This is what a family looks like

My husband’s Great-Aunt Gladys, my kids’ great-great aunt, passed away. It was not unexpected…she was 98 years old.
Aunt Gladys — or “Happy Hiney” (you figure that one out!) — was beloved by my husband, and much later by me and our kids. The last time we saw her as a family, we sat in her screened-in porch in New Jersey and watched a great show of lightning. Our daughter has always loved lightning, so she was thrilled. Gladys was a bit less thrilled.
I remember pieces of our conversation. She talked about the men she dated before she married, about typewriters and early word processors, and about her basement. We all trooped down to see it, except for Gladys, who couldn’t go down the stairs anymore. It was like a trip back to suburban 1950’s — they had a wet bar and old framed posters on the wall. Very cool.
Getting to know my husband’s family has been like learning about family all over again. My own family is a large tightly-knit nuclear family — 5 kids, 2 parents still married. But although we knew some of our other relatives, we weren’t terribly close to them growing up. My parents had complicated relationships with both of their families, so my take on extended family was either people you see once a year on a schedule, or people who sometimes drop in out of the blue and you are told they are related to you.
My husband’s family is exactly the opposite. He is an only child who grew up in a big extended family. He didn’t have to miss having siblings — he had so many “cousins” and “aunts” and “uncles” that he didn’t feel like an only child. I put the relationships in quotes only because, for his family, anyone around your age is referred to as “cousin,” no matter how distant, and anyone of your parents’ generation or older is aunt or uncle. Though there are also the “cousins” who are of his parents’ generation or further.
It was very confusing to me, but convenient that I wasn’t expected to keep track of the relationships exactly. “Cousin” would do just fine.
His mother’s family is especially close. They have something I’d never heard of before — a Family Circle. The family is a sort of non-profit association. They all descend from brothers that came over from Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. They still keep track of all the descendents, whether or not they actually know them. At the first Family Circle meeting I went to, a “long-lost cousin” appeared. She had always known she was part of the family, but didn’t feel it necessary to take part till later in life. They welcomed her like an old friend.
Another amazing thing about this family is that they welcome spouses pretty much as family, too. Even divorced spouses are still part of the circle. Aunt Gladys was not even related to my husband by blood (she married his mother’s uncle), but she was Family. He called her on a regular basis, even more since her recent illness. We sent her cards and pictures from the kids. She would sometimes call our house and say in her gentle voice, “Hello, Susana, it’s Aunt Gladys.” She was always pleasant to talk to.
My husband says that she never said an unkind word about anyone. Then he amended that to say that she spoke unkindly only about one person, George W. Bush. Even when she was housebound and complaining about her failing health, she was connected to the world.
Marrying into a family is such an interesting experience. I feel for women who live in parts of the world where, once they get married, they really do marry “into” the family. They leave the only nest they have known, and are thrust into another family’s functions…and disfunctions. Purely through chance, family ties, or astrological charts, they become part of a family that they may have no knowledge of. I wonder if their mothers can properly prepare them for this experience. It’s a bit like having your legs cut off and getting someone else’s sewn on. You have to learn to walk all over again.
I feel very lucky that I married into this family that welcomed Gladys so many years ago. I didn’t ask her about her early years in the family, how she felt about them, what it was like to marry in her day. One aspect of a death is all the questions that come up afterward. I didn’t get a lot of time, all added together, with Aunt Gladys. So I can think of a lot more that we didn’t talk about than what we did talk about.
But inextricable from my memories of Aunt Gladys is my marriage. We go into marriage so easily, yet it’s a very complicated thing. Not one of us can explore all the nuances of marrying “into” a family. It’s a life change, not just a change of status on the tax return.
The one thing I want my children to realize is how amazing and wonderful it is that they got to know a great-great-aunt. I never did. The other amazing thing is the wonderful person she was, and how we will miss her even though we saw her so seldom.
Aunt Happy-Hiney, she is alive in our hearts.

Choice, Ain’t it Cool?

I was talking to another mom in my daughter’s homeschool program the other day, when she happened to mention her age. She has kids just a bit younger than mine, and she’s still in her twenties. No wonder she’s so much fun, I thought. Her back isn’t killing her yet!
Seriously: I have never regretted my choice not to have kids when I was young — not only was I probably incapable of being a good parent, but I was with someone who wouldn’t have worked out as my co-parent.
But sometimes I ponder how it would be different if I had gotten the kid thing over with and found myself with half a life left when they were grown and gone. The main reason my husband and I stopped at two is our strong belief in controlling the human population so we don’t consume ourselves out of a planet. But the other reason was the calculation we did when I was pregnant with our daughter. At her high school graduation, we would be… oh, let’s not even THINK about the age we’ll be!
Studies of parental age have shown a number of correlations — good and bad — with parents who wait to have children. The good is borne out by my experiences: the children of older parents tend to be psychologically healthier, since older parents are likely to have worked through their problems and are probably more likely parents by choice rather than circumstance. Also, older parents are more likely to be in a relationship started later in life and thus less likely to dissolve when the kids are small.
Finally, older parents have a lot longer to make money and establish careers, so their children come into a more stable financial situation. My husband and I bought a house and fixed it up while we still had two incomes. Our income dropped when we had children, but since we’d already put together a home and done the really expensive things, we were pretty much set. It’s definitely the easier way to do it. When my husband was struggling to find a first house he could afford the payments on, he was single, and real estate was a lot cheaper.
Then there’s the flip side. When I think about how this mom is going to be younger than I am now when her children are grown, I’m envious! She’ll have time for a whole new career, the energy for travel — so many more options than those who will be able to draw Social Security before our kids are out of the house. (Luckily, my husband and I are not quite THAT advanced in age…)
I remember talking to a mom in my daughter’s preschool who had twins by artificial insemination when she was fifty. She was telling me how, now that they were energetic preschoolers, she wasn’t quite sure what she was thinking at the time. “The thing is,” she told me, “I’d been through it all before. My first set of kids is already grown.”
So she was a mom who had both experiences, both the joys and the drawbacks. She was better able to care for her younger children, born in middle age when she had a secure financial situation and had sorted out her own particular personal agenda. But, she confessed, they just tired her out!
I think that a lot of criticisms of feminism is disingenuous — that is, the person making the criticism started with a negative conclusion and is trying to find a way to justify that position. So I have read all that “backlash” stuff about how women have started to make the “unfeminist” decision to become mothers early and not seek a career.
The thing that this criticism misses is that feminism has allowed this choice to exist. In the past, women didn’t choose between kids now or kids later — they had to choose between kids now or being a very unpopular “spinster” who fights for a career. I’m a staunch feminist (the back of my van does, in fact, have a NOW sticker on it…), and I just love that women are making choices based on what’s right for them.
The other common criticism of feminism is that having mothers with their own lives is not good for children, who were better served by women who were forced to stay home. But again, what I see looking at the moms I know is that feminism has simply offered them options. No matter what choice they end up making, they will be emotionally healthier just for the fact of having had a choice. Mothers who want to be mothers, who feel like they made the choice when they were ready, are always going to be happier, and thus better, mothers.
I envy my young friend, but I couldn’t have been her. I did the right thing by waiting, and from the looks of how much fun she’s having with her kids, she did the right thing too. Choice…ain’t it cool?

Love Cats

I will never forget when I went to visit my older sister in North Carolina after she’d had her first baby. She was not only four years older than me; she started the whole marriage and family thing a decade younger than I did. So I was still quite young and not at all thinking about babies.
Of course, the first question I asked her when she picked me up at the airport was, “How are the cats?”
“Oh, cats,” she said. “Cats are just starter kids.”
Hunh?
Before I had children, cats were my only givers of unconditional love. I got two cats, siblings, with my then-boyfriend right after we graduated from college. I loved those two little beings so completely. When I travelled, I missed their touch. My boyfriend and I talked about them more than we talked about each other. Eventually, my relationship with them outlasted the boyfriend.
Until I moved to Santa Cruz, I lived in different places almost every year. Apartments changed, jobs changed, cities changed, but my cats were always there.
Then I got married, and then I had a baby.
My sister was right that my relationship with my cats changed. When the children were babies, I certainly paid less attention to them than before. But I appreciated their simplicity and predictability after a day with a baby or toddler. Sometimes it was hard to make the baby happy, but it was never hard to make Widget happy.
We like to say that Mr. Ruffie taught our son the meaning of the word gentle, and Widget taught our daughter. By coincidence, each of my college cats died about the same time in our children’s lives. Mr. Ruffie, an orange boy, died when our son was two. It took him a very long time to go. By the time I realized that it was not fair to keep him around, his sister had started to hiss at him and refused to go near him. His death was heart-wrenching.
Widget was healthy for four more years. She adored the babies — she’d cry when they cried, sit on my lap when they nursed. Then suddenly she started to go downhill. I learned from my last experience. I brought her in to the vet, who offered to run tests. No, I said, it’s her time to go.
The way I knew is that she’d become unable to get to the litter box in time, so I couldn’t have her in bed with me. If Widget couldn’t sleep with me, she had lost her reason for being. That last night she cried through the bathroom door all night. And I cried on the other side of the door.
After Mr. Ruffie died, we got two little black fluffy kittens to amuse Widget. She was not amused. Neither was I. I’d changed since I got those two kittens in college. I didn’t want to be woken up at night by someone needling my toes. I didn’t want to make room for two more fuzzy creatures in bed. So the new cats got to spend each night in the garage. They seemed fine with it.
When people asked about my cats, I would talk endlessly, as always, about my wonderful Widget as long as she was around. But the new cats were just cats. My sister was right.
Then the kids started to grow more independent. I got to sit down a bit more, rather than ending my days in a constant rush of what I hadn’t gotten done when there was a toddler rampaging through the house. My kids became more emotionally intense. The difficulty of having a baby in the house seemed nothing compared to the emotional draining of a difficult child.
And there, waiting for me, were the cats. They are Nisene and Maxine, fluffy love units. As if waiting till I actually paid them some attention, they gained personalities. I realized that cat personalities are not like human ones — they don’t necessarily inject themselves into the scene. You have to stop and notice them.
Maxine is the sweetest cat on earth, no great shakes in the brain department. Nisene is the murderer of rats and the avid lap unit. They have been joined by Mauen, who was my son’s consolation prize for having a very difficult toddler in the house who took up too much of his parents’ attention. Mauen is a half-orange boy, with a lovely white belly. Of the three, he’s the most attached to us.
But I love them all. My love for my kids is also unconditional, but it’s complicated by their having opinions. Yes, my cats have opinions, but I don’t have to negotiate with them so much. Their type of love is easier to negotiate.
Sometimes after a long day of parenting, easy love is what I need. They aren’t starter kids after all — they’re the antidote to kids. Unconditional, fluffy love units.

Hunt and Peck

Another thing I’ve been wanting to write about in relation to my articles about alternative treatments for behavior problems is Omega-3. (See my Resource List for links to research I did.)
Omega-3 is a fat found most commonly in fish, but also in a variety of other sources. Ask your parent or grandparent about something they remember from their childhood, and they are likely to remember the awful taste of codfish liver oil. It was common wisdom in the past that kids needed extra oil in their diets. This is an example where “common wisdom” is actually borne out by scientific research. It turns out that modern kids’ diets are not only lacking in oil supplements that have gone out of favor; they are also lacking in natural sources of the oil. Few children are fed fish on a regular basis. Also, the other sources of Omega-3 that we used to get have been undermined by modern ranching and packaging methods. In the past, a child might be able to get enough Omega-3 from an average diet; now, a family that eats a diet of feedlot-raised meat, packaged food, and no fish is probably denying their children this important ingredient for their mental health.
Omega-3 is used by the brain. Most people probably don’t know how much energy their brains burn — it’s pretty astounding. Kids’ brains burn more energy in relation to total energy burned by the body than adults’ brains do. So unless your child is overweight, you are doing them a pretty big disservice by feeding them a low-fat diet. Kids need fat, and studies have proven that kids with behavioral problems often do better when their diet is supplemented with Omega-3.
A while back I wrote a piece about supplements and how many kids and adults are being mega-dosed by taking them. This is an example of the old generalization, “all generalizations are wrong”! Omega-3 supplements are simply purified fat, the same stuff you get in food. Though no kid should be eating them as a significant portion of their diet, they can’t hurt. (Unlike the huge amounts of vitamin E supplements that are actually lowering some people’s life expectancy!)
I learned about Omega-3 from a friend whose daughter was diagnosed as “high functioning autistic.” We were talking about diet and behavior, and she told me about Omega-3, and then she mused, “You know, we’ve sort of slacked off on giving them to her, but they really did help. I wonder why we’ve stopped giving them?”
I think to a certain extent, parenting is often about the path of least resistence. Like my friend, I sometimes slack off on something that was actually helping, and it’s not till later that I realize that we’ve gone backwards in some area. I saw the same thing with Omega-3: my daughter hated the supplements I was giving her, and it turned out that she was dropping them down the grate of the fireplace next to the breakfast table. We never use it because the grate gets really hot and is right by the table, so when I opened it to clean it, it had probably been a year since I’d last opened it.
I realized that the dropping of the supplements into the grate coincided with new problems that had cropped up at school. Hm…
A lot of what you need to do when you’re treating problems with dietary changes is hunt and peck: you try something and attempt to isolate any changes from all the other things that could be factors (dad got a new job and isn’t at home as much, mom has been sick, we’ve been busy so our diet hasn’t been as good…and on and on). But I have definitely been convinced that omega-3 is one of those things that my skinny, brainy kids benefit from.
We have a rule in our house that everyone is allowed to have likes and dislikes, within reason. So I found my daughter a supplement that wasn’t flavored. She now happily takes it with a sip of water every morning. No more fake-out and dropping it into the fireplace. And it does seem that things are leveling out again.
Now about that advice from another mom to cut wheat out of her diet… eh… I think I’ll pass on that for another month!

Messy Science

I grew up in a town in the Midwest that happened to be the world headquarters for Dow Chemical Company. We may have had a senile high school French teacher who gave the same test over and over, but our chemistry teacher had a PhD.
It would be interesting to find out how much effect our solid science programs had on kids whose parents weren’t scientists. There were plenty of them — a town full of scientists also needs hairdressers and lawyers and musicians. And because our town had more money than the average Midwestern town of its size, we had solid funding for the other things that would bring families in: parks, libraries, a good hospital.
As the child of scientists, I can’t say for sure, but I think that our schools probably had an effect on the way kids who went through them looked at the world. Frankly, if you want a natural way of looking at the world, turn to religion. It’s easy for the human brain to wrap itself around mystery, wonder, and unexplained miracles.
Less easy is to train the human brain to do the thing that it alone among animal brains can do: reason. The scientific method is based on reason. It requires you to take that mass of neural pathways created by senses, emotion, and the story of your life and force them into the straight and narrow.
An example: One of my pre-mommy jobs was teaching argumentation at Cal State Hayward (now CSU East Bay). The young people I was teaching were largely products of poorly performing California public schools. Though the class was a basic Language Arts requirement, it was fundamentally a science class: How can we take apart something we believe is true and prove that it is true?
This is a hard thing for most people to do. One student I remember in particular. He had written an essay about driving (what a California topic!). Per my instructions, he tried to state his position, then develop the reasons behind it. In his first draft, he had a section about how Asian people were bad drivers. I pointed out to him that this was a stereotype. He agreed.
So a week later he turned in his finished paper. It had much in it that was well-reasoned, but he ended with something like this: “It’s not racist of me to say that Asians are bad drivers, because my sister is adopted from Korea, and she’s a bad driver.”
Oy. That sentence is a fallacy goldmine. Why was he able to write with reason for the rest of the essay, but when it came to his sister, he was stuck in emotion and prejudice?
Science makes us take fundamental parts of our belief systems and question them. Most of us are not comfortable doing this. I know that when I question something I believe and find it biased or lacking in evidence, I get this protective feeling. I MUST justify this, my instincts tell me, because it’s something I BELIEVE.
Another example: From a teaching point of view, there was one pair of essays in the book that we were using that showed rational argumentation at its best. The essays were about evolution. One of the young women in the class found them fascinating. She was a Christian, and she told me that she wanted to write her paper about evolution and religion. I don’t remember if I told her my concern: it is very hard for deeply religious people to look at their faith rationally in the way that she had to in order to write a successful argumentative essay.
I was amazed at the result. Instead of falling back on the easy arguments on both sides, this young woman of faith wrote a well-reasoned piece that both held up as argumentation, and confirmed her belief in religion. She came to me in what was like a religious fever, so excited about her paper. She had been “born again” into the realization that it is possible to be human, to have emotions and faith, but also to use the rational abilities that she as a human had been given. I considered it a great success of mine as a teacher, but she is the one who did all the work.
Science is not easy. In college, I took a physics class with a German professor who was always getting his demonstrations wrong. “Oh, vell,” he would say. “You know vat vas supposed to happen.”
That was the human coming to terms with science. Science wants to be exact, but the world is imprecise. Our atoms work mathematically, but our societies are chaotic and freeform. Those darn wire strippers made what seemed like a simple experiment very hard.
For the county science fair, my daughter and I are just about to redo her experiment so that she can show the physical results to the judges. And if it comes out different this time?
“Oh, vell,” she can say. “You know vat vas SUPPOSED to happen!”

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