Surly Beach Day

Yesterday I took two surly children to the beach. They clearly both needed exercise, and it was a gorgeous day. They refused to go into the forest, so I loaded them into the car with her bike (he didn’t want to ride) and off we went.

I thought I may have gotten us over the hump till we got to the beach entrance kiosk. The lower parking was closed for construction so we had to park at the top of 80-some stairs down to the beach.

Surly girl was not buying this. She insisted she wanted to haul her bike down the stairs, but I knew who would end up hauling it back up. I suggested she ride in the parking lot, which was largely empty. No deal.

Surly boy and I got out. He was complaining that he hadn’t wanted to come to the beach anyway, and now what were we going to do? She wouldn’t get out of the car.

I led him over to the top of the stairs where there were benches to sit. We had a direct sight-line to the car, and would have hardly had to yell to be heard by her.

So he ate a snack (and thus became less surly) while I sketched the stairs, the beach, and the pier leading out into the water. I could hear her kicking the car window, and hoped she wouldn’t break it. I wasn’t worried about her, though. She’d get over it.

After a while I glanced over and saw a woman looking into the car with a shocked expression. She called to the man she’d been walking with.

I called out to her, pointed to myself, and said, “Don’t worry. She’s with us.”

Now you’d hope that anyone would know that an eight-year-old could let herself out of a car if she wanted to. But those people shot me such a dirty look and as they walked away the man yelled out, “You coulda cracked a window!”

Like I was in control of this situation. Apparently, he didn’t know any eight-year-old girls. He didn’t know how to suffer defeat with a measure of gravitas. This is what sketchbooks and benches overlooking the bay are for: pretending you have some control in your life when your eight-year-old daughter has decided to be surly!

To demonstrate (to myself – the man and woman had moved on) that I was not, in fact, locking the girl in the car, I used my remote and opened the sliding door next to her.

As predicted, she immediately closed it and started screaming again.

This reminds me of a short, ugly period in our family life when our four-year-old son took to screaming in the car. It wasn’t crying, yelling, or anything else but simple screaming. He was doing it to hurt us, and he was succeeding.

We came up with a simple, passive solution. As soon as he started screaming, we’d pull over, step out of the car, close the door, and wait till the screaming stopped. Perhaps many of my most memorable parenting experiences happen in the Trader Joe’s parking lot. I remember standing there, this screaming child in the car, on a hot day.

I was practicing my response to the meddling adults who, perhaps, thought that they were stronger than a four-year-old. (Ha, those ignorant non-parents. They think they know the way the world works!)

“He knows how to get out of the car,” I’d tell them. “I’m just waiting till he stops screaming.”

Why is he screaming?

That was a question I never found a response to. After a couple of nasty weeks of this response to his screaming, when I had to stop in all sorts of random parts of our county, he finally stopped the screaming.

Back to the beach: eventually my daughter stopped yelling. The door of the car opened, she got out, closed it, went around to the back hatch and opened it to get her bike out. I went over to help her, and she happily rode around the parking lot a few times before we decided that it was time for Surly Beach Day to come to an end.

Home we went: bike, surly kids, a bit of sunshine, and two sketches of a stairway I didn’t want to be at the top of, anyway.

Positively imperfect

Perhaps I’ve just been in a self-critical mood these days, but lately I’ve been wondering: Do people think that I write about parenting because I think I’m the perfect parent?

It’s the “gone to school in my underwear dream” gone awry.

Sometimes I’m out somewhere and my kids do something (the particulars hardly matter) and I’ll not have the perfect Positive Discipline response. Almost immediately (but not immediately enough) I might think: What if one of my readers saw me now?

Moral of the story is, we’re all human. Parenting is neither a science nor an art nor a discipline. It’s something we make up anew every single day.

I know at least one of you is out there thinking: Well, MY kids are just fine and I never snap at them.

Go away.

To the rest of you: It’s likely, given demographics and the way life works, that you did something before you had kids. You probably had a job. You may even have had a career. You may still have that job or career! In that job or career, when you did something really well, you got paid! You may have gotten raises! You may have gotten a plaque to put on your wall! You may even have gotten lunch out at a pretty nice restaurant.

At your place of employment, they may have had those little sheets of paper ready for patrons to fill out: How did we do today? Your clients or customers or patients may have said wonderful things about you. They may have been overwhelmed at the service you gave! Perhaps your interaction with them was life-changing. Or perhaps just very fulfilling. They may have filled out that little slip of paper and put it in the slot. And your manager looked at it and nodded. Yes, s/he is a very valuable employee. Next time raises come around, next time I need to commend someone, next time I have to choose someone to represent us at the really wild convention in Las Vegas, that’s who I’ll send.

Welcome to parenthood: There are no How are we doing? boxes. We all know what our customers would say:

You’re mean!

You didn’t let me have a lollipop!

How dare you criticize my essay and say it needed work?

Why didn’t you let me go to the Debbie Does Dallas sleepover that my friend had?

Who said you could tell me what to do?

Who made you God?

It’s not like you know anything about me!

What am I? Your servant?

We don’t put out those little slips of paper. Occasionally our spouses would write, in an attempt at childish penmanship, “I lov yoo so much Momy!”

We wouldn’t buy it. Parenting isn’t about positive feedback. It’s about sticking with it till…

Oh, and then there’s those parents you know who have grown up children. You’re ready to worship them. You’re ready to say, Oh, you got through it. How did you do it? What is your secret?

Then those parents say something like (don’t they always say something like this?):

Johnny needs me more now than he ever did as a child.

Really, raising children is nothing next to having to deal with them as adults.

And you think, Oh, gee, thanks. Will I ever get a break?

I’m here to say: No.

I’m not a perfect parent. I read Positive Discipline the way that my friend’s Dad read Playboy. I don’t actually expect to be able to channel Jane Nelson most of the day. Occasionally I remember to do it. But most of the time, I fall well short of the goal of perfect parenting.

My husband’s family has a plot in a cemetery where they all get buried. And because they know that people will actually be reading their tombstones, they actually think about them ahead of time. It’s pretty cool. One uncle’s stone says, “Cha cha cha.” I don’t know what it means, but my husband always laughs when he sees it.

It begs the question: If I thought I’d ever have a tombstone (I don’t have time to die at the moment!), and if I thought anyone would ever look at it, what would I say? I know that before kids (B.K.) and after kids if that ever happens (A.K.) perhaps I would come up with my own “cha cha cha” that would make my offspring, nieces, and nephews laugh when they saw it.

But right now, I can think of only one fitting phrase:

I tried.

Positively imperfect, that’s me. Every day, chugging and cha cha cha-ing along, trying to get it right.

And being pretty darn happy when I approach “only a little bit wrong.”

Whatever you do, make sure not to have fun!

My kids attend a public school homeschool program. Though homeschoolers have a variety of choices (including homeschooling independently or joining a public charter program), I have been very happy with our hybrid choice. I don’t have anything against public schools as a concept. I think they used to be a fundamental part of the community and a place where people from different parts of the community came together.

These days, though, things are changing. Do you know that many public schools have “closed” campuses? No public meetings, no parents or kids who attend other schools. In fact, some campuses are even closed to the parents of the kids who do attend that school. Things have gotten a little crazy out there.

The craziness that has had our homeschool program buzzing this school year is the new set of playground rules issued from on high. Our program, in which kids attend a few hours a week for classes, enrichment, and community events, shares the playground with traditional public schools. So we share a playground with schools that, shall we say, have a rather different view of childhood than homeschoolers generally have.

Think back to your playground years, and remember what you found most fun. Keep that image in your mind, because chances are it’s gone now.

Did you like playing tag? No running on the playground now. Yes, that’s right, No Running.

Did you like (as I did) climbing up the slide the wrong way? Forget about it. Antisocial behavior that may cause bodily harm.

Did you like mixing with other kids you didn’t see in your regular classroom? Verboten. Our kids have scheduled times on the playground.

Did your school’s playground function as a community playground during the summer and weekends? Very likely it doesn’t anymore. Ours has chain link fence around it.

I will grant that all of the outlawed activities can sometimes cause problems. Sometimes there are conflicts. Sometimes there are even broken bones. But in my view, the playground was a place where real learning took place. Outside of the regimented classroom, kids could really learn how to negotiate the world. They had to deal with bigger kids. They had to deal with the annoying kid who thought it was funny to go up the slide backwards. Yes, it is a bit of a hassle for adults to have to deal with kids having problems, but isn’t that what we signed up for?

I think it all comes down to our culture wanting to assert complete control. And I understand the impetus. Many of us (myself included) grew up with the problems that stemmed from unmonitored playgrounds and rough play. We grew up, had kids, and wanted to make sure that the bad things that happened to us never happened to our kids.

But I think we’ve gone a little too far. According to NPR, the research says we have gone too farAs the New York Times profiled recently, some parents are starting to rebel by simply letting their kids play.

I’m seeing this sort of parental rebellion happening more and more. Though the overprotective parents still have their kids dancing to Wii, the rest of us are fomenting revolution. We’ll sheepishly admit to each other that we’re the only parents on the block who let our kids go outside when we are inside. We have climbing structures without regulation padding underneath. We let our children climb trees! We have them make dolls rather than buying the latest commercial tie-in toy.

It’s refreshing. It may, of course, result in some skinned knees, arguments, and maybe a broken bone. But the kids are learning and they’re happy.

Life: It’s not without its hazards!

Feminist inspirations

I have off and on been working on an article about the irony of being a feminist homeschooler. It’s a little bit like being a gay marine, but so far, no one has tried to stop me from telling my troops, eh, kids what my feelings are. I’m guessing they’ve figured it out.

One of the ways I love to teach is through stories, whether they are stories of my own or stories we listen to. And it’s not always a question of listening to stories that I “agree” with — my kids and I have had some fascinating discussions about books that I or they didn’t like.

However, I love it when a novel comes along that does it all: It teaches, it inspires, it creates a new world that we’ve never seen before.

Some time back, I got a recommendation for The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate for my list of good books for gifted pre-teen readers. (Click here to see that article.) This book is exactly what I was looking for: An inspiring story about a child just the right age, a deep story without simplistic moralizing and easy fixes, a book with subject matter that gave us reason to learn and grow as we listen. You can think of it as a more modern Little Women, but with lots of brothers!

Calpurnia is a girl living in rural Texas just before the turn of the twentieth century. She is twelve, and at the beginning of the book, she seems like a pretty happy child. She is interested in nature, and her oldest brother, seeing her interest, gives her a notebook. This simple act sets off a storm in Callie’s life.

First, she realizes how little she knows. Next, she acts in order to learn more. But as often happens with knowledge, a little bit can bring a lot of unhappiness.

Callie has an awakening. The good side of the awakening is her realization that her fascination with studying the natural world has a name: she is a scientist. The bad side of her awakening is that she is in the process of being initiated into what everyone assumes she will do with her life: wife and motherhood. The first realization elates her; the second dashes her to pieces.

As a result of hearing this book in our car every day, my eight-year-old daughter was interested in reading Darwin’s Origin of Species. And coincidental with hearing this book, my son and I are reading a biography of Darwin. Origin of Species is way over my daughter’s head. It’s doubtful that we’ll finish it. However, I love how her interest in this book was piqued by fiction. In The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, this book is vilified by many. That attracted my daughter. If I’d suggested reading this book to her, there would have been no reason for her to be interested, no structure to plug it into. But a good narrative can create meaning for learning. It creates the chair to set the knowledge in.

Similarly, my son might have been interested enough in a biography of Darwin since we were studying DNA and cell biology, but the narrative of the story made him curious. He is noticing a lot more about the historical context than my daughter, and between paragraphs read from the biography he inserts observations and questions.

But most meaningful to me (whether or not my kids know it) is the feminist content of the story. Callie is clearly a scientist. Taking care of children is not her calling (in fact, at one point she pays a brother to do the babysitting she is supposed to be doing so that she can go down to do scientific research at the river with her grandfather). The point of feminism is that we all — men and women — should be able to follow our calling. We should be scientists, if that’s where our passions take us. Or we should care for children and know that this is the way we are making our mark in the world.

It’s this last point I come back to when I consider the irony of my homeschooling life. Although I don’t remember any time when I was adamantly against having children, I never felt that having children was a calling. But now that I not only have decided to have them, but also to be responsible for their education, I call up that part of feminism that I think is most powerful: each and every job that a person does well is important, and if that job is childcare, that’s fine. And if that job is being an astronaut, that’s fine, too. The astronaut needs someone to care for children. The one caring for children needs the astronaut to provide inspiring narrative for the deeds of humankind.

We’re all connected, and nothing we do–if it’s something we are called to do and if it adds something positive to the web of human existence–is worthless. So when I feel like I’m wasting my time I remember: this is what feminists worked for. I have the choice, and I’m making it. And my children are learning that they have the choice, too.

It's International Year of Forests! Call your lawyer today!

Maybe I’m just in a mood tonight, but I just bumped into something that really rubs me like velcro on Berber carpet: I saw a note somewhere that this is International Year of Forests, as designated by the UN. I love forests. I live in one. Cool, I thought. I clicked on the link, and got to the very nice UN site about this designated year. Cute logos on it. I notice a little note at the bottom: “Logo guidelines and waiver form.” Hm. Click on that link and get a PDF:

All entities interested in using the International Year of Forests logo for information purposes must apply to the UN Forum on Forests Secretariat. When requesting approval, the entities should provide:

␣ A short statement of identity (nature of organization and its objectives);

␣ An explanation of how and where the logo will be used; and

␣ A Waiver of Liability (please see page 5) must be signed by the entity requesting to use the logo

What? Perhaps I’m just channeling my inner Libertarian here, but is this really necessary? Do I, Suki Wessling of Santa Cruz County, California, need to sign a waiver for the UN in order to display a logo? One that I think is pretty? One that promotes love of forests? One that is, fer gawd’s sake, disseminated by a body whose motto is “It’s Your World”?

Heck, it’s my world, so here’s the darn logo:

The UN logo -- in 6 languages!
The UN logo -- in 6 languages!

So sue me.

It’s amusing to channel other political persuasions on occasion, but back to my regularly scheduled liberal. We now have a Democrat in the governor’s mansion and do I think things will get better?

In particular, the things I’m interested in: schools, health care, funding for important services that have made the life of the 21st-century Californian one that people around the world envy?

Well, not really. I think there’s a systemic problem here, and no one has figured out how to deal with it. The problem is this: If you like your government-funded services—pick your favorite—you have to allow your neighbor to like his (or her) government services. So perhaps you value well-maintained roads and quick emergency response. Well, you have to deal with the fact that a neighbor on one side values food stamps for the poor and free women’s shelters, and the neighbor on the other side likes subsidies for his industry and the tax break he got for his big, gas-guzzling SUV (owned by his business, of course).

So you might be tempted to say, hey, I think we should only pay for necessary government services, and if you’re like most of us, you think the necessary ones are the ones you value and use.

But if you’ve signed on to government services, you have to deal with this package deal problem: none of us will ever agree which ones are really vital. All of us will agree that there are some that we think make our lives and the lives of our neighbors better. But which those are? We’ll never, never agree.

So I’ll call our systemic problem the Package Deal Problem. I want more money and less bureaucracy for public schools. So I have to give a nod to something I think is totally ridiculous (Got Milk?) because we’re in a democracy here, and the one thing we can agree on is that we don’t agree.

So frankly, no, I don’t think that having a Democrat signing bills will do much. What can he do? Our state is in a perpetual state of government gridlock. We can’t even agree to disagree and do a “simple up-or-down vote” (as Republicans say when it’s to their benefit). We have our state government set up to fail. It’s supposed to provide all the services that we and all our neighbors want, but it’s not supposed to raise the taxes necessary to pay for those services.

Cities have been failing—going bankrupt—at a steady trickle lately. Counties and states aren’t far behind. We have to agree to pay for the services we want, or we’re all going to end up living in our big piles of garbage while we argue with our governments about who is supposed to pay for hauling it away.

It’s a Package Deal, but the package is so stinky, none of us wants to be the one to take the responsibility of saying it’s ours.

Just haul it to the dump, OK? We can keep lowering taxes and raising services and driving faster and faster to get away from the stench.

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