irish poet & playwright
Robin Williams, comedian
Whoopi Goldberg, comedian & entertainer
Jay Leno, comedian 
Ann Bancroft, adventurer & record-breaker 
Paul MacCready, "engineer of the century"
Peter Lovatt, dancer & academic
Noel Gallagher, songwriter & musician 
Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA
Michael Faraday, inventor of the Bunsen burner
Darcey Bussell, British ballerina
John Irving, screenwriter & novelist
Willard Wigan, micro-sculptor
Andy Warhol, pop artist
Ignacio Gomez, muralist
Robert Rauschenberg, American painter & graphic artist
Fred J. Epstein, innovative pediatric neurosurgeon
Octavia Estelle Butler, first sci-fi writer to receive MacArthur Genius Grant
Robert Clark, photographer
F. Scott Fitzgerald, writer
Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip
Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg 
James Anthony, youngest pilot to fly solo around the world
Fannie Flagg, author of Fried Green Tomatoes
Jules Verne, science fiction & steampunk pioneer

The unspeakable part of our bodies, and why it must be spoken.

Visualizations of Adrienne's words.

Trying to educate my children to think critically about what they consume in our overwhelmingly consumerist culture is like howling at the moon and waiting for a response. 

We see the billboards slathered in pencil-thin women with massive breasts and buxom, rubber-ball bottoms. Those of us with curves wish we were skinnier. Those of us who are skinny wish we had curves. The pictures we see show us nothing real or natural. The pictures show us how much money we need to spend to fit the current trends being sold to our children, peers, and lovers. The pictures show us what we will NEVER be without ponying up.

During the second world war and the early ad era, curves were evidence of prosperity. Women rued their skinny bodies and forked out money to purchase Marilyn Monroe curves. My friends tell me how "lucky" I am to be "skinny" but being skinny means I will never have those breasts I see jiggling back from every billboard and mall kiosk. Being skinny means I can only have those breasts with surgical help. 

"So if you want them, why not just buy them?" one friend asked.

There are many things I want that are for sale. But sometimes the act of purchasing these things robs me of who I am to myself- this little "me", this self I call mine, the integrity that is the only thing I've worked to leave to my kids.

I cannot buy those breasts because my desire for them is a betrayal of myself. I am not a busty female. I am not well-endowed. My curves are not as steep as mountain roads. I am learning to appreciate my hills. In a sense, I cannot buy those breasts because somewhere in that transaction exists the seed of human slavery. Dissatisfaction with self threatens to make a slave of me.

Notice how this ad sets up envy between females? Creates it as backdrop?

I am tired of seeing sister placed against sister in this competition to be prettiest. Or coolest. Or most powerful. Or most gifted. Or most successful. 

My menstrual cycle is not a sickness that I feel the need to hide from men. It is not a contamination that makes me disgusting. Patriarchy begins with such myths.

I will not perpetuate the need to wear super-short shorts during my period in order to entertain a man while hiking (of all things, hiking!). 

I won't pretend to like whiskey or football or hunting to play the cool girl. If I liked football, I would not be ashamed to like it, but I don't care who wins the Iron Bowl. I don't care who plays quarterback.

I DO care when a football star assaults a female and the public gets mad that this is reported because "oh my gosh this will ruin his career." A person who assaults others should not be surprised if his/her career is ruined. That's how we learn and grow up. 

Or stop cruelty to women in the name of animals.

PETA's ads are annoying. Is there no other way to argue for decent treatment of animals than by dehumanizing females? Do her legs have to glow like butter? Does have Celina have to appeal to a personal fetish in order to make the world a better place? Does supporting PETA implicate us in much more insidious consumerist memes?

Do we have to imagine a blow job in conjunction with a burger? Do my kids have to imagine it as well? Do males have to compensate for penis size with sandwich size? Do males need to be told the lie that size matters?

I don't want my husband or son to ever think such things.

Size only matters in porn.

Size only matters when the goal is to punish.

No, no- I'm not done. Does innocence have to be peddled as sex product? Is the all-hallowed aura of virginity what we're peddling here? Who cares if someone is a virgin or not? Nevermind, misogynists and religious fundamentalists care. Does Christ care? I think the Bible is pretty darn clear on that one.

I want Lifeway Stories to stop selling virginity to my kids and then calling it "Christian." I'm tired of the disgusting cruelties and misogynies perpetuated in the name of a God who came to this world to overturn law and tradition and convention as we know it.

This female looks scared. That is scary.

And I'm soooooo tired of ads that paint sex as something "done to" a female. I'm tired of ads that show fear on a woman's face while suggesting sex. I'm tired of those ads because I'm tired of rape.

I'm also tired of bad sex. Why can't sex feel good? Why can't it be awesome, beautiful, intense, sublime, a loss of self, a discovery of another- the closest thing we come to magic in this life?

I love sex. I have always loved sex but never so much as now when it is mine- and my body is something I share with my partner- two bodies joining to create a landscape that exists only for us when we seek it- and differently every time.

In our house, I am as vocal about loving sex as I am about despising nonconsensual sex. I will never tell my kids to wait until they are married. I will never glorify abstinence. Instead, I will tell them to wait for someone who deserves to explore that world with them- wait for someone who is willing to get lost.

The last thought is our responsibility to be honest and truthful. Where sex is concerned, this means I'm going to be honest. I tell my kids:

Although the sex I've had while married has been the best and most intensely mind-blowing, the sex I had before marriage was also pleasurable. It's not about a wedding ring so much as the other party.... and your relationship.

And there is nothing wrong with pleasure as long as your pleasure does not hurt or damage another life. Perhaps you will discover pleasure is too easy and therefore unsatisfying. Perhaps you will discover you want more than pleasure. Perhaps you will develop an appetite for communion. If so, godspeed. 

If all the other voices in your culture- all the ads and billboards and peer groups and maskulinities- speak only for consumption, may you find words to hold in opposition. May you find words for the sacred unspeakably beautiful things. And may the truth of these words keep you free.

I had a nightmare about Mother's Day last night.

Atop the piano, a pastel by Prophet.

I woke up this morning with a Mother's Day nightmare fresh in my head. The nightmare was simple: it was Mother's Day and nothing the kids could do was fancy, expensive, or complicated enough to gain my approval. For a female who says (and thinks she believes) Mother's Day is not important to her, this was a nightmare from hell, replete with excessive consumerism and passive-aggressive poses.

Apart from being a commercial holiday for which our local Bojangles has a sign reading "Your Mother Would Love Our Heart-Shaped Biscuits", I think Mother's Day is a celebration of the way our world expands by mothering.

In my head, in that perfect land of parenting and partnering, Mother's Day would be any day of the year when you bust into a dance party on the beach with a beloved fellow mother and her saplings.

It would be the instant when I witness all three kids together on the piano bench and Prophet turning pages for the Eldest as he works on a difficult piece. It would three pairs of toes in varying degrees of motion. It would be the beautiful mysterious ways they've devised to cooperate without any suggestions or nagging from the voice that sounds like me.

It would be a poem about little feet padding down the hall at night, each step a succor-seeking syllable. It would be life, and the special part wouldn't cost a card or a penny. Only the kiss just after your eyes careen around the same curve and settle into seeing one another as treasure.

I took his name.

The cut rose looks beautiful in a vase but why can't we bear the sight of her roots?

I took his name because part of me wanted to believe marriage was an all-consuming fire that no one could bear in their unadulterated, premarital form. Marriage changed the life and its subjects. Name change seemed slight in comparison to the overall geist.

To be fair, the romance began much earlier than the wedding vows intended to seal it. The little girl who wanted to be Joan of Arc grew into the woman waving signs along the sidewalks of Boston, D.C., and Birmingham, her parched lips repeating again and again “NOT IN MY NAME.” She shouted until she grew hoarse and finally lost her voice. To that woman who wore black for all the innocent victims of war, her protest upheld the magic powers of a name-- the dissident’s belief that words can change the world, the existentialist’s assumption that we embody our ethics with every choice and breath. She didn’t care if she marched with strangers or friends so long as she walked uphill, lifting her vocal chords for what the media called a losing battle but what sounded to her like the stained glass echo of a cathedral chorus.

Such a woman has no business taking a man’s name after having worked to hard to say her own.

But I took his name anyway.

I took his name because romance felt sexier than revolution.

But also because my name sounded like boiled cabbage and foreign accents and the contaminations of communist history. “Stefanescu” is a common name in Romania, but raised eyebrows never ceased to remind me how uncommon such a name sounded in native Alabama drawl. “Stefa-what?” being the question I’d learned to anticipate at gas stations, courthouses, and extracurricular sports.

So maybe I took his all-American name to reduce the mispronunciation of my own. Or perhaps I thought C. sounded less suspicious than Stefanescu. Alina C. could be a good mom. Alina Stefanescu, on the other hand, couldn’t sit still.

The woman who took his name flips through albums containing photos of her previous versions. She looks back and admires the awkward, half-smiling teenager with unmanicured, soil-friendly hands. The girl in the photos doesn’t consider being anyone else except a future heroine. The girl in the photos is still trying to grow into the discounted Guess jeans she could barely afford.

I took his name because I come from an immigrant family that went red-white-and-blue. During the first year of college, my parents divorced each other, severed ties with their Romanian love stories, and moved into large, accommodating, American marriages brewed with the tasteful banality of Pottery Barn pieces. Suddenly, my email account inbox featured family events hosted on the July 4th.

My husband’s parents didn’t need to divorce and remarry to become authentic Americans. They were born here. Their first wails echoed down the sterile hallways of US hospitals. They didn't undergo the awkward process known as "naturalization." They’d always held hooplas on the 4th of July.

So I took his name. Erased my name to become another C. in a ceaseless succession of C.'s because, of course, every C. wife since Christ walked the sea of Galilee took her husband’s name.

But the external change failed to fix the internal discrepancies. C.'s disliked flag-burners while Alina valued free speech more than sacred fabrics. C.'s voted Republican while Alina couldn’t bring herself to vote. C.'s were “pro-life” while Alina wondered why so many people who were pro-life valued the gestating life of fetuses over the life of suffering human beings. C.'s valued consumer prosperity while Alina feared it like the plague-- for its generous numbness, its splendid distraction, the danger of generalized, nonspecific good times.

As Alina C., I had a responsibility to fit the family heritage. Looking different was fine so long as I didn’t think too differently. The pregnancies prevented me from thinking too deeply about my failures as a C. Every family needs a black sheep. Some families need several. I’d find a way to fit in.

I took his name because my in-laws spent years in the belly of the marital-problem whale but stayed married anyway and maybe the name was a hedge against my own family’s legacy of divorce. The lucky talismans I’d been raised to revere weren’t much help from across the ocean. Not even the Carpathian mountain legends remained stable-- unstable stories are hard to recall, harder still to re-tell.

My childhood came back to me in another language-- a mystical, fragile, evocative language, a tongue difficult to translate. Going from Romanian to American is like moving from magic to meal-planning.

Finding no middle ground, I looked for clear and present signs of impending good fortune. I read surnames like self-help books or guides on how to walk through the minefield of entitled maskulinities.

The right name was a free ride to happy places-- destinations like Disneyland commercials where everyone laughed and smiled. Stefanescus divorced but Coryells stayed married for life.

I took his name because it mattered to him-- and I liked how much he wanted me. I kept this a secret from my Stefanescu self because she was the sort of feminist who wouldn’t approve. Maybe people were right about feminists. Maybe they were just bitter. Maybe they didn’t know how good it felt to let go and get lost. To become a well-coiffed woman.

I liked how he wanted me so much that he was willing to act like an amoeba and settle for nothing less than swallowing me whole. I took his name and gave our children his name and tried (so hard) to feel proud that we were all the same.

Instead, I discovered unspeakable shame. The shame of selling out.

Because I never became a C. and he married a Stefanescu and when a C. marries a Stefanescu what comes logically is Stefanescu-C. but somehow we become our inherited mutations and so Alina C.-- this mutant concoction-- acknowledges how marriage alters a woman while Husband Coryell stays unchanged.

My mother was a champion downhill skier, a physician who took flying lessons at age forty to overcome her fear of flying, and yet she married my father and permitted the mutation. She took his name. 

I took his name. When friends asked why, I said "it's complicated." What I meant was wordless-- a persistent malaise at denying my family history and heritage to assume a foreign identity that, for all external appearances, approximated the coveted "normal."

Whatever my rationale for taking his name, the truth is simple: the name doesn’t suit me. Though I love my husband's family, I don’t want to be a C.. I don’t want to use air fresheners after taking a shit and I don’t want to put down my protest signs and become an apologist for cultural Christianity or neo-imperialism. I don’t want gift pedicures or marble countertops. And it still makes me cry sometimes to think of how my government terrorizes innocent civilians in foreign countries.

I'm an idealist, a tree-hugger, a person who thinks courage involves crying. I don't care if America looks exceptional. At this point, I'd rather we look humane and decent. And I will never ever ever so long as my name is Alina stop believing that love can save the world.

I lack a Protestant work ethic. I don’t have ambitions for a bigger house or to be the president of any association. I don’t want people to admire me, and I am humbly grateful for every friend and stranger who sees the best in me rather than the obvious worst.

I don’t want to be cool or coy or sexy. I like cool, coy, and sexy things but I don’t want to be a thing and I’m working on unliking the ways in which my mind objectifies others.

I’m a restless, homeschooling, wanderlusty dilettante who never needed to get married. When I agreed to do it with the only male that had been my equal partner in crime, I pretended the equality could persist if I signed onto the romantic myth of amoebal maskulinity. I was wrong.

I don’t want to smile stoically and tell young lovers that marriage is “hard work.” I will never tell anyone to stay married “for the children”-- no child should carry such a burden or be tormented by the guilt of being the world’s navel. Marriage is not (and should never be) an agreement to be deformed but an agreement to be formed together, alongside another human being. When marriage deforms a person, divorce is the most honest, decent solution. 

In this castle I've built with my husband, we shoot the moon more than we build. Often, we tear a wall down and watch to see what grows in its place. It feels more like wonder than work.

There's no how-to manual for building the castle that you imagine. The risk doesn't settle into the cushion comfort of stability. We admire our callouses and weave stories from scar tissue.

If I thought changing my name would secure my marriage, I didn't bargain for the way in which it denatured me. So now I'm going through the ardorous and unbelievably exciting process of changing it back. Not because I don't love his family but because I didn't marry his family-- I married him. 

Honestly, I think my husband will be relieved to lose the striving Mrs. C., the worry-laden wife who felt guilty for not having a pimento cheese recipe or not giving a rat's ass about Disneyland. I tried to care-- honestly, I did. But it's possible to love and enjoy life without visting the Epcot Center or chilling with Snow White. There are many ways to be happy-- many different formulas for fun. I've grown to accept that my idea of fun isn't popular or cool-- and that taking his name didn't make me a better person or mother or wife. Only a less certain woman.

If my marriage can’t accommodate Alina Stefanescu, then my marriage is not related to me. Because I am Alina Stefanescu, a wild concoction of vowels, a name that crawls through teeth only to emerge as a song of myself, a racuous, immigrant litany.

How we learned about the Girl Riders Organization (GRO).

Prophet and Mary climb the ramp after co-skating.

Why not wander around a park in Silverthorne and spend those last minutes of daylight surrounded by local chatter? Before you could say lickety-split, the Eldest made a playground friend. 

The Eldest and his friend climbed rocks around the skatepark before daring one another to race through the ramps between skaters. I tried to warn them that watching out for little folks reduces the flow state of skating for the folks on boards.

Just as I was about to launch into my lecture, a nice girl wearing kneepads asked if the kids would like to try skating.

Mary takes Gnome for her first skating spree.

Having watched her skate for half-an-hour or so, I felt confident in her skills and abilities.

"Sure. Why not?" I replied.

Prophet couldn't get enough.

Mary told me about a national group in which female skaters teach young females how to skate. Meanwhile, Gnome and Prophet begged for "one more ride" and "one more try". 

I'm so grateful to Mary for extending a hand, inviting the kids to try her skateboard. Mary is affiliated with the Girl Riders Organization (GRO), which hosts regular free skating clinics at skateparks across the country. Check the GRO Facebook page for details of a skate session near you. 

Silverthorne Skate Park is located at 430 Rainbow Drive right next to the Silverthorne Rec Center in Summit County, Colorado. Though more land sits and waits to be added to the park, the city of Silverthorne has not put this land to use yet. 

If you're interested in putting your skateboarding skills to use to make the world a better place, you MUST check out Skateistan, a nonprofit that teaches Afghani kids to skate. 

Father's Day.

Father's Day was uniquely uneventful this year. Going into our second week without a dryer, the King meditated about various and sundry things while hanging out four loads of laundry. "There's something calming about having to hang everything, then wait for it to dry," he confessed later that night, comparing it to construction work and the way he'd get lost in manual labor. 

Bunica brought by a delicious soup, thus sparing me the opportunity to start fires in the kitchen.

When we took a sunset stroll, the King found what every 21st century father needs most- something to climb and no good reason to refrain. 

So being a father is the weight of the world and the lightness that comes with lifting it high in the hair and hearing it giggle.

It's looking down at the tracks laid by others and wondering if there isn't some heartbreaking limit in the places we can go if we agree to follow them.

It's knowing you can't fix the past but you bear a responsibility for the future.

For what you sow and how you sow it.

It's teaching your son how to love himself outside the emotional and spiritual confines of gender roles and assumptions. Discovering new paths and giving him a sense of self strong enough to sustain the adventures.

It's watching your daughters breakdance on a bridge and not feeling the need to "show" or teach them anything at all- only to watch them and learn from their joy.

It's knowing deep in your veins what Wendell Berry meant when he wrote:

We have ourselves to fear.
We burn the world to live;
Our living blights the leaf.

It's knowing all these things without knowing the sort of simple answers given by ideologies or self-help books. Learning to read the runes scribbled in spray paint. Finding yourself in what you leave behind.

The post-piano recital relief.

Ahhhh... the annual piano recital. This year, Scott Joplin and Mozart were on the menu.

In addition to the Eldest's usual razmatazz, Prophet made her piano recital debut. As I sat in the library waiting and watching the little back in the front row, I remembered the feeling of raw nervousness at my own piano recitals. I remember hoping I could go first so that I might enjoy the other piano players without apprehension. 

For all my performance anxieties, the little folks seem to have inherited nothing akin to a fear of failure. Perhaps I say "fear of failure" when what I mean is "fear of disappointing". Growing up as a child of immigrants with no extended family in the USA made me very conscious of my parents' desire for us to "succeed" and to excel at everything we tried.

My love for performing dissipated in the bright glare of wanting to please those nearest and dearest to me. There's an insight into teenage rebellion here- it was only when performing in roles that I selected against my parents' preferences that I felt free enough to let go and love the stage. Take theatre for example- there was nothing as sublime as picking up a script in high school and putting myself in a character's shoes, trying to walk as they would walk, talk as they would talk, and feel as they might feel.

Little feet nowhere near the pedals.

Love makes things heavy at times. Liberation is not an attack on the love we feel for others but an effort to better love and acknowledge our selves.

I marveled at the performances, hoping that the kids felt no pressure to please, only the excitement and adrenaline of the performing itself. The Eldest bubbled with excitement to have a friend there, watching, grinning when he made mistakes and perservered without angst.

Prophet even mustered her first grand post-recital smile- you know, the kind where your lips appear somehow incongruent with the rest of your face. She grimaced when I showed her the picture- "That's not how I look!". Recognizing our true selves nested within our performing selves is a complicated part of growing up. "That's not who I am," and yet, somehow, it's a part of who we were.

Juxtaposing trees, fortune, and national habits.

I know it's odd to juxtapose trees with the images of weekend backyard fun- but there's an epiphany in the brew. It started with a Ukranian folk tale we read aloud this weekend. In the folk tale, a young boy set off to find his fortune. When the King and I asked the kids what a "fortune" entailed, they responded with all the wisdom of their American childhood- "money". 

But there is more to fortune that money in the tales of yore. In our folk tale, a good fortune included a family, a shared narrative, and the joy that comes with the courage to work hard and seek the best.

Here's the rub: There is a qualifier- "good fortune"- that indicates the difference between merely having fortune and having the capacity to appreciate it.

America lacks a mythology for its trees. Unlike the Druids and pagans of the Old World, we approach our trees without the caution of reverence. Though we borrowed a little from Native Americans- mostly names and herbal remedies- none of what we borrowed was savored and kept lidded long enough to sow stories. The lack of studious awe, the stuff of stories, makes sense for those lured by the hard glint of gold.  

As pioneers and homesteaders, our connection to the land proved more practical than spiritual. We loved the land for what we hoped to make of it.

Perhaps even the fact of ownership- the challenge of making land fruitful enough to warrant laying claim- demanded that the ties we forged be of the looser sort, loose enough to keep us from growing too attached.

Rather than name each tree, we calculated its value as timber. Here in Alabama, the longleaf pine forests made way for the rapidly-growing, productive loblolly pine. Certain birds and countless beautiful ecologies were lost in the process.

The nation prospered. Prosperity became a form of patriotism. But all our monied fortune did not translate into good fortune. All the money did not teach us how to use it wisely. All the toys and playthings only stole out attention from the unnamed trees and the holistic meaning of "good fortune" as a life lived in gratitude and joy for all that we've been given.

The dictionary defines good fortune as "an auspicious state resulting from favorable outcomes". I see a fortune in the stately pines and maple trees behind the house. But I see our good fortune as part of an agreement to live with them rather than against them- to live in their shade, knowing they bear witness to our stories- grateful for the chance to learn from our history.

Sunday silhouettes and cloudscapes.

What began as a plan to play basketball turned into an afternoon of cloudscapes. Looking up at the clouds and each other from the vantage point of a dandelion.

The King settles into a brief observation of Cumulus mediocris. 

Nothing occurs without a context. Our context was clouds- and the study of weather and sky Prophet declares her favorite to be the cumulonimbus- the one which portends a promise of thunder and lighting. 

She prefers the name "thunderhead". And she asks the Eldest, again and again, to tell her about the anvil at the head of the cloud and how it predicts the direction in which the storm is moving.

For the Eldest, the clouds make it hard to concentrate on other things- things of this world, things like basketball games. I like the way he prefers not to fight the daydreaming sky, adjusting his plans as needed. He's a person who acknowledges the leverage of a cloudscape.

Gnome sits astride the elephant and shakes it with her tiny arms. The effect is one of dispersion- each wave a break too soft to crest. The scattering and dispersion creates its own forms. Hail, little Gnome, ye shaker of clouds and creator of cirrus-scapes.

Each of us has his own way of interacting with the clouds. I incline towards the clouds- hoping to somehow scoop them into my body, where their mass mobilizes them into new shapes, always the yearning for new stories. 

"Tell me," I say to the Eldest, "which cloud formations strike you as the most stable and the most unstable."

"Sure," he begins to point and pontificate. Then he asks if I'm worried about the weather, or why I want to know.

"I don't care so much for the stable formations," I try to explain that the unstable clouds are the ones I want to follow, the ones which will eventually be forced by their own inner dynamics to spill into stories- some involving rain and backyard vegetable gardens, others revolving around the way pressure changes and reconfigures us as less than massive. 

Sir Eustace, my sports trophy.

Friday flew straight in the face of every well-laid plan. But it helps to explain why my "home-making" posts are far and few between.

By the time Max and Ellie got back after lunch, the girls had each invented the most hair-curling cries for their fabric baby dolls. When I asked them if I could breastfeed their babies, Prophet refused.

"They're not hungry, mom," she snapped, "They just like to cry. A LOT."

Little B. and Gnome smiled sheepishly. Then Gnome's baby began shrieking as if a small dragon had a baby toe between its long, shiny teeth. "See?" smirked Prophet, her lips compressed into a tight little line that I like to call a "smugile".

After giving myself the pronounced satisfaction of a little solitary eye-rolling, I trotted into the kitchen, where the boys were debating whether to bake banana bread or raspberry-banana bread. "Hey mom," ventured the Eldest, "I looked everywhere and I can't find my Honest Pretzels cookbook..."

"Obviously, you didn't look everywhere," I replied, keeping one ear cocked for fabric baby cries from the back of the castle.

"I did. I swear."

"But the book is clearly somewhere, so not finding the book means you failed to look everywhere because you may have looked in many places while not looking in the place known as somewhere- which is, in fact, a place BECAUSE...." I raised my voice and caught my breath, "your book still exists as a form or familiar recognizable physical MATTER." 

"Mom doesn't like to help me find things," the Eldest said in an aside to Ellie. "She thinks I should find things for myself." Ellie nodded. The boys looked amused.

They shrugged in unison as I set off (rather huffily) in search of the Eldest's cookbook. Twenty minutes later, with "somewhere" feeling more and more like elsewhere, I happened upon a gigantic cockroach, spread on his back, legs curled towards the ceiling. Since he was obviously deceased, I did the only thing that made sense given the circumstances, namely, selected a swatch of linen from the fabric bin and mounted Sir Eustace into a frame for the dining room wall. 

As I hammered a nail into the wall to display our new family friend, Ellie saw it and started laughing. He loved Sir Eustace. In turn, I discovered that Sir Eustace had minimized the cost of admitting I couldn't find the cookbook either- and maybe "somewhere" was actually "nowhere", immaterial.

The Eldest just grinned and said, "That's cool, mom," when I passed over a printed recipe for banana-raspberry bread.

"Actually," I wanted to say, "Cool is your non-shaming response to my huffiness". But I didn't say it. Maybe a residue of huffiness lingered.

As the Eldest prepared his ingredients and Ellie warmed the oven, I decided to make a snack for the crying baby dolls and the five uber-cool kids in the castle. "I'm going to make some microwave popcorn," I said, hoping it sounded official. Ellie watched as I put a fabric napkin under the popcorn bag and set the timer.

"Why'd you put that napkin in there?" Ellie asked. 

"Because the spinny-dish-thingamabob is broken and the popcorn will burn on the bottom if I don't put something under it and we don't really have paper napkins..."

"Only for guests," appended the Eldest, as he mashed bananas with the meat-grinder.

I set the timer for the minimum popping time and prepared to listen for the promised "popping intervals". It took all of forty seconds for the microwave to begin smoking furiously, filling the tiny kitchen with smoke and the familiar odor of burning. Something wasn't right. When the girls dashed into the kitchen screaming "Fire! Fire!", Ellie and the Eldest immediately demonstrated proper bomb-shelter skills by throwing themselves on the floor and covering their heads with their arms. 

At this point, we torn between cracking up and dealing with the current disaster. Somehow, we managed to alternate between both fairly evenly.

Ellie found a fan in the sewing room, and set it up to blow the air away. Prophet announced the rule that "no one opens the microwave door until daddy comes him". This gave her the chance to indulge in her favorite hobby of all, namely, the enforcement of very particular, legalistic rules. I try not to worry so much about whether this rigidity will condemn her to life as a card-carrying Republican. There are other things to think about. Like the smoke.

Meanwhile, the Eldest went on baking as if nothing had happened, while Ellie theorized about the cause of the burning. "You know, it's an urban myth that aluminum blows up microwaves," he said in his most serious voice. He had the floor. "Because, actually, all it does if you put it in the microwave is make a lot of smoke- I mean, A LOT of smoke, kind of like that", he said, pointing towards the closed microwave door. 

Could these kids be any cooler? I mean, here they are, juggling crisis-management, intricate baking recipes, baby dolls that cry no matter what you do to soothe them,  and then babysitting a mom who can't even pop microwave popcorn without setting fires. Someone give these kids a gold medal.

Needless to say, an hour later, the kitchen still reeked of smoke but we snacked ourselves silly anyway, under the shadow of a somber Sir Eustace, the delicious taste of banana-raspberry bread in our mouths. 

It was Tiffany who finally made sense of the whole event- "I like it," she said with reference to the framed Sir Eustace, adding that it made a great "sports trophy". Granted, Sir Eustace was deceased when I found him, so he was more like a roadkill trophy than a sports trophy, but roadkill trophy fails to capture the budding affection (the sentiment that led me to offer Eustace the token of a "Sir").

What Tiffany didn't know, however, was that our microwave held within it a napkin lined with metallic strips, still smoldering (eventually, charred) as a result of my kitchen shenanigans.

"Whatever," I overheard Prophet telling Little B., a sigh heavy in her voice- "I guess that's why Dad always tells Mom not to worry about doing any of that cooking." 

A brief foray into the Gnome's world.

Gnome and Cleo, a burgeoning love story.

Although our Gnome is nearing the fantastic age of four, the fact of age is almost irrelevant in the life of a hearty, busy gnome. Her fascination with animals now includes Cleopatra (or Cleo) the cat, a Persian who most closely resembles a barred owl. Gnome tries to pet Cleo whenever she gets the chance to visit Bunica's house.

Gnome is also a steadfast member of the Cousin Isla fan club- the only fan club permitted in the Coryell Castle.

Our fan club policy stems from one of our theme songs, Kill Yr Idols by Sonic Youth. But we make an exception for Isla. Because we date our doctrines rather than wed them.

The longest nurser and co-sleeper in our household continues to be the most independent of its younger members. Gnome plays with blocks alone on a regular basis, building entire worlds filled with stories and secrets. 

She maintains a magical sense of connection with the goings-on of a different dimension- one we might call "irrational" or "foolish" if we were foolish enough to think that way. For example, while we waited for the Eldest to finish his chicken-sitting tasks, Gnome started chuckling from the backseat of the car.

"What's so funny?" I asked.

"Ha," replied Gnome, wondering if I could be trusted with the more elusive aspects of metaphysics. 

"Why are you laughing?" I persisted.

"Because that house has funny eyes," Gnome announced with a grin. "It got eyes like a fly so it can see us really good," she continued, pointing towards the house.

I nodded, laughing. The King cackled. Gnome added that our castle was blind because it's eyes "didn't work at night for a long time". 

Enter Prophet, who quickly explained that's why the fireflies come to our yard- to help the house see at night. 

So the Gnome grows like a wildflower, and the joy she brings multiplies every day's bounty and blessing. Do you have a Gnome at home?

How to deal with emerging bullying behavior in a homeschooling home.

We've been witnessing a few bullying behaviors here in the castle- and there's nothing quite as painful to watch as little people using cruelty as a means of motivating one another. It's a form of slow torture for those who aren't content with a social darwinist approach to life. So, tonight, the King and I called a castle meeting to try and sort through a few things with our budding bullies.

One of my favorite free resources for castle meetings is the LifeTree Learning Systems Pax Curricula. A yearlong learning program enables you to teach kids how to make compassionate choices through activities, role-play, games, and empathy-building exercises. We use it for all our kids- and I think the little Gnome gets quite a bit out of it, even if the concepts can be a little abstract at times.

“Peace, according to Montessori philosophy, does not mean weakness, and it does not mean the simple absence of war. It means inner harmony and strong individuality, a full participation in community life, responsiveness to the world, and stewardship of its resources. It means respect for human dignity and diversity, and due diligence in protecting and supporting the rights of all. It is to this definition of peace that we dedicate our most passionate efforts.” 

Tonight, we're going to focus on our imaginary friend, Wendy, who just can't seem to be happy no matter how many things she accrues and manages to take from others. Unlike her friend, William, who can find so many wonderful ways to play with a few sticks, Wendy finds herself angry at others for her own inability to enjoy all the things she has.  She takes to picking on William- demanding his stick and throwing a tantrum when he won't give it to her. She calls him "stupid" and tells him that she hates him and that he is "disgusting".

No matter how much she gets, Wendy always wants more. And Wendy loves to talk about other people- there are so many people she "doesn't like". It's hard not to wonder if there is anything in the world Wendy does like. Selfish behavior aside, it's obvious Wendy doesn't like herself very much. 

I can't wait to see how the kids think we can help Wendy find a way to enjoy what she's given. I also hope they offer a few suggestions on how to help a friend like William when he is being bullied or mistreated. Stay tuned.

Tiny sorrows meet with exquisite comforts.

It was the Eldest who summoned me, in his most excited whisper, over to a corner of the backyard near a privet shrub. For the past two weeks, there'd been a pair of cardinals- one haughty red male and a soft brown female- flitting to and from the shrub. I didn't think much of it, but the Eldest kept an eye (and pen) on them, frequently referring to their actions in his nature journal. He also noted the day when the brown mother bird flew over to the shrub with a small twig in her beak. "She's building a nest," he declared.

An urgency in his whisper- perhaps even his ability to sustain a whisper against excitement's uncontrolled volubility- grabbed my attention.

Pointing within the shrub, the Eldest grinned. Inside a nest, three tiny little eggs, carefully laid and tended by our cardinal friends. "How did you know?" I marveled. 

"Because, I told you, she was building a nest," he said happily. "And because I found the nest last week with dad but I was worried because it was empty." The expression on his face charmed me- a look of simple contentment and gratification. 

The eggs imprinted themselves in our hearts and minds. Soon, a ritual developed. After watering the garden each morning- Gnome with her orange tin can and Prophet with ther yellow one- we crept over to cardinal nest to check on the eggs. Expectation and delight coalesced into a wonder-filled tenderness for the mystery and beauty of the three lives preparing to hatch in the midst of our unspectacular yard.

While conducting his daily nature study, the Eldest approached me on tiptoe, again, the discordant combination of excitement and whispering. I thought I detected a tinge of dismay as well. He tried to speak- "the eggs have hatched"- but then silenced himself ("Revererence?" I wondered) and, shaking his head, led me by hand to the privet shrub.

The nest was lying on its side, barely holding a mass of pink flesh within it. Something had happened to dislodge the cardinals' painstaking creation. I drew nearer, heart heavy, burdened by a sinking foreboding.

A pink mass of flesh nestled within the tipped nest. Only one- where there should have been three. My eyes met those of the Eldest. I understood his silence. There are few words to describe that sense when all is not well with the world.

Yet, I drew closer. The little one's head quivered as he brought it up and away from the mass of pink skin and gray fuzz.

Atop a slender, delicate neck, I could see two large black saucers that would eventually develop into eyes. But for the moment, the little chick remained sightless- blind to the fact of the two faces missing from the handwoven home.

What happened to the other two chicks? Did a hawk steal them? If so, would the hawk return to claim this one as well? Did raccoons climb trees to steal bird eggs? Had the cardinals chosen a dangerous location for their nest? The questions spun through my head. Those familiar, chest-warming maternal instincts drove my heart into a faster rhythmn, the beat of empathy for those more vulnerable and defenseless than our egotastic adult selves.

The Eldest looked on quietly. That's when I said it- "Oh no, little bird, you're all alone now...." 

It must have been the sound of my voice, or maybe even the soft feather-like texture of the whisper, that drew the chick upwards, suddenly raising its blind head and opening its mouth in the hope of a worm.

I felt the lump rise in my throat, and the pressure of tears forming in my eyes.

As the Eldest delicately explained why we should leave the chick alone so its mother would return and feed it, I fought the tears, pushed them deep inside, saving them for a later time and place, a time without a blind baby bird all alone in a precarious nest.

The King walked over to investigate; I turned to address Gnome and Prophet, whose worried faces mirrored my own. Pouring a glass of water for a red-cheeked Gnome put distance between myself and the solitary chick.

But the distance was quickly bridged by the King's announcement of the a broken egg on the ground near the nest- and a large colony of ants eating something next to the empty egg shell.

At this point, I simply started crying. 

Because that's what I do when things in the world defy my hopes of a fair and just outcome. Because doing anything else would be a lie or a subterfuge- a sentiment created for the consumption of others rather than a sentiment reflecting my earnest reckoning with my own feelings and fears.

The King shook his head, tried to find the right words, wrapping a warm, familiar arm around my shoulders. "It's not fair," I muttered, allowing the tears to garble the useless words.

The Eldest crept up alongside us, his expression contorted and unsure. "Dad," he said, in a certain voice, "I can feel how much it hurts mom to think about the chicks".

Bringing his face so close I could smell the lemonade on his breath, the Eldest continued, "Mom, it hurts me too. It's.... it's..... not what I thought would ever happen...." I leaned into the sweetness of his empathy. We stood, silent, cheek to cheek, for a moment, before he found words again.

"Even though it hurts, mom, it's just how Mother Nature works.... And the mother bird won't abandon her baby- that's not what's going to happen." I felt the balm of his words before I recognized them for the comfort they aimed to offer. My high-functioning ten-year-old son, the one who defies every expectation and limitation, soothed my soul and comforted me better than any neurotypical adult.

It was hard to keep mourning the broken eggs in light of the Eldest's courage and love. Even harder to keep from beaming at the King, who knows how much these moments mean to me- and who isn't too faux-manly to share them. 

So two fragile and lovely chicks did not survive their hatching. But two adults and one boy discovered the comfort of each other between the broken shells. There is so much beauty to be found in all life's breakings.

The liberating habits of compassionate men.

During my first pregnancy over ten years ago, I devoured books on the topic of raising boys. As with every new terrain, it made sense to cross-reference the maps made by those who came before me.

The most important conclusion from all my reading and research resulted in the taking of a vow. I vowed never to make the Eldest feel that he was only allowed to be half a human- that half currently recognized as the prototypical American male.

Having best friends that were guys taught me how much men suffered for the way we raise them to be caricatures of angry, sarcastic, beer-chugging brutes with "natural drive" for rape, destruction, and violence. Honestly, I've never met a man who fits the bill- though I've met way too many who lived like zombies for trying.

We treat men like they are naturally too insensitive, ego-driven, violent, and lusty to leave with out daughters. Then we wonder why the number of nuclear missiles in our arsenal continues to rise. The truth is that men and women are born with similar emotional needs and emotional expression.

According to various studies, around the age of four, the average American boys realizes that daddy (and his preschool buddies and favorite cartoon characters) doesn't like it when he talks about feeling sad. "Take one for the team," laughs the dad. Or, "crying is for girls- boys don't cry". Some variation on sarcastic disregard for what a boy is feeling and some form of withdrawal that teaches him to detach himself from any feelings lest he lose the affection and regard of his daddy and male peers.

The word "sad" is quickly removed from a developing boy's emotional vocabulary. But the sad feeling persists. Eventually, he learns that boys are allowed to get angry. He understands that winning makes fear and bad feelings go away. He agrees not to name all the complex congnitive emotional states he can no longer acknowledge. Instead, he does what "big boys do", namely, keep his eye on the prize and aim to win. Whether he is winning a soccer game, a promotion, a card game, a bet, a dare, or one of those emotional objects known as females, his develops only one response to losing- the response of fear and anger. Under these two words, entire worlds are submerged.

Men are not from Mars. Women are not from Venus. Both co-exist as human beings on the planet known as Earth. Books which promise to reveal why men and women can't understand one another usually fall back on the self-fulfilling prophecy of claiming that women are super-emotional and have emotional needs, while men are rational and lack complex emotional needs. Seriously, sitting in the stands of a college football game will quickly reveal the extent to which men and women are equally irrational and equally emotional.

Rarely do such pop psychology books acknowledge the cause for these differences is not God or "nature" or interplanetary travel. Rarely do they mention all the scientific studies that show these differences are largely due to the way in which males are socialized to ignore, project, or suppress their emotions. At no point does John Gray admit that male emotional illiteracy is normative but far from natural or even "normal". He's built a galaxy of cash on maintaining the stereotypes that keep men and their partners from being able to live life in its full variety of cognitive colors.

Reading one of my favorite magazines today returned me to the trenches of the old "unemotional male" sophistries. Describing five habits of "highly compassionate men", Kozo Hattori begins with the truth of the past- the early socialization against compassion in a culture that tells men "emotions" are something the other sex does.

Hattori remembers "being a very compassionate child"- the kind that "cried his eyes out" during the film version of "The Little House on the Prairie". By the time he became a young adult, however, Hattori's identity stayed firmly within what he calls the “act-like-a-man box”. Fitting popular conceptions of masculinity failed to equip him with the sort of self-knowledge that enables us to navigate the tight corners of fear and frustration:

Although I was what therapists call “high-functioning,” my lack of compassion was like a cancer that poisoned my friendships, relationships, business affairs, and life. At the age of 46, I hit rock bottom. Unemployed and on the verge of divorce, I found myself slapping my four-year-old son’s head when he wouldn’t listen to me.

At this point, Hattori questioned the self he had become and whether it served the spirit and soul of his body. Like many wise men before him, Hattori started seeking. He began with empathy. After workshops and seminars and hours of meditation, he grew into compassion. Or maybe compassion grew, naturally, from him. Either way, he discovered that the more compassion he felt, the "happier" he became. 

Like anyone who discovers an ineffable and life-affirming truth, Hattori felt driven by the need to share what he had learned and, of course, continue his own journey of learning. So he interviewed a number of individual experts in an effort to determine what, exactly, makes a compassionate man. Or, how a compassionate man is made.   

Interviewees included Dr. Dacher Keltner, co-founder of the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center; Dr. James Doty, founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University; Dr. Rick Hanson, author of Hardwiring Happiness; Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence; and Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen Buddhist monk nominated by Martin Luther King Jr. for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967.

The conclusions were as simple as the feeling of compassion to an unbridled, open heart:

1. Learn to see compassion as strength.
2. Cultivate compassionate role models.
3. Strive to transcend gender stereotypes.
4. Cultivate emotional intelligence.
5. Practice silence.

Hattori's happiness is contagious. I look forward to his research and encourage him to keep probing the depths, tackling difficult and onerous topics that assist fellow humans in resisting cultural influences against compassion.

The opportunities to make the world a better place for boys and men abound. So, the next time your son honors you by trying to explore and express his complicated heart, dive into the depths with him, rather than forcing him to tread water on the surface. Being born a boy should not relegate you to being less of a human being.

MY FAVORITE RESOURCES ON CULTIVATING COMPASSION

"Can mindfulness help kids learn self-control" by Sarah Wheeler (Greater Good)
"The way we socialize boys man harm them as men", a documentary must-see (All Voices)
"No more Steubenvilles: How to raise boys to be kind men" by Kim Simon (Yes!)
"Boys have become emotionally illiterate" by John Amaechi (BigThink)
"Male and female ability differences down to socialization, not genetics" by Robin McKie (Observer)
"I'm not socializing my kids- I'm humanizing them" by Kimberly Yvette Price (Home Education)
"Nervous Nellies" by Taylor Clark (Slate)
"How to deal with mean people" by Christine Carter (Greater Good)
"His hidden needs" by Nara Schoenberg (Chicago Tribune)
Barbie vs. Batman: The socialization of children's toys (Paula vs. Patriarchy)
"Creating a new generation of compassionate and sensitive men" by Dr. Ted Zeff
"We must look at how we teach our boys what it means to be a man" by Neil Irvin (Time)
"Strong men don't hide their emotions, they show them" by Jack Fischl (PolicyMic)
"The man who couldn't feel" by Contessa Schexnayder (Brain World)
"Helping men to help themselves" by Lea Winderman (APA Monitor on Psychology)
Understanding and Raising Boys (PBS Parents)
Peace In Relationships, Kozo Hattori's blog and counseling 

RELATED STORIES FROM THE CASTLE VAULT

The Eldest's first soccer game.
Why I homeschool.
About love.
Cross-stitching with boys.
Home-schooling and socialization: The heart of the matter.
Is technology narrowing our perception of life?
A date with Adrienne Rich.
Mining a fallow field for stories.
Radical home-makers of all stripes.

Gardening with kids of all ages: A how-to and how-not.

Our bamboo bean teepee with seeds planted just a week ago with Bill's help.

The bean sprouts curl their way into a winding adulthood- one in which they will be judged for their ability to produce food. It's hard to under-emphasize the thrill of fruiting. Hard to temper my love for the way a seed leads us to the dinner table. Hard to imagine and cultivate an ethic of beauty and wonder completely devoid of practical considerations.

So I steal a few secret minutes while weeding this morning to acknowledge my admiration for the producers of food. And I hope no one says, "Hey mom, what are you thinking about?"

Marigolds growing around the tomato plants, per Mary's aphid-free suggestion.

The Eldests' heirloom Brandywines.

We celebrated yesterday's rain for the way it darkened the soil and replenished our rain barrel. Today, the Brandywine's stalks are covered in a thick coat of white hairs- I imagined the hairs as a fur coat when last night's temperatures dropped and the wind released loose pink and scarlet rose petals, a pattern of fallen skirts.

While planting cucumbers last weekend, the Eldest warned that cucumbers should not be planted close together lest they attack one another and "keep each other small". I laughed and inquired as to his source. He couldn't quite recall if it had been an almanac or a gardening book. So we planted our cucumbers across the garden from one another. Because, as I explained to the King, "Some boys are territorial and require ridiculous accomodations to their insecure egos". 

The King looked as if he either A) understood or B) remained baffled. The thing about the King is you never can tell. His "I get it" expression is almost identical to his "I'm lost" expression.

The Eldest improvised a cucumber cage from twine and bamboo (see rear of photo).

Cucumbers do not cross-pollinate other vining plants. While you don't want crops growing into each other to create a tangle of vines, misshapen or poorly tasting cucumbers because of the pollen from nearby melons, squashes or zucchini plants. Only other cucumber varieties cross-pollinate -- all are the same botanical species. Cross-pollination does not affect cucumber fruit features or qualities, but it does yield hybridized seeds.

Over the years, I've collected quite a few resources for gardening with kids. Given my brown thumbs, it's rather incredible to see how little I've learned. But I sure did curate a tremendous number of informative and useful links.... So I went back through my gardening posts and added the most helpful, useful, and educational ones- the ones that inspire, inform, and amuse about gardening with kids. Thrive and enjoy.

THE BEST OF GARDENING WITH KIDS

Pre-school gardening club weekly activities plan (Little Green Fingers)
Preparing for our brown thumb garden (alina's adventures)
Is it garden bounty or garden booty? (alina's adventures)
Heeding the summons of spring  (alina's adventures)
The hunt for the perfect compost (alina's adventures)
Cucumbers everywhere (alina's adventures)
Planting poppies (alina's adventures)
The Eldest starts his heirloom seeds (alina's adventures)
The surprise that conquered coxsackie (alina's adventures)
Making scarecrows (alina's adventures)
Getting your garden journal and notebook ready (alina's adventures)
Flower gardening with kids (alina's adventures)
Gardening at night (alina's adventures)
The magical garden of Maria Barnes (alina's adventures)
Gardens and good germs (alina's adventures)
Getting my hands dirty (alina's adventures)

A yard covered in wild onions- and what it teaches us.

The Eldest knew immediately from the pungent odor that these lovely flowers were wild onions. Merriwether's informative foraging web page helped us to confirm our suspicions. Also called wild garlic or meadow garlic, wild onion comes from the Allium family. 

Allium was the Latin name for the onion. Some herbalists think the name comes from the Celtic word “all” meaning pungent. “Alla” in Celtic means feiry. Canadense means of Canada, but refers to north North America. Tricoccum means three seeds. Roman’s called garlic the “stinking rose".

Conducting an internet set for "wild onions" leads us to endless pages on how to "rid your yard of onion grass or wild onions". I try to hide my disappointment. Why not forage? I make a vow to keep from disparaging weeds in front of the little people- to honor what we find in abundance without demanding that our lawn "look like all the others".

I want to give my girls something to hold against a culture that tells them they should want to look like every other girl. That a "good lawn" is one that looks perfectly manicured, sterile, similar, immaculate perfection. So I offer our yard as an example of natural beauty- and how much nature has to offer if we honor it as we find it.

Looking at the tiny bulbs ready to burst with the miniscule onions, lifting my fingers to my nose to be sure of the scent, I think of the time Prophet found me in the kitchen, slicing onions for a salad.

"Why are you crying, mommy?" she asked.

"It's the onions," I replied, smiling through blurred eyes, "They make me cry."

"Then I don't like onions- if they make you sad."

I remember how strange it felt to try and explain that I liked cutting onions- that I enjoyed the way they cleared my eyes, savored the way they made me cry.

Rather than allow them to be mowed down by the lawnmower, we decided to harvest the onions. But when are wild onions ideally harvested? The Eldest runs inside to consult his sacred text, the book given to him by our neighbors, the Brooks, a few years ago. 

Wild onion (Allium canadense)

Thus we find ourselves in the thrall of another wild plant- another afternoon devoted to discovering the mystery of the weeds beneath our noses. Another day where the lessons we planned are not quite the lessons we learned. My heart swells with gratitude.

Finding the shelter of each other.

I burned the candle reading on the stoop outside our backdoor last night. The biblio-love with whom I communed, Mary Pipher's The Shelter of Each Other, resonated as clearly as the song of the barn own which visits our backyard at least once a week, the barn owl whom I have come to believe is divided between a past which took place somewhere in the woods behind our yard and a present which resides down the street from us. 

The social construction of reality and the idol of Progress

Pipher, like Wendell Berry, dismantles the idol of "Progress" to which so many mega-churches and self-help groups are now dedicated. Just because science advances to give us the atomic bomb does not mean that this technological progress makes the world a better place. Like many, I am in the thralls of this consumer myth in the places where I least expect it.

We are, after all, one of those crazy families that gave away their TV set this year. That's right- we don't have a TV. Our kids are clueless about the latest exploits of Dora the Explorer or the how the Bratz feel about halter tops. 

"Choose your books as carefully as you choose your friends," warns a grandmother in Pipher's book. For a woman who treats her books like lovers, the admonition is clear- my neural pathways are constructed by the books and media to which I am exposed. Ultimately, as an adult, I am responsible for creating the architecture of my own brain. As a parent, I am responsible for protecting and encouraging only the best and least harmless materials in the construction of my children's brains. 

We all have our blind spots. Boys are one of them. Pipher writes about the challenges faced by boys in our mediated culture- the tension between messages given by the media and the voice of their conscience, as nourished in their homes. When a boy tells his parents, "You just don't understand," he is absolutely right. How can we understand what it's like to grow up in a culture that sets a standard of "cool" for men in which scoring is always the goal, whether in sports or in human relationships? How can we honestly confront the mixed messages given by media that glorifies killing without remorse and consuming sex as if it were a supersized McValue meal? How can we unravel the unspoken double standard that tells boys to kill and screw without warning them of the cost, whether jail, pregnancy, or emotional detachment that leaves them lonely, lacking the very friendship and intimacy which led them to try and impress others in the first place?

To confront this mixed messages requires us to admit the ways in we are complicit in their formulation. We tell our boys what is right and wrong, then we hand over the remote or iPad that reminds them the extent to which right and wrong are glorified abstractions and unrealistic expectations. We pat them on the head and refuse to acknowledge the way in which their kindness and empathy will be held against them in peer groups. 

"Gentle boys who respect girls are at best ignored and at worst brutalized," writes Pipher. "To be accepted they must do things that are wrong and harmful", things which their peer groups will encourage and reward yet fail to assist them in coping with the consequences. The problem is compounded by the way in which our culture discourages kids from looking to their parents for help with complicated emotions and needs.

"We don't give teens permission to love their parents.... We teach them there's something sick about being close." 

This is tantamount to denying the deepest and most essentially human need of all- the need to be loved and nurtured, the need to find meaning in the way we relate to one another.

Encouraging fatalism and despair

"There is nothing is new under the sun," we promise, when our children express despair over bullying or the images of dead civilians, mothers with children curled around them, on the television set. So our kids learn to keep quiet about the things that shock them. Rather than empower them with tools to make the world a better place, we establish a rationale for passivity. There is nothing you can do. Life sucks. So keep playing that video game. At least you have a chance of scoring. 

Albert Einstein said that our theories determine what we are capable of observing. Rush Limbaugh doesn't see struggling single mothers trying to juggle two jobs and parenting- he sees only evil, selfish women trying to steal taxpayer dollars. If you listen to Rush Limbaugh, chances are you will see things the same way. Like it or not, he educates you and creates your worldview. He tells you what to think and what to care about. He lights that fuse beneath your bottom that makes you angry every time you see a young man wearing a hoodie. Worst of all, he convinces you that the world is nasty place where the ballots are rigged against anyone who considers themselves an "honest American".

I would argue that anyone who considers themself an "honest American" needs to take a step back and do some critical thinking and deconstructing of the phrase itself. The honest American is the one who admits what his lifestyle costs the world and all the children of developing countries. The honest American is one who repents of any "Americanisms" that allow him to justify the desecration of our natural world and its non-American residents.

To argue that change is inevitable is to say that planning and hoping is impossible. Its serves to deprive us of personal agency and identity, to sweep individuals into a dustpan where all are just undifferentiated dust flurries. Telling your kids that "that's the way the world goes round" as if it were a truism rather than just a funny song equips them with a sense of helplessness in facing life's challenges. 

Offering a rather un-erotic sex education

Rather than provide our kids with a rich, compelling sex education, we skim over the technical details and allow the culture of porn to do "the dirty work" for us. Perhaps, deep down, many of us still believe that sex is dirty, something that contaminates those who speak of it. So children learn to have "McSex", to just do it and get it over with and consume it as quickly as possible. The difference is not so much in the people with whom you do it, but in the presence of specific condiments- ketchup, onions, anal, etc. 

Honestly, are you surprised to see teens discussing sex as if it were banal, blase, and possibly even boring? Pardon my excitement, but if the coolest experience in the world (namely, sex) has become run-of-the-mill, what on earth is left to words to like "yearning" and "longing" and "hope"? I like words that represent feelings based on delayed gratification; they give us something to anticipate; they add texture and richness to everyday life. 

Human development occurs within the context of real relationships. We learn from whom we love.

The poverty of consumerism- that feeling of never quite having enough- commodifies things that might otherwise be created, hand-made, seeded between people and allowed to bloom, grow, and blossom in unspeakably beautiful ways.

We're stuff-rich but oh so very soul-poor.

We're theory-laden and yet still desperate for love. All the books which punish people for living as if we truly loved others- for living our way through our loves- throw us back on the market in search of the next book or pill that might fill in the emptiness.

Cars before conscience

I admire the courage it takes for Pipher to say that character has more influence on our longterm happiness than the momentary notion of "self-esteem". To define "will as the ability to act on the basis of one's values". To bemoan the extent to which "cynicism is king". To point out that most teens see conscience- not a car- as a luxury they can't quite afford. 

I wonder how we got to a place where kids feel more comfortable raising money to help pets or animals than fellow human beings. Have we made human-kind as unspeakably dirty as sex? Have we made it easier to show affection for an animal than a fellow human being? Have we made it harder for young folks to determine what they, as individuals, want as opposed to what they have been programmed to want? Have we extolled human nature above and beyond the power of human nurture? And do we really want to live the sort of world that exists as a result of these choices? 

These are important questions to ask- as individuals, as parents, and as families. Relieving kids of the opportunity to participate in discussions about the challenges posed by our culture only disempowers them. Many of us (myself included) are better at teaching our kids to be rebels than helping them understand precisely what they are rebelling against. 

Prophet brings me a bowl of flowers. I put down my pencil for long enough to remember why those books I take as lovers must remain, somehow, as side shows to the real show that unfurls everyday in our home.

In a world that tells us it is "safer not to care", the most daring thing we can possibly do is keep caring. And teaching our children to care, in spite of the cost to their "cool factor". If life is worth living, it must be worth engaging. We must agree to fight battles we can't possibly win just because it is the right thing to do. We must agree to be enthralled and delighted. Perhaps these are the best lesson to impart from our temporary, fragile nests.

What happened at Toddler Theatre in Dublin.

There they are- the King, Gnome, Prophet, and Eldest, sitting in the pews of the Abbey Theatre of Dublin, Ohio.

The whole thing was my idea, of course. We went to watch a show billed "Toddler Theatre". The name evoked images of costumed creatures singing and dancing, a play especially crafted for toddlers, an introduction to the fascinating world of theatre, a world well-loved by myself and the King. 

But Gnome and Prophet were neither amused nor intrigued by the interactive toddler dancing and music. They watched with all the curiosity of spectators.

"You two look like intellectual snobs," I parrotted in my best Katherine Hepburn voice. 

Performer Marlene Metz played children’s music on her guitar and sang like a happy mermaid.

Marlene was joined onstage by Ladybug Girl, one of Prophet's favorite characters. I thought this might bring the snobs from their seats.

Prophet quickly informed me, however, that "the Ladybug Girl was not a real one", merely a "pretend version" paid to trick gullible toddlers.

Would you believe it if I told you that the ladies didn't budge from their seats for a second? It was the Eldest who saved the day. Because if anyone in that theatre was singing every single song and clapping right along, inserting his own cheers and "hoorays", it was our 10-year-old boy, the same boy who begged to go down and shake hands with Ladybug Girl, the only child above the age of six on the premises. 

If it weren't for the Eldest, our excursion would have been a bust. Instead, it was an excuse for maniacal laughter when we jumped back in the spaceship and started back towards Bunicu's place. At the first stoplight, the Eldest announced, "Boy, that sure was FUN!". Then he added, "We should do that again sometime," as Prophet and Gnome glared ominously in his direction.

Meditations on the uses of anger- and the uselessness of despair.

Still, you cannot believe in uprisings without believing in some possibility of social change, and you cannot believe in positive change without believing that some things are morally preferable to others.

So writes Episcopal priest Garret Keizer in The Enigma of Anger. I console myself with his words as often as I hold his words (somewhat angrily) against others. 

Speaking to my dad or to my in-laws about current events and history only reminds me that the presence of facts does not diminish the prevalence of fictions. We tell ourselves stories based on a compendium of characters and then refuse to accept that any story apart from the one we tell ourselves can matter. 

I’m not good at discerning the precise place where patriotism turns into idolatry. My personal manner of reconciling myself with the mass-murdering apparatus known as the nation-state is an ascetic one. I refuse to add the saccharine of patriotism to the bitter drink, lest it lull me into revisionism.

The drink stays bitter so I’m not tempted to lie about it. 

So why is this drinker of bitter-draughts, the girl who declines to make the drink taste sweet, the idealist? How can we explain the fact that she is the one who believes in hope- believes in the value of protest and picket, finds comfort and fellowship in speaking truth to power- while those who sip from the sweetened tea recline and declare, “That’s just the way the world is….”

“Ever since Eve tasted the fruit,” they declare.

“Eat, drink, and be merry,” they reassure, “for tomorrow we die”.

Or, my personal favorite, “Humans sin and only Jesus is perfect”.

Hallelujah. Amen. Someone pass me that gun so I can take a shot at that hoodie-wearing scoundrel who’s looking for trouble. 

For all my sadness at the human condition, I understand that the American Revolution was not (as some armchair theologians might claim) an act of God but an act of human beings. I understand that human beings are capable of great things and awful things. I cannot understand attempts to mitigate or downplay the difference. 

"The feeling I dread most is not fear but despair: the dim, oppressive sense that the more things change, the more they stay the same," writes Barbara Kingsolver in the first essay of the captivating book of essays aptly titled, Small Wonder. It's a book to which I return often.

The persistence of evil and cruelty is not a sound reason for denying the way in which evil changes shape and form over time. In fact, the extent of this change is usually the reason we fail to acknowledge the most recent form of evil colluding in our daily lives. 

The Boy Scouts now "allow" gay members to scout, but the institution still refuses to permit gay "troop leaders". So a gay father can't lead his scout's troop.

Behind this decision lies the sort of shameful thinking we rarely confront. In this case, the rule is maintained by the unspeakable fear that a gay man is the victim of his own "disturbed" sexuality- a sexuality from which young boys must be protected, one that must never be allowed in a position of leadership. Imagine if single mothers were not allowed to leader Girl Scout troops for fear that their divorces or lack of marriage would "contaminate" young girls. Imagine if skin color determined one's access to leadership positions.

Don't tiptoe around "No"- say it. Set it in stone.

Black Americans are no longer slaves. Things do change. But those Americans who wanted to keep their slaves resorted to the same excuse that "things stay the same"- that change is ultimately impossible, that humans can't help but oppress one another and then validate such oppression by calling it "natural".

What if it is despair- that feeling that nothing you do can make a difference- that keeps us from doing the right thing? Rabid, irrational fear might explain bombing innocent civilians, but it is despair which keeps from acknowledging the horror of what we have done and facing it with courage and humility.

"The heart of a woman" by W.B. Yeats- and the way it rubs me wrong.

Lingering in the bed a little too long this morning reading poetry. Joined by two lovely sprites to take the edge off a poem by Yeats, the kind of poem that requires me to close the book and revisit my assumptions.

THE HEART OF A WOMAN

O what to me the little room
That was brimmed up with prayer and rest;
He bade me out into the gloom,
And my breast lies upon his breast.

O what to me my mother's care,
The house where I was safe and warm;
The shadowy blossom of my hair
Will hide us from the bitter storm.

O hiding hair and dewy eyes,
I am no more with life and death,
My heart upon his warm heart lies,
My breath is mixed into his breath.

A child's body keeps us sometimes from acknowledging the budding heart within. It is easier for me to treat her like a "little girl" than to acknowledge the seed of the woman in her smile. 

When she pulls close to me and rubs my elbow- the way she self-soothes since her fond relationship with my breasts ended- I never forget to ask her what's wrong. Being her source of comfort makes it easy to know when to ask the pointed questions. 

She rubs a little harder and faster; the sensation moves from a tickle to a scouring. Her lips tug her cheeks toward the pillow. "Mommy....." she begins carefully. 

"Yes?" 

Her eyes hide behind the unusual sentiment of not knowing quite how to parse a question that might be obvious if our lives were not limited by the minutes and hours of the day. 

"Are you still gonna be my best friend on the next day- too?"

Unsure of my words, I reach for something solid- the twine necklaces we made together, strung from seed beads and then tied around our necks, our "best friendship necklaces". I take her little fingers and run them over the beads around my neck.

"I'll be your best friend for as long as you let me," I reply, knowing full well the day will come when this honor will be bestowed upon someone else. Gnome smiles. It is enough. Our necklaces, and "mommy's arm", the same arm she claimed as a future bridegroom when Little B. and Prophet demanded who she "wanted to marry". 

I want to tell Gnome that her "soft heart" is the strongest heart of all- the sort of heart that doesn't fear the weight of love, or find reasons to avoid empathy. I want to warn her that romantic love is limited by the available leisure time; and that love of every kind is usually defeated by the expectation of profit or return. I want her to know that love requires courage- and that true love does not oppress or create victims. But the words are too heavy for these few minutes we share in the bed. 

"I wish I could have a little bead just like that freckle above your lip...."

"Why, mommy?"

"Because then... I would put it on my necklace and touch it whenever I wondered what you were doing or playing."

She smiles and rolls over to greet her sister. I wonder this once, again, how to give them a love that does not valorize self-abnegation. The conversation between sisters continues.

The dances behind us.

The salt water stretches backward like spilled ink. 

My sister always straightened her legs out over the rough, wooden planks of the dock, feet dangling alongside mine. We moved gingerly, careful not to stir up the wood into giving us splinters. 

Under the star-heavy beach sky, it was the back-lighting of the picture windows that kept us riveted, eyes on the stage where the sensual shadows of our parents, Doru and Lydia, kept dancing. All those glasses of wine never posed a threat to the integrity of the tango between them. They knew the steps as if someone had sewn them into their soles. 

We’d marvel over the way his hand curved under her supple back, dropping her almost to the hardwood floor, before saving her, the gallant flourish, maybe the magnet drawing the dance tighter. For the two little girls on the dock, the music was limited to the pulse of waves lapping the shore and the heaving, grunting of boats against the ropes binding them to the schedules of their domesticated human owners.

We learned something visceral about love from this montage. Like this: The way a man loves a woman requires him to let her fall just gently enough to make room for the exhiliration of his catching her. 

But Lydia, our brilliant, fiesty, restless mother, sought more from life than the security of standing still. Doru, our handsome, well-disciplined, and charismatic father, loved best the moments when the cause and its corresponding castle were clearly marked. His knighthood depended on clear instructions and boundaries. A dance must be one which has been marked and scuffed on these floors before them. And they were the best dancers we’d ever seen- no one held a candle to their magic when they picked up where the last dance left off.

Sometimes I wondered what it would feel like to invent a dance with another person- with the boy that would become the man that would marry me. The watching of it might reveal haste and division, confusion about what comes next and all the anxiety of being compelled to find a step of our own and then agree upon it in a world where we’d learned to rely on the steps of those before us.

I married a man who, like me, chose to invent his own steps. We spend the days trying to match our feet to the speed of the melody, always shifting, never certain when a particular sequence is good enough to keep and master.

The three small faces watch us with worried eyes. The mother in me wishes to cover their faces with my palms so they can’t peek- not just yet.

“We’re not ready,” I whisper, the comforting smile, “We’re still learning”. We blush, embarrassed, slightly angry that it’s taking us so long, secretly certain that the other’s clumsiness might be to blame. 

My parents, the impeccable dancers, divorced when my sister and I went to college. Maybe the lack of an audience made their dance less meaningful- no reflections from the picture windows to reveal the light’s glint in our shrunken world. The divorce ended my favorite love story on an unspeakable note. Still, the words won’t settle into something I can absorb and pass along to my kids as family history.

He and I have yet to discover that dance we pledged to invent based on the specific crevices and contours of our passionate hearts. Sometimes the search ends in tears; the little faces look worried again, wishing perhaps that we would just settle on one of those popular dances they see other couples doing on the tv or in their living rooms. The Macarena maybe. Or the Electric Slide. The waltz seems to have served humans well for centuries. 

Sharpened, I wonder the same. 

Who are we- this man and this woman- to need something as special and sacred as a dance all our very own? What makes the seeking- the anger, the frustration, the bruised toes- worth the smudged reflections? Why do we stand where others sit, fall, golf, shop, or take to the therapist’s couch? 

Love is too brittle a word.

We stare at the waves side by side, not touching, touched, apart. We hope that our desire and our dream dance will be worth the uncertainty. His hands know how to hold my body even at the moments when it takes more than love to hold me from running away. 

It’s the hearts that handicap us in formulating the dance. But these same hearts are the ones for whom we promised to imagine the dance.

And so we continue, sometimes shuffling, often slipping, over the revolving floors of our shared life- both creators and creatures of this Eclectic Slide.

Honoring creativity where we find it.

My creativity is not your creativity. Fortunately, we each have our itches to scratch. Yet one of the most difficult lessons to learn in life involves appreciating difference and diversity. 

We find endless excuses to celebrate and appreciate creativity that coalesces with our own allegiances and preferences. The color pink, for example, is a big deal among the three little ladies in the castle. Earlier today, Prophet asked me, "Is is true that your favorite color is bla-a-ack?" 

"Yes, my favorite color is black," I affirmed, as Prophet collapsed into a fit of giggles and Little B. launched into an extended "ewwwwwww" sound. Only Gnome sat silently, watching and waiting for the excitement to die down so she could come up and tell me, "Mommy, I don't think it's bad that your favorite color is black."

Maybe she feels the need to tell me this because, when she colors, Prophet and Little B. are the judges who declare her colorings "not pink enough". For whatever reason, Gnome dares to self-describe as a lover of the color orange. No yuk-yuk sounds stand between Gnome and her favorite color. Yet she never finds ugly things to say about the color pink, regardless of how many times it has been used against her.

The microcosm of the household reflects the challenges in the macrocosm of the world. Those who can appreciate the colors and creativities of others are in a better position to enjoy more of life- and to feel less threatened by those who enjoy it differently. On the other hand, those who need to validate their preferences against others will find themselves constantly at war with anyone who dares to be different.

I look forward to the day when Prophet and Little B. tone down their holy-terror-of-pink and evolve into a more gentle appreciation for the rainbows. The world is far too beautiful to miss....

The Eldest has started his seeds.

I love the way he labelled them and lined them up along the windowsill "for every drop of sunlight". Though he is sad we don't have the time or means to maintain a community garden plot this year, I know he understands our former plot will go to others whose seeds will grow in the soil we helped maintain. A beautiful circle of life.

"Look at the dark tips on my lavender sprouts," he exclaimed. I nodded and smiled, trying to calibrate my excitement at seeing his hands succeed where mine often fail.

The Brandywine heirloom tomato sprout was greeted with a high-five- it's one of our most anticipated fruits for the coming summer.

"Thank you," I told the Eldest as I stared at his "final surprise". He wondered why I was thanking him.

"It's the first beet sprout I've ever seen," I confessed. "And.... I love it." He blushed and hugged me, but not without adding, "Awww Mom, you're going to make me turn beet red."

If only he knew what powerful seeds he sows in my heart with this dedication and determination to grow his own garden- to grow his own way, to grow anyway, in spite of my unspoken longing sometimes to kiss his not-so-little feet and toes. So it goes.

Building birdhouses and questioning the rise of the nation-state.

Weekends at the Coryell Castle have a tendency to develop in unexpected ways. This past weekend, the King and the Eldest spent a Saturday building a "wren house" from tornado-fallen wood found along Hurricane Creek. It happened because of a book....

Meanwhile, the girls and I colored the "Coryell Castle" sign for the garden gate. The King cut it from found wood last year, but it languished in the garage, unpainted, until the chirps of a coming spring brought it to our attention. 

"Our house is really small- it's not like other castles," observed Prophet, as she washed a paintbrush in water she'd procured from the rain barrel. 

"That's because all the other castles are way too big," I said (a little too smug). "One day, we humans will be remembered only for our ruins- and the ruin we made of this beautiful planet."

Prophet giggled and leaned against Gnome. "Mommy is in a serious mood," she whispered.

Now, after having built the birdhouse and painted the Coryell Castle sign, the King and I sit watching the girls swing.

Gnome shows off her new ability to propel herself by pumping through the air; she throws her head back and closes her eyes for emphasis. We are charmed.

“She would have made a good Wren,” I say to the King, a reference to the original name we had planned for yonder tiny-swing-thing. He agrees.

Why did we name her M---- rather than Wren? Neither remembers.

The clouds lay like a poisonous white snakeskin over the sky. I want to peel them back and find the proper name for this strange planet-place in which we find (and lose) ourselves on a daily basis.

Prophet settles onto the swing nearest Gnome. Suddenly, Gnome's two pigtales reveal their asymmetry, she lays her head to the side, crumples her face into a cry- “No, Prophet, go away”. Prophet tries to ignore the crescendo of wails demanding that she get off the swing.

I feel myself redden.

“Gnome, you can’t cry because someone sits next to you or breathes near you!”, I snap. I'm surprised by how much this flusters me.

“Next thing you know, you’ll become one of those nationalists!" I practically spit out that last word as if it were an expletive.

"Look," I say, trying to impose some calm on my own outrage, "If you don’t like the person next to you, then it's YOUR job to get up and move. You don’t have a right to remove them or make them leave....” The Alabama Immigration legislation flashes through my mind, alongside sepia-toned photos of Ellis Island and Japanese internment camps. Gnome stops complaining; the girls swing as if their lives depended on feeling their toes touch the clouds.

The King enters my field of vision, picking up trash from the lawn, a large smile on his beardless face. “Did you just call her a nationalist?” he laughs.

“Yes,” I admit. I am that woman in the check-out line who fears that her children will find anything of value in flags, nation-states, and patriotisms. The excuses we imagine for mass killings can never be sacred to me. Fortunately, the King takes a more nuanced view of fences, gates, and the history of the nation-state. 

If it weren't for the subtle poetries of living in the deep South, this girl would be roaming the continents with her backpack, eyes peeled for caravans or other contingencies. I wonder sometimes if my rambling blood courses through the kids' veins- how and when and if they will recognize it, what symptoms will lead them to give it a name.... The mysteries of life disguise themselves in rapture.

Mining a fallow field for stories.

The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.... Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word "unspeakable".... Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried....Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.... When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom....

Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992

Yesterday, the Eldest and I sat on the damp grass, writing in our nature journals- his eyes locked on a story he was telling about henbit. But the henbit didn't interest me, not enough, not really. I wrestled with the words that lay sleeping. The colors of the storm-drained day forced me to seek the life around me, to push against the temptation of laziness and lack of color, strain my eyes to find the green on the field.

I turned quietly to the Eldest for inspiration. His nature journaling was notable for its flow state. I felt suddenly self-conscious- the laggard in the long line of people excited about the goal behind the waiting. Why was the wonder absent? How could I retrieve it? 

Nevermind that the attempt to control wonder- to force it to the surface- fails for its willed desperation. It's the babies we most want to conceive- the ones that we intend to fit into the perfect plans for our lives- that give us grief for their refusal to arrive upon demand.

I remember lying on the king-sized bed and talking to my eggs. "Look guys," I said, hoping the Eldest would not overhear, "your job is to get fertilized and give me that baby we want so badly." Ultimately, the conversation ended badly. I didn't get pregnant for another eight months- exactly three weeks after I'd given up on getting pregnant. Prophet, whom I'd hoped to will into existence, eluded me so long as my desperate pursuit retained the aura of a supplication.

I'm the kind of person that fears those moments in which I can't find the story that ties the room together. Like the Dude, I need the rug, my woven waft of words, to anchor everything else.

The uncharmed moments- the ones that don't "speak" to me- ruin plans and turn delight into drudgery. Like a woman holding a grocery-store corn cob, whose perfect rows of kernels add a foreign presence to the kitchen, it seems all there is left for me to do is to add water and boil it. But what's the point of adding to heat to an unhusked object? How am I different from a tool when my only task is to push the right button?

Judith Herman's insights into the transformative, liberating power of narrative resonate with me. For it's not only trauma that requires narrative liberation- the cycles and rhythms of everyday life bud and bloom best when untangled through stories. Yet, we dread the presumed price of honesty, weighing it against our self-concept and pride. I assume being "myself" means being the self I have known and recognized for all these years. I find excuses to keep from telling the stories that threaten this static, unchanged self. 

"I move to keep things whole," Mark Strand reminds me. The true story of a self can only be a quest, a tale in which the protagonist changes and adapts, acquiring the traits discovered in leaves and creatures along the path. Being dedicated to a story about an unchanged self generates its own forms of trauma- the trauma of living in the past and never marveling over how those lines suddenly appeared around my eyes. Under the circumstances, all that matters is getting rid of those lines that make me look "older". Being physically "young" becomes part of the story I tell about the past self, the only one I can love enough to narrate. 

"I move to keep things whole."

So read my nature journal entry for yesterday's 45-minute observation period. The Eldest covered four pages, front and back, with scribbles and scrawls about sapsucker marks on trees and the perfect seeding method of tulip trees. I settled for six words.

But those six words reminded me of the story I continue to observe in the social ecology of American family life- a story woven of many strands, one that looks different enough to obscure the shared loom, the common threads. Maybe the only stories worth telling are the ones that lead us into a livable present. Maybe the only wonder worth engaging is the kind that creeps up on us, uninvited, and reveals the leaf miner at the heart of the leaf. 

How an unexpected child adds joy and meaning to my life.

Magical night- one in which the entire magic centered around Little B.'s ability to sleep without watching TV or throwing a tantrum. She slept in her own bed, sharing a room with the girls because- as she confessed- she "doesn't like to sleep alone". 

"I don't like to sleep alone, either," I explained. "I like to know there is someone next to me- it makes me feel warm and relaxed."

Little B. nodded. I asked her if she ever got scared at night. She nodded again. I wondered aloud what scared her. Missing Pops and her home down the street- with its more flexible bedtimes hours and lack of TV rules- was part of what Little B. expressed.

The other parts- missing her recently-deceased grandmother- didn't come to the surface (and I wouldn't expect a little person to be able to articulate something as ineffable and complicated as grief). There are moments when Margaret's amazing, powerful shadow- the way she captured all the light in a room and turned it into the sort of fire by which you long to warm your hands- fills the space, makes her absence more prominent. How to discuss these dark places around us- the places inhabited by the memory and fleeting presence of Margaret?

Initially, Little B. had insisted on having her "own room"- so we tried to make the guest room her room. But her 4-year-old wants were at odds with her natural need for company and reassurance. In a way, Little B.'s desires also flew in the face of her new status as part of a team of siblings, a way of holding on to her long-established identity as an only child. "I wan-n-t-t-t-t...." she sometimes wailed, as if the mere of act of wanting was its own justification.

"I want things too, Little B.," I said, struggling to keep my tone even as my heart raced and my head pounded. The physiological effects of hysteria on those who must watch are notoriously effective and disconcerting. In a sense, hysteria removes the hysteric from feeling for others around them- it severs their ties to other humans and allows them to express the most extreme, exaggerated form of any feelings passing through their minds. The hysteric is unconscious of the world around them. They are lost in the moment, upping their own antes, chasing a feeling straight into its most destructive variants. 

Personally, I doubt the "cathartic effect" of hysteria. I've never met a hysterical person who realizes anything about life or themselves while lost in a fit. Nor have I heard of situations in which hysteria made people "feel better". Usually, it draws us deeper into the morass of our own heads without enabling us to understand it or cope with our feelings. The underlying causes of hysteria range from PTSD to anxiety to panic disorders or phobias. What all these underlying causes have in common is a solution that encourages learning to express and articulate our feelings and fears in order to find solutions or adaptations to the way in which they cripple our lives. Hysteria is not really the sort of behavior left best unattended.

A recent review of psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic studies led to the conclusion that there is "no hard evidence for a cathartic effect of tears, even for so-called cathartic therapy, in which patients are asked to recall as vividly as possible their traumatic experiences". Randolf Cornelius likewise concluded that, in contrast to a catharsis, “crying is associated with increases in arousal, tension and negative affect … Crying does also not appear to be necessarily beneficial to one’s health, as the cathartic model of crying would predict.” 

Despite this evidence, crying is something we value in the Coryell Castle. There are complicated feelings or moments in which tears and hugs feel better than talking. But hysterics are not about hugs- they push everyone else away. It literally hurts to watch a hysteric tantrum. As an adult, you ache for the little person who kicks you away. As a child, you feel terrorized by the possibility of an impending reign of terror that can wake you from your sleep, destroy a family dinner, cause your own little heart to race with anxiety, and make your home feel like an unsafe, unloving place.

In agreeing to remain attached and emotionally empathetic to our children, we stay vulnerable to the feelings of a little person. This includes the way in which their hysterics can unmoor our hearts and nests. More importantly, however, it includes the contagion of their happiness. We carry the joys of the smiles across the room, the brilliant flashes of light when she comes to me, wraps her arms around my legs, hides her face in my knees, and says, "I love you, mom".

There is no way to describe the way her trust and affection makes me feel; no words to express the way in which it evokes the familiar while opening my spirit to something entirely foreign- the amazing love one feels for a little person who enters your life unexpectedly and carves her name on your heart in a way that makes it impossible to not feel her pain or to keep from co-feeling her frustrations.

"It's a root," I told her. "We all have roots that keep us from losing our place in the world...." 

"And you are so special and lucky- you have many roots to keep you safe, many arms to love you, many hearts to call home..."

Last night, the magical night, left me with a sense of peace. The King read the girls a bedtime story and kissed them goodnight. He tiptoed into the living room, beaming- "She's asleep", he whispered. It went without saying that our hearts felt light.

Watching Little B. struggle to sleep alone as she screamed when presented to alternatives has been painful- all the more painful for her refusal to be comforted. The my-way-or-the-highway mentality common to little people was only reinforced by recent traumas in her young life. Little B. needs to feel she is not at the mercy of circumstances- and this need is a legitimate one. 

I snuck in to peep at her around 9:30- she was fast asleep, long legs having kicked off the covers in her usual fashion. I was happy for her- just happy for her peace at that moment. Around 2 am, I thought I heard a little stirring in the girl's room. The King ventured in and I followed, bleary-eyed, slightly worried. 

Little B. was lying in her bed- she'd woken up for a moment and wanted someone with her. We pointed to the girls. She smiled. I put on an audio story of the "The Little Engine That Could" and kissed her on the forehead, then the cheek, then the wrist, and then the tip of her nose.

She smiled, again, simply, as if it were easy and natural. "I love you Little B.," I whispered. "And you are so lucky to be surrounded by the love of so many people." Little B. hugged my neck.

"There must be something very, very special about a little girl who is loved so very, very much," I whispered, trying not to do that "ineffective" thing known as crying. She let me go, her eyes drifting towards the voice telling one of my favorite stories. It was a good night- one to inspire us and give us hope.

Snow romping on rewind with a little lesson on sibling rivalry.

During all the wild craze concerning two inches of snow, I decided to steal some quiet moments while the King took the kids on a snow romp. 

The second hand reports from the Eldest emphasized the romping-ness of the affair. Little B. explained that her clothes were "too big" for the slide, and she got stuck.

But the secondhand reports relayed by Prophet emphasized the sibling rivarly that can poke out its head even in the middle of the woods, mid-adventure.

Upon discovering the secret bench in the woods, the King wanted to get a photo. But Little B. said Gnome could not be in the photo- that she "didn't want" to be on a bench with Gnome. The King was confused because there hadn't been any fights or spats between the two, and Gnome was being her usual feisty, three-year-old self. 

"I'm going to take a picture and everybody can be in it," he told Little B. "If you don't want to be in the photo, you don't have to sit on the bench," he added, "but I'm not going to tell some people they can't be in it."

Little B. sulked and thought it over. She finally decided she wanted to be in the photo. However, she would only be in it if she could turn her back towards the Gnome. So the King snapped the first shot.

"Do you guys want to trade places on the bench?" asked the King, hoping it might soothe ruffled feathers. Little B. did not want to trade places- she stayed put. Gnome and Prophet switched. 

When Prophet reported the bench fiasco to me, I went to find Little B. and pulled her into my lap. It seemed important for her to hear what Prophet was saying, to be part of the discussion in an attempt to understand her feelings. Little B. refused to explain why she didn't want Gnome to sit next to her on the bench. At one point, she said it was because she "didn't like" Gnome.

"But you play with Gnome- just the two of you- all the time," I pointed out. "And you hug her and say how much you love to play with her...."

Little B. had a hard time finding words to express her resentment of Gnome. I wanted to validate her feelings while helping her to understand why they might be hurtful and unworthy of her focused attention. So I explained to the three girls that it is the most natural thing in the world to feel frustrated and resentful of siblings after going from being an only child to being part of a troupe of kids within a family.  

"Imagine if you went from being the baby to being one among four," I began. "Until four months ago, Little B. was the baby- she got all the attention the littlest member of the family receives. But she was also the oldest, with all the privileges of being the oldest. Don't you think that sometimes it is hard to explain why being a middle child can be frustrating?"

Prophet nodded. Little B. curled her legs in my lap. I could tell that Prophet's empathy engine was working hard; she began to explain why Little B. might be "missing" getting "all the attention the way you get when you are the only one". Prophet's thoughtfulness really came out, however, when she gave the following example:

"My favorite time with Mommy is when she takes me somewhere with just me and her. We have fun and no one is whining or crying. It makes me feel like Mommy is my best friend when I get to be alone with her."

As Little B. puts on a brave face and tries to sort through all the challenging feelings and emotions coming her way, my best hope is that her siblings will encourage her rather than resenting her in return. Sibling rivalry is one of life's greatest challenges. Learning to communicate one's secret resentments on this front can equip you to handle difficult conversations and situations. My prayers for Little B. and the girls are the beginning to every day.

Two printable games for kids to play on what appears to be a wet and windy day.

So begins the day's play.....

Two simple games (PDF)

I found the games- pebble tag and triangle house- in a international family book from the 1930's. Since the pages were frayed and filled with misspellings, I did a little copywork and added the games to our family play binder. 

The quote from James P. Carse makes a great family play book binder cover- a subtle reminder that the games we enjoy the most don't revolve around winning but on the art of play itself.

"Who Remains Standing?", a poem by Andree Chedid.

WHO REMAINS STANDING?

                by Andree Chedid

First,
erase your name,
unravel your years,
destroy your surroundings,
uproot what you seem,
and who remains standing?
Then,
rewrite your name,
restore your age,
rebuild your house,
pursue your path,
and then,
endlessly,
start over, all over again.

Andree is a Lebanese poetess, a woman well-versed in the art of beginning again. Given the sour aftertaste of an unintended power struggle in lapbooking with the girls today, I found myself closing the books, turning my back on the crafts, and waiting for the howl.

Standing in the room- with the girls and the toys and the half-capped glue sticks, the floor sticky with lemonade, the windows smudged with tiny fingerprints, a sketch I'd started only to find as part of someone's surprise collage- standing still in the center of the chaos, not a word came to my lips.

There was nothing to say.

Or, rather, nothing I said would have shaved the edge from the madness. Nothing would make the cut from the remainder of the well-laid plans any cleaner.

The Prophet wanted to take "portraits". I sat on the floor by the $30 thrift-store couch and gave in.

The images showed me to myself- an immobilized "modern" woman feeling her feminism more intensely with each passing minute- a still life surrounded by motion, by moving life. 

 When I reach out to steady myself, the poems are sturdier than any oak table.

It's not what we know, but what we long to know that keeps us hungry for life. The unquenchable longing is my best friend- the piece of myself I won't relinquish for any man, woman, or child. 

On days like this today, I fold my hands. If I sit still long enough, steadied by poetry, the hubbub dims and narrows, chiseled by words folding one atop the other, thickening to the density of whetstone. I wait to be sharpened. 

An alpine sunrise followed by logistical decisions.

On the day when the King captured this Colorado sunrise, we sipped coffee and debated whether to head over to Raven at Three Peaks, a golf course that an electrician told us was great for sledding and nordic skiing.

The possibility of skiing on a golf course did not sound alluring- but the King insisted that we should rather play it safe than play it sorry.

The Phish song, "Northern Lights", came to mind.

"I think we should look for some easy hiking trails and try to ski those...." I said.

"How about Breckenridge?"

"Breck is so geared up and hip- I'd rather go somewhere with a negligible cool factor, somewhere I can fit in."

The King almost rolled his eyes. But, instead, he asked me to suggest another location. So I went back to my original longing- to explore some old mine trails some where closer to the treeline. Say, Baldy Mine Loop Tour, for example.

Or Herman's Gulch?

Or the Peaks Trail? That one smacked of adventure.

"Aren't those the trails designated as possible disasters?" my husband asked.

"Adventures, disasters, glass half empty, glass half full....."

The trails around Dillon looked- at first- like something we might be able to agree upon. That is, until other, more winsome possibilities came to mind. 

Sometimes everything we might do stacks high against those few things we can do. But we can agree on the beauty of an alpine sunrise. And we can take it from there, this once, again.

New Year's road-trip: Going through ten different states in ten days.

En route to our mountain vacation, we drove through a total of 10 states. Courtesy of the tourism bureaus in each state, the little folks and I walked away with bags of information about American history, geography, geology, economic development, and culture. 

OUR TEN STATES

Missississippi
Tennessee
Arkansas
Oklahoma
Kansas
Colorado
New Mexico
Texas
Louisiana
Alabama

On the way, the King and I learned a few lessons about long road trips, teachable moments, and the importance of multiple good playlists. The take-homes:

Pee outdoors when possible.
Stopping at established restrooms involves walking through gas stations full of candy and glitter intended to seduce your kids (and you) into forking over a small chunk of change in return for some junk. Also, imagine all the germs and viruses you can avoid by just peeing in the woods with the song of a sparrow to lighten your load. So pack that toilet tissue and vow to find nature-made restrooms on your road trip. By the way, snow isn't a problem. In case you haven't noticed, kids will pee anywhere. It's their adult companions that crave the water wasted by those porcelain thrones we call toilets.

Nature journals.
Whenever we stopped at a rest area or even along a scenic piece of road, Max wandered around with his nature journal and made notes. The King provided the latitude and longitude as Max canvassed a brief area for local birds, trees, plants, grasses, and insects. Then, when we got back into the car, he flipped through his field guides and tried to identify each living thing while journaling them into a context (i.e. climate, geography, etc.).

Geocache kits.
Simple as having an iphone, a compass, and a geocaching log. If you have a signature stamp, bring it along as well. There are geocaches aplenty all over these fine United States. It makes a great excuse to pee in the woods for the more inhibited family members.

Printed maps and colored pencils.
Oh the things you can do with just a few maps and pencils. Encourage the writers to list all the towns they pass through on the map and then turn them into a narrative poem. Show little ones how to draw a blue circle to indicate a lake (and then mark them as you pass) or a red square to indicate a barn or a black dot to indicate a cow. Then let them make their own map adding what they observe along the way.

Read-aloud chapter books.
Long car trips are a great time to read that awesome book to a captive audience. Who needs illustrations when the scenery keeps catching your eye? I shared A Finder's Magic by Phillipa Pearce with the crew, while Max read chapters from the original Winne the Pooh by A. A. Milne aloud to the girls.

Water bottles.
Skip the juice boxes and other sugar-laden laxatives- water is the best possible drink for the road. It saves big folks the frustration of spills, sticky luggage, and endless restroom stops. Kids tend to drink water when they are thirsty, while they will often drink juices to satisfy hunger or a craving for sugar. Keep it simple. Milk at night and water during the day.

Apples and clementines.
Bring along washed apples and seedless clementines. The little folks like to peel their own in our family. As for the apples, what could make a better all-around snack?

Scissors, glue sticks, and white drawing paper.
Using all those fantastic resources procured at each stateside rest area or travel office, cut out pictures of landmarks or places in each state and pass them (along with glue stick and paper) to the little people to make their own state-based collages. Alternately, let them tell stories by cutting their own pictures and pasting them to white paper (reimaged as a blank storyboard). Then, when you make your next stop, tell everyone that he or she has to pick up all the paper scraps around their chair and put them in the trash bag if they wish to "get off the bus", so to speak. Consider cleaning up as a ticket (a get-out-of-van-free-card). 

White cardstock and stamps.
Make your own postcards using glue sticks and travel brochure cut-outs. Let the kids write a message on their creations and then use your iphone to look up addresses. Put on a stamp and drop them off at the next post office box you see. 

Good music and playlists.
There are so many ways to tie the music to the state you are visiting. For example, some cities are mentioned in songs. Travel brochures will mention which musicians hail from their state, so add a few locals to your playlists. Use the songs as segues for discussions about history and culture. Or just find a few favorite sing-alongs. We use Spotify rather than mp3s or ITunes because we can find any song in world and enjoy it without having to "own" it. You can also find lots of stories and songs for kids. 

Poems and inspirations.
Find beautiful words to add to the mix when whimsy is conspicuously lacking. The little people may or may not show interest, but it will probably stir your soul just right. Keep your own journal of impressions and observations. Everything you see becomes part of the story you discover together. 

Oh, the winter clothes woes...

Unlike their wiser, more seasoned older brother, the two M's and the B decided that winter clothing is not to their liking. This means that every effort to go play outside involves whining and complaining and silly antics over not wanting to wear "a coat" or "not that coat" or "that hat is yucky". 

After more cajoling and pleading than I can reasonably justify, followed by whining that "it's too cold", I decided to put my boot down on the winter clothes whines. Enter colored pencils and "We Love Winter Clothes" coloring pages (see below).

WE LOVE WINTER CLOTHES (PDF)

We sat down for a coloring session, beginning with the funny cat faces. And I began my sermon, which went something like this...

"So, ladies, you see all these happy cats? Well, one of the reasons they are so happy is that they are wearing the right clothes for the weather. Cats have fur coats all year round, and those fur coats keep them snug and warm. A cold cat is not a happy cat."

Everyone seemed to agree, after mentioning that the cats might also be smiling because they "just got petted" or got to "drink milk". We moved on to the second coloring page- the one with winter clothes.

"Imagine that you got to decorate your winter clothes however you wanted. Use your colored pencils to make them look like your dream coat or dream hat or dream scarf..."

As they colored their winter clothes, we talked about how each item of clothing is used to keep a specific part of the body warm. Scarves and turtleneck sweaters are used to keep necks warm. Hats and hoods are used to keep heads warm. Gloves and mittens are used to keep fingers warm. Jackets and sweaters are used to keep the chest and body warm. And so on.

Finally, we colored the last page, which depicted a fun snowball fight between two well-dressed and happy kids. I pointed out that dressing in winter clothes allowed the kids to have fun in cold weather rather than sit and complain about being too cold. The girls nodded. B. pointed out how her fingers "got froze" in the park the other day. We talked about how being cold feels tingly and numb. Here's to hoping a lesson was learned.

Beads, books, and a thoughts on guilt from Shannon Hayes.

"Radical homemaker" Shannon Hayes ponders how to get rid of all that art her kids create on a daily basis... It's a challenge for every parent who wishes to honor their child's creations while living a home that enables movement and moving-on-ness:

But what of that past? The curled-up crayon drawing is still in my hand. I remember the day they made it. They had decided they were opening a beauty salon, and decorated the bathroom with drawings and paintings of stylish women sporting trendy haircuts. If I throw out that picture, where will that memory go?

And then, I catch a glimpse of my own image in the bathroom mirror. My face has changed dramatically since I had Saoirse ten years ago. My own youthful skin is slowly giving way to smile lines and crows' feet, evidence of the years I've spent grinning, giggling and laughing with these children. And there, written plainly across my aging face, is my truest memory book. I cannot hold on to each and every slip of paper, to each and every shred of fabric, to each and every knitting project, shed tear, spill, impromptu song, music lesson, snuggle, or kiss.

All of them drift away. And I must keep physical and emotional space in my home and in my spirit to allow new ones to enter. But if I do, the lines on my face will capture all of it somehow, and when I gaze at myself and see those slowly emerging signs of age, I will know that I have lived well, and that I have enjoyed every moment.

You can read more from Shannon at Yes! magazine, the one (alongside my Harper's and my The Crisis) that brightens my mailbox visits at least once a month.

A three-year-old's thoughts on "being in love".

Milla has been talking about love lately.

More specifically, she keeps referring to "being in love". It's hard to believe she is only three years old, as I haven't heard much talk of romance from the mouths of other budding babes.

Milla chatting with Joshua on Thanksgiving- Linda and I overheard lots of giggles from the foyer.

SCENE: Today, at the castle, the kids prepare to go play outside in the wet grass with a dreary December sky overhead. I zip up B.'s coat, and help Micah wiggle into her cardigan.

ME: "If you say 'thank you', then I get to say one of my favorite things."

MICAH.: "What?"

ME: "I'm not going to tell you without the magic words..."

MICAH: "Thank you, Mommy."

ME: "Oh man, you are so-o-o-o welcome Micah."

I help snap the buttons on Milla's denim jacket.

ME: "It makes me feel warm inside when someone says 'Thank you' to me... All warm and fuzzy."

MILLA: "I too, Mommy!"

The final button snaps shut.

MILLA: "Thank you, Mommy."

ME: "You are so very, very welcome, my Milla."

Milla cocks her head to one side and grins. Her eyes meet mine in the warm squinty ooze I recognize all too well-  the one akin to that similar squinty sweetness which runs through the veins of the King.

MILLA: "I feel like I gonna fall in love wich you...",

 We stare at each other for a second, tasting the fullness of love and life. She is her father's daughter. I am her father's partner. There are oceans of unlived delight between us.

OUR KOINONIA EXPERIENCE: Discovering our spiritual footprints.

We ventured out along the dirt road the meadows near the pecan orchards, back towards the creek and the reknowned Picnic Hill. The roosters had their say amid the chirps and the steady sound of hammers in the hands of a few volunteers from the Fuller Center for Housing. I found myself chasing the little people, lamenting their joie de vivre which often felt more like lack of self-control or obedience. Again, the old question- why can't they drop everything and obey me? Again, the sharp answer, also a question- why do I need to feel this sort of power over them?

The king created a lovely parting gift- a journal filled with verses, photos, poems, and daily meditations. I longed for the free time to sit down and pore through its pages. Stealing moments and glimpses only to find myself conscious of the way Milla's shrill shrieking (a new habit) strangled the soft sounds of nature and creation.

The ugliness within- here it comes- the true test of my faith, the way in which I allow myself to feel that the little people grate every available nerve. My hands lay idle, yet filled with the care and nurture, the possibilities of need to which I must continuously tend. I found myself distracted by the barriers within my own heart to accepting the mystery of life. It seems I would prefer it to be a pretty picture that I have designed and painted without any input from Max, Micah, or Milla- a picture of my own making which I can then encourage everyone to admire. 

Does it seem silly that I thanked God for their heedlessness and disobedience at that moment when I most wanted them to sit down, plait the grass, and obey?

The little people collecting fallen limbs from the field.

In an effort to make ourselves useful, we picked up fallen tree limbs and branches from the soccer field. Max stacked them around the base of a tree- with Micah and Milla quickly joining him. Then the kids had a contest to see who could snap the largest number of branches into kindling. Watching them break twigs, arguing and laughing, building tiny piles of tinder in a race against each other, even their competition offered a truce of sorts- a moment to stop, breathe, and appreciate the lives we've been given to live and love. 

After carting a few bags of kindling over the the bonfire pit, Max returned just in time to find Milla crying over a recent foray into a fire-ant hill. Her tiny plump feet were covered in red welts. I made a practical discovery with vast implications for future fire-ant incidents. Iodine, applied heavily with a cottonball, works wonders on fire-ant bites. After an hour, Milla's welts dried out, removing every trace of the white bumps that characterize a fire ant's vicious communication. The little things should never cease to fill our hearts with gratitude.

Another source of gratitude came with the development of a more other-regarding awareness. There's a consciousness that comes from sharing a house with six hard-working interns- a house that is open to us whether we have money to donate $30 a night or not. I found myself watching my voice and its volume, standing to walk into the adjacent room in order to talk to the kids rather than shout across the rooms. By facing them up close, the way in which I communicated also changed- my words and language softened by the tenderness of flesh and proximity. 

Alongside this re-humanized way of relating, I was struck by the way in which communal property earned a sort of respect from me that private property rarely evokes. Oddly, it mattered that we put the chairs back in the way we had found them. Knowing that everyone draws water from the same well, we took short showers and shared bathwater to make minimal use of this precious resource. Micah reminded us to turn off the lights and the fan. 

We became conscious of our footprints not just on this world from an ecological standpoint but on the lives of others around us. A loud song from our room might keep others awake in the room next door. A yell might jar someone's prayers. In a community where residents live nearby, there is an implicit understanding that one must honor the humanity and spirit of other persons. The way we express our grievances ripples in circles around us.

That second night at Koinonia, on our starlight walk, all four of us talked about our newly-discovered "spiritual footprints", or the way in which our spirits impress and affect the world around us through through words, thoughts, and deeds. It was a heady and beautiful revelation, one with which I am still reckoning.

And yet I would lack the honor of this reckoning if it weren't for the spirited excitement of the little people that share this space under the stars with me. Perhaps this is because the things I think I want are not those which allow my spirit to grow. Instead, the things I want (i.e. peace, silence, obedience, control) encourage spiritual statis, keeping things as they are, exposing me to familiar delights and comforts. Being broken can be beautiful thing.

What we know.

“Because IQ tests favor memory skills and logic, overlooking artistic creativity, insight, resiliency, emotional reserves, sensory gifts, and life experience, they can't really predict success, let alone satisfaction.” 

        Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain

Shucking corn together is a habit in our family- something known as a little people's "job". Usually, they chat and sing as they peel back the layers to reveal the cornsilk.

It's not just about being together and talking, a form of communion (though it includes much of that), but also makes for great metaphors ("how peeling back layers leads to new treasures"). Not to mention the context it provides for many of the books we read about rural and local history where barn raisings and harvests involve activities that create and solidify community.

Activities like corn-shucking give us a tiny taste of communal life- a life in which everyone helps and lends a hand, a life in which the greater good is truly greater than any immediate gratifications we wish to pursue. As a mother, I relish those things we learn which draw us closer to one another and build a structure for happiness pursued in conjunction with others.

Milla's belated birthday in the form of poem inspired, somehow, by Ovid.

OVID: "Neither can the wave that has passed by be recalled, nor the hour which has passed return again."

She is ours for the moments quickened to memory,

this "Milla",

this genus of plant of the family Asparagaceae,

subfamily Brodiaeoideae, 

this container of the Mexican star, tiny scrunched fists,

and bottomless mirth.

Germans take her to be industrious,

Russians find her somewhat pleasant,

yet the wavering Romanian in me knows 

she is actually compassion,

that form of wisdom which generates mercy.

We watch 

uncertain

what genes can be held responsible

for the science of her strut. 

The evening begins with kids

spinning

to the strobe of a sunsettling

sticky fingers against the darkening sky,

hands cupped with the hope 

of firefly friends.

This moment

where

what we catch

means less than having

once upon that time

just tried.

Eating at restaurants with little ones is always an adventure.

The adventure inadvertently includes the rest of the restaurant-goers, as it were. Some are sympathetic, smiling, and happy to be alive; others scowl, revealing that persistent pre-snarl and I left imagining the lecture they'll deliver on "well-behaved children" and public spaces. 

Milla tangles with me at the Mellow Mushroom.

Perhaps the conversation is familiar to you- or on your list of interactions to avoid. Let's imagine it goes something like this:

DISGRUNTLED EATER: (Rolling his eyes in your direction) Ma'am, your child (he spits the word out with distaste) is singing too loud...

WORRIED MOM: Oh, sir, I'm sorry. (turning to Milla) Milla, you have to sing in a whisper- we are at a restaurant.

MILLA: Okay Mommy. But we outside- you tell me I can sing outside.

WORRIED MOM: (Casts glance at disgruntled eater, who is following the conversation carefully) Yes, but not here Milla. This is a pizza patio where people come to eat.

DISGRUNTLED EATER: It is, after all, a PUBLIC place so bratty kids can't do whatever they want.

WORRIED MOM: (Getting annoyed with his tone) That's right- it is public place where all kinds of people come to eat, drink, talk, and hang out. There is no sign that says, "Autistic children are banned."

DISGRUNTLED EATER: Is she (pointing to Milla) autistic? Because that would explain her behavior.

WORRIED MOM: No, sir, she is not on the autism spectrum. She is 2 years old, which also explains her behavior. There is no sign which bans two-year-olds. Would you like for us to move to another table further away from you?

DISGRUNTLED EATER: Yes, I would. But it just so happens that I am sitting in the middle so any table will be the same distance from me.

WORRIED MOM: Well, sir, maybe the patio isn't the right place for you. Maybe you should go inside. There, you won't be bothered by the traffic honks, the sounds of rap blaring from car speakers, or the usual pedestrian noises. You may, however, find yourself inconvenienced by the loud television sportcasts and newscasts.

DISGRUNTED MAN: I am a paying customer and I did not pay to hear that baby (pronounced with distaste) sing some baby song while I eat.

WORRIED MOM: I see. You're not the kind of man who appreciates a serenade. If I had known, I would have brought a set of ear plugs for you so you can drown out the sound of life around you as you eat your pizza. Do you have a favorite song that Milla could sing for you?

DISGRUNTLED MAN: That's it- I'm moving inside. You people are crazy.

 

Milla dangles on the iron railing.

Well, that conversation did not happen on this day- the day mom and I went to talk about writing and my most recent handwritten adventures into Hannah Arendt's head.

I am grateful to have a mom who respects what I value in life- a mom who has learned that the unruliness of my hair and the tears in my jeans are a topic I prefer to avoid in conversation, a mom who enterains my interest in ideas and enjoys chasing them to different conclusions.

“What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsibile, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside. And I think it means love."
                                Jeanette Winterson, novelist, poet, and author 

Sailing on the Lady Lydia.

Last week, the King, the Captain, and the Max took a little sailing trip around Fairhope, Alabama. Since someone had to stay with the ladies, I tried not to feel too sorry for myself when that someone was me. Max returned from the adventure raving about sailing, which made my heart do a little dance inside my chest.

After extensive ballyhoo-ing, Max finally agreed to take the helm of the Lady Lydia. The King and the Captain were thrilled to see his interest in the navigational tools, including the compass and the tell-tales. 

You can see the Mobile Bay bridge behind the sailors.

The King told me that Max enjoyed sitting near the bow of the boat, catching the first bursts of wind and watching the calm waters of the bay float by. I longed to see him in the flesh and discover what caught his attention- and what kept it. Since I wasn't there, however, I had to rely on the regales of the masculine posse.

I remember being his age and sitting on the bow of the first Lady Lydia with my parents at the helm. I also recall that most enchanting aspect of ocean sailing which involved straddling the front of the bow with my legs squeezed tight around the lower mainstay, intentionally allowing them to dangle as low as possible so when we rolled over the big waves, my toes would disappear for a few seconds in the frothy ocean water. 

And then there was the way in which I could sit in that same spot looking downwards for hours, just watching bow rise and fall with the ocean's rhythm, cleaving and cutting these perfect, precise lines which then vanished under the hull of the boat. 

And then there was the fact that none of the adults knew I was secretly keeping lookout for any wandering mermaids or lost fairy folk who might have taken the West Wind into a location which was not of their choosing. I'm so happy for Max and his first taste of sailing. His appetite for sailing terminology is insatiable. I

f you have little people who might be interested, we had fun comparing the old gallions and big sailing ships of the past with the present-day recreational sailing boats. You can download the free printable handout right here.

Idea for a horror movie: The Ezzos come over for dinner with my family.

Who knows what I'm saying in this photo, but my stellar eye infection really brings out the chatty Cathy in me. Clearly, not an Ezzo moment.

Reading Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards' Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future illuminates the ways in which the struggles of feminism have gained complexity for the Third Wave. Since its publication in 2000, the book itself is already somewhat dated. For example, it glosses over the rising numbers of educated feminists who are choosing to educate their children at home with the premise that the revolution starts now. While providing ample information on the continuing battle for a choice over whether to continue pregnancy, the book skims over the tremendous battles fought by women who seek to reclaim their uterus and birthing process from the medical establishment by giving birth at home.

I can't read the words of sisters without remembering that it's my responsibility to say what I see and not to expect others to say it for me. Being a woman who has decided to also be a mother changed my mind and reaffirmed my belief in the continuing need for feminism in our society.

What I discovered did not please me. I am very good at biting off the head of a man who condescends to women and I am unparalleled in my ability to provide running monologues on the extent to which we perpetuate the patriarchy by honoring the concept of "success". Yet I am somewhat lacking when it comes to integrating my parenting choices (which tend to follow the child) with my Riot Grrrlish self. I'm going to take a little detour to explain what I mean by this.

Fact: It's important to parent and raise your children in a way that works best for you. However, "a way that works best for you" should not be taken to mean that the child becomes a product which you compare to other highly-valued objects. When we talk about children, we don't talk about possessions or things- we talk about little people whom we hope will NEVER be treated like possessions or things in our super-thingified culture.

After the King and I first got married, we attended a small-group for young parents which focused on parenting strategies. The textbook for the group was one written by the Ezzos which outlined their program for "Biblical parenting". As the sessions progressed, my discomfort with some of the phrasing from the Ezzos just wouldn't go away.

The "strategies" seemed mean and hurtful- as if to punish little babies for being needy, vulnerable little beings who cannot thrive or survive on their own. Letting them "cry it out" required me to deaden my most natural maternal instinct to comfort and soothe- and deadening that instinct leaves you less sensitive to a child's needs and concerns. I cannot believe that women were created with this universal instinct by accident. It seems to me to be an important part of the way in which God wants us to relate to our children. In other words, that constant nurturing impulse is a given- a starting premise for any parenting methods rooted in respect for human beings or their Creator.

Your Shenanigans Will Not Be Tolerated wittily sums up more Ezzo in the most snarky and simple fashion:

In a nutshell - and I will keep things to a nutshell, there is plenty of information readily available on him - Mr. Ezzo was complimented on how well behaved his kids were in church.  This led him to create the Babywise publishing empire.  Babywise, as a method to raise your baby is very similar to that of the Baby Whisperer.  The main difference, however, is that instead of getting to know your baby's signals & cues and respond to it's individual needs, you actively avoid learning its signals and cues and make it respond to your own personal needs.  This is generally done through starvation and abandonment.

The Ezzos believe the primary threats to the family came from a bad relationship between the parents and child-centered parenting (i.e. behavior that acknowledged and dealt with the little person's feelings or fears). Their solution to these percieved threats might be called the Nuclear Rearmament Strategy with all selfishness and inhumanity implicit in such a description. You can read the details here.

Essentially, the Ezzos insist that the "greatest influence parents have on their children is as a husband and wife, rather than as a mother and father". While there are ways in which this is true, the rest of the Ezzos' philosophy is just one particularly rough interpretation on how to honor this relationship in a family. Lest we begin to worry about kids getting liberal ideas, the Ezzos quickly insist:

"This lesson is not promoting egalitarian roles in marriage. Egalitarian is defined as “equality in marriage,” meaning equal leadership as well as sharing common roles at both work and home."

Of course, promoting egalitarian roles in marriage is precisely what the King and I were trying to do. As we worked our way through those first years of marriage, deciding who would do the laundry and who would cook dinner, we realized that "expecting" me to cook dinner just because I stayed home with the kids was another patriarchal way of undervaluing the work I do by caring for our kids.

It didn't come as an epiphany, of course- it emerged through arguments and re-arguments as we learned from our gay friends that a "partnership" is the only way to truly honor one another within a marriage. Our partnership is my favorite place to be in the world- it evolves, changes, and amazes us continuously as we negotiate new ethical qualms and novel interests. The Ezzo-style marriage for us would be a quick route to disenchantment and divorce.

As the group meetings continued, I realized that I was accepting and learning this odd philosophy without studying the source- so I decided to study the source. Who are these Ezzo folks for whom egalitarianism is such a threat? What makes them such supercalifragilistic specimens of humanity? Are they known for their kindness and generosity, like Jimmy Carter? Or their peace-making skills, like Nelson Mandela? Or perhaps even their piety and joyfulness, like Thomas Merton?

What I learned was that the Ezzos did not have a reputation for honesty, truthfulness, and accountability in their longterm relationships. Former elders from churches wrote warning letters to naive, exhausted parents like myself- letters which suggested that snake oil might be part of the package we were purchasing from the Ezzos and their outfit, Growing Families International.

The snake oil really started to stink in 1998. That spring, the conservative, evangelical-minded Christian Research Journal published a report on their extensive evaluation of Growing Families International. While acknowledging GFI’s popularity (over a million reported followers around the world) and noting that “a number of the parenting ideas in GFI materials are sound and have benefited families who have used them”, the article evaluated the widespread controversy associated with the organization. They concluded:  

“GFI has provoked unprecedented public censure from Christian leaders because, although it is not a cult, it has consistently exhibited a pattern of cultic behavior, including Scripture twisting, authoritarianism, exclusivism, isolationism, and physical and emotional endangerment”. 

As far back as 1998, a physician writing for the American Academy of Pediatricians warned that the Babywise method was "linked to dehydration and failure to thrive". This physician, Dr. Matthew T. Aney, expressed his concerns again in 2001 after comparing a chart generated by the Babywisers to one generated by the AAP. But the Ezzos are still winning hearts and minds under the guise of their secular books on the "Babywise" method- essentially the old Biblical parenting without reference to Bible verses or Evangelical terminology.

The truth is that my feminism is not compatible with a parenting philosophy that undervalues emotions and the stuff of the heart.  And I am baffled by the Ezzos' pro-life politics in light of their anti-child parenting. Fear is not a "structure" that little ones need in order to thrive. And love is not manifest in how we hurt or frighten little ones who rely on us for their lives and livelihood.

There is a lot of pressure to consider children who "obey" their parents out of fear as "good kids". Deep down, however, I know that fear can be used to motivate us to do anything in the world, including bombing cities overseas and marching lockstep behind political parties or ideologies. So I bite my lip and accept that my children are usually not the most "obedient" ones in the room. Instead, I focus on their zest for life, their creativity, their strong individual sense of justice, and their love for our family.

Michael Bates expresses my misgivings better than anyone when he shares his own about the "first time obedience" strategy central to the Ezzos' philosophy:

That approach to discipline alienates parents from children, and sets mom and dad up as scorekeepers and penalty managers. I found myself denying myself the enjoyment of time with my brilliant, funny, and beautiful kids for the sake of teaching them a lesson. And a child's natural desire to please mom and dad turns to despair -- the feeling that nothing he does will ever be good enough, so why bother trying?

It is hard to ditch the Ezzo mindset. You're confronted with regrets over years wasted and damage done, as the letter on Quiet Garden discusses. There's also the inner Ezzo nagging you that you're being too lax, too lenient, that you're spoiling your kids. But I'm starting to think that the worst kind of spoilage would be if my child no longer felt connected to me, if my child felt alienated from me, no longer identifying with my values, uninterested in my advice, unwilling to learn from my experiences.

I'd rather work alongside my children, enjoying their company, sharing laughter, and guiding them down the right path -- not like the guy back at the gas station who gave you directions but like the sherpa who is with you step-by-step up the treacherous mountain trail.

While Michael and I probably don't share the same views on other things, we both have that same gross feeling in our stomachs that something is wrong with the extent to which childhood is demonized by the Ezzos. Tomorrow, if you can bear it, I'll share the story of a young mom who sees the world through Ezzo-eyes and what this has helped me to realize about parenting as a feminist, Jesus-loving existentialist who is more convinced of her own ignorance than her sanctity or "savedness". 

[Caveat: I don't believe in hell and I don't think anyone is going there. If you're concerned about my politics or worldview, see my bio for details.]

The face of courage when losing a child.

The first time I met Bethany, she was managing to joke and make light of the challenging early months with a high-needs baby. Having been one of those mothers and having failed to remain as calm as Bethany during the long nights, I immediately had one of those "I can learn from this person" moments. A few years later, when she lost Lucy due to complications from Kell's, my heart broke for her.

I'm still learning from Bethany. When I ran into her at Manna Grocery last month, she looked tired and sad. My sister and I were having lunch with our brood of chatty children, so it wasn't a good time to stop and talk. But I needed to talk to her- felt drawn to the sadness and grief she wasn't bothering to hide. So I ignored the awkwardness and walked over to her table, realizing I had not decided what I wanted to say or even why I needed to say anything at all. I just hugged her and then told her that grief was a long, torturous journey (something Sarah taught me) that doesn't just end according to our plans and schedules. I wanted her to know that her grief over Lucy's death was legitimate (how sick that I should even feel the need to reassure her of that) even six months later. I wanted her to know that I admired her (as I admire Sarah) for refusing to settle for the fatalistic "it's God's will" sort of answers which suggest a God that does not hear or communicate with us.

But Bethany should be the voice in your ear right now. On her wonderful blog, Losing Lucy and Finding Hope, Bethany shares her journey with grief and Kell's antibodies. Her courage in sharing what most of us prefer to hide or fake amazes me. And teaches me about what courage means in a world where social taboos keep us from being honest and living with integrity. Bethany explains:

"I’ve noticed that people don’t like to talk about miscarriages or stillbirth (I mean who would WANT to talk about something like that.) Some women feel like they’re supposed to keep these losses to themselves. It makes people feel uncomfortable and awkward. Before losing Lucy I used to think miscarriages were sad and that the women who suffered them probably felt better after a few weeks. I thought miscarrying or having a stillbirth was nowhere near as painful as losing a child. Now I know that it IS losing a child. It is a soul shattering, heart crushing tragedy that leaves permanent wounds. No matter how far along the woman is in her pregnancy it is still her baby she lost. I think her grief should be respected and her baby should be mourned as a lost child. I want to talk about my miscarriage. The people who have comforted me the most through this ordeal have been mothers who had miscarriages/stillbirths and shared their stories with me. I hope that this story somehow can bring hope to someone who has been through a similar tragedy."

To honor a life often requires us to mourn its passing with devotion. Beautiful Bethany is in my thoughts and hopes. I am grateful to her for everything she dares to feel and express- grateful because her love for Lucy frees me to be honest with myself about grief and hurt.

The more I experience of this life, the more convinced I become that stoicism is the enemy of hope, joy, and love. It's the ultimate cop-out, the way to "save face" under the pretense of appearing to be strong. But there is nothing strong or brave about living a lie and asking others to play along. Maybe the best I can do is to acknowledge this and honor the grief which lies at the heart of only the best love.

A story by Tom Waits on parenting.

A little story from Tom Waits that bears repeating. In an interview, Tom remarked that his kids “starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads". They wanted to know why he didn't just have a regular job or regular life like everyone else. And he told them this little ditty:

In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.” 

A weekend at Ono with extended family.

Carla and Isla get their kicks on the dock.

A few weekends ago, we drove down to the Gulf and spent a weekend with my sister, her man, and their baby as well as my father and stepmother.

Isla can't help herself from giggling all the time.

Watching Isla grow and giggle her way through the day was a delight, and being close to so many people that I love ALL AT ONE TIME blew my mind.

Isla's super-strong little grip and tiny fingers that hold on to mommy.

Carla's devotion to Isla's needs- both physical and emotional- warms my heart. It's a pleasure to watch and experience. I've had such a hard time in the past spending weekends with family and friends who were sleep-training. Wine glasses in hand, everybody smiling and "letting the baby learn to self-soothe" meant that we had to pretend a baby wasn't screaming it's little head off for forty minutes at a time. No amount of wine in the world can drown out that sound for me. 

Being a mom means ignoring the fact that you have a silly facial expression in a photo where your baby looks plain adorable.

While I respect parents' perogatives to parent as they see fit, I confess that it's hard on my soul to be a captive audience to the tears of sleep training. Carla did nothing of the sort- she nursed when Isla was hungry or needed a little soothing and she napped with Isla when the opportunities arose. Rather than tote around a Pak-and-Play, the Newsomes traveled light and managed to share a full-sized bed between the three of them.

Pamela rocked Isla for a little while so Carla and I could venture out on the
most lazy, dysfunctional kayak ride ever confessed.

The King and the Germ got along great, and my dad kept rolling out the comments on how "nice it is to have my two son-in-laws together at the beach" (which is another way of saying he enjoyed having dudes with which to share beer).

Milla scribbles on the cement under the Baba Yaga house after a good swim.

Amid the chaos of life vests, plastic beach toys, wet swimsuits, "that's MY shell" or "she took my shovel", we enjoyed delicious food, good music, splendid sunsets, and a whole lot of love. Even Germ and the King did some cuddling. What can be more entertaining than that?

2 years into congenital hypothyroidism and doing great.

Milla in the car with me on our date. She is "reading".

Last week, Milla and I took a day to visit her endocrinologist in Birmingham. It was our special date- and one of those days when I am reminded how what was once frightening has become "normal" and part of our everyday lives. When we first heard the news, I was dumbstruck- it seemed impossible that my "best nurser" and my most content baby could have been born without a thyroid. Being one of those mothers- and one of those women- who assumes responsibility for educating herself about her kids and their individual needs, I started to study CH. 

The more I learned, the less I worried. And the less I worried, the more I noticed that Milla was a thriving, happy, loving child whose lack of a thyroid did nothing to reduce her zest for life.

Milla shows me the pictures in between "reading".

As Milla sits on the cusp of three years, I celebrate her feistiness and her daily discoveries. She can count anything in the world up to ten, and she peppers her daily requests with words like "actually" and "disgusting"- perhaps the influence of having a big brother like Max.

Since her doctor prefers to keep her hyperthyroid (as opposed to hypothyroid), sometimes Milla gets hot flashes or has a tendency to sweat more quickly than she would if her thyroid levels stay in range. This is only the case because CH is so rare that drug companies prefer not to invest the production of Synthroid doses for infants and children- so we have to take adult doses and half them or quarter them, thus making an inexact science of what is made more exact in adults. For thorough information, you want to peek at the following:

Guidelines for Management of Congenital Hypothyroidism (APEG)
Childhood and Congenital Hypothyroidism (Patient.co.uk) 
"Outcome for Congenital Hypothyroidism" (J. Hulse) 

During our three year journey, we have learned many things about CH, Milla, and ourselves that may have made a difference in her stellar outcome (she has stayed in the 70-80% height and weight range of the development charts). Here's the short list:

1. Synthroid (as opposed to generic thyroxine) works best for Milla and there is little difference in cost between the two. 
2. The medicine pills taste sweet and Milla has not issue with chewing hers up every day.
3. Multivitamins with iron reduce the absorption of Synthroid, so space out the time between vitamins and medicine. 
4. In most cases, a "treated" (or well-medicated) CH child is like any other child with a thyroid. Don't be too quick to attribute quirks or preferences to CH.
5. Being born with a thyroid in Milla's case has not changed the way she "presents" other illnesses. In other words, she still has fever is she has a virus. Don't let inexperienced medical staff worry you (i.e. an ER physician suggests your child may have pneumonia with no signs due to CH thus requiring chest xrays when it is perfectly obvious she has croup and only requires treatment for croup). 
6. Having a child with a rare disease means you have to be informed and prepared to educate others. In our case, both our pediatrician and our local pharmacists had never treated anyone with CH before. We all learn together and communication is critical.
7. Keep your endocrinologists phone number handy and make sure other medical staff treating your child consults with the endo before beginning any drastic treatments or diagnostic procedures.
8. Sharing details and information about your child's symptoms and developments with medical professionals helps increase knowledge about rare diseases. You are your child's lover, parent, and advocate- but you are also the advocate and support team for all the CH babies (and their families) who will be born in the future. The more we know, the better the outcomes for everyone.

The King and I now know that we will never "understand" why Milla was born with CH- and we learn everyday why the satisfaction of an answer matters less and less when little Mills loves and lives life so very very well. Once I stopped thinking of Milla's CH as a problem to be solved rather than a condition to be treated, I realized how much I owed this gradual discovery to all the moms out there who shared their CH stories and who helped me along.

Yes, there are stories we tell to hand one another along. These stories, whether shared in person or through emails, resemble an open hand. Daring to trust that hand and hold it makes our lives richer and full of radiance. So if you have googled "congenital hypothyroidism" and found yourself here, forehead creased with worry and heart made heavy by fear, don't be afraid to take this open hand and email me. We are here for each other- or this entire "life" thing is pathetic.

My hand is here for yours. One day, your hand will be there waiting to warm someone's elses. As John Prine so aptly put it, "That's the way that the world goes by..."

Vintage Rachel Carson never seems out-of-date.

In July of 1956, Rachel Carson published an unlikely article in Women's Home Companion, a magazine generally devoted to conventional representations of the 1950's housewife and the multifaceted potential of mayonnaise.

The article, "Help Your Child To Wonder", describes Carson's experiences with her nephew, Roger, in the natural world. It remains as poignant now as it did then. I've posted a brief excerpt below- now it's time for you to follow the link and read it for yourself.

The kids you see.

It was one of those mornings when everything went just as planned. I even remembered to pack extra snacks and refill the water bottles for everyone.

But the perfect plan didn't quite buy me time to sit back and savor it all as it happened and whirled around me.

Snapping photos removed me from the pictures taking place only to bring me back right now. These are the kids you see- the little people who learn as much from our cynicism as they learn from their Sunday school books. 

The kids you see are growing and searching for answers to questions we have learned to dismiss- questions about friendship, confusion about why wars exist, queries about bellybuttons and caterpillar legs. Parenting the kids you see doesn't mean teaching them about a world so ugly and crass they would rather die than live there. It means helping them to find beauty in each other and hope in the common ground we cultivate and weed together.

Looking at the photographic evidence, I notice tiny details that whizzed past in all the action. Micah hovers nearby seeking safety in the group- she craves unanimous decisions and worries over who is on "her side", often losing sight of what the sides are staking. I am baffled by the way in which she craves the conflict which upsets her.

Last night, I stared at the stars for a little while trying to decide what my role as a parent should be.... Or my role as a teacher. What should I teach her? What am I missing?

The girls always seem more conscious of the camera than the boys. It's as if their smile counts for greater currency in the exchanges of everyday life.

Max imagines something else.....But the girls are fixed, posed, preparing their best smiles (the ones that balance ease with happiness). I am suddenly aware of the way in which my request for their smiles creates a prison reflected in prisms of lights.

J.'s hand rests against her old sister's stomach. Is it protective? I don't know.

The kids we see reassure us with the tiny touches that exist in a world that still dares to wonder. If you've watched  reality TV show lately, chances are that your ability to wonder is slowly being scrubbed away. We should treat those TV shows as the dirty secrets of darkness that they are- nothing worth talking about and certainly nothing the mind of a child should ever have to see.

The kids you see are vulnerable to the contagion of laughter and giggles. D.'s huge grin lights up the landscape- and then radiates out from the faces around him.

Do we find ourselves turning towards the most radiant smiles? It's as if those huge smiles hide a special secret or insight into the joy of life. That's why the big fake smiles are so distressing to me- because they parody something very real and true, something raw that grabs us deep in the pit of the stomach. 

The kids you see are more real than you or me. They don't need to be trained in the fine art of despair. They don't need to know that their value as people will be determined by their social status or professional striving or how many marathons they manage to run. What they need is to be seen as the kids you see. Those. There is nothing "better" they could be than what they are at this moment.

Being a civil libertarian in the context of community.

On Saturday, May the 18th, Westboro Baptist Church is planning a picket on The Campus of The University of Alabama. Like everything planned by the Westboro Baptist Church, this picket will be targeted against social diversity and will probably attempt to blame social tolerance for the tragedy of the April 2011 tornadoes. Although it is disgusting and sad, and everyone should sign any petitions to this effect, I believe it is very important that they be granted legal permits for this event. 

Wise citizens of Tuscaloosa are planning a counter-protest (you can learn more here), which I plan to attend with my kids. Because the most important part of civic education is not the part that occurs in the abstract- it's the part that occurs on the streets when we are confronted with intolerant ideas and ideologies.

Little people who aren't equipped to counter the hate in the flesh will not recognize it when it calls their name.

In his prophetic book,The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry expresses concern about the rising, career-oriented elitism and its effect on the ties that bind local communities and fellowships. He notes correctly that learning ideas in the abstract prepares us for resume-building and sycophancy but does not enable to actually understand and participate in the civics of everyday life. Berry warns:

It must not be forgotten that, divorced from the practical, the liberal disciplines lose their sense of use and influence and become attenuated and aimless.

Towards the end of the book, Berry hones in on the importance of an "intelligence" which is holistic and experiential- based in life as it has been lived rather than life according to the text-based guidebook- rather than an "intelligence" based on access to constantly-changing facts, statistics, and experts. Since I have been guiltier than most when it comes to consulting the guidebooks, this observation is especially important to me.  Berry describes the current notions of intelligence (obvious even in the way we test children in schools and train them for fact-oriented, regurgitative "thinking") as follows:

This intelligence protects itself from the disruptive memories and questions of experience by building around itself the compartmental structure of the modern university, in which effects and causes never meet. The experential intelligence is a tyrant that is saved from the necessity of killing bearers of bad news because it lives at the center of a maze in which the bearers of bad news are lost before they can arrive.

But it is imperative to understand that this sort of intelligence is tyrannical. It is at least potentially totalitarian. 

A book-bound, abstracted form of "intelligence" is not a good breeding ground for ethics. Unlike calculus, ethics must be lived to be meaningful. Ethical intelligence requires habituation and habitation- a feel for the soil and ecology of life and community. When Westboro (or any form of ugliness and hatred) comes to town, you look them in the eye and say, "I firmly disagree".  

As those who dissent under totalitarian governments know, there is some comfort to be drawn from humor. What is tendered by extremists as "sacred" is very vulnerable to satire. So reading Landover Baptist's critique of Westboro reminds me that both extremes are silly. In a talk forum following the talk forum about how "Pregnancy through rape is a gift from God", "True Christian" shares a video from Westboro and writes:

Just look here what these liberal so-called "Christians" has to say about God's nr. 1 favourite country, you could almost think they are from Chechnya or something. God does not hate America, God LOVES America, the best and most Christian country in the world. 

Of course, Landover Baptist's disclaimer (scroll down to the bottom of the page) makes it clear that fundamentalist extremism cuts across every divide of major religions:

The information presented here is Biblically accurate. Opinions concerning the technical difficulties, fitness requirements, safety, and ratings of self-crucifixion, flagellation, stoning, destroying enemies of GOD utterly, without mercy, and other activities inherent in Christianity are subjective and may differ from yours or others' opinions; therefore be warned that you must exercise your own judgment as to the difficulty and your ability to safely protect yourself from the inherent risks and dangers. Do not use the information provided on this site unless you are a True Christian ™ who understands and accepts the risks of participating in these activities. Landover Baptist Church makes reasonable efforts to include accurate and up to date information on this website, errors or omissions sometimes occur, therefore the information contained on here is provided "as is" and without warranties of any kind either expressed or implied. Viewing, reading, or any other use of the information contained within this web site is purely the voluntary will of the viewer or user. You, 'the viewer' or 'user' shall not hold the publisher, owner, authors or other contributors of The Jesus Experience responsible for any incidents related directly or indirectly to the Experience. Landover Baptist Church, et. al., assumes no liability or responsibility for your actions.

Not being a trade-marked True Christian spares me the seriousness which accompanies said views. Perhaps there is something to the statement that "if babies had guns, they wouldn't be aborted"- but the something is far more evil and twisted than anything Larry Flynt might dream up. Ultimately, my kids won't truly grasp the consequences of extremism unless they see it for themselves. And I'd prefer that their first experience be one in which there is caring, sober adult present to point out why it is so very, very ugly and so very, very wrong.

Sailing in Maryland with Bunicu and the boys.

Me and Bunicu on Transylvania.

Nine years of incessant change and sweetness spiked by the realization that I am not the ideal mother I always thought I'd be. 

As Bunicu sails across the seas somewhere with his wife and friends, I am reminded of a time when we visited him for a weekend sailing trip near Baltimore. Patrick, Max, and I savored every moment of sunshine and little breezes tickling the sails into laughing. 

Max loved steering the boat, and Patrick made sure to be the arms when my own were full. Of course, Max needed reassurance that no big fish could bite the boat underneath.

And so it goes. Parenting is the long nights and the tortured hours of not knowing where or how to step next. There are truths about life and our world that I can't "kiss away" or change. There are truths about "success" and what it means to thrive, however artificially, in the time of incandescent light bulbs. 

There are moments  and realities that aren't mine to re-wire or demystify. Though he certainly isn't secretive, Max has "secrets" these days- things he can't quite express but often wants somehow to share or discuss with me. Watching a child grow into his own agency- his own moral compass- is both exciting and brutal. We want to make sure we've done everything "right", presupposing somehow that our "right" is the "right" and that "right" absolves everything else.

Absolution and answers are ultimately a mercy which we share with ourselves and others.

As I type, I can't keep this line out of a book I'm reading from dancing through my head. The line isn't an absolution, or an answer, or even an attempt at lightening the burdens of being. It's just a line that echoes- a line from a Vietnam veteran in a post-war rap therapy group trying to come to terms with the dimensions of existence and integrity. After serving in Vietnam infantry, the veteran returned to the US and dealt with his experiences by getting involved in Vietnam Veterans Against the War, one of the most courageous groups of warriors to walk the White House lawn.

It takes courage and grace to admit that we did what others told us to do for fear of being held responsible or accountable for the consequences of failing to follow. As a parent, recognizing the damaging effects of physical and emotional violence required me to abandon fast-and-easy behavior-modifiers like spanking and verbal humiliation. It also put me in the category of "those who don't discipline their children" according to established practices. Sometimes people don't appreciate the difference. 

I've tried what the Ezzos said (and what my peer groups recommended) and found it to be harsh and soul-killing. I respect the decisions of others to raise their kids as they see fit. And I can't help smiling as I finally get around to sharing the quote from the long-haired Vietnam veteran who decided to stand up and speak out against what he had seen and done:

When they give me flak, I tell them, "I was in Vietnam. I fought your dirty little war there. Now don't tell me how to cut my hair."

Grass stains and spring brains.

Spring fills every moment with buds and blossoms and scents of moist soil. One of the horrors of school for me was the glossy linoleum corridors that sparkled and smelled like ammonia- how dare a cleaning product compete with the grass-heavy odor of spring?

And what were those awful rubber-scented shoes on my feet- that border between my body and the feel of grass and tiny things growing? We were ALL once tiny things, growing....

So the kids can wear shoes during the day if they so choose. Or they can enjoy the feel of verdance between their toes.

Milla is torn between the soft slithery grass and those new shoes Suebee bought for her. After much huffing and puffing, she finally discovers which shoe is "left" and which is "right".

But nothing is as easy as our well-laid plans lead us to believe.

Toes can be tricky. They creep through slots and spaces that are not intended for toes or creeping. Milla's toes even venture to get tangled in things.

So Milla removes her foot, untangles her toes, and prepares to try again. 

Effortless satisfaction. Hindsight is 20/20. And Milla's momentary frustration has morphed into that smug smile.

With "success" behind her, Milla is ready to face the challenge of the velcro heel-strap- a challenge she will be first in the family to take on.

The tiny problem-solver has solved the problem of the back and now carefully works on the problem of the top strap.  

My brain is made mush by all the beauty sometimes. And it feels like an accomplishment to just sit and watch little people grow their way into the world growing around them. Life is my favorite mystery...