c o t t o n w o o d

2011-12-04T12:41:00.001-08:00

From Reflections on Fat Acceptance: Lessons Learned from Privilege, Linda Bacon, PhD, some excerpts:

Thin privilege only exists, of course, because fat oppression exists – because we have this sick cultural
idea that there is something wrong with fat and that a fat body is a marker of a defective person. This
idea is so strong, so deeply entrenched in the culture, that we absorb it, it gets lodged in our psyches,
and most people, fat and thin, come to believe and act as if this oppressive idea is reality. Most people
want to be thin – and view thin as better. The internalization of this belief drives the body anxiety most
people – fat and thin - experience. It fuels our preoccupation with trying to obtain or maintain that thin
weight - and the feelings of shame if our bodies don’t measure up.

[...]

No, my motivation for working against fat oppression has little to do with being a caring or fair-minded
person. When it comes down to it, working in this field is really about my own survival. I fight fat-phobia
because it’s ugly and mean and I need to save myself from it. I do what I do because I’m really afraid –
because I believe that the costs of not challenging this system are too painful for me to bear. My whole
world shifted once I understood that. The war that was originally waged against my self – the fat on
my body – was more appropriately waged against oppressive attitudes about fat.

Let me share a little more about why fat oppression feels so painful for me, because it may not be so
patently obvious given my body size. The cultural perception of fat bodies as “wrong” hurts those of us
in the “right” bodies too. In fact, most thin people suffer from anxieties about their weight. An
individual’s weight tells you very little about whether it feels problematic to them.

[...]

Most people have internalized fatism and believe that there is something wrong with fat, from the
perspective of appearance as well as health. We’re all subject to what psychologists call “confirmation
bias.” Once a belief is in place, we screen information in a way that ensures our beliefs are proven
correct.

Also, because we like to believe that our values are derived from a well-reasoned thought process of our
own volition, there’s a natural resistance to the notion that we’re basically pawns who have absorbed an
oppressive system, actively complicit in our own oppression and that of others. It makes sense that
people have a strong defense system – denial - that prevents many people from seeing this.

[...]

But another lesson I’ve learned over time is that resistance isn’t valuable only when it sparks an
immediate and visible change. The power of resistance is to create a safe zone – even if it’s just for a
moment - where fat-phobia isn’t tolerated, to set an example. You may not necessarily change the
other, but you plant a seed. I can’t tell you how many times people have told me over the years that
they heard this message once, but it wasn’t until years later that some other event catalyzed a new
awareness. Without those earlier seeds, the later events wouldn’t have had their impact.

[...]

It may just be that we don’t eradicate fat oppression. I’d like to have faith in the inevitability of justice
being done, of good triumphing evil, but I need to be honest here and acknowledge that I’m just not
confident that’s going to happen. The civil rights movement based on race began long ago, and while
some of the more explicit forms of racism are less tolerated, racism still permeates our psyches. [...]
But before you get down on me for pessimism, I challenge you to look at it in a different way, because it
can be very liberating to reframe it. Maybe the point isn’t victory, as much as we would like to see that
done. Maybe the real issue is that through the effort to achieve freedom and equality we get our
humanity.

Now, please, go read the whole thing.

2011-11-15T09:12:00.001-08:00

What I think of as the eras of my life had completely different feelings to them, and I think of them as different eras because of this. I am not remembering as well anymore what they felt like, which saddens me. It makes me afraid that I may be losing individual memories as well, so I think I had better get some of it written down before I forget everything.

The earliest thing that I am aware of really remembering -- not just seeing the images from photographs in my mind's eye, but the actual sense of being -- is being at the zoo. That makes sense, because for an experience to stick in my head it requires having been different in some way from the usual routine of life. For a long time this memory of being at the zoo was one of my favorites, that I would go to time and time again because I could feel the experience of being there and because it was so wonderful.

This memory of the zoo had nothing to do with the animals, but with the sensation of my being in the place. There is a concrete walk, round and expansive, and a curving low concrete wall. The air is hazy and cast in a golden hue, everything a watercolor blur, warm and bright. It is at the height of summer and I am running, playing. My mother is there; there is a stroller that my brother must have been in, which makes me think that it must have been in the summer of 1969. It is my most enduring impression of the happiness of the beness of childhood.

Another memory that stands out for me that has not been produced by or survived because of photographs is that of kissing my mother on the cheek. I would press my lips into her cheek as hard as I could and she would say, "Linda, you can't do that, it's hurting me!" I didn't mean to hurt her, it was just that my ardor was so physically intense! I had to. I loved my mom so much. I thought she was the best mom in the wholeworld. I called her "mama". She was sweet and loving and took care of me perfectly. (My friends has mothers and mommies, one too formal and the other too silly for me. Later there was the perfunctory and detached "mom". The word "mama" still calls forth for me the maternal goddess archetype; lucky for me that that is what my children call me.)

When I was three and four years old I went to preschool. My mom tells me that I was wildly desiring of being able to go, and that she was able to get me out of diapers by telling me that I could go only if I used the toilet. It was a rectangular room in the daylight basement of a large old house. It was not a room that they simply used for the preschool, the room belonged to the Preschool, as if it had been there from the beginning of time. At one end was a long table where we made things and had our snacks; in the middle against the wall was a climbing structure/fort made of heavy wood beams painted with a glossy red and blue paint that had a distinctive smell that I loved. The climbing structure was important to me primarily as landscape; it was part of the identity of the room. The opposite end of the room was a little play and storytelling area with a rug and low book shelves and puppets and dolls. I was never much interested in listening to one of the teachers or mothers reading a book to us, as we were expected to do. I was fidgety, bored. Though I loved books and was already reading, it was not enjoyable for me to have to sit there and listen to a story not of my own choosing when I could be doing something I wanted to do. I'd rather have looked at a book by myself or continued making things.

And the main thing for me was indeed the making. One project that stands out in my mind is the pasta Christmas tree, macaroni and wagon wheels glued to cardboard and spraypainted gold. We made beautiful designs by folding paper and dipping it into water dyed with food coloring, something that I've never been able to replicate; there was something special about that paper, a cross between the crinkliness of onion skin paper and tissue paper. There was the spatter paint over a maple leaf onto construction paper, and blowing through a straw at ink to make a tree shape on paper.

I don't remember any of the people. I have a vague sense that some of the adults annoyed my mom, but I was unaware at the time of any of their personalities. They were like the out-of-sight generic mwah-mwah-mwah grown-ups of Charlie Brown cartoons.

Despite attending the preschool for two years of my life, that is all the memory I have of it; it too became part of the routine of my life so is now unrememberable as distinct, separate events. It was enough though to shape my expectations of life, because it was so nice. I am wanting always to get back to the feelings of security and wellness and warmness and engagedness and beingness that were characteristic of the place. I have a preference for hand-made things and solid wood toys and glossy bright colors and polished concrete floors and children's books from that era. It does make me wonder how much of the current crafting DIY movement has to do with all the crafting we children were exposed to in the early 1970s in schools. It would be interesting to see if the type of crafting favored by people corresponds to their age. I bet it does.

2011-11-01T08:11:00.000-07:00

I think a lot about what I would like to be. I look at Swiss Army Wife or Soule Mama or Purl Bee (or, ironically, Amanda Palmer,) or a hundred others I appreciate, and I think, "I want to be that, I could be that, I will be that," and then of course I don't because I'm not. I think what it really is about -- why I can't just let these people be without dreaming of putting myself in their place, but in my own way of course -- is envy. I would like some attention. I would like some accolades.

But not just that. When I was a little girl I would draw a picture that I thought was just so good and show it to my mother, and her response was always positive, but I knew that it was not really true. She was supposed to tell me it was good, you can't tell a child you don't like her picture. I knew (and I know now how that feels) that she didn't feel it. No fault of hers, I have a pretty strong pretense sensor. But I wanted desperately for her to share in what I felt with me, to be with me in it. It was soul-crushingly disappointing to me that she didn't. I hounded her about it, asking her over and over, more and more aggressively, Do you really like it? Do you?, (as if by intensity I could awaken some primordial passion in her, wake her up to the reality I lived in,) until she became exasperated and angry.

That story illustrates a large part of the nature of my envy: I want what I am to be what others are. That a blog has great numbers of followers demonstrates that they get it, whatever it is that the blogmaster puts forth. They are with her. This is what popularity means: that something about you is something that others recognize. And this springs from a deeper place still: the desire to truly fit, to have sympatico, to have comfort and ease in being with people, the people to whom you truly belong. Who hear you, who see you, who understand you.

I know, intellectually, that at least in this world a price is often paid for that in loss of privacy and expectations of leadership, and that what looks like sympatico may be something else entirely, and that even if it is real, people change and people move on. But I still want it, and I still imagine sometimes that this is a way I could have it, even if just a little bit of it.

Clearly, I'm not in a position to. I'm not showy, I'm not clever, I'm not a salesperson. I'm earnest and sensitive and too serious for most. I think to myself that I am that song: I am a rock, I am an island. And then I think of anything that C.S. Lewis has ever written about friendship and love. Somewhere he writes (and I paraphrase probably very badly) about the astonishing moment when one realizes that there are others out there very like oneself. That one is, in fact, not alone. And how else am I going to find them except to keep allowing myself to be what I am, and not wasting energy trying to make a village for myself where none would exist naturally? What that leaves of course is hard and scary in its own way, because it involves doing what I am really excited by, what makes me sing inside, which perhaps no person I ever meet will understand, and that's a lot of not fitting, a lot of rejection. I suppose the answer lies in letting go of it. Like they say (infuriatingly) to people who are desperate for someone to love them, when you're least looking and least expecting it and paying the least attention to gaining it, that's when you will find it. At least for real. Or, you don't, because there is no magic equation by which we can guarantee that we get what we want. Which is why, I figure, I've just got to get on with being who I am. It's the only real, good thing that I can guarantee.

2011-10-27T07:19:00.000-07:00

I doubt I would ever lose weight without becoming ill, but the possibility worries me. I think about factors that may have put me at the upper range of my normal, like pregnancy and breastfeeding, lifestyle changes that come with having children and living in the suburbs, toxins in the environment, lack of nutrients from soil depletion, etc. As some of these factors change naturally or by intention so that I no longer need as much fat to function and be well, my body may respond by changing its composition. I also worry about wearing form-fitting clothing occasionally because it does make me look smaller. If I wore it all the time it wouldn't be a problem because people would be used to me looking that way, but I like to be comfortable so I usually wear looser clothing.

What do these two things have in common? That people are inevitably pleased by the perception that I've lost weight (based in reality or not) and feel the need to comment on it. My fear of this is not unfounded; it has happened to me countless times.

And it is so, so, so problematic for me. I know that the intention is good. I know that people feel it to be somehow intrinsically good to be thin and that they assume that this is universally agreed on, and that it is a friendly, happy thing to praise and congratulate someone for it. But from my perspective, knowing what I do about the body and psyche and social control that they probably have not even guessed at, it is incredibly offensive and harmful.

Imagine living in a culture in which a woman's work is understood to be taking care of the home and catering to the husband, and in which the ideal woman is to be not too smart or concerned with the workings of society. It's not too hard to imagine because we're not yet very far off from that. So, imagine that. Now imagine a woman who has a natural aptitude for, say, mathematics. I will tell you a story about her. When she was young, and before she knew it was bad to be smart (because the common wisdom in her society is that it interferes with being a proper homemaker and wife,) this woman was scorned and shamed and ostracized for it. Her teachers and parents, feeling bad for her, gently (and sometimes somewhat coercively, but always for her own good!,) tried to get her to make choices that would make her like the other girls (some of whom were naturally inclined toward homemaking, some who as of yet had no obvious inclinations other than to play, and some who did have other inclinations but quickly learned to keep quiet about them.)

She tried very hard to get the approval of those around her. She studied what it was that the books and magazines and movies showed proper women doing, and her parents helpfully put her on a regimen of those behaviors in the hopes of making them into habits. She tried very hard not to do math, or to think critically and logically, or really to think much about anything at all. Her own mother had done it successfully, and the girls at school were constantly talking about ways to master the temptation to think. You needed to do it a little to survive, but too much would make you undesirable. This was obvious because the girls who didn't look like they were thinking were the ones that got the attention from boys and adults, which they of course wanted because it felt good. For most of the girls, the older they got the more developed their brains became, and so the harder it became to conform to the ideal, and they spent much of their time worrying about it and hating their brains for wanting to think, and consequently secretly hating themselves.

The protagonist of my story wasn't aware of what the other girls were going through for a long time. She thought she was part of a disgusting minority in her failure to mold her brain into something society approved of. She thought she would never be at peace. But when she went out into the world, on her own, she started to meet people who had also failed but who did not see it as such. They said that while it was fine to be a homemaker, not all homemakers are unintelligent and need not eschew intellectual pursuits, and that women who make careers out of their intellects are wonderful too. The most important thing, they said, was to be true to what you are and to love what you are.

She could see the rightness of this and forged ahead, rebellious, to become a mathematician. She felt great anxiety at going against the grain, and felt heavy-hearted every time someone exhorted her to do the right thing and be a proper woman, or just said mean things because she wasn't. She lapsed a few times, buying into the hype that her life would be better if she wasn't so smart. Reason and self-preservation eventually won out, and she felt emboldened and morally obligated to speak out about the discrimination and bigotry, yet all the while harboring a wistful desire to not be the way she was so that people would love her and she would be allowed to be at peace.

As a grown woman, talented and therefore employable by those who are not so bigoted, she found work as a mathematician. Most people didn't understand. They thought she had to work because she didn't have a husband. After a time she and a man fell in love and got married, but she continued to work which they attributed to his flaws -- he must be desperate, there must be something wrong with him and nobody else would have him, or perhaps he couldn't support two people on his own wage.

Now we come to the present. They have a daughter who is well loved and cared for, and as the daughter grows it becomes clear that she too has a mathematical mind. The woman, knowing full well what society's opinion of that is, works very hard to normalize it as much as she can for her daughter, through her speech and her actions and who they associate with, in the hope that the daughter will not have the hard road to self-acceptance that she did. Then one day she loses her job. For whatever reason, they cannot employ her any longer. It's a small town so soon everyone knows, and nearly every person she comes across says to her, "Oh, how wonderful! You must be so relieved! You finally get to be a housewife!"

Now, this isn't a direct analogy, obviously. But it does explain how it feels to be a person in a situation in which she is being praised for something she doesn't believe to be praiseworthy, and how loaded that situation is for her. When someone compliments me on appearing to be smaller than I looked to them previously, a number of things are going through my mind: being led to believe all my life that there was something wrong with my larger-than-average body and me for having it and the misery that was a result of that, the long struggle to liberate myself from it, the goals of the kyriarchy and how convincing women to associate their worth with their appearance serves that, how appraisal of others' bodies implies ownership of them, how current praise implies previous negative judgment, the weakening and deleterious health effects that dieting has on a body, and my concern for the psychological well-being of my daughters, who have inherited a large body type, and what message it sends to them about their bodies when someone says to me, "You look great! Have you lost weight???!!!"

How to respond? I can't say "thank you". But I can't very well condense a whole lifetime and formation of ethics into a polite acknowledgment of their well wishes that also makes clear that I don't appreciate them one bit.

"I'm sorry, you're not in labor..."

2011-07-24T10:23:00.000-07:00

"In labor", "not in labor", these are such loaded terms! With all kinds of definitions. For me, "in labor" means that this is different from the previous nine months of the baby growing inside of me. My body has finished growing it and is now in "getting it out" mode; a significantly different process is going on. I have shifted into a special awareness and alertness. It is imminent in the sense of "the next day or so," which it is not when it is "the next few months or weeks." Granted, in the early stages I may not be technically laboring in the sense of doing hard physical work, but it is quite different from the rest of pregnancy nonetheless. And please note the use of the term "early stages", which implies that there is something to be in the early stages of.

Midwives tend not to like to define it that way. Arbitrarily, according to this or that birth attendant: I am "in labor" (or alternately "in the birth process") when my contractions are four or three or two minutes apart and not before, or I am dilated to six or eight and not before, or other such markers (the mother not being able to converse during contractions, for example.) Or, subjectively: when I start having to work hard. But, you know, some women never do hard physical work to birth their babies (and I suspect that if not for modern birth management, that would be true for most women.) I didn't, in three out of four of my births. I walked around, I floated, I rocked, I howled in pain when the baby's head pressed on my sacrum, and I bore down a bit. Whatever it was, I did not regard it as hard physical work. Does that mean I was never "in labor"?

Of course not. But when a midwife says, "you're not in labor", she is not really talking about some objectively measurable thing, despite what numbers or signs she throws at you, or even about how hard it is. What she really means is that she doesn't want to hang around for something that is not very interesting to her that looks like it is going to take a long, long time, she's got other things to do and a life to live, and that in her opinion it will not help the mother for her to be there at that time anyway and might actually hinder her.

Now, I am all for being clear and honest about boundaries (thinking mainly of the care provider in this context,) and it is for me a great annoyance to have anyone around me in labor *at all* and I have a huge bias against social birthing, as well as guided and observed birthing for that matter. So trust me, I'm not of the mindset that midwives should never leave the mother's side. But I do want the midwife to consider what it is that is going on behind this request of her presence when the mother is, in the midwife's estimation, "not in labor."

When a woman wants her midwife in the early stages of... whatever this thing is that she's in that is different from plain old gestation but that midwives do not like to call "labor", what that says to me is that she is either scared and needs information and reassurance, or that she is not getting her emotional needs met by others in her life (extremely common in our culture) and is relying on the midwife for that and feeling like that is part of what she is paying her for, or that she has a mental picture of birth that has been fueled by culture that women are supposed to be attended from the moment that contractions start. What a surprise, then, that she has this expectation!

What is the remedy? Well, at the very least it is something that really needs to be hashed out before the birth. Just saying "you're not in labor, bye" is dismissive of what the woman is experiencing and feeling and can feel to her like abandonment, and can also be demoralizing, especially for those for whom "not labor" is hard work ("what the hell have I been doing then??") Sure, some people are tough and will say, "she's right, what a weenie I've been, I'm going to be a big girl now and do this all on my own until it's really hard and then I will be justified in having her support!" But I'm guessing that's the exception. Human beings are complex, and birth is a BIG DEAL. It is not the time to expect that people work out all their issues, it is the time when they should feel unconditionally supported. So yeah, boundaries need to be made clear, philosophy explained, terms defined, and expectations examined, BEFORE the birth. Please, don't just spring a "you're not in labor" on her! And consider, also, what other words might be used that are realistic about what will best serve the process, without being minimizing of what she has already experienced and done.

2011-07-13T06:54:00.000-07:00

I've been playing around with what would constitute a good school curriculum, to my mind. Not because I wish to institute one in our 'homeschooling' (which we do not, technically, do) but because it's an interesting exercise. When someone asks, "What curriculum do you use?," I say that we don't and try to explain my disdain for the idea of curricula made up by people I don't even know, who think that people are standard, or should be, and that they learn best by reading someone else's boring textbook summary of some thing that they have no interest in.

Although I think I could make a better curriculum than any developed by the so-called "experts", I wonder how people would like being subjected to the things that I think important, aka Queen Linda's Curriculum. They wouldn't of course, because it has to do with personal interests; it's not "core". I respond that "core" as presented by curricula-makers is an illusion; it's all someone's personal preference, but over time we've been trained to regard these "core" subjects as the objectively accurate base of the skyscraper of knowledge. It also artificially compartmentalizes the information (so that we are trained out of awareness of the true, messy interrelatedness of it all) and presents it in a very specific format that implies that there is only one correct way to approach it, undermining creative and critical thinking, and divorcing it from the actuality of the thing in the real world. The result is that it is regarded as "just something we have to do" rather than something valuable and useful, and accordingly quickly forgotten (hence the need for repetition, in order that the school can have good test scores to prove to parents and government that it's "doing its job.")

But all right, I concede that in our school system things can't really be done any other way; parents need babysitters, teachers are understandably concerned with the organization and management of many children at a time, administrators are concerned with keeping their jobs, government is concerned with numbers, social engineers are concerned with keeping the class system as it is, and all this adds up to what we have, and it will stay that way until our society completely falls apart and there is no longer any funding for the schools.

What I don't understand is this: why do homeschoolers, who have the freedom to do just about anything they want, seek to imitate a system that has so little to do with true learning?

So, going back to my curriculum, I think it would be a fun prop to whip out when the conversation starts up about homeschooling, i.e. school at home. However, my interest in creating it waned pretty quickly and I couldn't bring myself to finish it, because it's essentially bullshit and my mind was distracted and wanted to go enjoy what isn't bullshit: my and my children's actual learning.

And god, it's fun! So much fun! How many kids do you know who get to learn in a way that makes that true? I ask the question not to be smug -(ha ha, we get to enjoy ourselves while you poor slobs continue to suffer!)- but because the answer matters. People will huff, "well, the point of learning isn't to have a good time." No? Try to tell my unschooled kids that. :) But all right, I'll concede at least that fun isn't all that learning is for. Regardless, there is no denying that learning happens best when it is enjoyable because that's when it really sticks.

That's not to say that the answer to getting kids to learn is to entertain them. If you are trying to teach someone and they don't really want to be taught, certainly the ability to entertain is a very good tool for keeping them engaged. The mistake though is in assuming in the first place that learning is something you have to get kids to do, when actually that's true only for institutional learning and imitations of it. The desire to learn, to take in information, to parse it, to apply it, is intrinsic to being human. And that intrinsic desire, when allowed to dominate, feels good. And you don't have to work to keep people engaged with something that feels good.

Granted, if you leave them to their intrinsic desires they probably won't learn what you think (or have been led to think) is important. They won't necessarily put themselves on a path to be doctors or lawyers or take over the family business. What they certainly will do is play for a long, long time. There's a reason for this, and it is that human children (and mammals in general) are wired to learn through play. Play contains purpose and thought and is characterized by a feeling of timelessness and being inside the thing of compelling interest, with it, flowing along with it. Play is creative and does not have an ulterior motive or goal outside of itself. Einstein's best work was a result of play of the mind. Play is not efficient, but it returns ultimate value, if what you value is creativity, innovation, and a sense of rightness of being in the world. Play loves the thing for itself, wholly. As a consumer or client, I'd much rather deal with a doctor, for instance, for whom her/his work is the end result of all of the previous, than one for whom it is simply a job that confers status and pays the bills, because that is the one who gets what it means to be a doctor and therefore the one I'd be getting the best care from.

What does this play-but-not-necessarily-what-you-want-them-to-learn look like? Often, just about every parent's greatest fear (at this time in our culture.) A perfect example is my twelve-year-old son, who spends a lot of time on the computer. If he's not visiting friends, going to the park or river, going to the library, shopping, making food, playing piano, watching movies, playing Magic the Gathering, etc., he's absolutely glued to the screen. I'd estimate, oh, at least the same amount of time every day that most kids spend in school. He used to spend much of that time playing video games on game systems, but he's mostly lost interest in that in favor of the internet. If I glance over, it usually looks like he's playing a game or watching a video, and if that was all I bothered to do I might develop a superficial judgment of what he's doing. Just playing! "Mindless" video games at that! But. When I sit down and talk to him, for even just a few minutes, here is what I discover that he has been thinking about when I was otherwise occupied: artificial intelligence, what constitutes consciousness, and something called "The Millennium Prize Problems". Which, once I ask, he wants to tell me all about. He then brings up something that reminds me of a video I saw earlier in the day that I think he might like, and we end up talking about conic sections, real-world applications of algebra, and the difference between objective reality and symbolic representations of it.

Earlier (which was about 11:30 pm actually, he is a night owl and while I am not it is good for both of us that I put off my preferred bedtime once in a while to spend time with him at the time of day when his mind is at the height of its machinations,) he and I happened to be sitting together surfing the internet, and as he thought and asked questions, we sped through flowcharts, algorithms, the electromagnetic spectrum, perception of visible light, the color wheel and color theory, base number systems, binary, and binary digits (i.e. "bits"). My brain was getting sloggy with the late hour, but his brain was going ping! ping! ping! ping! It is exciting to be around. And he has the mental energy to do this because he isn't bogged down by homework in the "proper" subjects, and because (this applies only during the school year, obviously, but still,) he hasn't been forced to sit all day in a place he doesn't want to be listening to a person he doesn't want to hear talk.

Now, I'm lucky in that my kids want to talk to me. Or maybe it's not so much luck, maybe it's that I've never tried to school them, or insisted they perform, or belittled or disparaged or restricted their interests (which, yes, include video games,) so that they see me as a comrade in learning. Certainly, though, there are children who are not ready to articulate certain ideas, or they might just be not interested in group learning, preferring their inner minds. So it's at least partly luck that I get to receive this very obvious evidence that children are learning all the time even if they play a lot of video games and assuage my society-induced imaginary fear to the contrary. I understand that fear. I just no longer believe, intellectually, that it's legitimate.

I also realize that there is danger in this type of example, because in this culture we revere math and science knowledge, we put it way up at the top of our created hierarchy of impressive and important things. The reason that most homeschoolers use a pre-packaged standardized curriculum is not because it's so fantastically educational and perfect for their kids, but because they're scared. They look at what we're learning about, and they think to themselves, "Well, we're not like that. It's all well and good for them, but we aren't academically-minded and that's why our kids are better off with a curriculum/being in school." But they are missing the point. This science-y stuff just happens to be what we like. It's not what anyone else should necessarily be doing. What you should be doing and learning about might be sports, building things, theater, tumbling, decor, feng shui, horseback riding, volunteer work, the paranormal, mythology, religion, organizing, bibliophilia, fire rescue, care-taking, aging, pottery, dancing, clothes-making or design, therapeutics, photography, old things, chemicals, movies, baking, retro advertising, auto mechanics, flying, animation, cake decorating, dirt, knitting, the paleolithic, bearded dragons, D&D, romance novels, rafting, Japanese culture, dolls... there is literally a whole world of full-on living that isn't inherently academic and doesn't need to be made academic to be important and worthwhile to you.

Because it's not all math and science here, either. Other examples from my children include lots and lots of screen time (problem-solving, strategy-making, sociological assessing!,) singing (mostly made-up songs,) piano playing (mostly video game songs,) imaginary play, writing and reading fiction, swimming in the river and finding agates, looking at pictures of arts and crafts, drawing, sewing, board games, going on walks, riding bikes, loving chickens, government and civil liberty issues (prompted by listening to NPR news in the car,) money, humor, Adobe Flash, spending the evening with no electricity, making cookies. And talking, talking, talking, always talking, about a million things under the sun. (People vastly underestimate the power of simple conversation between people who are really interested in what they're talking about.) None of these are less important or interesting or of potential value in their lives than awareness of how science-y people describe light, and all of these interests and states of being interweave with each other and spawn curiosity in myriad ways. When I think about the kids being made to trade even one minute of all this for dully simplistic and questionably relevant and certainly uninteresting exercises of "core" subjects, my heart goes heavy and black. Not while I have any say in the matter will anyone get to do that to them.

What happens though, when the child shows interest in something you don't feel you have the capacity to understand and have no interest in? I can't imagine that that isn't true to some degree for any parent. But here's the thing: people don't need someone standing over them dictating their learning for them, or even someone to provide all the answers. What they do need are resources and support and encouragement. I have zero interest myself in voice-overs for advertising and film, but one of my children has demonstrated skill and interest in it, so I am genuinely excited about it for his sake and will help him work toward it if that's what he wants. He doesn't need me to be his teacher for it, though, and I definitely don't need to give him assignments and prompt him to learn about it. All I need to do is support him and help with logistics that I (with the money and car) have the power to help with. What if it's more "academic"? Well, I can tell you right now that despite my love of math and science (and to be honest it is mostly the pretty, sparkly "pop" stuff that I love) my 12-year-old has already far surpassed me in the more cerebral aspects of it. He is doing fantastically well progressing on his own (and I do not mean to the school system's standards, just to be absolutely clear); a teacher would not be useful to his purposes at this time, but might be in the future and if that were the case I'd back him in finding a good one. Or he might decide to work with a mentor or group of people with the same interests. If you have a love of something, you go where other people have that same love. Most importantly, he's growing up knowing that he can make that happen, that he doesn't have to wait for someone (parent, school, university, government) to tell him what to do, who to learn from, where to go, when to do it. He gets to decide and he has the right to seek that out for himself. The confidence to self-direct is an empowering and powerful thing.

Really, I'm just here, simply communicating in word and action, "You have a wonderful mind and spirit and I love being around you. I know you know the world is a fascinating place and I think so too. Let's go be in it." That sort of thing is not hard if you really believe in it. And from that, effortlessly, flows everything good about learning. I wish so much that people could start believing it. Of all the damage that the our culture's system of schooling has done to people, that is some of the worst, that people have been conditioned to believe that their own drives and interests are unimportant and not useful, so that simply following them is not enough to create and live a good life; that they need to spend years and years putting all that aside to accommodate some arbitrary and irrelevant curriculum. So the spark is buried and we forget it. Do you begin to see that this is what this is really about? My kids will never have to forget it and never have to fight to find it again. Never.

2011-06-28T14:08:00.000-07:00

What today has looked like so far at our house:

Topics:
anarchism
the concept of "laziness"
what it means to be "free" in our society
social engineering
planned helplessness
the class system
Greek mythology
the diet of ancient humans
the difference between "diet" and "dieting"
types and causes of eating disorders

Activities:
sleeping until awake
talking to and holding chickens
making an alphabet book with faces and names
asking and answering spelling questions
making up imaginary scenarios with dolls
making cookies
playing outside
singing
playing piano
having friend over
Super Smash Bros. Brawl
Mine Craft

2011-06-24T19:59:00.000-07:00

Invisible Midwives on Facebook writes, "I am making a list of helpful things partners/father can do during pregnancy, labour and after birth. I am struggling a bit and need some ideas."

Here are mine:

Accept and appreciate that in this process there are shifts in consciousness and body chemistry that manifest in many ways. Be understanding when my priorities change to reflect this, and stand by my side while I am in it -- slow down, quiet yourself, listen.

Take over more than your usual share of the care and maintenance of our lives, because I am too (just in a way that is not very visible.)

Be affectionate, loving, and passionate. Remember that I am still your lover. And that oxytocin is good not just for you and me, but for the baby and for the birth and postpartum.

During labor, do not tell me I'm doing a good job or ask what I want. Look to see that conditions are clean and warm and comfortable, and set out food and water within my reach. Lovingly tend to our children if they are present; take care of their needs first. Sleep if you are tired; do not worry about me, but be ready to wake and jump to my side if I call you. Stay close so that I can choose to go to you or not, and if I do wrap your arms around me and murmur lovingly to me. Be calm, and above all be loving. If you are stressed or fearful, leave and return only when you feel well again. When the baby is born be still and quiet. Be watchful for my cues. When I am ready help me move to a comfortable place and clean up.

Postpartum, let me sleep. Bring me food and drink. Be on top of the laundry. Take care of our children; engage them and attend to them. Check in with me often (I will not want to yell for you.) Protect our space; do not let anyone in that I have not previously approved. Let me know, often, how much you love me and what a wonderful baby it is that we have made together. ♥

2011-06-24T19:58:00.000-07:00

"We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world." --Terence McKenna

2011-06-19T06:59:00.000-07:00

So, I was going to have a baby, and I'm not going to have a baby anymore. This was an interesting and good thing to happen to me and I'm going to try to explain why.

I'm old. At this age, just about nobody here has babies unless they are Quiverfull or are desperately trying for their first or second (never found a mate, met their mate in middle age, focused on career for most of their adult life, fertility issues.) In my community the exceptions don't even apply; women are educated and married and have their babies in the "proper" stage of life, in the decade between 25 and 35 or so.

Also, I already have four children. People have different reasons for why they disapprove of large families, but almost universally they do indeed disapprove.

Also, I'm aware that statistically genetic anomalies are more likely at my age (and the age of the baby's father.)

I felt anxiety about all these things. But, my partner was not only supportive but happy, and that was very romantic and lovely. And, I am naturally an Eeyore and seriously identify with the writer of Ecclesiastes, but not particularly happily or willingly, which means that to have a natural mission and purpose is greatly appealing to me. So I had mostly decided to go forward with it, but to keep quiet about it as long as possible.

I began to feel better and better. In fact, I felt great. My hip and pelvic pain disappeared, and I was energized both mentally and physically. I felt like I was on a happy drug, and the happier I got the happier I got. It built on itself. Biology is such a powerful thing. And of course that good feeling rippled out into my family. I was more loving, kinder, more considerate. I was so happy to be with them, so grateful. I hadn't ever really let myself enjoy pregnancy before, I was realizing. I always felt a little ashamed, like I shouldn't be doing this. I was thinking: I should be contributing to society, I should be doing impressive things, breeders are ruining the environment, I am so tired and grumpy from running around after little kids, and we can hardly afford basic necessities as it is. But now I am old and much more haughty and selfish, I guess. I have a much easier time telling those who would judge me to fuck off and not letting it get to me. I have a sense of there being things that are much more important; that there will always be pain and suffering and the world will continue to be misused and population will grow exponentially, but I can love and feel love and have experiences that humans are supposed to have and report back on them; with the hopelessness of everything, that is the one true power I have. It is the point of it all. Come with me and love, and we will die, and we may get sick, and we may be hungry, but at least we will have loved. If it is between a long, comfortable life and ecstasy, I will take the ecstasy. They're not inherently mutually exclusive, of course, but so often the things we do to try to guarantee the former eat away at the latter until it has disappeared except for fleeting moments here and there. That is a tragedy, it seems to me, more than any death or suffering.

So, here I was, getting to embark on this unusual and disapproved-of course, and really being happy about it. And feeling sad that for various cultural and practical reasons throughout history, women haven't felt it. I guess that it hasn't been the norm for a long time. Even for those in the approved status group it isn't, still. How different would the world be if women's conditions were such that they didn't feel conflicted about pregnancy and children, always to some degree a burden or a guilty luxury? How different would individual lives be? I am talking about Eden, I realize, but I was inside of it. It exists still; it is possible. I want to yell out to women everywhere, "Take it back! Don't let them steal it from you!" No matter what else is going on, how dire our circumstances, this is something that we are supposed to have. It's written into our very cells. I wish we could have it always, all of us.

***

Wednesday, on my 45th birthday, I started bleeding. Through my mind ran all the possible causes and I paid close attention to where the pain was coming from and the degree. I did not take pain medication because I wanted to know exactly what was going on. I decided finally that most likely I was experiencing a normal miscarriage. I remained watchful. Flow became heavy with small shiny dark red clots or pieces of tissue. I was tired, oh so tired. I wanted to sleep a deep sleep all the time, like the kind of sleep you fall into when you've been doing hard physical work all day and come home to a soft bed. It was nice. My sleep was filled with watercolor dreams, where there is no plot or dialogue, just flowing images. I was dreamy while awake too, in an altered state of consciousness, in a liminal space. Everything around me took on an Edenic cast, especially outside, whether sunlight on greenery or grey mist. I did not particularly want to see people but when I did I loved them. I told a few women and they were caring and I just loved them. I didn't care for the moment about noise and pollution and greed, I saw shapes and color and movement and coruscation and I loved it. I was serene and at peace. I continued to bleed, more than I can remember ever having done.

Today I am feeling back to normal. The bleeding has mostly subsided. I feel the lack of all there was. I feel emptied.

I was only six weeks (and I realize that this is only my experience, and others experience it differently) so there was nothing in the way of the loss of a known person to mourn. I did not feel a soul come and go. But I am different, I am changed. I am not sad, exactly, but I feel tender, raw, and there is a lump in my throat. Tears come to my eyes easily.

A friend of mine said that she was sorry that she could not be more of a support, but she was actually the very support that I needed, in simply acknowledging that this was not nothing. For such a private person as I am, and someone who normally finds people annoying and tiresome and who is not particularly socially adept, it was interesting how much I did not want to keep this to myself. I had a desire to whisper to people (certain people) that it is here, here it is, do you see it, to pull them into it a bit, and to open my heart. It was an odd and lovely place to be.

I am not going to have a baby, but I'm glad that I was for a little while.

2011-06-07T10:51:00.000-07:00

That last post was easy to write, hard to put out there. I know very well that the vast majority of people (as far as my experience has led me to believe anyway) see it as so horrible a thing to be as to be automatically and justifiably maligned. I also know that I'm not the only one who feels this way.

I wrote it originally on an unassisted birth forum which is part of a larger parenting forum, and it is largely unmoderated so I have no doubt that it will get some indignant and offended replies. I haven't gone back and won't, not because I'm uninterested in rational and thoughtful discourse, but because controversial subjects in public forums tend to bring people who are already consumed with hate and anger out of the woodwork, and they aren't interested in rational and thoughtful discourse, they're interested in having your head on a platter.

I do though, for anyone who might find their way here, have a few more things to say that might help clarify why I feel the way I do.

I agree, it's a shocking thing at first. You might build up a picture in your mind, based on the written evidence, of a mind that is really "out there" -- in a word, nuts. If you met me, I don't think you would think so. I'm sensitive, but generally (unless people are mean) very even keel. I'm not a "woo" sort of person at all, though I've had some unusual experiences that make me wonder exactly how limited our five senses + brain cells really are. I'm a skeptic. Some people are out of touch with this reality (as most of us appear to know it) and some people are intentionally manipulative and deceitful. I don't take anyone's word for anything; there are not and will never be any gurus for me. On the other hand, I don't automatically discount it when people relate unusual experiences because I really don't know. My brain is limited. And we're all in the same boat, so I have little patience for people who scoff and sneer at things for no reason other than that they are outside of what we in this little corner of the universe and time with our little minds can grasp.

I do believe in objective reality. I don't think it's just a dream we're all in individually, making up our own ultimate truth out of nothing and meaning ultimately nothing. That objective reality, though, contains much more than we could possibly imagine, and our experience of it is of course subjective; depending on many different factors we can have experiences so disparate that they can seem impossible to reconcile as coming from the same source. I am not saying I am beyond anyone who doesn't agree with me, but we are certainly looking at things through different lenses. A lens may be cloudy or warped or it may be perfectly clear, and what you see through that lens depends on where you are standing, how close or far away, through fog or light shining in your eyes or with a tree standing in the way. Not one of us has all the information available to us, and different pieces are available to different people, depending on all sorts of things.

A pronouncement that has been directed at me and others is: "you wouldn't be saying any of this [stuff about being accepting of death] if you had ever held a dead baby in your arms." These people are incensed at what they see as great naïvity and hubris. And while it is true that, no, I have not held a dead baby in my arms, I do know of people who have and who, as painful as it was, were at peace in their hearts with it.

How could this possibly be?

When I was pregnant I read a story about a baby who was born with a congenital disorder and very ill; he wouldn't have survived without life support. So for months his life consisted of being hooked up to machines and being fed drugs, interspersed with occasional surgeries. He got sicker. After a while his mother, depressed at what seemed like a hopeless situation, would no longer go to see him and she retreated into herself. Finally after several months of this he became so sick that the decision was made to take him off life support. Although I understood the motivation of the people involved to try to help this baby live, it read to me like a horror story. I imagined myself in that situation, tortured with the thought of my baby suffering, keening and mourning the loss of a peaceful passing for him, or worse, detaching completely. I didn't know how I could live after experiencing such a thing.

Around the same time a thought experiment came to me: I imagined myself on a desert island, completely provided for and comfortable, but alone and pregnant with no way to find or contact other people. Obviously there would be no one to save me if trouble arose with me or the child; I would have no choice but to let nature take its course. How would I feel inside of that situation if the baby were to die?

The most important thing about this thought experiment was that it removed social judgment from the equation, so that I could see clearly what was left. And what became apparent was that the thing that I actually fear and dread is not death at all but social judgment (which is in itself a sort of death, and not a good one.)

I immersed myself into the thought experiment so thoroughly that it became a vision, and in the vision I felt the baby die. I felt myself grieving deeply, but a good, clean kind of grieving. Although sad, although initially painful, it was as it should be. I did not feel like railing against the universe, I was not angry, I was not guilty, and there was a kind of holiness to the happening that enveloped me in a womb-like peace. It was a revelation.

It has occurred to me since then that as there is a seeing to birth when it is not interfered with -- a temporary transcendence into the root of life, that which we come from and are made of and all that really matters -- there is also to death, and that it can be hard to see when we mess with the process or when we are so fixated on some desired outcome that our failure to get it is all that we can see.

That's going to make people mad. "So it's my fault that I didn't get some spiritual experience out of it?" No, I'm not saying it's your fault, or that you don't deserve to experience it however you wish. I am saying that your way is not the only possible way. And having been there (through giving birth and in other ways,) and not feeling "special" in some sense of having created it out of my own wonderfulness, I can't help but believe that it's something that belongs to us all; that it is our birthright.

And so I find myself distressed by this imperative for "safety" (in this inherently unsafe and unpredictable world,) that would divorce us from this birthright. I do realize that there are people in the world in whose minds this would be twisted into the following popular anti-homebirth sentiment: "See? All they want to do is have a nice experience, they don't care about the baby at all." But this is disingenuous; for they are motivated by selfishness themselves, in the desire to get to have that baby, live in their arms. Will the baby know the difference if it lives or dies? No. It is really all about the mother and the society around her. But in fact, while we all operate from a place of selfishness to some degree, natural unfettered birth (which includes possible death) is about the baby. More than I want that baby in my arms, I want the baby to not suffer and to follow its own needed course; and if that means life outside the womb, I want the baby to experience a normal mother-baby bonding and the beautiful and blessed life that bestows, to have that which is its birthright, which modern wisdom insists on sacrificing for an assumed greater likelihood of survival. It hasn't been very long in the history of humankind that we've really had the power to temporarily stave off natural death. I am not at all saying we shouldn't; but even assuming that it's sometimes right and good, doesn't mean that it always is. And who is the omniscient person who knows definitely which is which? We make the decision as best we can with what understanding we have. The problem is when we assume that extending this life as long as possible is the only right thing, so that the default is to enforce it as much as we have the power to do so.

In the end, this is about love. I love my children more than life itself, and it pains me that I've made decisions, based in fear of what others would think, that denied them the most good and beautiful things that were their birthright. I am guilty. Was the supposed "insurance" worth it? I don't think it was. I've seen the other side, I think we are meant to be there, and I am willing to take the risk again to get my baby and I there again.

2011-06-06T10:16:00.000-07:00

[I wrote the following on an online forum in response to those who like to spend their time arguing that the choice to give birth without a medical attendant present is selfish, stupid, and dangerous.]

For the naysayers it all boils down to this: the only acceptable scenario is birth with a medically-trained attendant. Period. If you do not agree with that, you are wrong. There is no rational debate to be had with that. It is not even desired. They have no interest in understanding the philosophy and motivations behind unassisted birth. They really just want to flog us with their opinion until we give in. Or maybe just for the sake of it, I don't know. What I do know is that they don't like it, they don't like that we exist, and... perhaps if they bug us enough about it we will just give up and go away? Stop doing this thing they don't like! Stop being different! Stop being not them!

I really don't understand why people are so angry about it, have such a need to campaign against it and "prove" it wrong. What does it matter to them what I do? Who am I to them? Why is it so important to them that life and death be, to me, what they are to them?

I do understand the desire to protect those who can't protect themselves. And of course we should. We shouldn't allow people to cut off others' genitals without their consent, or to mistreat them, or to force them to spend any part of their lives in an institution. That good intention goes awry, though, when we think our sphere of control should always include that of individuals' relationship to the natural world, which I regard as much a part of a person's autonomy as their right to their own body. It should be the default, until the person him/herself is able to assert otherwise, or if they would obviously suffer without intervention. Sometimes that good intention goes awry too, but it's the best I think that we can do.

And that default sometimes mean the ending of this particular phase of existence. I know it's not okay with a lot of people; it's okay with me. My spirituality is such that I do not have fear that the natural death of any person is wrong. When there has been no violence done, I have no objective moral basis for claiming that it isn't the right or best thing. I think there is a plan, I think no one languishes without getting to go through that which they need to, and I don't think that this life is the be-all and end-all of existence. It perplexes me that people feel so strongly averse to the choice to allow the possibility of natural death. If they are spiritual, believe in God or whatever, do they not believe that there is a plan and all will be right in the end? If they are not spiritual, then what does it matter to them if someone is fine with natural death or not? It seems absolutely irrational to me that people are so fixated on life at all costs for everyone, not just themselves. Certainly, it shouldn't be taken away from them; they get to make that choice for themselves. And I won't argue with the sense of duty they feel to further persuade others who have the same fundamental mindset. The mistake these people make though is in assuming that we all feel the same way fundamentally, so that if they could only convince us that their numbers and facts are objective and true, all would be well. People who are anti-homebirth do this; people who are anti-hospital birth do it too.

Some of us though really just are outside of that need to pin it down; our concerns are elsewhere. I can't speak for everyone, of course, and I imagine there are ways of looking at this that haven't even entered my mind. But for me, there is a purpose to being here, and it isn't about trying to string it out as long as I possibly can or getting as much stuff as I can or being as pain-free as I can. It is about learning to be what I am meant to be. I've been given a particular framework within which to explore that, and it is right, and it is my right, to do that as thoroughly and authentically as I am inwardly compelled to do. That is my guide; it is the only guide that makes sense, that has meaning to me. Anything else would be just living for the sake of living, or for the sake of convention, and to me that would be a tragic waste, a throwing away of an immense gift. And that means that I sometimes go down pathways that are not guaranteed "safe" (as if anything is) and that sometimes look foolish to others (who do not share or are even aware of my purpose.)

Meanwhile, there are going to be people reading this for whom it has no relation to anything they personally have the ability to perceive and understand, and so they assume that it is inherently meaningless. To them it looks like blathering, the making up of things that don't exist, like claiming that pink elephants with wings are real. What can you do? To the people who don't like that I wish to live my life in accordance with the natural world and spirit, I'm sorry that I can't put your hearts at ease. I would like to, I would like everyone to feel happy. But that power hasn't been given to me. And for you to keep railing against me about statistics and dead babies and responsibility to a moral/philosophical belief system that I don't even share, isn't making you happy and it isn't making me happy either. I suggest you stop. I suggest that you examine the possibility that your chosen mode of existence isn't the only moral or meaningful one. I suggest that you accept that there are things that you don't understand. I suggest that, aside from kindly-meant suggestions as to possibilities, you let conscientious loving people find their own way, and let go of the desire to control them and be angry when you don't get your way about their lives. If you agree to all that, and still want to talk, I'll be here.

-------------------

(Please read also the follow-up post.)

2011-06-02T18:36:00.000-07:00

Yeah... I'm going to take a break from the social networking. I've been thinking about this for a while. It's not that I consider it a "time waster" -- I don't consider making personal connections, hearing what my loved ones are up to, and learning about important issues a waste of time. My problem is that there is so much wrong with the world that I can't do much if anything about, and it depresses me and I am angry about it, and I carry that around with me. If I am powerless, what's the point of dwelling on it? I don't feel guilty about withdrawing. A resistance to engagement is not necessarily about apathy. Look, I already know what's ethical. I know how to vote with my pencil and my pocketbook. I don't have the resources to be more active than that. So I gain nothing but lose plenty by filling myself up with it every day. I don't want to do that to my family anymore.

The straw that broke the camel's back this morning was the anti-fat movement, the "your body [,Linda,] is bad" movement. I saw the following all back-to-back within the space of about an hour today, all linked from my Facebook news feed:

#1

From a popular progressive gentle parenting blog:

"A person who has gained 100 lbs, often gets overly frustrated when they can never seem to make one solid decision to eat healthy and exercise forever more, and then keep that goal. They make the goal over and over again, and they ultimately fail every time. Likewise, parents who have badly parented themselves into a corner often get so frustrated when they can never seem to make that one solid decision to be a perfect parent, never yell, never lose their temper, never slack off, and never slip in their goals. These parents tend to make the goal over and over again, and they also fail every time.

The overweight person who sets goals this way inevitably gets bigger and bigger, packing on a few extra pounds every time the scale swings up again. The parent who parents this way inevitably gets worse as the frustrations of not being able to control everything the way they'd like increasingly weigh down their already low parenting self-esteem."

Using fatness as an analogy for poor parenting. What makes it an apt analogy? The fact that in our culture the general mindset is "fat is bad and none of us want to be it." Which is offensive to a fat person who is healthy and makes an effort to be so, and who is happy with her body. And please don't say that if I was really happy with my body I wouldn't be disturbed by this. First, no matter how good you feel about yourself, it doesn't feel good to have fingers pointed at you, assumptions and accusations made. Second, I suffered for a long time from this message being ingrained in me, and so many people still suffer, and this sort of thing feeds that.

#2

From a blog about urban homesteading: "[...] please - no more fat dogs - you don't want a Doberman that looks like most Americans." And, "[...] by learning to "DIY", you'll cease to be part of the fat, pathetic, SUV driving, "American Idol" obsessed zombie hordes that plague our once independent nation."

The author is making a sweet little "us and them" scenario for himself where he gets to be one of the superior moral few. Must feel good. Meanwhile I'm "them" by virtue of being fat, and as he says fat and "DIY" are mutually exclusive, so clearly I'm not welcome. Guess I'll get my urban homesteading info elsewhere.

#3

A friend suggests a chiropractor in my area who she's heard highly recommended. I think to myself, I hope she's fat-friendly, and while I'm talking to my friend I silently compose a letter in my head to the chiropractor asking about it. I go to the website, and one of the prominent tabs at the top of the page (along with "Meet The Doc", "Services" (which I assume include chiropractic,) and "Nutrition") is "Need To Lose Weight?" which links to Power Losers, a business that makes money through hawking Medifast, which is a starvation diet of prepackaged food that has non-food fillers and artificial sweeteners and hydrogenated fats, and is highly refined and processed. Its packaged oatmeal, for instance, contains 38 ingredients, only a handful of which I even know what they are. (What's wrong with just oatmeal...?) Frankly, I'd rather eat real food and follow my body's cues. Even if it makes me fat. Anyway, yeah... touting such a weight-loss system isn't smart or nutritional, and it certainly isn't fat-friendly. So I guess that doctor is a no-go.

#4

Another friend sets up an online shop with some very nice essential oils, one of which, however and unfortunately, is the "Slim & Sassy Metabolic Blend Oil":

"[...] an invigorating blend of grapefruit, lemon, peppermint, ginger, and cinnamon oils that can be used both internally and externally to help manage your hunger, calm your stomach, and lift your mood. Mix a few drops with ice water for a refreshing zerocalorie beverage, or combine a few drops with our silky Spa Hand and Body Lotion and apply to your troubled spots for a slimming and moisturizing experience. Either way, Slim & Sassy will have you beach body ready for the summer!"

Never mind the completely bullshit claims (which are offensive enough in themselves,) let's be clear on the important message here: Fat Is Bad. Are you beginning to understand? I can't even go to look at essential oils, for crying out loud, without being confronted with it. Sensitive? You try being constantly bombarded with messages that there's something wrong with you. After a good three decades of it, I bet any little bit of it would start to grate pretty seriously on you too.

I give up. It makes me sad, it makes me angry. I'm tired of being reminded (passive-aggressively though "likes" and concerns about "the obesity epidemic" and articles and programs linked to) that pretty much everybody I know thinks that there is something wrong with me and assumes that I think so too and want (or should want) to change it, and that I will benefit from shaming and disapproval. That I am sick; that I am disordered; that I eat poorly; that I am not what they want their kids to be; that I am ugly; that I am lazy; that I would be happier if I were thinner.

What would make me happier would be if everybody would just get off their high horses and maybe consider for once that their belief system isn't objective and isn't universal, and in fact that it's harmful and discriminatory. That's too much to ask, I know. Which is why I'm thinking I need to make myself happier by forgetting about it for a while, by not being open (via social networking) to being reminded about it constantly and spending precious mental energy refuting it, over, and over, and over again. To go along oblivious, for minutes, for hours, for days, thinking instead about the weather, the beautiful flowers and trees, our plans for the future, my wonderful children, the projects I am working on, my music. Just going along feeling the lovely oxytocin rush of flesh to flesh, the cool wind on my face, my body moving strongly across the ground. Talking about Schrödinger's cat and laughing to SpongeBob. Being in my body, in this world, and being loved and normal and happy in it right now, nothing from the outside let in to negate that.

perceptions about fat

2011-04-26T11:48:00.000-07:00

Saw this today about cultural perceptions of the relationship of food to weight in America. Which is interesting, to me mostly in a neutral way. (Hi! I'm in the red!) The comments on it (from a private Facebook page) were also interesting, though in a distressing way, though not unexpected. They're par for the course with fat talk in our culture. I paraphrase them here for you:

-Parents are the problem: if you take your kids on bike rides or swimming, they will be thin. And if they are fat, it is because you use the TV as a babysitter. Thin children don't watch TV or eat sugar cereal, they are out all the time riding their bikes.

-If you cook healthy food at home you will be thin. Fat people eat fast food.

-Fatness implies neglect -- because the parents don't care enough to provide healthy food and love so kids eat junk and overeat to fill the void.

-Thin people are thin because they make good food choices and exercise, at least more so than fat people.

-We need to make nice clothes unavailable to fat people, and make it so they can't physically fit in chairs, and that will make them be thinner.

-"Our society has embraced people who are overweight."

(Funny that the last comment was made completely seriously on the heels of a consensus of anti-fatness. Upholders of truth and knowledge, this group, yes, while everyone else is totally blinded by their love for the fatties. What planet are these people on?)

The graphic essay that prompted these comments also has a list of opinion statements about the "why" of fat, presented as fact ("Factors Contributing to Obesity in America") that echo the above sentiments: "too much junk food," "too much fast food," "too much sugar," "no will-power," "couch potatoes". The implication being that thin people are thin because they aren't or don't do those things, and fat people are fat because they do.

Most people, regardless of whether they are fat or thin, believe that it really is that simple. Fat people eat at McDonald's, thin people don't. Thin people choose to be virtuous and deny themselves the cupcake, fat people don't. Thin people are physically active, fat people aren't. Etc. Whether or not shaming is directly applied ("you are sick and ugly") it is implied by all of the above popularly-held assumptions.

Here is some food for thought:

-Fat may be a genetically-based evolutionary protective mechanism -- not the cause of illness, but a reaction to threats (toxins, stress, starvation) in the environment.

-Body make-up is entirely genetics-based, and not everyone is the same. In this particular case, have the gene, flip the switch with something in the environment (there are various theories about what the triggers are) and your body either does or does not work very, very hard to gain and keep fat.

-Our current beliefs about normality are arbitrarily narrow and culture-based. Like with other health issues, extremes are debilitating and dangerous, but there is a spectrum of normal outside of that and it is different for everyone. Our culture does not like the look of the size of my body, but it does not follow that it is debilitating or dangerous to me.

-There is a range of phenotypes, including those having to do with size, weight distribution, and fat to muscle ratio and degree of both. This accounts partially for what our culture defines as "fat" or "thin". It's the perceptual equivalent of comparing a bulldog to a whippet.

-An analogy: my son just turned 14 years old and is over six feet tall with broad shoulders and big muscles. He has one friend who is his height, minus the muscles, and the rest are significantly shorter and also minus the muscles. Looking around me at adults, I think it is reasonable to assume that some of these kids will remain that way into adulthood. Probably few will reach the height and strength my son has that is so valued in our society by men. Why is he different, you ask? What did he do to create that height and get those muscles, and what did they do to create their small, comparatively weak bodies? Did he eat a diet superior to theirs and do hard physical labor or work out with weights? No. Like his friends, he plays recreational tag, wrestles, plays dodgeball, and he spends a lot of time on the computer and playing D&D and reading books. Like his friends he eats things like broccoli, oatmeal, spaghetti, granola, and chocolate, and contrary to the popular stereotype of the teenager, he isn't eating constantly and voraciously (and that seems to me to be true for his friends as well.) In our social group these behaviors are the norm. Same behaviors, different outcomes. Which is why no one congratulates him for being so big and strong, and no one blames the other boys (or their parents) for being smaller.

-This notion of "fast and slow food" is a myth. I don't mean that it doesn't exist or that it doesn't have an effect on our lives, but that our definition of it is screwy so that it has become a straw man in the war on fat people. I didn't get fat eating at McDonald's and for the short period of time that I did eat at McDonald's (before watching Food Inc.) I didn't gain weight, and after discontinuing eating at McDonald's I didn't lose weight. I rarely eat heavily process foods, cereal, candy (except for chocolate,) or soda. (Ironically, when these things constituted a major part of my diet I had no trouble maintaining a "normal" BMI.) I eat this so-called "slow food". I make nearly everything I eat from scratch, well, by our culture's definition anyway. Here is a lovely recipe from anti-obesity crusader Jamie Oliver that is a great example of exactly the sort of thing I like to make and eat.

But, really. It's not like I went out and gathered the grain, ground it, rolled it into pasta, planted and harvested the spinach and garlic myself, harvested and extracted oil from the olives, cared for and milked the cow, made the butter and cheese, went down to the river to get the water, and chopped down the tree for wood to make the fire. Compared to that, going to the store and buying all this stuff already made for me then spending half an hour to prepare it, IS REALLY REALLY FAST and not substantially different time- or effort-wise from going through the drive-through at McDonald's. I don't eat at McDonald's not because those fifteen or so minutes that I'm walking around the kitchen are having such an enormously wonderful effect on my body, but because McDonald's doesn't taste good, has gross stuff in it that could make me sick, and tortures animals. In terms of nutrition, it's a wash. McDonald's vs. Jamie: both high in refined grains and the not-the-best fats, and both have some green stuff. Jamie's is better only because it tastes better, probably contains fewer weird chemicals, and tortures fewer animals. I'm not deluded though that it's somehow going to make me and my kids thinner by virtue of its great slowness.

Likewise, that stupid "an extra fruit and vegetable a day" campaign he and others have championed in the schools that is supposed to combat childhood obesity. What a terrible waste of money that could be going to actually feed hungry people. There are thin kids who eat refined carbs. Some of them eat a lot of refined carbs. There are fat kids like mine who eat organic whole foods and yes, fruits and vegetables. Given that, it seems obvious to me that something is really, really wrong here. Yes, of course it is great for kids to eat fruits and vegetables -- all kids. This assumption that thin must be the result of virtuous living (as defined by our culture) and that fat could not possibly be so on any level, is itself jeopardizing this nation's health because it leads to just about everybody (i.e. people who are fat, people who perceive themselves to be fat, or people who are fearful of becoming so) second-guessing their choices even when they're correct, leading to disordered eating, and for the rest to hardly consider their choices at all because to be thin is to be inherently right.

-"I am thin because I don't eat the extra cupcake. Just don't eat the extra cupcake, it is that simple. If these people would just get some willpower like me they would be thin."

So: thin people are thin because they necessarily make a conscious choice (superior moral character!) to behave in a way that achieves thinness for them. And it is not a big deal to do so (it's simple! Just put down the fork, fatty! Stop when you're full! Get off the couch!) which underscores the level of depravity that a person must have within themselves to be fat. Not only does a fat person choose to be immoral, but it would be so easy not to be. No wonder fat people are so scorned in our society.

Here's why I don't buy it anymore: I don't limit myself and I don't weigh 300 lbs. If I did limit myself, or somehow otherwise convinced myself that I am behaving the way I am because I am so virtuous, I might look at that 300-lb. person and say, "My, it is disgusting that they won't control themselves. Tsk." But the truth is that I couldn't get that big if I tried. It would take an enormous amount of work to even attempt it, it would make me sick, and my body would reject it. I would have to be force-fed, and even then I'm not sure that it would take. It is absolutely no effort for me to not weigh 300 lbs. So who am I to talk to the 300 lb. person about willpower? Clearly if it doesn't take willpower for me to not be 300 lbs., it's not about willpower. Something else has got to be going on there. Is it disordered eating? Compulsive eating? A metabolic disorder caused by just the right combination of environmental toxins and genetics? A strange mutation? (There were very fat people way before refined grains and soda and high-fructose corn syrup. Really.) Is it possible that they are just fine? (Aside from the societal disdain and shaming of course.) I don't know, and it is none of my business to speculate and judge. And here's the thing: you can just slide that realization right on down the scale. Thinking very highly of yourself for being smaller than me? I'd be laughing if I didn't know how much damage you can do.

TOO MUCH

2011-04-04T11:10:00.000-07:00

(or, how the internet ruined my life)

This morning's brain activity, in no particular order:

write a blog post about being fat, yes another one, are people getting tired of this, regardless, there is more to say and some people aren't hearing it, maybe I need to write LOUDER, how is that people don't get that when they make comments about themselves or other people or animals being fat, and they are making them to you, a fat person, that it implies that they think you are ugly and disturbing and deserving of being mocked and that there is something wrong with you, and that it is not any different from them saying it to your face, even though you all go on pretending that such a statement has not (implicitly) been made, how do they think that affects the young girls present who are part of a subgroup that is known to have a high percentage of eating disorders, and even if they think it is the truest true thing ever that fat is BAD, what makes them think I want to continue spending time in the company of people for whom I am an object of derision and disapproval, oh forget it too hard and depressing to think about it further, check facebook quick for messages that is easier, look this person is making an unschooling documentary awesome, person worries about kids being involved, consider that, how exactly would I want my kids involved if at all, what sorts of things I'd like to see covered, how I think other documentaries have failed the subject, what has been missed, revisit horrible coverage by mainstream media, click on mainstream video, outrage, how I would answer every. single. question., should do it on my blog, that woman's hair is awesome and how does she remain so calm in the face of such absurdity, putting kids on the spot oh yeah like if you did the same with school kids after a mind-numbing lecture they'd be reeling off the facts, argh! must write blog post refuting all stupidity!, hey they make wood toys, I have always thought that would make a great business for us, how can I get husband on board, there are so many great unschooling videos, must amass list and post on website, must make personal website that has been sitting in brain for months, see link to kid slapping mother on Dr. Phil don't look don't look must look, oh my god, poor kid, poor kid, how can they not see that the real problem here is the mother and her "might makes right" mentality, sad sad sad, depression setting in, must write blog post about this, what's the point only two people will ever read it, the world is insane, nothing I can do, nobody is listening to me, I have to try anyway! must speak out loud, oh I remember what I wanted to do, read that essay about schooled math by a mathematician which I have been trying to finish for days, lost the link, back to Facebook, can't find it, stupid news feed doesn't go back far enough, oh but what's this, do I or do I not have the time to explain why the FDA's decision to remove the breast cancer indication from a drug label is the sort of thing they do all the time and not the same thing as rationing or a death panel, and point out how strange it is that people who are against health care for all are worried that people aren't going to have access to a drug they wouldn't have had access to anyway because they don't freaking have insurance, finally remember what the math essay was called, look it up, oh, but I don't have time to read that right now, I need to get on that letter about the bill to make unlicensed midwifery in Oregon illegal, mandating birth as a medical event this is WRONG!, must fight, and also write a blog post about it, and gather links to post on Facebook, outlaw midwife, racism in birth activism, what is this? don't understand, read, read, Squat Birth Journal, no I'm not impressed either not so radical, need to read more of it though, find out what's going on, where can I find it? and now I remember this midwife's plight, and the other one too, witch hunts, must write, remember also other friend midwife and her unschooling questions, must write, would love to see her but when how, must start speaking out, supporting individual families, birth education, how to do that, take Birthingway class certification, when how, oh there is Julie Persons, I love her so much I want to go to her blog and feel happy, no time no time, remember that she sells books, I love books I always wanted to work at a bookstore, I could be a bookseller!, wonder how she does that, oh through Amazon, how does that work, read every Amazon page on the process, watch video about using cell phone to track ISBNs, don't get it, must understand how this works, read read, oh need internet access costs money, think of resellers doing this at book fair, mad at them taking books from people, but wait I'm considering doing the same thing myself, argh, mention bookselling idea to husband, slightly skeptical reaction, discouraged already, watch more videos by people saying you can't make money doing it, mad now that my original vision has been marred by their bad attitudes, speaking of business I should answer my friend's query about how much money I want for graphics work that I really don't want to be paid for, speaking of graphics how much should I insinuate myself into husband's business plans he wants to do himself but I can help but if I help and he doesn't like my vision I'm sad, I should help anyway, get the website going, html, oh I've forgotten about css space layout, how does that work, re-familiarize self with it, bag it because he will want to use a template anyway and do it himself, but it would be better my way!, argue with self, but remember also that I can use it for homeschool group's site, remember meeting tomorrow, think about what sorts of things would be good to cover, think about what sorts of things should be done, talk with husband about future of group and issues and how to address them, remember that in four hours is family gathering, worry guilt should I bring anything, what, all gifts accounted for?, is it enough, do I have clean clothes, should I start a wash, must see to it that people are fed before it is five minutes before we leave, for that must wash dishes, also I stink must take bath, locate clothing don't know where it is because we were out of town, cold, start a fire? take too much time, turn on heat? make me sicker with stupid duct system, easier to just stay cold, I have a headache, sinus stuff, I hate living in the valley, how can I get out? worry worry more spraying now that field burning illegal, get you either way, sick, hungry, must do housework, why are there candy wrappers everywhere? didn't I just sweep? the garbage is full! I am not recycling enough! guilt, annoyance, girls want to play awesome game they got for christmas, should do that, but there is TOO MUCH ELSE must be done, tired tired brain want to go back to bed, guilt nothing accomplished!, make self take bath, notice large grasshopper toy, bugs are cool, head fills with vision of rich bug-filled educational life for kids, ideas, plans, get out of tub, note that people are still hungry, wonder where clothes are, STOP.

It's time. I have to stop doing this to myself. My brain is stretched too far. There is too information, too many interesting things, too much I want to do. I have become paralyzed by the Too Much Syndrome. Greatness to me is doing every single one of these things and more (this is just the tip of the iceberg,) and vanquishing them all. Being a voice for everything that matters. Reality: I can't do it. Last spring we didn't have internet access for about three months. It was really, really good. I have to back up, take life one step at a time. Concentrate on one thing at a time, and I don't mean one new thing every other minute. I'm not a multi-tasker. (How did women become burdened by this unfortunate label?) I'm tired. And I'm not effective when I'm tired and my mind is being pulled (albeit willingly) in dozens of different directions. I wonder if it's just me. Everyone else seems to navigate the world, this SO MUCH STUFF all right. But then, I'm aware of people having this perception of me as being calm and centered. I'm reminded of Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock. How does anyone get anything done?

2011-04-02T06:51:00.000-07:00

I have this internal battle constantly going on. It keeps me from doing the things I want to do, the things I feel deserve to be done. There's this sense that I am not good enough, so that I don't have a right to it. There's also a fear of judgment.

I don't believe it's true. But it feels like it is, which is enough to stop me. "Just don't let it bother you." But that's like saying, "don't be hungry." It's just there.

It's a problem, obviously. My solution is to isolate myself with just those things around me that don't hurt me. After a period of non-hurt, I feel strong, I feel normal. There is some bio-chemical process going on here that I don't understand, but that is clearly affected by environment.

A large part of my unease is lack of "fit", and that the lack of fit has to do with there being nothing for it to fit into. My world -- the physical and social landscape around me -- has largely been chaotic, oppressive, low on quality. Am I the only one who feels it? Or is that others feel it but don't recognize where that feeling is coming from?

These broad gray swaths of concrete, the ugly cars speeding past, the chemicals in the air, the buildings whose occupants do not truly own them so that no one takes pride of ownership in them, the garish form whose purpose is solely to grab attention, the drudgery everyone feels about work, the oppressiveness of class and prejudice and poor governing. Who makes the world around them just for the sake of the goodness of it? We're not taught to. But we could. We could.

Then I think: "we" includes "me". And I'm afraid.

It seems hopeless.

Unless: I break free. Unless I say, "No, I won't do that anymore," and take an alternate route.

I'm not sure what I'm waiting for. Permission? For someone else to go first? Nobody watching? There's certainly a fear of being disapproved of and thought foolish. There's a little fear that what I think I want is really just "the grass is always greener on the other side". Meaning, it's really not, it just looks that way from a distance. That stupid phrase, I wonder how many people it stops from trying? After all, sometimes the grass really is greener. Apathy is born of hopelessness.

It's become obvious that that's my next hurdle to clear.

visiting the new mother

2011-03-31T11:12:00.000-07:00

I was reading How to be the best post partum visitor (via Invisible Midwives) and thinking to myself, "Well, I agree with the intent but not the details!" Here's what I wanted:

Newly postpartum:

Do not visit. Just don't. Please come to the door and drop off meals and care packages and gifts. Please take my other kids out to have fun and wear them out. Please offer to do my shopping. But do not expect me to visit with you. I would love any homemade comfort food (no restrictions.) If you bring me a smorgasbord from the co-op food bar I will faint in thankfulness. Extra points for luscious organic in-season fruit. Do not bring me anything scented.

A couple weeks or a month after the birth:

1. Wait to be invited to visit.
2. Do not wear perfume.
3. Before you do anything else, greet my other kids and show them attention and love. Gifts for them would be even more appreciated than for me and the baby.
4. Do not expect to hold the baby, and don't ask. Sorry, you probably won't get to, so if that is going to be distressing to you please don't come.
5. Gush over the baby. Tell me how absolutely beautiful and precious and perfect s/he is.
6. Wash my dishes and sweep my floor and I will love you forever.
7. Make your visit brief -- under half an hour.

By the last baby this is pretty much what I got. Wish I'd have asserted my desires more for the first three. Every new mother (if she has preferences at all, which I assume she does!) should write up her own version, email it to everyone she knows, and post it on her front door.

2011-03-30T08:52:00.000-07:00

Anna’s paper is on top, illegible as always. Jason’s and Zoe’s are as good as expected, but then there’s Ryan’s. At first glance it appears “the” and “a” are the only two words spelled right in the entire paragraph. Jee got off the subject in his second sentence and never returned. And Erik’s. Poor, sweet Erik could churn out a complete story each hour, but his hands just can’t keep up with his vivid imagination.

“Just like last year’s horrifying statistics, that’s four out of six in this classroom unlikely to pass the writing portion of the test,” Mary says out loud while placing Erik’s paper on the bottom of the pile.

[...]

In June, 2003, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the Nation’s Report Card), reported that 36 percent of 4th graders cannot read at what the test defined as a “basic” level. Not only are scores equally dismal in other basic subjects, the evidence strongly suggests the situation gets worse, not better, as these children reach high school.

One of the reasons may be the potpourri of negative learning labels slapped on children today. (from Parent at the Helm)

Here is a story about my son. He was 10 years old before I could honestly say that he was a reader. If I'd sat down at any point and tried to make him a reader, it would have failed because he was so resistant and frustrated by the process. In fact, I did just that, and it was a disaster. He needed to do it in his own time, in his own way, with me acting only as a resource.

He's fluent now. He reads me passages (on his own initiative, yes, because he wants to) from books containing "college-level" words (a term too often used to segregate words for the purpose of so-called intellectual status.) To him it is just part of the landscape of his 13-year-old life.

He uses pencil and paper for various things, by choice, all in block letters. He may some day learn how to write quickly with a smart-looking stroke, just as he set himself the task of learning how to type when he understood how it would benefit him. Or he may never have a reason to do so and decide that the block letters suit him just fine. I had a friend in college who always wrote in block letters, insisting it was fastest and most comfortable for him; it hasn't hindered him one bit in doing what he wants to do with his life. I know other people with chicken-scratch or childish-looking handwriting, who went through the full barrage of mandatory school and beyond, and yet still don't write particularly legibly but somehow managed to create lives that are successful by our society's standards. I have to wonder how they would have fared under our government's current standards programs.

I don't understand. It seems so crystal clear to me, how is it that the rest of the world just doesn't get it? Intelligence and ability to contribute and have a rich, full life isn't going to look the same for everyone. Anna and Erik may not (yet or ever) have the skills to do well on a particular standardized test. The enormous mistake our society is making is to assume that this really means something and that the action that should be taken is to label them, ostensibly so that they can get help, but the reality is that what they are really learning is this: You are not as good. This is your place, and it is at the bottom.

This is why my children are not in school. My children are brilliant, all in their own ways. They know it because they were born knowing it, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let some ignorant "authority" try to convince them otherwise. And that is exactly what would happen if they were in school. My son -- the one who is now reading like it's second nature and who is also a story-teller, inwardly compelled to put his stories onto paper -- would have been "behind". He would have been "learning disabled". And that would have followed him throughout his life. He might have been part of the small percentage to "overcome his disability", or he might have been one of the many who are taught that there is inherently something wrong with them and who end up becoming a self-fulfilled prophecy. If he'd been in school, told that there was something wrong with him because he still wasn't a reader at age 7, 8, and 9, put in "special" classes or just ignored and given bad grades, labeled "a poor achiever", diagnosed and put on dangerous stimulant drugs... would he be confident is his ability to become an author? Would he feel pretty darn good about himself, right here, right now? How many people of "low IQ" are we creating?

The standards are wrong. I can tell you that without even knowing what they are, because I know the simple and obvious truth that everyone is different and learns in different ways, at different paces, with different interests. There can be no objectively correct standard for all people. I remember these idiot standards even from when I was in grade school, way before No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top (bah, everything in our culture has to be a competition, doesn't it.) I could see even then that my peers were falling between the cracks, not because they were stupid, but because they couldn't fit into this tiny little box that the school was trying to force them into. And I could see the people who fit well, who weren't necessarily more intelligent or more creative, yet who were already being primed for success. I could see even then that it was unfair and ugly. A child can see this, yet the people in power, getting paid lots of money to be in power, can't?

We need to stop. Stop playing along as if it's all fine. I have two children now who could conform to the system well enough, but they deserve better than to simply do well in an environment in which that which is normal isn't (think about that for a minute,) and that penalizes people for not being willing or able to conform to an absurdly limited conception of "normal". I would consider that a false, meaningless achievement; what would it cost them to be trained to assume that it's important in any sense?

2011-03-16T17:01:00.000-07:00

Our boys weren't yet reading when they were 8 and 9 years old respectively, and we didn't decide how and when to teach them, or to teach them at all. Educational theory of the past several decades says that children must be taught to read, at a specific time and in a specific way, and that when they don't learn according to these dictates, it is evidence of a disorder, and that when they aren't taught according to those dictates, it is neglect. It is taken for granted that this is just the way it is. Considering our situation through that lens, what we allowed to happen looks like pretty severe neglect. But to the contrary, it was a carefully considered decision based on reason and a desire to protect their sense of competency and love of reading. Here are some of the facts that went into our decision:

- People learn most powerfully and most efficiently when they're developmentally ready, and people aren't all ready at the same time.
- Expecting and pressuring them to learn before they're developmentally ready is stressful and creates a feeling in the learner that something is wrong with them.
- The written word is a major form of communication in our culture, and inherent to humanity is the desire to communicate, resulting in a natural drive to master the culture's dominant forms of communication; therefore we trusted that the interest and desire would manifest when able.
- There is no evidence that the "window of opportunity" of optimal learning, if not driven by external means to meet it, could be out of sync with the person's actual needs and desires in a free, rich, supportive environment.
- John Holt wrote that in his experience (as a teacher involved for many years in educational reform) that when children learn without pressure and at their own instigation, the average age of learning to read is nine years old, and that under these conditions it happens relatively quickly and easily. Anecdotes I've found about "late" readers have been in line with this.
- Trying to teach our firstborn phonics at age six was frustrating and made him angry and distrustful of us, and questioning of his own intelligence.
- Unschoolers somehow all manage to escape the "dyslexia" label, though it is common in schools where the root assumption is that if you don't meet or exceed arbitrary expectations for age-based production, that there is something wrong with you.

Put all this together, and clearly the smartest thing for us to do was to be patient and aware of our kids' needs and at the ready to help when needed. Through that lens, what we were doing was the opposite of neglect, it was conscientious and responsible.

2011-02-18T09:20:00.000-08:00

My friend had called to tell me that another friend was in the hospital. She had wanted a homebirth, but her blood pressure had risen high enough that she felt it warranted extra medical monitoring. I was busy at the time and gave the situation a perfunctory "oh, that's too bad," before moving on to the more pressing concerns of my day.

What I remember next is that I was in the car with all the kids, driving down our long country road. I tend to zone out in the car if I don't have traffic that I have to be aware of. It's one of those repetitive muscle-memory tasks, like washing dishes or taking a shower, where I disengage from the practical material world a bit, and often have insights or interesting thoughts come to me. As usual I had tuned out all the loud sounds and activity around me and was humming along in an empty brain, just being. And quite abruptly I was somewhere else. My body was still in the car with its hands on the wheel staying between the lines and going the speed limit; I was visually and tactilely aware of all that, but my inward sensing didn't match that. It was instead in a space and surrounded by people that were unfamiliar, clinical, stressed. I felt deeply emotionally sick and violated. Utter wrongness. Then maybe thirty seconds later I was just as suddenly fully back in my body, back in my car, safe, fine, hearing my kids squabbling and laughing, but still with the sick feeling lingering. A certain knowing came over me that I had just been where my friend was. I was grief-stricken.

I didn't at all have the sensation of being her; I was me, experiencing it myself. As if we had traded places. When it happened, I thought, this is what they tell us is normal. And what we convince ourselves is normal, "just the way it is." It was one of those defining moments; where you think to yourself, I am never going to forget this. This is why I continue to fight. It's not normal, it's not good, and it doesn't have to be that way.

It was a weird thing. And unbelievable. I mean, who could I tell who wouldn't think I was making things up or crazy or exaggerating a sense of empathy? So it's been something that I've kept pretty much to myself all this time. Strange to feel that a thing that made such a difference in how I see things is something I don't know how to relate to others.

2011-02-18T08:09:00.000-08:00

I have been censoring myself.

When you talk about something unusual -- something that is not yet part of the fabric of the societal consciousness -- people aren't always accepting. First, smart people are often skeptical. I'm smart and I'm skeptical. I know that people lie for personal gain. I know that people are deceived, that they can't know everything, that they make up stories in their heads. Why should I believe something just because someone said it? On other other hand, I don't scoff at something just because it's outside of my experience, because I don't know everything either. But a lot of people go beyond practical skepticism to fear. If they don't understand something and it seems unlikely considering what they do know, it's therefore stupid. They are scornful and angry and they will attack.

Second, if you even just imply that people are unhappy because they are doing it wrong, they take great offense. Nobody wants to be wrong; nobody wants to have been miserable unnecessarily. Some will swallow their feeling of being offended because they know that something's not right and that they could benefit from trying to figure it out. Others will, again, become scornful and angry and they will attack.

When I was in school, it wasn't a good idea to attempt to answer questions or to volunteer for anything, because the culture was such that if you got it wrong you were subject to embarrassment, humiliation, and disdain. As well, it was a mystery as to what behavior -- what amount of natural talking and living and enjoying oneself -- would be too much for the teacher, at what point they would crack and become angry. The safest thing to do was to sit in the back of the class and say and do as little as possible.

I'm still doing it, and I don't want to anymore, and that's scary to consider.

2010-12-15T12:08:00.000-08:00

Answering some questions about "extended" nursing, i.e. past the age of about a year, into toddlerhood and childhood. Questions lifted from Mayim Bialik's blog, with a few of my own added.

Didn't you eventually run out of milk?

No, I had milk the whole time. My body produced it in the amount that my baby was using it, so at the end I was producing less as she was nursing less. It didn't stop producing milk entirely until a few months after she nursed for the last time.

Did s/he really need breastmilk for nutrition?

Breastmilk is pretty dang nutritious, and bolsters the immune system as well. My children certainly deserved that for as long as they desired. But "need"? This question makes me think of Frank McCourt's book Angela's Ashes, in which he details his childhood of poverty in Ireland in the 1930s. I don't remember if his mother was unable to breastfeed due to malnourishment, or if it was discouraged, but whatever the case his siblings were fed primarily tea as infants, as they couldn't afford anything else. They were sickly, but most of them survived. This says to me that the human body is pretty resilient. So, define "need". Is it only that which is necessary for survival? Then, no, my children didn't "need" it. But it sure was good for them.

If s/he’s old enough to ask for it, isn’t s/he too old to have it?

Based on what logic? It cracks me up that people take this seriously, it's so arbitrary. Besides, my children were always old enough to ask for it, from the moment they were born. There's no special relationship between nursing and the switch from non-verbal cues to verbal cues.

Wasn’t it weird having a walking talking thinking LARGE child nursing?

No. Not a bit. I found that my perceptions of what constitutes appropriate mothering and childhood behavior changed when I was actually inside of it. I would have never had ideas to the contrary if I'd grown up in the kind of culture in which natural (non-managed and non-shamed) breastfeeding is the norm. But as it was, all it took for years of artificial conditioning to be undone was that I allow my human body to do exactly what it was designed to do.

Did you place any limits on this?

Yes. Past about the age of 2.5 or so we didn't nurse in public. Not because I thought there was a problem with it, but because other people definitely did and I didn't want to risk a visit from Child Protective Services. If there was a great need for it, I would take her to a quiet corner and turn away, shielding her with my body. Most times it was easy enough to agree to wait until we got home.

But you didn’t nurse her/him at night, did you???

I sure did. Children make it known that they have a need for physical closeness at night so we slept together, and babies do best nutritionally when they nurse during the night. As they got older the night nursing sessions naturally became less frequent, as their bodies' metabolisms changed and they began eating other foods during the day. Babies nurse for comfort as well, of course, so I tried not to wake them unnecessarily during the night. I snore (allergies!) so we made use of white noise and made the sleeping arrangements as spacious as possible.

At the time that they began to have the ability to reason and to understand me as a separate being with needs of my own, I started talking to them about how I would like more sleep and how it would be nicest for me if we could just snuggle back to sleep and nurse in the morning. I'd pat them on the back and murmur comfortingly and sometimes sing quietly. If not nursing was upsetting, we'd nurse. In that way we night-weaned in a gentle way over time. (Not that it was entirely without ramification. Ideally I'd have had the emotional and physical energy to not feel the need to night-wean at all.)

Didn't this make them spoiled?

Oh, what nonsense. Love, kindness, comfort, and a sense of security are the best things a parent can give a child. It's meanness and intentional deprivation (lack of a generous, loving spirit) that spoils people.

What did your husband think?

Well, he never said a thing about it, and he would look on lovingly as I'd nurse our children. I guess it felt normal and natural to him too.

When did you stop?

My first got to nurse until he was 3 1/2 years old. This was because he was too young to stop when I had our second, so I nursed them together. However when he was 3 1/2 I became pregnant with our third, and because I had found tandem nursing very difficult and challenging and crazy-making, I wasn't about to try it with three. So I weaned him and also my second-born, who was 2 at the time. The same thing happened when my third-born was 2 years old. It was too early for all of them. I regret weaning very much, but it was definitely the lesser of two evils. If I had it to do over, I would have made much more of an effort to delay the subsequent pregnancies so that each of them could have nursed exactly as long as they needed to. My fourth-born nursed until she was done, at age 5 1/2, and it was fantastic. I'm grateful that I got to experience it with her. It was an important part of our relationship, and a very, very good thing. I wish it could have been that way with all my children.

Did they nurse for comfort?

Of course. It was a really lovely thing to be able to comfort them in that way. Really, it was the best kind of comfort too; it was almost instantly calming. Which made parenting so much more enjoyable and easier. It felt good to have such a wonderful power!

What did your family/friends/the public at large think?

I live in a pretty nursing-friendly community. Once at a private party it was suggested that I nurse in a more private place. (I declined.) Other than that I was never bothered by anyone about it, and I've nursed a lot in public. My friends and family all acted like it was a non-issue. If they thought it strange, they kept their opinions to themselves. My mom did ask a few times, in a surprised tone, "Oh, is she still nursing?" But I never sensed any judgment attached to that. Of all our parenting decisions, this was one of the easiest for people to accept/tolerate.

Wasn't it inconvenient?

It was far more convenient than having to fix and serve and clean up a meal, or deal with a melt-down in any other way. And besides that, it was nice. Calming happy love hormones, ahhh. When you feel good, whether something is convenient or not becomes irrelevant.

Didn't you want your body back?

No. That to me is a nonsensical question. It's like asking, "don't I want my body back from my husband?" When it feels good to share your body in a mutually pleasing way with someone, you're not thinking about when you can finally be done with it. Rather, you miss it when it's gone.

Oh, c'mon. You paint breastfeeding as some kind of panacea and perfect thing, when we all know it's hard and a lot of work. Tell the truth, now.

Yes, there were times when I was stressed out by other things, and when a person is stressed out it makes it hard to do anything else that takes care and time and energy. Sometimes the stressors can't be avoided, and sometimes we just don't know how to avoid them yet. For me there was a lot of the latter, as I'd grown up in a culture in which there are a lot of expectations about achievement. It took me some time to figure that out, and then some time to let go of the fear of what would become of me if I didn't toe the line.

Also, yes, it was hard to get started because I was not as healthy as I could've been, didn't know some things, and didn't have the right kind of support. It was excruciatingly painful. I wept with each feeding. I would absolutely have stopped if my baby would have taken a bottle, but I couldn't let him starve, so I kept at it. Eventually I learned some important stuff about how to take care of my body so that it could do its job without suffering, and from there on out it was smooth sailing.

But the breastfeeding relationship itself? Magical. Holy. The sweetest thing I've ever known. If I'd known then what I do now, I would have been deeply grieved not to have been able to do it.

pronouns

2010-10-08T06:56:00.000-07:00

Specifically, gender-neutral. I'm with the camp that thinks it about time that we stop considering the human race to be male by default. The words people use affect where their brains go with those words. If you are always referring to "he" and "him", your brain is naturally going to start perceiving the world as primarily a man's world even if logically you know this not to be true. The use of male-specific pronouns in what are actually non-gender-specific situations serves quite well to encourage people to sub-consciously regard patriarchy as the natural default. It also can be misleading and confusing, as we don't have any way to know whether the writer is actually referring to men or to humans in general.

Occasionally in feminist writing I come across the use of invented pronouns like "hir" and "ze". I appreciate the intention behind the effort, but it's going to fail simply because people adore tradition and convention, and the only thing that will loose their tenacious grip on it is if the new thing has outrageously enormous appeal. That's not the case with these invented pronouns. Many of them sound too much like existing words which feels confusing, and all of them sound wrong to our ears because they're not in common use.

The English language does of course already have inbuilt non-gender-specific pronouns, but which are unworkable. There is "it", but it's not generally used to refer to a person because it makes it sound like the subject is genderless or like a non-human object. There's also "one", as in, "one should not take more than one's share." The hearing of it imparts a strong sense of stuffiness and eccentricity, so people just don't use it in casual speaking.

So we have work-arounds, and these have become fairly popular. First, there is the alternating use of male and female pronouns. This works best in longer written works, not in stand-alone sentences, excerpts, or casual conversation. It also suffers from being potentially confusing, for the reason I noted above in regards to using the male pronoun as the default: you don't know if the speaker means to use the pronoun to specifically denote gender or not.

Second, to refer to both at the same time e.g. "his or her", "s/he". I've done this a lot myself, but have stopped because it feels awkward and cumbersome to me.

Third, to use the plural pronouns they, them, their, themselves, including the made-up word "theirself" to reflect the fact that while the brain can generally accept the use of a plural pronoun to refer to a non-gender-specific situation, it so strongly associates an ending "s" with the plural that it all falls apart when an "s" tacked onto the end of the word. Hence, the need for a singular "self" word. And in this case, the invention has enough appeal, and sounds natural enough, that people use it.

This last one is what I do. It is what I grew up with and it sounds absolutely normal to me. The only problem with it is that it tends to make staunch grammarians really mad. Not so much in oral conversation, but in writing. Which is something I can live with, because I don't have to interact with them when I'm writing. ;)

All this to say: this is how I write, and why you will see lots of poor grammar here on these pages. I am aware that it is not considered grammatically correct and I don't care. It works, and it works better than anything else that I know of, and that is what matters to me.

2010-10-04T09:56:00.001-07:00

I have some admittedly unpopular ideas about why people get fat and others stay thin. I believe that given the exact same environment, genetics will dictate a wide variance of differences. It seems to me that the science bears that out, but my experience with my own body and observations of what others do with their bodies bears that out too. Being a fat woman, that is, being a woman with obvious adipose tissue in places other than my breasts, is to be vilified to some degree in our culture. For most of my life it was expected of me that I feel embarrassed of my body, guilty for having it, and responsible for changing it. And I took those expectations seriously and worked hard to meet them. I spent nearly three decades spending time and energy trying to fix my body to the point that I could at last feel capable and deserving of going out and getting that which was of value to me. Of course I wouldn't have admitted that at the time, it sounds ridiculous. But that is what it boiled down to.

So, having wasted so much of my life disliking and being disappointed with myself and thus having neither the time nor energy nor confidence to do much of what I really wanted to do, I'm fairly invested in challenging the notion that fat=bad is somehow objective Truth, not only for my own sense of vindication and freedom, but for my daughters so that they don't have to lose so much of their precious lives to this culture-wide mental disease.

To that end, I have been consciously body-positive or at least body-neutral in their upbringing. I embrace their bodies on a physical level. I tell them they are wonderfully made, beautiful. As long as they've been alive I have never complained about my own body or assessed it in a negative way. I encourage them to listen to and trust what their bodies are telling them, including when and what to eat or move. I do not bring fashion magazines into my home, and consciously counter the more formulaic media (that they are inevitably exposed to) with that which is more realistic and inclusive. I very obviously take pleasure in their papa's fat body, as he does mine. This has mostly been done on a level that they weren't aware of. It has been woven as imperceptibly as possible into the fabric of their lives.

I guess I always knew that it wasn't going to be enough, but it pains me to be at the point where I have to start vocally and pointedly addressing these issues. My older daughter has crossed over. I think of it as having the knowledge of good and evil -- out of Eden. She's aware now that it matters what kind of body you have, that there is something different about her body, and that she is the outsider. When she's grown she won't be so unusual, but in our genes is early accelerated growth. (Nice only for the boys -- who have learned that people find it a good thing that they are bigger than average.) The other girls her age that we know are a head shorter and quite thin. She laments that I cannot carry her. She wants to go back to being younger so that she can be smaller.

Being not-average is in itself troublesome. But now there's something else. Last night in bed we were working on her reading. I made up a list of rhyming words -- cat, bat, sat, fat, hat. When we got to 'fat', she didn't want to say it. That's a bad word, she said. Now, this is interesting, because that word has been in common usage in our life, sometimes in a purely descriptive sense, sometimes in a positive sense, and this is the first time she's ever reacted to it in that way. What happened? We spent the day with a young woman who several times commented derogatorily on her own body, using the word "fat". That's all it takes, folks.

So, as we lay in bed, I asked her, "Why do you think that?" She said she didn't know why. I gestured in the direction of my belly, which her arm was wrapped tightly around. She loves my belly, she loves that it housed her for nine months while she grew. She delights in its squooshability, gets mad at me when I wear something that inhibits her ability to feel its jello-like movement. Her pet names for me, of which there are many, are all based in the qualities of fat. "Do you realize," I said, "that mooshy is fat? That cushy is fat?" She didn't. She hadn't associated, at all, the wonderful softness and expansiveness of my body with the unhappiness of the young woman earlier today, because to her my body isn't something bad.

I feel so tired. I'm so sad and I'm so angry. I wish people would just stop. Stop perpetuating it. Stop accepting it. It doesn't make things better, it doesn't make people happier. It makes us sick from the stress and self-hate of it, it makes us unkind. Please don't talk to me about the "obesity epidemic". The real epidemic doesn't live in my fleshy thighs, which aren't hurting anyone, including myself, it lives in people's minds. Our focus, our concern, and our money is on entirely the wrong thing. I wish I could say, "Fine. You want to waste your life obsessing over how your body isn't right, that's your business, but leave my daughter alone." I wish to hell it worked that way.

work and duty.

2010-10-03T07:10:00.000-07:00

This morning when I woke, the first thing I did was to start a fire in our wood stove. That is known, in some parlance, as a "chore". I have not started a fire many times yet this season; when the wood was wet and I knew it would be a miserable smoky struggle, I preferred a cold house. But this time I had good starter material and dry wood and a lighter; so I made a fire.

In some contexts, by some people, this would be regarded as work. I went out into the cold the night before to get wood and stack it to dry, I cleaned out the stove, going out into the cold again to dispose of the ashes, I had to get creative about finding starter material as I did not have kindling, I got microscopic slivers of wood in my hands, I gathered my skirt and crouched to arrange the material, I continued to check and tend the fire until it got going well. Certainly, there's more effort involved there than flicking a switch on a thermostat.

But now here's the interesting thing: by virtue of doing this thing called "work", I get to be deemed "not lazy", which is specifically meant to address moral status. But my choice to start a fire this morning had nothing to do with my moral state. It was purely practical, and I had the right tools to make it a successful venture -- not only the dry wood and know-how, but an absence of psychological baggage surrounding the act; no current assignment or expectation of duty, no notion of a "work ethic", no one watching over me to see that I do it right, no past of having had to do household work just because someone said so. Just me and the wood and what I wanted from it, and out of this, logically and without my needing to be high and mighty about it, flowed action.

This is a simplistic example, but the principle that underlies it underlies everything. Sometimes there is a spark, an internal drive, sometimes there just is not. It's circumstance, that's all. So regardless of whether I am at rest or at work, it does not follow that I am lazy or not lazy. "Lazy" is a made-up story about human nature. We made it up to manipulate people into doing what we want them to do. That is its whole purpose; it is used for nothing else. Nobody wants to be thought of as a bad person, so it's often a successful tactic. Turn your moral lens to that.

A subplot of that story is that when we feel inertia or internal resistance, we supposedly have a moral mandate to push ourselves out of it. But what if, considering that circumstance has brought us to it, we are there for a reason? What if it is a message, an index of the situation? Then there is no wisdom in trying to deny it or override it through force of will.

Halfway through my life, it has finally dawned on me that every time I allow the "shoulds" a voice, I end up spinning my wheels, becoming more and more exhausted and discouraged and anxious and eventually paralyzed.

Let labor begin on its own.

2010-10-02T08:41:00.000-07:00

For me there was never any talk of induction. In my first pregnancy I had transferred to a midwife's care about halfway through and she never said one word about it. Pre-internet and almost entirely dependent on my care provider for information, with my only other source of information being What To Expect When You're Expecting (aka "Don't Worry Your Pretty Little Head About Anything, the Doctor Will Take Care Of It",) it didn't come to my attention and therefore I didn't think about it. With that pregnancy I went to 41 weeks, and I know very well now that had I been in the care of a physician following his employer's protocol (I say "he" because, strangely, most primary birth ~~dictators~~ attendants in our culture are men,) I would have been pressured to induce. 41 weeks is considered "late", though in her book The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth, which is stuffed full of studies and statistical information, Henci Goer points out that in fact the average beginning of spontaneous labor in first-time mothers is 41 weeks. (Technically 39 weeks gestation, but those wacky OBs like to count from last menstrual period - two weeks before the baby is actually conceived - and it's become convention.)

Induction of labor carries the risk of a slew of complications. Depending on the method, it may require that the mother be prone which in itself creates a climate for complications to arise; movement and being vertical are both important for proper positioning of the baby and pain management. If the baby can't move down easily and have the space to maneuver into an ideal position, it compromises the baby's safety and invites interventions like the use of forceps, vacuum extractor, and surgical opening of the vagina or abdomen. It makes the labor longer and harder, which makes the use of pain medication more likely, which brings its own risks: mother unable to push normally resulting in damage to her body, drugs in the baby's system and affecting its ability to breathe, separation of baby and mother at birth - affecting bonding - with possibly painful tests done in the NICU. Again depending on the method, it can interfere with the mother's ability to produce her own hormones which can have serious ramifications not only for the progress of the labor but for third stage (hemorrhage) and bonding. If the body is not ready to give birth induction can result in "failure to progress" and from there cesarean section. There is also an increased risk with induction that the baby will be born prematurely (with attendant medical issues) even if gestational age is known.

That's the short list of what I avoided, not because I'd done any research of my own, but by lucky accident of having innocently chosen a care provider that didn't practice that way. She did however have her own ideas about what sort of situation would justify intervention. In my case it was not that my pregnancy was taking "too long" but that my labor was. I was doing well, in good spirits and energy despite not having slept much, but she was impatient to get things moving along. So she suggested that I augment the labor with a natural substance that stimulates the uterus: castor oil.

Now, this woman was licensed to practice by the state, she had attended by her estimate over 1500 births, she was trained as a nurse, and she was well regarded in the community. I assumed (replacing the "doctor as god" mentality with "midwife as god" mentality) that she knew what she was doing. Why on earth else would I hire a professional? Consider too that all those studies show the safety and superior care of midwifery; of course she must know what she was talking about. Further, this method of induction or augmentation is supported in the natural birth literature, and there are doctors who prescribe it as well. Surely it would be safer than injecting the body with artificial hormones? I had not educated myself at all about birth (reading the aforementioned piece of crap book and taking a completely useless class at the hospital don't count,) so I felt completely dependent on her to tell me what to do -- the situation that most patients find themselves in, and which most care providers encourage. And I was indeed a "patient" at that point.

So she mixed up a concoction for me consisting of the castor oil, some kind of alcohol, and orange juice, according to the Susun Weed recipe in the book Wise Woman Herbal for the Childbearing Year. (Susun Weed, too, is well-known and highly respected.)

I had a vague idea that all the castor oil would do would be to increase the frequency of contractions. What it did, rather, was make me feel like I was going to die. (I later found that there are risks to the baby as well.) I have never experienced such severe intestinal cramping in my life and can't imagine it possibly being worse. I spent the next hour on the toilet spurting diarrhea, weeping and moaning in agony, trying desperately to escape my body, with people gathered around me "supporting" me with words like "you're doing great," etc. (Why is it that in labor things that normally demand privacy suddenly are regarded as public events?) The midwife chose this time to explain to me that I had been emotionally resisting the labor, and that this illness was going to force me to "let go". I was and am offended by this armchair psychoanalysis. Who was she to say why my labor was progressing the way it was and that there was something wrong with it? I was doing just fine until she got involved. Now angry and resentful and having lost trust in her, the labor became difficult and stressful, neither of which made it a safer situation for the baby.

Not that I'd have been better off with hospital management: pitocin (a synthetic form of oxytocin, the hormone that stimulates uterine contractions, among other things,) would have been used instead (and it probably would have been started long before 48 hours.) It's very commonly used and can be, as many women have attested to, a horrific experience, making the labor unbearable (so that pain medication becomes necessary.) It increases risk of uterine rupture and fetal distress and more.

It's good that people are questioning induction, but it's really only part of a larger issue, that of whether labor should be allowed to follow its own timetable from beginning to end (assuming that the mother and baby are both fine.)

My next three births weren't interfered with. None of them went as long gestation-wise, but one was another long labor. Unlike the first, it was allowed to progress as my body needed it to. With my first labor, the intervention caused hours of agony, emotional trauma, physical injury, and a sense of disconnection from my baby. With the long labor that was allowed to progress undisturbed by outside intervention, I got a relatively easy and lovely emergence with no harm done to the baby or me or us as a mother-baby unit.

2010-09-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

For the past couple of years I've been working toward living a more sustainable lifestyle. My friend Wendy's efforts to deal with the plastic bag issue have really gotten me taking environmental concerns even more seriously than I had been. There's this real live person, that I actually know, caring about the same things that I do; the community aspect of it amplifies the energy that I have for it. In a movie I just watched, No Impact Man, it's observed that our disconnection with the harm we are causing has happened because of our loss of sense of community, so that none of us feels very accountable as individuals; the people that our choices affect are nameless, faceless, don't even really exist for us -- out of sight, out of mind.

That's been very true for me. For most of my life I consumed thoughtlessly. I spent years living in Eugene, Oregon, which is a stronghold for the environmentally aware, and I would see people with their reusable jars full of bulk goods on their kitchen shelves, and have no idea why they were doing that. It didn't even occur to me that there might be a reason that I could inquire about. To me, it was just part of the hippie landscape like patchouli and tie-dye. It's only been recently, as I've been challenged by outside sources, that I've started to think about it. This highlights the importance of outreach and education. It can't be assumed that people will just get it on their own. They need information.

So there is ignorance that needs to be dealt with, and this is why it matters so much for people to talk about what they're doing and why. Not to make others feel guilty, but to give them access to information that they may have had no idea was even there and would appreciate having. But ignorance is only one part of the equation: we have also greed, complacency, and a sense of hopelessness. Greed: No, I do not make money off of planned obsolescence, plastics, white paper, and garbage, etc., but the desiring and demanding of convenience at the expense of others is certainly greed. Complacency: Because I'm comfortable enough that it's easy to not spend my mental and emotional energy worrying about these things. Hopelessness: It doesn't matter what I do because I'm only one person and nobody else cares (or, at least, the people with the power to change things will not,) so why bother putting myself out for it?

Here's the process that started changing my perspective:

One: Experience being affected by non-sustainable, polluting practices. When my husband and I moved to the country, I assumed that we'd be breathing cleaner air. I made this assumption because I had never thought about how agricultural and paper products get to me, the consumer. Unbeknownst to me, these processes were happening where people live (of course they are, how could I have been so dense,) and I was soon to be one of those people who live where it's happening. Pesticides, sulfuric compounds, smoke, and dust from chaff and dry soil being churned up all combine in a murky haze that makes it hard for my children and I to breathe, and who knows what the chemicals are doing to us. Before? Completely unconcerned. Now? So angry I'd be more than happy to put these people out of business if I had the power to.

Two: Realizing the personal benefits. The alternatives to exploitation of people for wealth, planned obsolescence, abused animals, toxic chemicals in the soil, air, our bodies, etc.: are nicer for me. They taste better, feel better, look better, wear better.

Three: Ethics logic. I may not be able to stop the mugging of a person, but that doesn't mean it's fine and dandy for me to join in. I'd be horrified if someone even suggested it. So why is it that the same thing doesn't apply on a larger scale? I don't think it's right the way things are, yet every day I live in a way that looks an awful lot like I love it, because the money I spend supports it. That is just completely nuts. It doesn't matter if I don't have the power to change it on a large scale, for everybody; it's still completely nuts.

The challenge is how not to live this way when it's all I've ever known and when the system is set up to make any other way inconvenient and difficult.

2010-08-30T09:18:00.000-07:00

One of the things I love most about my daugher is her devotion to certain motifs and themes in her singing. For years now she has been singing when playing with dolls, digging in the dirt, in the bathtub, sitting on the toilet, and riding in the back of the car. And while she is greatly inventive she also has favorite words and melodies that she uses over and over, and these have become dear to me. One commonly used phrase of hers is "I know what to do." Of course it touches my heart when she sings "I love my mommmyyyyy" with rising crescendo, but it is utterly fantastic to me to hear her own the words I know what to do.

These are words that have never left my own mouth. I grew up in school, where I learned to respond automatically and efficiently to the ring of a bell, did what what I was told even when it was useless and unpleasant, was taught to wait to be told what to do. My own passions and reasoning process were deemed silly and irrelevant, and I was taught to believe that external judgments are real and important. Going along with this got me the status of 'good girl, likely to succeed'. The implication of all this was that the notion that I know what to do is conceited. What incredible audacity it would be to claim such a thing!

Apparently not everyone learns this. My suspicion is that a few people get past it for the following reasons: because their social life outside of school is absolutely supportive of their person-hood, perhaps even viewing school authority as an irrelevancy; or because they aren't quite as skilled at following the rules and "fall through the cracks," rendering the authority of the school useless to them; or because they are neurologically inclined to be oblivious to these lessons. But my brain and environment were perfectly geared for this programming to take. The result was that I graduated and didn't have any idea what to do. This is because I assumed, as the whole structure of school had taught me from day one, that there was something that I should do that is outside of my own desires or inclinations, and without someone to tell me what that was I flailed around miserably for quite a while looking for it, assuming it must be there. You know that book "Are You My Mother?" Looking back, it was exactly that pathetic. Is this what I'm supposed to be doing? Is this? Is that? It was extremely anxiety-producing and eventually led to a nervous breakdown. Hardly anyone knows that this is what happened, because I was so good at keeping a smile on my face and keeping quiet about what was really going on. So I imagine it didn't make any sense to anyone when, after a five-year intensive professional program, I abandoned my career track entirely.

Thus began my recovery. But it's not something that you just get over, because life-long brainwashing is something you don't just get over. Intellectually accepting a more authentic paradigm is one thing, acting on it is another: that takes trust and courage.

Naturally I wanted to spare my own kids all this nonsense, so I didn't put them in school. I want all my kids to keep singing "I know what to do," in their own way, their whole lives. A common criticism of unschooling is, "But they can't just do whatever they want!" To the contrary, their survival as authentic, well, whole human beings depends on it.

2010-08-25T08:35:00.000-07:00

A friend wrote to me,

"Can you tell me what you think of this article? I am still in need of more sleep, and of course want to consider M's needs as much as possible."

My response:

Have you tried rolling away and going to your own bed for a while? Have you tried white noise? What happened? And feeding her something hearty and low-carb before going to sleep? (carbs make you hungry) I'm going to suggest too that you not use artificial lights (including computers) at night -- messes with the serotonin levels. Maybe even try sleeping and waking with the natural day/night cycle.

I'm not a fan of sleep training of any kind. If a parent is desperate I'm not going to judge them, I mean it's their family, and any consequences affect them, not me. I just think too often people are not aware of what situation they're really creating. I mean, people who Ferberize their babies still have babies who smile at them and want to be held by them. Therefore, Ferberizing is not harmful, so the reasoning goes.

Any stress instigated by the parent risks antagonism and a loss of trust. I'm not saying I'm above that, just that it is the truth. It would follow that the wisest thing is not to invite more of that on top of what is already just there as a result of everyday stress.

With W and N I was very tired. This had a lot to do with my lack of confidence in the validity of me "just being a mom." I felt like I had to fill all these other roles too, being pulled all these different ways. You know, keep the house pretty, have dinner for my hard-working husband, be working on some kind of intellectual life and work outside of caring for my children. So what I did was I nursed them to sleep and upon waking, but any time between then I would say, "mama's too tired, sweetie, I'm sorry. We'll have milk in the morning." I'd whisper words of love to them, cuddle them, pat them. If they were really not settling down, I'd say, "Do you want me to sing you a song?" (Because that is what we did before sleeping so they associated it with comfort.) This went on for a couple of months, but gradually they got used to it.

It did however make them more clingy. They are completely different children than J and R in terms of their confidence and relationship to me, and I have no doubt whatsoever that this is because I was more stressed out with them and feeling like I needed more space. I tried to do it as gentle as possible, but it still had an effect. If I hadn't done it differently two other times, I wouldn't know that and might just think, "that's just the way kids are."

So while I think it was necessary for my sanity given my psychological state at the time and the fact that I was unwilling or unable to change other parts of my life that were stressing me, I have to be honest and say that it wasn't the best thing for them and did affect them negatively and made more trouble in the long run. Obviously, different kids have different needs, and maybe M would take to it easily. If that's the case, I wouldn't worry about it. It's only if she's distressed that I'd say to consider it only as a very last resort.

I disagree with Dr. Gordon on a few points. First, this notion that 'scared' is something to be concerned about, and 'angry' is not. They're both reactions to distress. It's that cultural conditioning we have that children's anger is silly, that it is really not serious or valid.

Second, that babies over a year-old do not get hungry at night. You said that M gets frustrated at the breast as if she doesn't really want to eat but doesn't know how else to get back to sleep... you may be right, but usually babies still like to suckle for comfort when they're not hungry and even when they're not getting any milk, so it makes me wonder if she is frustrated because she's hungry and not getting enough. I'd be sure that in fact she does have access to adequate milk before making the assumption that she's not really hungry. Are you experiencing let-down when you wake up to nurse? That might be your answer.

"If I could wake my wife a few times each night, ask her to squeeze me a little fresh orange juice (my favorite drink) and rub my back while I drank it, I wouldn’t choose to voluntarily give up this routine." --Jay Gordon

This is a really bad analogy because, actually, adults don't normally like to interrupt their sleep cycling for awake-type activities. This sort of thing would make me more awake, not less. It would not be comforting. When I'm tired, what I really want to do is fall back asleep, and I start to feel angry if I'm being distracted in a way that prevents that. I'm guessing it's not actually true that he'd like those things, but either way, the point of the analogy is to imply that babies and adults are alike in their needs, so that if adults should be able to do without night-time feeding and physical comforting, so should babies. And that is simply not true.

Third, this idea that it is done as some kind of project. In order to feel any amount of peace about whatever choice you make, you will have to follow your heart and intuition and not try to plug the baby into some sort of equation as if the baby is a piece of machinery that comes with operating instructions. 3-3-4 is, I'm sorry, ridiculous. He's setting it up as some sort of optimal plan when really it's completely arbitrary.

"Yes, for the past many months we have enjoyed voting "1 to 2″ — non-democratically — in favor of . . . the baby. ‘Anyone want to get up all night, feed and walk the baby and be really tired all day and the next day too?’ Well, the vote is 1 to 2 in favor of the baby.” Now, what we’re saying is, we will sometimes be voting two to one in favor of the baby’s family. This “baby’s family” concept may be abhorrent to he who considers himself the King of England, or Emperor of the Whole World, but our knowing he has that feeling of power allows us to confidently demote the dictator to a majority-respecting member of the family. His family." --Jay Gordon

This whole section is really annoying to me because it reeks of the mindset that sees attachment parenting as "making the baby the center of the universe" to the detriment of the rest of the family's needs, thereby raising a spoiled brat. I don't think that's what he really believes, but he's using the same language and so perpetuates this way of thinking in which it's the ("manipulative") baby against the parents.

"Don't hug him."

Well, there he completely breaks with me. Is a very, very, very bad idea to refuse a child desired physical contact, EVER. That's a recipe for dis-attachment and insecurity.

I do agree with him that if the parents are seriously sleep-deprived, it's reasonable to do whatever necessary to get them more sleep so they can function and parent well during the day. But sleep-training is not without ramifications, so as far as I'm concerned it should be done only when other options have been exhausted.

2010-08-20T07:54:00.000-07:00

People want so badly to believe that fat is bad and that if you are fat it is because you do bad things. Well I've got news for you: no part of my body is bad. My body is healthy and it does really fantastically good things for me. It gave me four normal pregnancies and births. My women's care doctor said, astonished, that it looks like I haven't given birth at all. I don't believe that would be unusual in a world in which birth was not routinely pathologized, but the point is that my big, fat body did that. It is powerful, it works. It carries me anywhere I want to go, it protects me from viruses, it responds with passion to my lover's kiss, it feels the sun and hears the wind. It is a really lovely piece of machinery. Viscerally, too, it feels normal and right and good to me. My children sing praises to its softness, its squooshiness. Those are all great, enormous gifts that I will not take for granted, that I will believe despite all the strident voices telling me I shouldn't, that I will not shove aside in disappointment over not having society's approval.

For my part, I am really quite nice to my body, thank you very much, good lord no I don't do bad things to it. I have in the past but that is over. I will not ever, ever, ever again force it to do things that it doesn't like in the name of "virtue" or refuse it good things in order to assert personal power in the face of the pressure to be "virtuous". I put good things in it because that is what it wants. I move it around because that is what it wants. I don't try to make it different from what it tells me it wants to be; I trust it. All your notions about virtue can go to hell, because my body knows better, and it always has.

And I am fat. Oh, I am fat. I am the "obesity epidemic exclamation point!" This body that is security and comfort to my loved ones, that has protected itself beautifully against enforced starvation and harmful exercise, that has a blood pressure of 120/70, that is able to hike through forests and swim in rivers and squat to pull weeds, feel sublime pleasure, and grow and nourish four people with the food it made itself: this is the body I am supposed to dislike, be angry with, be afraid of. Because other people dislike it, are angry with me for having it, are afraid of it.

No. They are superstitious and brain-washed. Certainly there are plenty of people who would benefit from treating their bodies nicely, which would result in their bodies become smaller or, yes, BIGGER or perhaps not noticeably changing in appearance at all. My body, however, is fine, and I am fine in every way except for the continual onslaught of the judgment of others. It is alarming and scary and depressing to have fingers pointed at you in disdain when in fact you haven't done anything wrong. If any of those people are reading, here is what I would like you to do: I would like you to please shut the hell up. You who find yourselves opposed to the existence of my flesh, keep your "fat is unhealthy" nonsense to yourself. Fat is crucial to the proper functioning of bodies, and though you consider yourselves experts, trust me, it really truly is not for you to decide how much fat that means for me.

Fat is also just nice. I have friends and family whose round forms I really appreciate. Meaning, it makes me happy to see them, to be around them, to hug them. While I might appreciate the aesthetic appeal (as I've been taught to) of thinner bodies, I cannot deny that my preference is for healthy bulk. I like bigness. I like that my husband is large; I am bowled over by the beauty of my children's stocky bodies. That's not to say that I regard thinner bodies as wrong in any way. Why make a point of it at all, then? Because maybe if more people were to come out and admit to it, the perception of it as a shameful perversity would cease to have so much power. In the worship of thinness, there is often the disclaimer that of course the exception is thinness which is debilitating or the result of ill health. I say the same thing applies to fatness: that which is debilitating or the result of ill health is not good. Otherwise? GOOD.

For those to whom it occurs that there might be an alternative to feeling that I'm deluded and that all would be well if only you could enlighten me about how dangerous and ugly and costly my body is, you might appreciate some reading that calls into question our culture's cherished assumptions about why some people are fat and others aren't, as well as what constitutes "attractiveness" (hint: it isn't objectively extremely narrow in scope.) I won't list links because there are too many, and what speaks to me might not be what speaks to you anyway. Some helpful search terms are: health at every size, Linda Bacon, junkfood science, genetic fat, Kate Harding, Paul Campos, fat acceptance, fatosphere, Jules Hirsch. Keep in mind that whatever you find, you will also find people rending their garments in outrage and distress at what this world is coming to that people like me actually exist. There is a huge amount of resistance to critical thinking about fat; I'm just saying, be prepared for some ugliness.

To those of you who are allies, whether large-bodied or not: I thank you from the bottom of my heart. It is because of people like you that I feel able to say any of this at all.

2010-08-07T06:28:00.000-07:00

I am a writer. I don't write for a living, but it's one of the things that I'm confident that I do fairly well, and it feels like a calling to me. I've been struggling for a long a time now with not being able to, not in the way I want. I am the kind of writer who starts early in the morning, goes all day, takes a break for dinner and maybe to go outside and lie in the grass for a few hours to think and just be, and then start again late at night when the candles are lit. I cannot be disturbed from my train of thought because when I am in the flow the phrasing comes just right, and the phrasings are important, so that interruption makes me crazy and angry. I am a perfectionist, and a constant editor. The progression of points must be linear and easy to follow and represent my thoughts faithfully, my goal being that anyone who is not inside my head will know exactly what I mean. I enjoy this sort of crafting, but it takes so much time, time that my children need more. It is time for me to be honest with myself about this reality and make a choice: it is something that I will just have to save for when I have no other responsibilities. I'm looking forward to that. For the time being, I'm trying to figure out what this blog is for, then, if I do not write my writerly things in it. It could be for other things, I realize. One could be to gather the quick thoughts and Q&As I put down in forum posts at Mothering.com, grouping them under topics. Another, to start posting my drawings and photos. Another, to just jot down whatever thoughts come to me without taking the time to clarify and expand. That would be hard, but we'll see. Maybe I'll surprise myself.

2010-07-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

This is a response to Flo's comment on this post. My response got long enough that I thought I may as well make it into a post.

Flo wrote:

I really love this, Linda. Life with our kids can be so much more harmonious than we're socialized to believe. Slowing down is absolutely a key for me, which is not always easy for me to do. But examining all those underlying motivations has been so valuable and liberating!

Thanks, Flo. It's really hard for me to write about serious issues because my social upbringing was geared toward making me a "good little girl" and I have a deep fear of expressing my anger and disapproval for fear of not being liked. (Except with my children -- which is a common element in the phenomenon of perpetuating the cycle of abuse.) I almost deleted that post several times.

Slowing down -- yes, thank you for bringing that up! That is such an important and effective tool! I was so conditioned to be all dart, dart, fast, fast, hurry hurry (efficient) that I was behaving that way even when I didn't have to and when it really wasn't gaining me anything of value. When I slow down and just allow life to take as much time as it needs for everything to feel all right, the situation improves dramatically; I became far less stressed and the kids are far less likely to get upset or do something troublesome (inconvenient) for me, because I am paying attention to them and loving them, making the outing about us, rather than just an uncomfortable chore that must seem irrational to them when they are too young to really understand the need for it.

This reminds me of the first time I ever told myself, "I am going to be as patient for them as I expect them to be for me." We were in the candy aisle. I hunkered down while they happily perused the contents of the shelves at their leisure. I don't know how long we were there -- maybe 10 minutes? But it seemed like a lifetime to me. It was horrible not being able to make the situation go the way I liked, with a "c'mon, it's time to go. NOW." Waiting was literally painful. I swear I broke out in a sweat. I became fidgety; irritation started to boil up inside of me. I realized that I couldn't control it and that at some point it was going to burst out of me, so hoping to minimize it I appealed to them: "Guys, I am really bored and having a hard time standing here patiently. Could you please make a selection soon?" And... they did. No "You'll just have to wait. You have to learn to be patient." No matter that I had countless times overruled their own boredom and pain. They were showing me more consideration than I'd ever shown them in similar circumstances.

That day I learned two huge lessons: First, that kids are better than adults. Jesus: "Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter Heaven." They learn to be like us and become us. But while they are innocent and young they put up with all sorts of crap and still, if given a chance, will do the right thing. If you think about it, you realize how incredibly patient children really are already, how often and well they do wait, how many of their own needs they deny while we do our Very Important Things. And yet we are surprised and outraged when finally they've had enough of being trailed around after us while we attend to our concerns, and have an outburst. We tend to see it as coming out of nowhere because, well, it hasn't been hard for us all this time (egocentrism.) When it comes to children, adults don't often look for and acknowledge cause and effect. And their sense of fairness is warped.

Second, that we are the same. If I regularly had to deal with the same control and condescension and unkindness that most kids do, I'd be having meltdowns too; they'd just probably not be in public as I'm old enough to have developed self-consciousness and fear of disapproval (whether it's warranted or not.) In fact, I do have meltdowns, in private. What does that say about my adult status exactly? That it is in some ways (maybe more than I've even yet realized) a self-serving mental construct. My children and I share the same psychological and emotional responses to attacks on our well-being and personal integrity and will. If I want people to respect mine, then I should respect theirs.

Being patient and in the moment (becoming like the little children!) has started to feel like an act of rebellion. All around me are people who say that I shouldn't alter my path (hurry hurry rush rush!) to honor my children's desires. That it will make them "spoiled". Logically of course that makes no sense; we constantly tell children to give of themselves (share, play the game your guest wants to play, don't yell when you're frustrated because it makes people uncomfortable, do what I tell you to without asking why,) yet we don't model that behavior for them in our interactions with them; and what they internalize over time is what we do, not what we tell them to do.

2010-07-01T22:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon the kids shooed me out of the living room and said I couldn't look. They put up a barrier of chairs and my yoga mat just to be on the safe side. Once I heard "Noooo! That's mama's good scissors!!!" Another time they asked me to get them some tape and string and a yellow marker and hand them to them eyes closed. Other than that all four of them were quietly occupied for a couple of hours.

That evening their papa and I were watching a movie and they came in and told us to close our eyes. When we opened them this is what we saw:

I have the coolest best kids in the entire universe.

2010-06-30T07:56:00.000-07:00

I have just had it with people who think they are justified in complaining about the white trash woman in walmart who is yelling at or spanking her child in public, and then go home and manipulate, control through fear, and hurt their children in myriad small ways, and think that there is a great big difference between the two.

Speaking harshly, coercion, yelling, criticism, withholding of love, sarcasm, shaming, and spanking all share something in common: they are violence. Violence has consequences to the spirit and to the relationship between the giver and the receiver. That's just reality. You may think you're justified in the type and level of violence you dole out. But please, let's dispense with the denial that it doesn't have an effect on the relationship and how the child sees the world and navigates it. Rebelliousness, deception, aggression, sexual risk-taking, bullying, depression, addictive behavior, disrespect, sarcasm, emotional disconnection, lack of ability to assert boundaries, willingness to let others emotionally manipulate or take advantage of you, sado-masochism, trouble developing nurturing relationships: these are not normal behaviors for children and teenagers, for anybody. (Please note that I do not include as "abnormal" things like asserting one's individual needs, or acting upset when those needs aren't getting met, more so the younger the child is.) I'm not saying that violence is the only cause of these types of behaviors, only that these are the sorts of behaviors that can result from it when it's present; and that to the degree that it's used, there will be a corresponding degree to which it manifests. (You reap what you sow.) That is serious. And so, therefore, there had better be a damn good reason for it, if it's ever used.

And yes, I am talking about force and shaming used to gain cooperation about car seats, brushing teeth, bathing, sugar, meal times, bed time, chores, sports, school work, "enriching" activities, finishing what you start, saying please and thank you, etc. Parents who wouldn't dream of spanking their child think nothing of controlling these things in a way that causes distress or anger in the child. The excuse is that it's necessary because people don't always want to do things that are important to do. Two points: First, don't make the mistake of not seeing the connection between force and rebellion. Second, aside from things like a peanut butter allergy, none of these things are objectively right or important. Because most of these situations aren't peanut butter allergies; they're "we'll be late" "I'm embarrassed" "what will the neighbors think" "that is beneath us" "that's just the way it's done" "I like it better that way", etc. Sometimes the parent's concerns are important, yes, and sometimes they will benefit the child; but the burden of satisfying them in a harmonious way should be on them, not on the unconditional obedience of the child.

Isn't that how we would treat any other person, who was not dependent on us? We wouldn't force them; we would take whatever steps necessary to make it easiest for them (which ultimately makes it better for both of us) and hope for their cooperation. Sometimes people say 'no' and somehow we manage to live with that. That means we have more love (shown as respect) for people we hardly even know than we do for our own children! Something is very sick and wrong there. But surely sometimes these things *are* necessary? Well, take car seats. Think: do you really need to go somewhere? Is there another possibility for being together that doesn't involve going somewhere? Can you do what you need to do later when you can do it alone? Is the car seat hard and uncomfortable (most are) and what can you do about it? Does it make the child motion-sick? What happens if you transition slowly, so that the child has a chance to feel finished with what they're currently involved in? What if you don't automatically man-handle the child, but ask their permission? What if you are are relaxed and smiling, playful and affectionate from beginning to end? Is there a possibility force might not be needed?

How about teeth brushing? Are you sure that's what is protecting your child from getting cavities? Are you using it as a band-aid because you haven't provided good nutrition? (Read some Weston Price.) Do you know what sorts of things promote good bacteria and pH? Some people are more genetically prone to have issues with their teeth, and I'm not saying brushing has no value. In that case, have you modeled tooth brushing so it becomes just something that's done like using toilet paper and flushing the toilet? Does your child have sensory issues? Is the toothbrush too big (gagging) or does the toothpaste burn their mouth? (It does mine.) Can it be approached playfully?

And (a popular example among those who spank) what if your child wants to just run out into the street? First, let's dispel of the stupidity that says that hitting (or other punitive behavior) is an effective teaching tool. If the child knows nothing about the situation other than that you will inflict pain if it occurs, what is that child going to do when you're not around? An older child needs only to have information, and a younger child needs to simply not be left alone -- that is the ONLY guarantee. So what other things could you do while being present and attentive? How about hold their hand (most children like holding the hand of an adult who doesn't use physical force on them, who they're not scared of, who they haven't been given a reason to be rebellious against.) Make "hold hand" and "stop and look" just what you do from the earliest age. Use a stroller; try a harness if the child doesn't object. Lock your doors (sorry, I don't buy the "my kid's a Houdini" excuse. Get a better lock.) Put up a fence. I've raised four children and taken care of many others and have never had to hit anyone to deal with the street issue. Lucky? No, just not lazy.

And in general: Is it an issue of convenience or preference or bias on the part of the parent? Is common wisdom about the thing known to be objectively correct? Is the danger serious? What would really happen if the child's (person's) preference was honored, and not just for a day or a week or a month (because inconsistency breeds defensive behavior,) but for all time? Try very hard to look at it from the child's perspective as well. What is really being learned here? That you are a bully? That you are more worried about what other people think than you are about your own child's comfort? That you are a liar?

Thinking these things through and being creative about ways to avoid stress is not only smart, but it's also kind. And what is the word for the opposite, for taking advantage of someone's dependence on us to suit ourselves? Abuse. Some people like to try to get out of that by refusing to define "abuse" as anything other than extreme harm. Whatever. Whether you use the word or not, the situation is still exactly the same. It doesn't become magically something else just because you've refused to call it what it is. Just because it is not really bad (like molestation or beating,) or because you are so focused on your own experience that you don't see it, or because you don't have sinister intentions, doesn't make it not so. It is, specifically, an abuse of power. Even a little abuse of power is still an abuse of power, and it still has ramifications.

Your child's body and life are not yours to do with whatever you like.
It is not okay to lie to your child in order for you to get your way.
Coercion should never be used unless *absolutely necessary* to avoid worse harm.

But look, I'm not saying any parent is perfect, or that there aren't situations in which displaying anger or hurt or frustration isn't warranted. I believe, in fact, that it's important to be honest about how things affect us so as not to give children (people) the idea that their behavior doesn't affect people or that people are supposed to be pretty robots. Authenticity is key, but not being a jerk is key too. You have to decide what kind of relationship you want with your children, what you want your everyday reality to be like. You really do get to decide that, within the realm of what you have to work with. Whatever you've got, to some degree it's what you've made. That's NOT to say that the parent of a "difficult" child is a worse parent than that of an "easy" child. Appearances can be deceiving, and you never know what someone is starting with neurologically, or what they've come from and are working on overcoming, or what that obedience or disobedience really means. This is not about what I think you should be doing in order to produce children I approve of; it is about what you know about your own situation and being a grown-up about it. It's about being nice and not being selfish for your benefit. It's about realizing, and acting on the belief, that it all starts with you. It didn't before when you were in the place your child is in, but it does now.

2010-06-29T14:57:00.000-07:00

so we much teach our kids to love themselves and let them live their lives
what will they be if they grow up? whatever they like.
it's crucial to raise children who don't do what they're told
who will fight for what's right and who can't be bought or sold

I want nothing of this business I'm staying underground
I'm going to ride the railroad and let my guard down
we can forage and ride bikes jump in lakes go on hikes
we can sing and sing for hours and click like like like
when somebody posts something good we share and spread the truth
it's time to define what success means to you
I hope my kid will never be another cog in their machine
trapped inside a box trying to remember her dreams
they will sell us all out for their greed
as we cry for the earth while she bleeds

so hold onto your loved ones, hold on for dear life
and try to walk like thunder leaving footprints that are light

2010-06-26T09:52:00.000-07:00

We know a person who, when she's seen our kids sitting quietly and patiently, has made comments several times like, "How do you get them to do that? Do you threaten them? Bribe them? Sedate them?" It's hard not to be offended by it -- what kind of parent does she think I am? -- until I remember that quite a lot of people, actually, believe that children are inherently troublesome (read: bad) and must be coercively controlled, often with violence, if they are to be acceptable members of society. I was thinking about this when I read this quote:

"The best-kept secret in child psychology is that children who were never
spanked are among the best behaved." -- Murray Straus

It's true, and includes other forms of punishment and control like threats, shaming, humiliation, sarcasm, withdrawal of love, isolation, etc. My kids were sitting still in the above scene because a) they are developmentally capable of it (crucial first consideration) and b) I treat them with love and respect (punishment is never about love and respect) and c) while I treat truly serious situations firmly (by serious I mean threat of harm to someone, and by firmly I mean not allowing it to happen again and being honest about the effects) I strive to be conscious enough to not make arbitrary demands of them. From this they infer that I'm the good guy and that my goal is to meet their needs, and that's a pretty powerful gift which induces loyalty and cooperation when the request is reasonable (from the child's perspective) to expect and meet. So when I ask them to do something and they understand that it's important to me, they want to help me (assuming they are emotionally and physically capable of it. Sometimes they just aren't.)

If I'd previously proven myself to be generally untrustworthy (by serving my own needs at their expense, by making arbitrary rules, by not treating them kindly and lovingly,) why should they want to do so? The only way I could gain their cooperation, in that case, would be if I could manage to make them scared of me. And I shudder to think what that would cost us, our psyches and our relationships to one another. Fear isn't love.

Now, surely most people with brains know these things on some level. Surely in their own experience they know that the more they're treated kindly and with trust, the more they are likely to respond in kind (unless they've had such violence done to their spirits that they've become sociopathic.) So how could it be that people can have such different notions of what "works"? I think it's pretty simple: we're speaking different languages. What I mean by "well-behaved" and what enthusiasts of the authoritarian model mean by it are different things. You can see it either as an effort to respect and promote the well-being of others, as one is able (dependent on developmental and psychological state); or as an unquestioning and absolute submission to those with the most power and what suits them (enforced with "do what you're told" and "because I say so" and "you better, or else [I will hurt you]": the language of barbarians and bullies.) Those whose primary interest is the latter are going to see a child raised with gentleness who is, say, crying and resisting the parents' will, and say, "THAT is not well-behaved. Therefore Straus's statement is false." And you can't argue with that, if you're working with that mentality.

But let's look into the future: the child who has been continually treated punitively and shamed and coerced has two places to go. They either become submissive and self-doubting and afraid, or they become rebellious, sometimes back and forth, sometimes observable, sometimes not (depending on how hard you're looking; people can get good at developing elaborate facades.) They are not really their own people; they are a reaction, a defensive and self-protecting one. Obviously neurological, chemical, and sensory issues can complicate this, but in the absence of those, people who are allowed to live and grow in an environment that they perceive as safe don't need to develop defensive self-protecting behaviors; they don't need to lie, evade, hide, or hurt themselves or others.

As Jan Hunt of The Natural Child Project says, "Children reflect the treatment they receive." What I desire most for my children is that they feel and therefore reflect peace and love and gentleness, not fear and pain and control. However, I want to be absolutely clear that I've not always loved them perfectly, and of all the wonderful parents I know, I don't know anyone who has. And while I don't intentionally put the kids in toxic environments (which school is a great example of for most people) they are out in the world and will be exposed to it regardless. So it comes out in their own behavior: an unkind word or tone, a selfishness, an angry shove, a lack of confidence. Thankfully, most kids have some degree of resilience, and love strengthens that resilience. They want to give you a chance, and a second, and a thousand, and by doing so give themselves another chance. The key is parental admittance of wrong-doing and apology and being their advocate and protector when toxic situations arise. Those things won't erase abuse, but they will lay a new foundation to build on. Being imperfect creatures, that's where our hope has to lie.

Resources:

essays about spanking at The Natural Child Project

thoughts on parenting peacefully from Sandra Dodd and friends

Project No-Spank

Dr. Sears (a Christian) on physical and emotional punishment

The Center for Non-Violent Communication

"How Spanking Changed My Life", on the effects of controlled, ritualized physical punishment

gentle discipline resources at Mothering.com

new Ken Robinson

2010-06-26T08:35:00.000-07:00

View his first TED talk here, with some transcript.

teenagers and sleep

2010-04-26T06:53:00.000-07:00

For months now Jake has been staying up *really* late. Like until 2:00 a.m., sometimes 4:00 a.m. At first I assumed that he was making himself stay up late because he wanted more privacy and quiet time than our family life usually affords. This was a little silly of me, I admit, because I'm well aware of how difficult it is for me to stay awake when my body wants to sleep, and I could see (if I happened to get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, for instance) that this wasn't the case for Jake -- he was AWAKE. It finally dawned on me that he was experiencing what I've heard from so many of my friends with teens. After a little research online, I found that it's thought that there's a physiological basis for this -- melatonin, a hormone that plays a role in sleep, is released at different times of the day at puberty and sometimes throughout adolescence and the teen years, so that there's a shift in a person's circadian rhythms.

Even though this is a natural occurrence, because it interferes with our culture's factory-like philosophy of life, as well as its love of fixing what ain't broke, it's of course deemed a disorder that must be controlled. It's called "delayed sleep-phase syndrome" and it's treated by administering melatonin.

Jake, on the contrary, since he doesn't have to get up in the morning, gets all the rest he needs without having to have it induced artificially with hormones. Somehow this just sits a lot better with me. But then I'm one of those rare, strange creatures that thinks that nature knows what it's doing, and has a good reason for doing it. In my experience, it's always worked better just to let things be the way they want to be. With birth, with parenting, with aging -- interfering with the natural process and with instinct only invites problems somewhere on down the line. Could this interference, whether in forcing the body to be awake when it's not ready or in forcibly changing the circadian rhythms, be responsible for growth issues and future sleep disorders? And what else, conceivably?

But what's especially interesting here is that after all the nights of me not hassling him for staying up "too late", of trusting that he knows what he needs, of believing in him as a smart, conscientious, autonomous human being, he's now going to bed early, sometimes earlier than anyone else, and getting up early, usually around 6:00 a.m. He has grown a lot in the past several months, so I wonder if this current growth spurt has come to an end. Maybe he's going to maintain where he's at for a while, the mustache not getting any darker, the muscles not getting any bigger. It'll be interesting to see if the physical changes coincide with the sleep changes. I bet they will.

unschooling Q&A

2010-04-24T09:26:00.000-07:00

Woman Uncensored asked some questions about unschooling. Here are my answers.

What is unschooling to you and your family?

Unschooling is learning as a result of living and pursuing one's unique interests. It is the recognition that learning happens best when it is interesting, relevant, in context, and by the learner's choice, and that schooling usually fails to provide these things and in some ways actively undermines them. (How Children Fail by John Holt is a great book for understanding how this happens; also John Taylor Gatto's essay The Seven-lesson Schoolteacher, which is in his book Dumbing Us Down.) Unschooling is also a rejection of structure as a means of crowd management and psychological control (bells, short periods of time allowed for anything, not being allowed to come and go as one likes, having to ask permission to satisfy basic bodily needs, grading and testing, etc.) in favor of organic, autonomous living.

How did you decide to unschool?

Initially homeschooling wasn't even on our radar. But when the time came to start our oldest in preschool, I wasn't impressed with any of the programs available to us, and ultimately it just didn't feel right to send my young child away to be with a stranger for part of the day. I am his mother and really wasn't interested in anyone else getting to play that role. By the time he was "school age" we'd gotten internet access and I had discovered discussion forums (in particular hipMama and Mothering.com) and became aware that there are a lot of people who don't send their kids to school because they don't agree with the school system's educational philosophy. And obviously if one doesn't agree with the educational philosophy one isn't going to seek to replicate it at home. I did further research, and of the alternatives, unschooling made the most sense to us.

How do you get a kid that refuses to do his work to sit down and do it? How do you stay on track? Be consistent?

These are all questions about homeschooling. In unschooling there aren't academic requirements, so there is no "track", so there's no need to make anyone do anything they don't want to.

How do you unschool multiple children, especially if there is a baby or toddler in the mix?

The same way that you care for and love multiple children. I'm present for them, available when they need me, but that's not every second of the day. They are busy people, engaged with their world -- and because they have a background of nurturing abundance, the older they get the more independent they naturally become. But yes, of course life with a baby is different from life without a baby. When I'm part of the mother-baby dyad I'm in an altered state of consciousness, slower, quieter, more internally-focused, and that's reflected in how I live my life. It's a good thing for older children to be part of and witness to. But it's also why we've stopped at four children -- I want to direct more of my energy outward now and be able to do the things with my children that I am less inclined to have the patience and energy for when I have a baby.

Can you ever unschool a child who needs routines and visual schedules?

It depends on what is meant by "need" and whether it's arbitrarily and externally imposed, or if it's something that the child is naturally most comfortable and secure with. If you have to make someone do it, it's not unschooling. We have routines; we snuggle in the morning, we make a fire, we have breakfast, we check the chicken coop for eggs, we talk about what we're doing that day, we get ready to go (bathed, dressed, shoes on, hair combed,) we see friends, we go shopping, we put the groceries away, we walk down to the river, we make dinner, we read, we watch a movie, we make hot chocolate, we make our beds (which have often been played on during the day,) we read books, we sing lullabies, etc., and in-between lots of talking and internet searching and reading and playing. Those are all things that the kids can count on most days. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that there is rhythm to our days. I have one child who likes clocks and calenders and plans. I don't like these things, but for him we have clocks and calenders and plans.

How do unschooled kids adapt in society when they have grown up?

Although there is a difference between family life and the larger society, it's not as if not being in school means living in a closet. And consider that schooled kids must also adapt at some point, as they are part of an artificially created sub-culture with its own strange rules that have little relevance to the outside world. When I graduated from high school and went out into the "real world", as we referred to it then (which is telling, that we used that wording,) I felt lost. It was so different from the school setting that I had no idea how to navigate and conduct myself. I had to relearn everything. Unschooled kids have the potential to be already out in the real world, now. They are able to be out amongst people of all ages during their day, they can move around socially and spatially, they can volunteer, work, go to community college. Their process of adaptation from family life to societal life can be as gradual as they need it to be.

How do unschooled kids adapt to a structured work environment?

Well, no structured work environment I've ever been in has even remotely resembled school structure; one could just as well ask how schooled kids adapt to a differently structured or unstructured or self-directed work environment. There might be some adaptation necessary, yes, but it's not rocket science; if it's valuable to someone they'll do it. If not, they won't. It doesn't make sense that someone should have to be trained for 12 years in order to structure their day in a way that's valuable to them. Whether unschoolers generally find value in factory-style work is another question; perhaps not. And perhaps that's because it's not a very human-friendly structure; unschoolers, used to being free, might not be inclined to look for that sort of work. But I don't see that as a bad thing.

How do you know you have given them all the tools and experiences you could so they can have a well-rounded education in many subjects?

I'm concerned only that they have access to opportunities and information, and that their inborn love of learning and confidence in the validity of their authentic path remain intact. However that manifests -- whatever passions and interests and activities -- is better than being made to study many arbitrarily-chosen things that they have little or no interest in. And who gets to decide what "well-rounded" means, anyway? What the school system considers well-rounded is very different from what I consider it to be; and likewise what I consider well-rounded is very different from what it will be for my children. My version is relevant to me and my life, not necessarily their lives. Although in the end I think it's an overrated concept anyway -- I'd personally rather spend my time focusing on a few passions than gathering little bits of information about many things.

2010-03-25T07:52:00.001-07:00

Jake just turned 13 so he is officially a teenager, and I get to join the "parents who like their teens!" club. :) I just think he is so wonderful. He came shopping with me recently and it was a sheer joy to be able to focus on him without distractions. A couple of things he said particularly delighted me:

Our errands were taking longer than we'd expected, so we started getting hungry and stopped at the co-op to get something to eat. They have a really good food bar there. I got a bunch of different things: curried rice, chipotle tofu, garbanzo beans, quinoa, spelt berries, pasta with pesto. He got lasagna. :) While we were eating I wondered why it might be that when I was a kid none of this would have appealed to me but now I love these complex flavors. Jake said, matter-of-factly, "Well, as your body changes its needs also change so that must be what your body needs." Such a smart guy!

(I also love seeing the evidence of the benefits of having grown up in a non-food controlling household. He'd also gotten a piece of carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. With the first few bites he was full of praise for the chefs at the co-op, but then he stopped eating, leaving about half of it. I said, "Oh, are you full?" And he said, "No, I just don't feel like eating any more." There is a sensation we all get, before we're full, where the food stops being as good as when we started eating. The term isn't desensitization, but it's something similar, maybe someone can help me with that? Anyway, Jake is aware and secure enough to acknowledge it and act on it. It's something that many of us lose the ability to recognize when certain types or amounts of foods are bad or "a special treat" or there is a consistent feeling of deprivation or just a general attitude that proper eating requires discipline. Psychologically that creates a grasping behavior, a feeling that one needs to get what one can while one can. It's an aspect of disordered eating that I'm still recovering from.)

Later in the car again he used an unusual idiom so I asked where he'd heard it. He shrugged and said, "All over the place," which turned out to mean manga and Japanese-style video games. We talked about some other differences between ours and Japanese culture, and I observed that "Japanese culture is interesting." To which he replied without a pause, "All culture is interesting, it's just that you're used to this one so you don't see it." And I was like, damn if he didn't nail that one!

how it works

2010-03-17T13:52:00.000-07:00

Noah: If a third of six is three, then what would half of twenty be?

Me: I don't understand the question, because a third of six isn't three.

Noah: But if it were, what would it be?

Me: sigh... I don't know.

Noah: The answer is fifteen because basically it would take ten twos to make twenty and in that case the answer would be ten but if a third of six is two, then all those twos would change into threes and it would equal thirty so twenty would change to thirty and half of that would be fifteen. And that's how it works.

-----------

Get that? Yeah, it took me a minute, too. Basically it's a roundabout way of saying that we've simply framed the numbers in the problem in multiples of two (except for the percent we're taking) and changed that to multiples of three. I asked him if there could possibly be another answer to the riddle, and we mulled that over for a bit. What if we did this? What if we did that? Noah even managed to bring time travel into the equation (which I still don't understand, so won't try to relate.) "But would that actually be possible, Linda?" One of my favorite questions. :) "But wait! If two were three, then two wouldn't exactly exist! And then three wouldn't exist either!" (Orange Man: "What are you guys talking about?") And he's still over there muttering to himself about it, as I write.

For the record, Noah is eleven years old and has never attended school or had a math lesson. He got this riddle from a video game, and looked up the answer online, in order to understand it. Then, excited about it, he shared it with me. I really get a kick out of this. Here is a kid who has never had to do a work sheet or take a class or take a test. And what is he doing? Math problems. Human beings are curious; throughout most of the history of the world, they have learned this stuff because they wanted to. And that really is how it works.

2010-03-04T13:37:00.000-08:00

[Willow, as she came zooming up to me on her bike]

Mama!

Yes?

Have I told you how much I love being alive? And how great human beings are? And all the things they invent? Like houses, cars, lights... it's awesome!

2010-02-24T08:02:00.000-08:00

From the March issue of Babytalk, a Parenting magazine publication:

"If he is uncircumcised, it is important to gently tug back his foreskin and cleanse thoroughly."

Here's the letter I wrote to them:

Congratulations, you have just damaged the genitals of who knows how many baby boys. As a major publication with an audience of millions of readers, you have a responsibility to do some basic research before speaking as an authority on medical matters, so that you don't make the mistake of advocating a dangerous practice as if it is medically valid. A retraction isn't enough to cover this, you need to also publish an article about the proper care of the intact penis. And please, stop calling it "uncircumcised." To use this euphemism is to imply, wrongly, that circumcision is the normal default.

I also wrote a shorter and very polite, very non-inflammatory note on their Facebook page, simply pointing out the mistake. It was deleted about a second after posting, I kid you not. Nice -- censorship for the purpose of saving face. Not that I ever had a lot of respect for this magazine, but now I have good reason to warn people away from ever reading it at all.

I'm guessing that what they are going to say, if they do ever say anything about it, is that "tugging back" isn't the same as "retracting". But the word "back" itself implies that there is an inside that needs to be exposed to be cleaned. This is wrong. There is really no dancing around "we meant this" or "we meant that" that will make it not wrong. Proper care of a child's penis is to do nothing but rinse. No soap, no tugging (except by the child himself, as he does spontaneously; he's not going to hurt himself,) and absolutely no retraction. The foreskin is attached to the glans, sometimes until puberty. Bringing it "back" breaks this attachment, causing pain and sometimes bleeding, and potentially adhesions, which are a common complication of circumcision but should not occur in intact genitalia.

Thanks to Woman Uncensored for spreading the word.

unschooling basics: how does this work?

2010-02-14T08:49:00.000-08:00

Generally people seem to understand the wisdom of interest-led learning, but occasionally people will express concern about "basics". I've written some posts previously about our journey of the learning of reading and math. It's a pretty simple idea: people want to know about those things that are valuable to them. You can hardly get more basic than that truth. We see it in children from the time they are born -- no one has to make them learn how to walk or talk: they see others doing it, and they want to be included, so they just start doing it. Without instruction, and without thinking to themselves "this is something that I need to learn." It's picked up in a gradual, organic, automatic way. That's human nature.

The basic shared information that makes up a culture or sub-culture, that makes it possible for us to function and communicate with each other, is learned in exactly the same way. It includes things like idioms and body cues and table manners and rules about things like taking turns. If you're cognitively capable of perceiving them, you will learn them just by paying attention and wanting to participate socially. Sometimes "teaching" is part of the equation, in the sense that sometimes the most efficient way of learning something is to ask a question and have somebody tell you the answer. Again, we see young children doing this constantly, asking why? and what? and when? until our ears feel ready to fall off. Traditional instruction is unnecessary for this kind of learning to take place (and arguably is a hindrance to it.)

Math and reading, the most basic part of "academics", are part of the kind of knowledge base I've been talking about simply because they are used so often in everyday life. Money exchange is a great example for how math learning takes place organically, as kids tend to be fascinated with money and the ability to buy things they want. In interacting with others, they begin to understand pretty quickly that the different coins are used in specific ways, and will ask you over and over, "what is this? what is this?" Kids like sorting things. Give them a jar full of coins, and they will pull out all the quarters, then all the dimes. They will make piles. They will see that piles of the same height have the same numbers of coins. Then they will want to buy something, and they will ask, "why did she give me money back?" and then, "how did she know how much to give me back?" Then they will want to count up their money to see if they have enough to buy what they want. Have a garage sale -- they will be the ones begging to take money and make change. Cooking, another common activity, is particularly good for fractions.

Past that, there is not a whole lot that most people need to know about math. Those who are mathematically inclined will continue to seek out higher math on their own, just as a child who likes dinosaurs will find or ask for the dinosaur books at the library, and pour over them of his own volition. But -- "What about those who don't like math? What if they never want to learn algebra, and trig, and calculus????" Okay, what if? Honestly, let's just be rational about this. Life is short; we have little enough time to focus on our strengths. Why waste time being made to learn something one has little aptitude and interest for? For what possible purpose? "To get a job that involves doing higher math." But why on earth would someone want such a job, if they didn't like math? Perhaps wealth and prestige; but there are many ways of gaining those things if they are your primary goal, many of which don't involve math, and as they wouldn't be the best person for the job, and wouldn't be happy doing it, it's not sensible that we as a society or as parents ought to be encouraging or pressuring them into such a thing.

Now another but: "How will they know they have an aptitude for it if they're not made to do it first? And do you not see how much time is lost when we aren't made to learn about something before we're interested?" Look, I just don't believe this. Math is all around us. If a person's brain likes numbers, that's going to become apparent pretty fast. But also, and applied more generally, it's just not a workable approach to make everybody do something "just in case". In the last few years I've found myself interested in things that I wasn't before; no one could have predicted what those things would be. How do we then choose what to expose a person to? There are just too many things, and relevant context (as opposed to just reading about something in a textbook) is just too important to deep understanding and retention.

Reading is probably even more of a bugbear as far as the general public is concerned; they are adamant that kids be made to learn by the age of 6 (and preferably earlier,) to give them a "head start" and so that the "window of opportunity" is not missed. The concern is understandable, given that illiteracy is a very real problem in our society. People tend to assume it's because there's not enough instruction happening; I think it's because there's too much inappropriate instruction, and too much instruction period.

This is all theory, of course; there have been evidence and indications that people interpret to fit their world view, that which seems reasonable to them. To make guesses is really the best we can do right now. Well, the school system's guesses seem to me to not be doing too well. Their failures are heart-breakingly many, and their successes could be accounted for by coincidence (many children already have the basic skills before they start school.) My guess, based on reason and the anecdotal evidence available to me, is that when children are in a non-pressured reading-rich environment they will naturally pick up reading skills or ask for help in figuring it out when they are ready, and that this often happens gradually enough (because in a word-rich environment the clues are all around them constantly) as to be imperceptible. My son learned to read by playing video games (matching words to context.) We never did any instruction and he never asked any questions. One day when he was almost nine years old, he read something out loud to me, fluently, and that's how I knew that he could read. He's never been aware of himself as being "not a reader" because we never called attention to it. He's not interested in literature at all so is "not a reader" in that sense; that's okay. It's more than okay, it's the way it should be. He's a computer and math and science guy. He asks me to buy him science magazines that have articles about things like the origin of the universe. He's eleven years old.

With my other son, our oldest child, we tried to teach him to read when he was six. He clearly wasn't ready as it was frustrating to him, which made him angry and resistant. We apologized and told him the problem wasn't him, it was us, and that we understood now that we did the wrong thing, and that it wasn't the right time or method for him. What would have happened if he were in a program in which it was considered crucial that we keep pushing it until he got it? The same thing that happens to lots of kids: they develop a perception of themselves as slow, poor learners, not smart (because everyone else -- seemingly -- can do it.) Or, limp through the early grades, falling more and more behind, until age eight or nine, when they have fallen so far behind that it all falls apart. (This is, I have read, the most common age at which children are diagnosed with learning disabilities and attention deficit disorder.) None of that happened to my son, because he was in a very different environment: supportive but non-pressuring. He was a fluent reader, seemingly suddenly, at age 10. At age 8 he was struggling to read Dr. Seuss; at age 9 he was struggling through adult-level science fiction, a few pages every few months; at age 10 he whizzed the entire Harry Potter series in six weeks; at age 12 he is rarely without a book. Nobody has to say, "Okay, you need to read a book once a month for your betterment." He is the one bugging me to take him to the library. He reads himself to sleep, and is working on writing two books of his own. Of all of the children I know of who have been allowed to learn in this way, there have been no failures, and all of the stories resemble those of ours.

Okay, but what about all the little details? What about learning to diagram a sentence and rules of punctuation? What about times tables, etc.? Well, these sorts of things may be useful (usually marginal so, not at all justifying the intense importance placed on them in school,) but can be learned better in other ways. When they're learned by rote, outside of meaningful context (i.e. useful now,) they're mostly useless because the information has no current practical use and so the brain has no reason to make it "stick".

And these things do come up. Story problems, for instance: We are driving down the road, and our destination is far away. The kids have already asked what the signs with the numbers mean. Now they want to know how long until we get there. Put those two things together, and you've got a story problem with a real application (i.e. not just academic.) This is cool and interesting and useful for them in a way that a problem in a textbook could never be, and because this real-world usefulness is their first exposure to it, they have no reason to resist it as "just more school work" (which we all know is not fun.)

Another example: my son is a story-teller, and wants to save those stories, for which writing is obviously a useful tool. Because he is a story-teller, he also enjoys reading stories, and reads them every chance he gets. From that he picks up on all the possible elements of style. He doesn't memorize them consciously, but he is aware of them, and remembers, when he sits down to write out his own story, that they are something one can use to convey meaning. As he's working, he checks back to some previously-seen source, to search out what's appropriate or what works; or he asks someone.

Another example: the kids are singing "Mr. Roboto", which they've heard, I believe, on the video game Rock Band. They don't know the words so I offer them (having grown up in the '80s they are burned into my brain) and in response to questions tell them that they are Japanese words and what they mean. The word "Japanese" triggers in their minds that I had once told them what the Japanized version of "McDonald's" is (hard to spell out, but something close to "makadonanodo".) Now they want to know why they say it that way and I explained that in the Japanese language syllables generally have one consonant and one vowel, so that vowels are between consonants. Now they want to know what vowels and consonants are, and we spend some time experimenting with what the tongue does in relation to the mouth when we make different sounds. None of this is prompted by me (except the initial sharing of trivia) or presented in the form of a "lesson".

These sorts of things happen all the time. They are happening to schooled kids all the time, to all of us all the time. It just doesn't occur to us to regard it as real learning because we've been conditioned to think of textbooks and assignments and tests and bells and classrooms and professional teachers as "real learning". Once you see, though, that real learning happens most wonderfully and continually just in the course of living one's life, it becomes apparent that the schooly additions are ridiculously (and sometimes painfully) superfluous.

Some people like that stuff. That's okay. A thing doesn't have to be necessary or efficient for it to have value or be enjoyed. It's the notion that these things are necessary and important that is so flawed, the assumption that if it doesn't work for someone that something is wrong with them or that they are lazy and just need to work harder. Nothing could be further from the truth.

2010-01-22T21:46:00.000-08:00

Dream:

River, narrow but deep, clear blue water, the current moving me. I am carrying something, a small highly conscious being, like a small child but more the size of a tiny monkey, that I have saved, or rather it has saved itself by attaching itself to me. Before, I was watching the being save itself by grabbing onto this human, now I am this human.

We are being followed, by people who do not mean us well. On our left is a high bank of smooth rock with round outcroppings but most of these are impossible to get a hold on. But I know where I can get up and I climb easily. I have no fear of the pursuers.

Now I am searching for a place to hide. They are coming. My people are gone, captured or escaped, I don't know which. I will it to appear, this scoop in the rock where I fit my body and that of the being. I fear for a moment that it won't be quiet enough, but it understands when I put my finger to my lips. I have glimpses of the intruders, but they do not see us. I feel safe here but know I cannot leave. I know they will post a lookout for some time, to wait for me to appear. We stay there, drinking water from my flask, for many days.

They are here again. I see them coming, barely in time for me to squeeze under a wooden platform, soft dirt beneath me. It is not a very good hiding place. Strangely, they have children with them, and one of them comes to play. The children are not my enemy. She looks under the platform, sees me, and I whisper urgently that she must not let them know that I am here. She agrees. She is not afraid of me. But then another child comes and sees me and calls to them. I leap out and run into the forest. I am too fast for them, and I know the forest better. They do not follow for long.

*

This is an odd dream for me, a new type. I have had many dreams of needing to escape the bad guys, but they are always in my house and the bad guys are real villains, trying to hurt me and my children, and I always feel a great deal of fear and like they are just on the verge of getting us. This dream was substantially different in that my pursuers weren't necessarily bad people but it was somehow their job or duty to find me and curtail my freedom. I also had a lot of power in this dream to evade them, and I felt powerful in general. It was also in a natural setting, which is unusual for me in itself.

2010-01-13T17:21:00.000-08:00

I've been thumbing through And the skylark sings with me by David Albert. Yes to this:

Where we differ from some homeschooling families is that their main objectives appear to be to protect their children by narrowing the range of available experience. As parents, we too strive to protect our children, but frankly we never apprehended the school system as a threat to our children's innocence or understanding. If anything, we perceive the range of educational experience offered by schools -- starting with the segregation of children into age-bound classes -- as far, far too narrow.

And this:

Our vision of the perfect learning environment is a library, but like none we have ever encountered. The library would have books and videos and tapes and computer linkups, but that would be just the beginning. [...] There would be a vast exchange of skills, from basic mathematics to auton mechanics. There would be lending libraries of tools and materials, from carpenters' saws and hammers, to biologists' microscopes, to astronomers' telescopes. [...] There would be large gardens and orchards, staffed by botanists and farmers, where students could learn to grow fruits and vegetables, and home economists who could teach their preparation and storage. There would be apprenticeships for virtually every kind of employment the community requires.

Now that is something I would be happy to put my tax dollars toward. That is something useful: and what it is, simply, is opportunity. Rote learning of subject matter uninteresting and not relevant to the learner is not opportunity, it is a waste of time and resources, a monstrous one when it goes on year after year after year.

I disagree with him, however, when he says, "[...]all users, both children and adults, would be required to contribute time (not just tax dollars) to the library's success." That is where it would fail. Because once something becomes a duty, even more so if it's mandatory, an entirely different energy gets brought to it; it loses its vitality, its goodness, its truthfulness. I'm guessing it would not be unlike... school.

Last night I was at a gathering of unschoolers, and a young girl related to us how much she's always enjoyed writing, that it's easy for her and she's good at it. She said that the words just fly out of her. But recently she's been taking classes, to work toward her dream of a certain vocation that requires certification and therefore degrees, and in one of these classes she is being given writing assignments. She related, the dismay plain on her face, how suddenly writing had become unpleasant, difficult, and worst of all inauthentic.

Who hasn't had that experience? That something, good for its own sake, was robbed of its integrity just because somebody said, "you have to"?

the school of hard knocks

2010-01-13T07:58:00.000-08:00

My son just had a birthday. Because his birthday is so close to the winter holidays, we've tended to make a fuss about it in the past. Last year, for example, we celebrated three different times, with different groups of people, by his choice. This year I was privately thrilled and relieved that he decided to just have one friend over to play on his birthday, because I have terrible anxiety of being the party planner, having to do with fear of unpopularity and fear of nobody having fun and holding me responsible. It goes back to all sorts of sad events in school that culminated in me having extreme social anxiety that I could deal with only by retreating into myself and not adding to the conversation until I had assessed the situation thoroughly to see what was required, and then waiting to be invited in. I still do it, now automatically. It works in that it protects me to some degree, but it also makes people uncomfortable, and often I miss out on connections that I am really yearning for. So then I try to be more outgoing, but that's never worked very well either because it's not authentic and so it doesn't come off right. I'm disabled in a sense, and though it's not a life-threatening disability, it is painful.

I'm at the point now, halfway through my lifetime, where I know I have to withdraw fully from our circus culture in order to heal and maybe find my power again. This is because fear breeds fear. I can't just stop the feedback loop; I have to step outside of it. I know this with all my heart. But I'm waiting, biding my time, because the kids need me not to be withdrawing right now; they have needs that will not be served by that. It's a quandary, because even though I do my best to not burden them with my anxiety there are still unspoken effects, and I don't think they're insignificant. But I'm doing my best. I do my yoga, I do my deep-breathing, I do my affirmations, I meditate, I take long hot baths. And I keep thinking, and wondering, maybe there is another answer that I am not seeing? Maybe there is another community, changes to lifestyle, other things I can do. I think about it a lot. I want them to be safe, and grow their confidence and strength in that safety; and yet I struggle to create safety for myself.

So far, they are not like me. They enjoy being around lots of people. They don't always want to be amongst people, but they can choose not to be without feeling like there's something wrong with them. If they want to read a book rather than go to the gathering, it's not a big deal, it doesn't mean anything to them, it just is what it is. I am really hoping that for them not to be in an artificial environment for most of their waking life (where few of the inmates are not resentful or afraid or angry to have to be there) but in relaxed environments where they always have the power to make choices rather than forced to develop coping strategies, that they will never develop a feeling otherwise, if they do not need to in the most vulnerable and impressionable time of their lives. I say I'm hoping. That means that I acknowledge that there are all sorts of variables that could affect the outcome, and that I am in control of perhaps few of them. But I can help not make things worse.

There's the school of thought (an apt phrase) that it's valuable to learn coping strategies when young because we will find ourselves in hard situations as adults; the belief is that it is what being young is for, a practical hazing period. It is unbelievable how many people I come across whose primary argument for compulsory schooling is not academics or socialization but hard knocks. (Another "school of".)

I will admit there's a sort of sick logic to it. But it perpetuates exactly that which it is supposed to be armor against, because it makes people who are fearful and angry by the time they're allowed to enter the adult world, and it's been ingrained in them so thoroughly that they don't have a choice -- they have become hardened, they have become defensive, they have become actors; sometimes in subtle, little ways, sometimes in big frightening ways. I'd guess that most people aren't even aware that they are who they are because of this, and that it's not inherent to their humanity.

So, as parents, we have two basic choices. Play along, or not. Give our children over to the culture gods, or not. Train them to be tough (or, if the training backfires, weak,) or allow them to retain the soft heart that we all begin with, nurturing that through pregnancy, and babyhood, and childhood, and adolescence, and risk that their survival will be threatened by the ones who are made to be otherwise, and hope, however, that respect and care give them enough power to survive in a better way, souls not too damaged.

Although for me it is not ultimately even about winning or losing, it is about doing the right thing, and the right thing means not taking away a person's freedom and autonomy for the sake of protecting them against the future. It means not forcing them to suffer for the sake of making them stronger. That's twisted and misguided. The school of hard knocks might produce someone who is rich and powerful and long-lived; still, at the expense of peace. Or someone whose wiring has been so messed up by it that they need to take drugs just to function; also at the expense of peace. It's true, people will be mean to them. People will hurt them. People will try to take advantage of them. But that will happen anyway, with or without paying the price of lack of general well-being. What's the point of paying it, then?

2010-01-09T19:25:00.000-08:00

Two stories about Rowan:

Over Christmas she received a "craft kit" with lots of little pieces. As she started to open it up to get a closer look at everything, the person whose house we were at, and who I suspect didn't want lots of little pieces getting strewn around, said nervously, "You'd better ask your mom about that... ." Before I had a chance to reply, Rowan said blithely but reasonably, "Oh, it's my present," as if the person was simply confused as to whom the present belonged. Because why else would someone act as if another person didn't have the right to do with her gift what she wished?

*

I've been organizing. Rowan has a lot of clothing that she has grown out of or just won't wear, so I was asking her what we needed to weed out. She pointed to a couple of things that I love, and I said, "Oh, but these are so cute!" "No," she said, "they don't feel good, and besides they're too big." Cajoling, I said, "But maybe once you've grown into them you'll change your mind." She paused as if to consider whether I had a point, then said brightly, "Mama, you can have them!" She'd figured out that the issue was really that I was attached to the clothes, so clearly the solution should be that I should keep them for myself.

*

Both times her reaction delighted me. This is not the reaction of a person who has learned from past experience that she is supposed to indiscriminately regard older people as authority figures and to interpret their interactions with her as something to be defensive or annoyed about. I was delighted because I immediately had a vision of how she might have reacted instead, how I've reacted, how I've seen so many people act, and I was struck by the meaning in the difference. She is innocent of those things because her personhood has always been respected and protected. She didn't try (didn't feel the need) to fight, either time. She was simply reasonable. Such a simple, seemingly small thing. Yet it is exactly how a peaceful life is made, and what it is made up of.

2010-01-07T21:45:00.000-08:00

In no particular order, my favorite songs of 2009 (player below):

We Both Go Down Together - Colin Meloy of the Decemberists
I love depressing Irish folk music, and this has all the elements -- star-crossed lovers, suicide, and a driving repetitive beat in a minor key, topped off with Colin Meloy's lovely, strange, earnest voice.

Another Lonely Day - Ben Harper
A sweetly sad song sung in the low smooth soft buzz that is Ben Harper. sighhhh...

Everything's Just Wonderful - Lily Allen
I just love her, I love her attitude, I love her cockney accent, and man is she a great songwriter. This song sort of reminds me of when I was 25, spending my days thrift-shopping, wandering the inner city, swearing and drinking a lot, and playing pool in dives.

Island in the Sun - Weezer
Honestly, I am not sure there is anything to not love about Weezer. If you don't like them, you can just go away, because I don't want to hear it. (Very nice solo version by Rivers [here] that I think I may like even better.)

Radio Nowhere - Bruce Springsteen
I heard this first on our local college's radio station with not very good reception, and I thought, hey, these guys are trying to be like an alt Bruce Springsteen, and then, this is the sort of song Bruce ought to be doing if only he wasn't washed up in his old age, and then I heard the sax and I realized that it was Bruce. The sax I could do without, but damn, I'm impressed.

Rise - Eddie Vedder
Eddie Vedder has cool hair and a pretty amazing voice, but Pearl Jam lost me a long time ago so he kind of went off my radar. Scott introduced me to this simple, beautiful song, which he's working on learning to play himself. I'm not sure if it's the song I love so much or my husband's sweet attachment to it, but there it is.

What I've Done -- Linkin Park
This cannot be played in our house without the entire family starting to rock out together. For that reason alone, it is a gem.

Wagon Wheel - Old Crow Medicine Show
Another that Scott brought home. So adorable to hear him singing, "rock me mama like a wagon wheel, rock me any way you feel"!

Romulus - Sufjan Stevens
The perfect song to dance to while holding a four-year-old with her arms tight around your neck, as the golden late summer sun pours through the window. It's also one song where I shouldn't have looked up the lyrics, dang it. Too sad, even for me.

Go - Indigo Girls
"Did they tell you you would come undone when you tried to touch the sun? ... Raise your hands high, don't take a seat don't stand aside." My anthem for EVERYTHING.

Little Bird - The Weepies
The music is lovely, but the lyrics... ahhhhh. Speaks to everything I've been coming from and moving toward.

Californication - Red Hot Chili Peppers
Best driving song.

Three Little Birds - 13 Ghosts
Just because.

And, not on the player below because it couldn't find it, but this Decemberists cover by Sarah Jarosz is outstanding: Shankill Butchers, courtesy of My Old Kentucky Blog.

2010-01-07T08:05:00.000-08:00

The kids' talents are emerging. They all have many beautiful qualities, but some really stand out in a defining way. It's exciting to see.

Jake is a writer, a story-teller, a thinker, a creator. He is rational and conscientious. He has the ability to imagine and bring to life complex worlds.

Noah is mathematical and musical and literal. He is focused and tenacious, soft-hearted and passionate.

Willow is an artist and dramatist. These are simple words that cannot convey the immensity of her innate talent. I marvel at her energy and vision.

These things are crystal clear to me because I watch them all day long. It is something that would be impossible for an outsider to really perceive, because so much of what they are doing is internal and often only subtly expressed. There are no formal performances; the making they are busy doing is primarily not of material objects for others' consideration, but of their selves. It's why I am so averse to the idea of a government employee, an "authority" and "expert", coming in and thinking they can assess their "progress" with a glance and a "what did you learn today" and a curriculum list and a schedule of activities and grades and standardized tests. That is nonsense.

This was perhaps the last schoolish myth I had to conquer; that children are not already what they ought to be but should be made into something "more" and "better" with "enriching activities" and that this can and should be measured. First I found myself pulling back from the notion of externally imposed betterment (including that imposed by myself,) more and more over time as I discovered and felt secure in my power to allow what is about me to be, well, what I am. Then, I applied it to them; to all.

In our society allowing people to just be is widely disapproved of and in some ways forcibly thwarted, but I've found myself to be (really almost by accident) in a relatively tolerant pocket of humanity. Elsewhere I've had to fight for it; it took me three decades just to call ownership on my own life. My children, they were practically born into it. They know who they are and who they belong to, without a doubt: themselves.

2010-01-01T20:38:00.000-08:00

Willow (8), singing along with a song: "Nay, we are but men, rock!"

Rowan (5): "You said, "butt men"!"

[both dissolve in laughter]

They've never seen it, I swear! And we are not prudish in this household, nor do we model the potty humor. I'm scratching my head at the same time that I'm cracking up. :)

Hobbes explains unschooling

2009-12-31T21:27:00.000-08:00

"If nobody makes you do it, it counts as fun."

(click image to see larger)

Thank you to Mary for finding it!

2009-12-21T21:43:00.000-08:00

Before we go to sleep the girls and I often lie in bed and read and/or draw. Last night I was looking at a magazine. Willow pointed to a picture and said, "Who's that?" I said, "That's Martha Stewart." "Oh," said Willow, "is she the evil one?" Which made me laugh so hard. I am not sure where she got that, but in truth, as much as I love Martha's Good Things, she is a little scary, a little too perfect, a little too happy, a little too photoshopped, a little too everywhere in a magazine that is supposed to be about food and decorating. Willow asked if she could black out her face. I've seen her do that before to models in catalogs. If I didn't know her better I might find this disturbing, but the truth is I've never asked her why she does that. But now I just said "sure." Because something told me to go with it. So we looked at the magazine page by page, and I found it interesting that I had never before noticed that on at least every other page there is a fakey wax museum-ish face with a vacant stare and a wide fixed grin, and most of the advertisements feature women that look eerily similar in terms of hairstyle and coloring and makeup. Willow happily blacked out each face, then put an X through each advertisement. And it occurred to me suddenly, "Wow. How much nicer it is not to have those weird, alien people constantly staring at me."

I don't know what all this means, I just thought it was interesting. I'd also that day been looking at Photoshop editing videos on Youtube, following on the heels of the Ralph Lauren disaster. One professional photo editor remarked that 99.9 percent of photographs in the fashion and entertainment media are changed to make the subjects look "better" -- thinner, whiter, smoother. I have the software and I know how incredibly easy it is to do, and it's one reason I do not have fashion and entertainment magazines in my house. For a tiny minority to define what is good is offensive enough, even without the computerized improvements. But what we see in the magazines isn't available to anyone, not even the models. It is literally unattainable. That means nobody wins (except for the people making the money off of those of us who are willing to believe it.)

food; body.

2009-12-21T09:29:00.000-08:00

There are a few stories I'd like to get off my chest.

A few months ago there were two new arrivals to the children's section at our library: a librarian, a smiling, friendly woman who just happened to be very tall and unusually thin, and a book about the dangers of obesity in the featured books display, flanked by picture books about wizards and anthropomorphic animals, next to the little round tables holding bowls of crayons and pictures to color. Immediately I was conscious of my size and wondered if she was the one who put that book there, and what she was thinking about me behind her smile. We were no longer just two people, we were one bad person and one good person who means to save the other. I didn't want to be part of that dynamic, especially if she was innocent; but this suspiciousness and fear of judgment is what the learned obsession with looks, and the privilege of those deemed beautiful in our society, has wrought. I can control my behavior but not the context.

So, I took the book. I moved it to another part of the library. A few days later it was back. This time I wrote a note and put it in the "suggestions and comments" box that our library provides to its patrons. I wrote that I couldn't think of a more inappropriate book to feature in a children's library, given the epidemic of eating disorders in our society. The young children, ages four, five, six, seven, who frequent this area of the library will be hit with the insanity of food obsession and body perfection soon enough, and are probably already getting it from their families and schools. Surely there should be a safe haven from that at least here?

When I next visited the library the book was gone, and I haven't seen it again, nor the librarian.

*

My friend lives in a cul-de-sac with lots of school-age kids, and I've had the pleasure of meeting the acquaintance of several of them. One girl in particular caught my eye because she is "like me" -- somewhere back in time our ancestors must have occupied the same area of the world, perhaps the same tribe. Her young body is slim, straight, athletic -- and considerably larger than average, due to bone structure and distribution of body weight and growth pattern. She is truthfully perfect at this time in her life, a vision of health and beauty.

My friend tells me her mother is worried about the way her daughter looks, as she has reason to be in this culture, and is already starting the misguided "fat talk", a learned knee-jerk response to the fear. I am so sad for this mother, for the ignorance that may very well come to haunt her when she realizes some day the damage she has done, playing to and helping to create the very thing she fears. And I feel infinitely sadder for her daughter, who will certainly suffer damage before, if she ever, finds out the truth.

*

A year or so ago I took a woman off of my blog roll. She's an unschooler and a good writer, but her take on food issues upset me so badly that I could not bear to look her in the face, so to speak, any longer. She considers herself a "radical" unschooler, applying the principles of freedom and autonomy and self-knowledge to facets of life other than learning; except in the case of food. She does not trust that intuitive eating is real and that it works to create healthy people. And she is very afraid that her children will become fat if she doesn't control their eating. She pointed accusingly to a well-known unschooling advocate, who also advocates for intuitive eating, whose children are "fat". To her mind. Which has clearly been taken hostage by the fashion and diet industries, that wish us to believe that the thinnest 5% of the population, photoshopped on top of it, is alone representative of "normal". I felt outraged especially on behalf of the one of the children who is a girl, at having her small slim frame deemed "fat". I'd guess that she's far less at risk of being affected by such nonsense than most, given how she's been raised, but no one is totally immune. And this is, exactly, how eating disorders start. This is the kind of culture my daughters are to inherit.

2009-12-14T21:43:00.000-08:00

"I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar, it can crumble so easily but don't be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it."

2009-12-14T21:42:00.000-08:00

I have dreams often where I'm trying to escape. Sometimes from criminals in my own home with my children, but most often from law enforcement, in which case my identity changes. I have never done anything wrong, but am being sought for who I am. I always have others with me. Last night it seemed like I was dreaming about this all night. There were two of us and we were small asian children. We were escaping. It was easy, even when the pursuers were on motorcycles, and the terrain was beautiful, interesting. At one point we were on a hill overlooking the city of Corvallis, and it was lovely, vibrant, many of the buildings having red roofs like a European town. I said to my partner, come look! And this while we were being pursued, and sure enough here they came over the ridge and yet it was easy to stay ahead of them.

2009-12-07T21:40:00.000-08:00

you know what I'm going to be when I grow up?

2009-12-07T12:14:00.000-08:00

Willow: You know what I'm going to be when I grow up, mama?

me: What?

Willow: A scientist.

me: Oh? Why's that?

Willow: I've always wanted to figure out stuff.

me: Like what?

Willow: Like make a potion to make people live longer. And I want to find out mysteries, and I want to find out what things are and test things and see how they work.

2009-12-05T21:39:00.000-08:00

Last evening I was reading in an unschoolers' blog about girl cliquishness -- she said that when her girls were in a certain age range (unfortunately a pretty broad one,) in *all* the social outlets they had to deal with this and that just as often as not her own girls were the problem. She seemed to think that this is just the way it is, and this bothered me so much that I woke up this morning thinking about it. I don't like it so I don't want it to be true. I mean, there was a time when racism was the norm -- probably for most of human history in which people have had contact with groups different from them. Not so long ago in this country it was not only the norm, but it was culturally accepted. I have no doubt there were people who believed (and still believe) that it is just human nature, or has an evolutionary basis. In other words: It's just the way it is. But increasingly people are coming to understand that it is overwhelmingly a learned, social phenomenon.

If that's true about the girls (and I fear it is) it makes it very hard to accept. It seems like it would be easier if I did believe that it is something wired into them. But as it is I'm disgusted and dismayed at seeing my own daughters learn to be part of it, either as the ones doing the ostracizing or the ones being ostracized. And just to be clear, I'm not talking about thinking everyone should be friends with everyone else. Real friendship is a rare thing and can't and shouldn't be forced. And I'm not talking about accepting everyone, even if their behavior is offensive and hateful. But there's no question that the most moral and conscientious way of being around other people socially -- that is, people who are are not offensive and hateful, and regardless of how else they look or act -- is to be considerate and kind. Now, still that doesn't necessarily mean fully inclusive -- we're all naturally drawn to certain people, those we're familiar with, those we find common ground with. And some of us are shy and tend to be quiet in groups or new situations. But that's a very different thing from treating a prefectly decent person as if they're unpalatable, or invisible, or a social liability. Intelligent adults just don't do that, and if they do, *they* are the ones who are ostracized. But we have different standards for kids. "That's just the way it is."

My greatest fear is that my girls will learn to be the ones treating others callously. My second greatest fear has already come to pass -- that they will be the social outcasts. They are learning that they are second-class. That they are not as good. That they are unattractive. None of which is true -- it's all context. What makes me angry is their reaction to it -- to become desperate to be accepted by these others, to become grasping. It makes me furious to see them following someone around who is ignoring them. I want them to have more self-respect than that. They deserve better than that. I am so mad at them, for their own sake -- but is that fair? They are little girls. Is it even rational?

And then I think, well, I went through the same thing, and I turned out... okay? Picture a little girl, sweet but incredibly not socially savvy. Picture her round pasty face with small features, her black-rimmed glasses, her square body that won't fit into the cute little girl fashions. There were long periods of time when I had no friends, and it was clear that my presence was undesired, that I was deemed an untouchable, at best invisible. Do you know what that feels like? Well, don't even try to guess if you haven't been there, because I assure you the reality is worse than what you can imagine. But here I am, many years later, and I do have friends, I am comfortable in our community socially, I am in love, I have people who love me. And still, lingers, a sense that I am unlikable and unworthy, and that all people are untrustworthy. My guard is up always, and I am stingy with my affection. I will not be the one chasing after others, never again.

And that is an uneasy, mean sort of existence. It protects me but doesn't give me comfort.

I want to take them away. I do not, because I fear that not even having a chance to find that friend who loves you is worse than learning that you're lesser or better than others. And I think that I'm wrong to do so, but it seems something is lost either way.

2009-12-02T21:38:00.000-08:00

I read somewhere once about an experiment, written about from the perspective of one of the participants: a group of people had gathered together for some kind of self-improvement seminar. The facilitator gave them the opportunity to take part in an exercise in which they would first be blindfolded, then paired up arbitrarily and asked to take off their clothing and explore their partner's bodies. The person relating the story, a young man, said that what he sensed with his hands was that his partner had an incredible body -- very voluptuous with large breasts and soft skin. He said that touching her body turned him on, and that she responded in kind, and they ended up kissing passionately. After a few minutes they were asked to take off their blindfolds, and he was very surprised to find himself facing an elderly woman with sagging breasts. He found the experience enlightening.

The story had a profound effect on me when I read it, when I was also still young; suddenly I was conscious of the fact that the visual world, though undeniably prominent for most of us, is not inherently the defining source for all the other senses, and that there is a whole world of feelings that are unique to themselves and independently valid and valuable.

The sooner that is realized, certainly the less any person suffers throughout her lifetime for her particular degree of visually and mentally perceived imperfection. (And of course the subjectivity of beauty is relevant here, and also important to acknowledge and explore for the sake of pleasure and to alleviate suffering, but human subjectivity is, after all, limited to our programming and conditioning.)

As I lay in bed this morning, darkish and quiet and warm, I thought about my body and my absolute comfort in being in it and my total identification with its way of being, in terms of how it feels viscerally from the inside. And then, exploring outwardly with my fingertips, as if of an object before me, now both from inside and outside: all softness -- dry smooth papery marshmallow -- and gently sloping form, here and there a harder smoother prominence, evidence of the internal structure. My husband's shell has some similar but additional different qualities -- skin utterly smooth, as if polished, muscles firm, radiating strength.

And this, oh how I love this:

Our bodies open, as they grow older. Become less secretive. Doctors open them up, and pry here and there. The doors and windows of our souls fit more and more loosely. The vulva blossoms, a red-coral-purple flower opening. Our breasts and stomachs and buttocks spread. There’s some slack. We don’t need to hold the fiction quite so tight, that all our parts fit together. We know they don’t. We even lose some of them. Ovaries, gall-bladders, uteruses, appendixes, breasts; here and there a tooth and a toenail. Various tubes get tied and cut. Hair comes out. Scars expand. Veins reveal themselves at the surface. We get used to workarounds for the joints that don’t quite work as they’re supposed to, and the eyes that don’t quite see what they used to.

It’s just a body, she said. And that becomes clearer, all the time. It’s not a mystery, not a tightly-wrapped bud. It’s a blowsy, smelly, gone-to-seed creature, a lumbering mammal, kin to bears and orangatans.

When she was young, Martha says, she wondered how middle-aged people had sex. They couldn’t possibly be attracted to each other. So how did they go about it?

Apparently we manage. Not in spite of the spaces opening, but because of them.

I don’t really miss the tight-wrapped buds, the smooth-functioning bodies. They always pretended to be doors into other countries, and they seldom were. But these bodies, these shameless flowering temples, they really are doors.

2009-12-01T21:38:00.000-08:00

It was a good night overall -- my hips and back did not hurt, I was warm enough, I had some good dreams -- in one in particular I remember laughing and laughing with my friends and child -- and then there was this odd thing. I don't have the perception of it having been a dream, but I don't remember anything else about it so I really don't know. All I came away with was a sort of inkling, almost like a message with no messenger. And it woke me up. It was: I am going to die in May. And then on later reflection (as I got up to go to the bathroom) I thought: May 22nd.

I didn't feel any sense of foreboding or grief about this. It doesn't feel like a real thing either -- it wasn't like a Knowing. But it got me thinking: what would I do if I were to die in six months?

I would write, a lot. I would write about my memories. I would write everything that I know and think, without compulsion to look smart or marketable. I would write letters to people to let them know how much I appreciate them, the sort of thing that seems weird and socially inappropriate when you're alive. I would draw a story for my children.

So then the question is: if it is so important, why am I not doing that already?

beautiful polyhedra

2009-11-30T21:37:00.000-08:00

This site, with models made by mathematician George Hart, makes my heart beat fast.

"this is what we fought for"

2009-11-28T21:36:00.000-08:00

the dreams that came

2009-11-26T21:35:00.000-08:00

Then my heart was glad. But immediately supervened a sharp-stinging doubt.

"Father," I said, "forgive me, but how am I to know surely that this also is not a part of the lovely dream in which I am now walking with thyself?"

"Thou doubtest because thou lovest the truth. Some would willingly believe life but a phantasm, if only it might for ever afford them a world of pleasant dreams: thou art not of such! Be content for a while not to know surely. The hour will come, and that ere long, when, being true, thou shalt behold the very truth, and doubt will be for ever dead. Scarce, then, wilt thou be able to recall the features of the phantom. Thou wilt then know that which thou canst not now dream. Thou hast not yet looked the Truth in the face, hast as yet at best but seen him through a cloud. That which thou seest not, and never didst see save in a glass darkly--that which, indeed, never can be known save by its innate splendour shining straight into pure eyes--that thou canst not but doubt, and art blameless in doubting until thou seest it face to face, when thou wilt no longer be able to doubt it. But to him who has once seen even a shadow only of the truth, and, even but hoping he has seen it when it is present no longer, tries to obey it--to him the real vision, the Truth himself, will come, and depart no more, but abide with him for ever."

--George MacDonald, Lilith, chapter XLIII, The Dreams That Came

2009-11-24T21:34:00.000-08:00

2009-11-22T21:33:00.000-08:00

this is why.

2009-10-01T21:32:00.000-07:00

From "Readers Write", The Sun magazine, October 2009:

One summer afternoon, while my mother and father weeded the garden and my brothers and I played in the yard, the sky darkened without warning and released buckets of rain. My mother leapt toward the house, head tucked under her arm to keep her hair dry, but my father stopped her. She was trying to figure out why when he pulled her to him and kissed her. My brothers and I squealed with disbelief at what we were witnessing: Mom and Dad kissing right out in the front yard, in the rain!

This was when we still lived in the tiny ranch house and watched Laugh-In on our small black-and-white television; when my brothers and I would jump on our parents' bed on Saturday mornings and beg for pancakes, and our father would simply ask, "What kind?"; when he sometimes packed us in the station wagon before dawn -- my brothers and I huddled under a blanket in the back seat -- and drove us an hour to the beach to watch the sun rise.

After the kiss ended, our father took off his sneakers and socks, rolled up his trousers, and pranced around the yard. "Come on, kids!" he yelled. We couldn't get out of our shoes fast enough, racing to get in line behind our father. The four of us marched across the grass, legs and arms pumping, mud oozing between our toes. Our mother soon joined our procession, and there we all were, on a rainy summer day, my father leading us in a parade on Garfield Avenue.

We moved to a bigger house a few years later. The change in my father was so slow, it was barely perceptible. He worked more, talked less, made fewer pancakes. He asked about school and friends but didn't seem to listen to our answers. By the time I was in high school, he seemed worn down by a marriage he no longer wanted to be in. He sat in his chair after dinner, sucked the last drag from his cigarette, and rattled the ice in his drink. And when a storm came, he stayed inside and swiveled his chair so he could watch the rain through the window.

--Kristen Rademacher

"late" math acquistion and the learning disabled label

2009-09-09T15:43:00.000-07:00

She's just turned 8 and would be, I believe, in third grade if she were in school. The past few days she has exploded with questions about money, playing Pay Day and counting out coins from the money jar, in stark contrast to her previous dearth of interest save for a few times when she asked for addition problems (in a desire to be part of her brothers' games) and was entirely uncomprehending, which, if she had been in school all this time, would have been a big issue. There would have been conferences, there would have been special testing, there would have been special accommodations and pressure, and along with that lots of special worrying. We'd already learned with my oldest child what the consequences are of pushing someone to do something they are not interested in or not ready for -- they get angry, the relationship suffers for it, and they start doubting themselves. And also, that it's not necessary -- that when they are ready and interested, it comes easily and their self-confidence remains intact. And this is exactly what we're seeing with my daughter and math.

The schools are making an enormous mistake by classifying children who are "behind", i.e. not matching some arbitrary definition of "on time", as learning disabled, which is commonly defined as a brain disorder. Now, certainly brain disorders do exist, but in this case I wonder what the evidence for it is. Diagnosis does not normally come from the neurologist, it comes from a gradeschool teacher (or other childhood education "expert") who simply observes that the child does not seem able to do the work, apparently without the understanding that a child who is mentally normal may not have a particularly mathematical mind (just as there are people who are not naturally musically or artistically or verbally or physically gifted) and needs a different learning method or timing or emotional environment to acquire the basic skills, or that a child may have a mathematical mind and likewise need a different mode of acquisition and timing and emotional environment for that to manifest via performance; both of which are very different situations from having an actually abnormal brain.

2009-09-08T21:31:00.000-07:00

Everyone's in a different place in terms of their needs, desires, goals, fears, and I wonder so often if we are really that unusual in ours. I don't think we are, but I could be wrong. Granted, I'm privy to the private feelings and thoughts of very few people and see incomplete pictures of others from the discussion forums I read. I make assumptions about the rest based on what I know of our society. From my vantage point, it doesn't look like a healthy society. In some ways we are a relatively rich society, not in just material ways, but arguably intellectually and even spiritually. But almost everything, everywhere, in my eyes falls short. Maybe that's just a feature of the inherent chaos in any system made of millions of little parts for which their relating to each other is unplanned and in constant flux. Maybe it's a feature of human nature and has always been this way. But then, of course, I see what goes right and don't understand why it couldn't potentially go much righter, in general. Obviously some things are wrong, we disagree as to what they are, but not that they are. So we agree: we are rich, and there is something wrong.

Why are so many people on anti-depressants and seeing therapists? Why do so many people need to use legal and illegal substances to self-medicate? Why are there so many "addictions" people feel they have to struggle with, from TV, to porn, to food, to...? Why are so many people angry and aggressive? Why are teenagers so full of angst and so maligned? Why do so many children struggle with school? Why do so many people hate their work? Why do people hate on people walking down the street, simply for dressing a certain way or having a certain body type? Why are there so many marital problems? Why do so many women resent caring for their children? Why are we judgmental of others' situations and hardships? Why are we so stingy with our wealth? Well, and the list goes on.

So, individually, we do what we can do deal with all that unhappiness. We suppress; we control; we pretend; we follow the rules with hope that it will help. We go on vacation. We go to self-improvement seminars, read philosophy, find religion. We diet, and buy, and take classes that we hope will get us a better job. We admit it's our fault, we're weak. We blame the fascist government or the blacks, or the whites, or the Mexicans, or women, or men, or the homosexuals, or the breeders, or what-have-you.

I'm one of those people who's particularly good at pretending. The thing is, there's got to be an outlet somewhere. It's the people I love most, then, who suffer my suffering. Forget society. I don't care anymore, it can do what it likes as long as it leaves me alone. I'm concerned right now only with what I've done to my family and what I have to do to make it better. There is a right and a wrong, and every day I'm living in a way that is enabling that wrongness. I am taking responsibility for that, but I also need the right tools to work with. Sometimes, you know, we counsel people in bad relationships to just leave, because some people just don't fit each other. It's not true that anyone can make a marriage if only they just work hard enough at it. Sometimes we mistake a square peg person for a round peg person, when we have a round hole person to fit it into. This is like that, only the relationship is between us and everything we've accepted as a framework for our life: the marriage, the house, the job, the car, the vacation, the television, the consumption. Oh, the sheer consumption.

Every once in a while I come across a person who seems okay. Really, truly, okay. Not manic, not depressed, not angry, not sarcastic, not anxious, not worried, not in a hurry. They seem a little odd, too, because happiness is something that people in our culture (I specify because I honestly don't know about other cultures) are really not familiar with. I wouldn't mind being that kind of odd. It's really the only thing that I do want anymore. And these people, they have all whittled down their lives. They figured out what was unnecessarily weighing them down, and they threw it out.

So, here is the story. The man, who was playing the traditional role of leaving his family and real life every day too early in the morning to have his work dictated by others with more power than he, was angry and with no more patience. The woman, who was playing the traditional role of keeping the house and the kitchen and the children, was resentful, and guilty and depressed besides, and scared as well. Despite their full bellies and pretty house and lots of machinery, she saw how they were falling apart and she tried to fix it but failed continually. She remembered vaguely a time when it wasn't so hard and knew exactly why that was. She had glimpses, searingly beautiful, of peace and contentment. She believed in God, or meaning (and perhaps they are the same thing,) then. It was absent otherwise.

She got angry in a desperate sort of way, and started saying 'no'. She said it to the people who wanted her to prostrate herself before men in white coats and to put her baby down and walk away. She said it to the institutions, big and small, to all those mandates of education and career and body image and parenting. She wasn't ungrateful for her privileges, and didn't do it just to be ornery or different. It was survival. (A different kind than physical, obviously.)

Still, there came a time when everything was turning sour. She was hurting and more scared than ever. And she said, "I want you to quit your job." And he immediately softened and shone brighter and she knew she'd hit on something key, this was fundamental, maybe more so than any of the other 'no's had been. He said "what will we do?" (He meant: how will we survive?) And she said, "sell the house and get a bus." (She meant: do whatever it takes to live wholly within our means and be and work together.)

*

I'm not sure why people think it's so crazy. We can do it, financially speaking, and we want to; and life is short. God, how am I feeling that, being now halfway through life. When I think about it I start to feel panicky; I have lost so much time to all this nonsense, when it wasn't at all necessary, and while I sit here brooding about it, every new moment is slipping away. I don't see how we could not do it, at this point. Staying would be madness.

My mom told me that I am brave. She's said that all along, to every non-conventional thing I do. I can't say this vehemently enough, but it's not true. Oh sure, there's a little fear involved in bucking the system, and hurt in the disapproval, but that is nothing compared to the internal discord that I feel when I just go along with the plan that's been set up for me since birth and which isn't working.

2009-08-28T21:31:00.000-07:00

I just realized something. The happier I am with what I am doing with my own life, the less I worry about what the kids are choosing to do with their lives. I've been inappropriately targeting them when the issue was me.

I wonder if all the worry and all the control we try to put on children and others is based entirely in our own fears and feelings of inadequacies -- itself a result of having worry and control put on us. Similar to how the abused often become abusers. If we could just be left alone to pursue what we care about, what we love, what we feel compelled by, without any judgment as to what is talent, how much income is praise-worthy, what is statistically safe, what is fashionable, what is impressive... would we have a basic culture of well-being?

So smart we think we are as a society, we highly evolved animals. And yet I'm hard pressed to think of anyone I know that really feels at peace.

2009-08-12T21:29:00.000-07:00

The time cannot come soon enough for him to quit his job. It was at one time something he was happy to be doing -- important work for people in real need, and he liked the people he worked with well enough, in some cases quite a bit. In the mornings I am pretty sure he didn't mind too much zipping off in his little Karmann Ghia to get his morning jug of coffee at the local cafe, when I clearly did not have a moment's rest from the demands of small humans, struggling to make peace with the work that I had the luxury (in this culture) of choosing. He'd rather have been home with us, but still he liked his work well enough and would come home with stories of the people he'd helped that day, sometimes bearing gifts from them. That was gratifying. But then things started deteriorating. Management started making decisions from on high that did not even attempt to take into account the well-being of the employees. People making more money than he were doing stupid, wasteful things with no repercussions. A contract was proposed with no cost-of-living increases for a long period of time, and when it was voted down rumors started of the angered overloads threatening to fire everyone and contract everything out. This is in a non-profit, mind you, which is supposed to be about people, who are already making salaries that put them close to the federal poverty line. And the final and worst injustice perhaps: when competence, experience, and seniority is flouted for a whim. Oh, I'm sure management has their own side of the story and perhaps it's not their fault -- it's true that human beings in general aren't capable of handling power decently. It gives them funny ideas and feelings that pit them against the people they're entrusted with governing. It's incredibly difficult for fairness to exist under those conditions. It has to be forced, or it just doesn't happen.

My dad's union became one of the most powerful in existence. The type of people that do his job tend to be really, really tough people that you don't want to try to take advantage of because they just might hurt you really badly if you do. They were able to make it happen, I'm sure, because they were constitutionally meaner than the management. And getting what they deserved did not make that business fail. In fact it continued to boom. But they wouldn't have gotten anything if they hadn't fought hard for it.

This union isn't like that. I'm sure some people are apathetic, and others are scared. Some feel we should be grateful for what we're given. That's hard for me to understand. No one asks to be born in a place and time where the hierarchical dog-eat-dog system of business is ubiquitous. Honest work isn't the same thing as acceptance of charity. To frame it that way is just another way to manipulate people into believing they are miserable failures who don't deserve to be treated decently. And then there's the notion that you have to work to change things you don't like, or you shouldn't complain. In abstract, that sounds reasonable. But we're not interested in starting a business, that's not where our hearts and talents lie. And it doesn't matter -- regardless of what we're doing, it doesn't change what they're doing, and what they're choosing to do isn't right. I am not going to be bullied by aspersions cast against my own supposed character -- that's irrelevant -- into saying nothing about that.

But all this bullshit is killing us. He is even one of the most mellow, unaffected people I've ever met, but he's coming home quiet and serious and withdrawn, smoldering. Meanwhile, I currently have it relatively easy -- no babies, no whacky hormones, even the sibling bickering is at an all time low. We could be having a lot of fun, but we can't because he's not in it with us. The difference between his world and ours is gut-wrenching. It is not sustainable for there to be this difference. I'm very afraid of what it will do to us, if we stay here.

Again, there are the moralizing voices: You don't know how good you've got it, in this economy no less. You're spoiled. There was a time when people would feel grateful to have what you have, and they would be happy about it, thrilled. It's all what you make of it.

But I'm not falling for that anymore. Those voices are delusional. If I'm dying of dehydration, I will be grateful for a cup of murky, stale water. But here I am surrounded by fresh-water lakes -- albeit with possibly imaginary monsters lurking in the depths, and certainly reachable only with courage and some sacrifice, yet fresh nonetheless -- and you are telling me I should be happy to stay with this dirty cup?

I don't think so.

on schooliness: arbitrary challenges

2009-08-07T13:53:00.000-07:00

Last night we found an odd looking insect in our bathtub, so I captured it in a jar. It had the backwards-bend legs of a grasshopper so I searched google images for that first, then saw that crickets are related so I did another search and found that what we most likely had here was a bush cricket. It has a curved stinger-like thing coming out of the back of its abdomen, which makes it look scary. The kids really wanted to know what this was, so next I googled "cricket body parts". This gave me mostly irrelevant links, with the only actual diagram I could find coming from a site called "Enchanted Learning". It's the sort of thing that is typical as an assignment in grade school, with a line drawing and places for labels and arrows pointing to body parts, with the terms and definitions listed below; you have to read all the definitions then figure out how to label the drawing.

I was immediately annoyed -- I just want to know what the thing is, it's simple enough for them to just label the damn thing, what is the point of putting this extra step into it? But, whatever. I start reading through the definitions and pairing them up with the arrows on the drawing. I'm not familiar with the terms at all, so I start at the beginning of the list. It takes me a bit to figure out what the arrows actually mean -- for instance, the label-line underneath the entire back part could be referring to the abdomen, but seems to include the legs and things sticking out of it, so I wonder if the arrows actually on the abdomen refer to the abdomen and the other line to something else? I'm going back and forth trying to guess what the diagram maker wants me to do. My mind does like to compartmentalize things and do things in order, and I am annoyed that this is not very straightforward.

So I change my strategy and just look through the list for something that might be in the area of the stinger-thing. I see then however that the hind leg appears to have two places for labels, and there is not one for the stinger-like thing, and I am again going back and forth between the picture and definitions trying to figure this out. Now my irritation is starting to feel more like rage, as I didn't want an assignment in the first place and I resent having to jump through this hoop to get the information I want, especially when, in my opinion, it has not been laid out very thoughtfully.

That's when I just said "screw it" and went back and searched for "cricket anatomy" which gave me more useful results. I found very quickly that the stinger-thing is an ovipositor, the female's reproductive organ. Then I went back to the original diagram to see if it now would make more sense to me, which it did immediately. Oh, I thought, I mistook the shaft of the arrow as part of the drawing, and the label line that was on the lower part of the leg was supposed to be for the ovipositor.

This is the sort of thing that is wrong with schooling (besides which, I didn't see anything particular "enchanting" about it. I certainly wasn't enchanted.) My brain, a fairly intelligent one for what it's worth, wasn't seeing what they thought they were showing me; even it had, it was still a superfluous process to have to go through. Now, I know someone out there is going to say, "But you found a way to work around a difficulty, to persevere to figure out something that appeared nonsensical!" (Although it could be argued that I cheated -- and yes, in school finding a labeled diagram would be considered "cheating" in this case.) But I won't argue with that; what I want to know is what good did it do me? "Why, it's good for your brain, it's a way to exercise it!"

And there you have it: what school is about, for the most part, is artificially creating challenges for the sake of "exercising the brain." As if there aren't enough real, relevant challenges in the world. Not that there's anything wrong with an artificially created challenge in itself-- I enjoy them from time to time, but the difference is that it's for the sake of my enjoyment and my desire for a challenge. That makes sense. What doesn't make sense is for someone else to say, when I ask a straight-forward question, "Oh, I'm sorry, I can't tell you that because it's more important that you exercise your brain right now!"

In the same way, it annoys me greatly when a child asks, "What is this word?" and is told to figure it out by sounding it out for themselves or looking it up in the dictionary. I understand that the teacher thinks they are doing the child a favor by making them work for it; it somehow magically makes them a better and smarter person. However, for some reason this applies only to children. If my husband asks me how to spell a word I don't tell him to go look it up; that would be rude, and beside that it is a completely unnecessary and inconvenient thing to do when I can simply tell him instead. Neither of us believes that he'd become better and smarter if I decline to answer.

peace

2009-08-06T17:49:00.000-07:00

I have no simple words to describe how I've been feeling. The closest I can come is an extended meditation state. It is a serious feeling but not melancholy. I feel compelled to be still and hushed and intent, like when you suddenly spy a colorful bird close to you and want to watch for a while and not scare it away. It's been this way for a while and I'm not sure what to make of it other than it feels like a transitional thing, a little limbo-esque; something else is coming.

Recently we were in eastern Oregon. It was an enormous disaster of a trip in one way, but there were also surprises. The feeling didn't start there, but it accelerated its growth.

The drive took about eight hours each way because we made so many stops. It takes five hours if driven straight through without stopping, which is for me still a long time to be in a car. I'm not a good traveler normally, and it seems to me now that it is because I am always so focused on the destination that the time spent getting there is valueless and therefore a burden.

I drove there, and Scott drove back. It didn't make any difference, I was so inside the moment it never felt too long, it just was. I couldn't stop looking everywhere, the changing vegetation and feel of the air from moist, dark, green to dry, bright, vivid blue. I started to resent the neat, brilliant green patches of irrigated fields we'd see occasionally, feeling offended on behalf of the land.

I had a dream once that I'd made a home in the desert and it felt like a sacred place, a wholly right place. I considered that it could be metaphorical -- after all, everyone knows the desert is an awful place to live -- but I've always felt doubtful about that. It seemed so true.

The inhabited areas we passed through were not pleasant. Dairy Queen, Thriftway, Les Schwab, cowboys and farmers. But we'd drive out a ways, and there would be the great, sensuous, bare rolling hills, and the streams not too cold to swim in, and the cottonwoods shimmering in the breeze. And no people, save for my family.

I felt so incredibly at peace. That's all I have. That's all I think there will be from me, for a while. Either being there or working toward trying to get back there.

Sufjan Stevens - Romulus via indie muse

when I was little I would bang

2009-07-22T15:46:00.000-07:00

Eric Nagler, from Making Music With Eric:

When I was very little I would bang on the piano. My mother would say, "Eric please. That is a delicate instrument." My father would say, "Stop that Racket!"

So I would wait until my parents went to work and then I would bang on the piano. My grandmother would say, "Eric, play `The Tennessee Waltz'. It's my favourite song." I would bang a little slower. "That's beautiful," my grandmother would say.

When I got a little older I would ask my grandmother to hum it so I could pick out the notes, and soon I actually learned the melody of `The Tennessee Waltz'.

One day my mother heard me. "Eric, you have a natural talent," she said. "That boy needs lessons," said my father. "Someday he'll thank me."

I didn't want lessons. My friend Glenna took lessons and had to stay in while the rest of us were playing on the street . "Just take lessons for three months," said my mother, and then if you don't like them you can stop."

So I took lessons for three months. The teacher would play the song and show me the notes, which I wouldn't read. Instead I learned by listening to the teacher play, the way I used to listen to my grandmother.

"Don't look at your hands," the teacher would say. "Look at the notes." So I learned to play the songs without looking at my hands but I wasn't reading. After a while the music got too long for me to remember by ear, but I still couldn't read the notes, so things got very difficult. Luckily, three months was up and I quit.

"I didn't think you'd remember about the three months." said my mother. "I counted the days," I said.

When I got older I met a boy who played the saxophone. He showed me how to play `The Tennessee Waltz'. That Evening at dinner I asked for a saxophone. My parents looked at each other, then at me. My mother said, "The saxophone is not a valid instrument." My father said,

"Learn the clarinet instead. Someday you'll thank me."

The next day my father brought home a clarinet, and my mother brought home a teacher from the symphony orchestra. "Read the notes," said the teacher. "That note is flat. Bite harder. That note is sharp. Bite softer." I did not like to read notes. I did not like to bite harder and softer, and I did not like Brahms. I quit.

When I got older I was at a party and somebody played a Charlie Mingus record. I fell in love with the bass. The next evening I asked for a bass. "I want to play `The Haitian Fight Song' like Charlie Mingus," I said. My father and mother looked at each other, and then at me. "The bass is very limiting," said my mother. "The notes are all too low."

"Take up the cello,"said my father. "Someday you'll thank me."

The next day after school I didn't go home right away. I sat by myself for a while in some bushes in a vacant lot around the block. I got home late for dinner and there was a cello standing in the corner of the dining room which my father had borrowed from his school. But since they were angry at me for being late they forgot to talk about the cello, and the next day my father took it back to school.

One day when I was 14 I was up in my room, supposedly doing my homework. I heard a strange sound coming from the living room. I threw down my comic book and ran downstairs. It was a friend of my older brother playing the banjo. The moment I heard it my heart opened up and the banjo music jumped right inside. That night at dinner I didn't say anything.

The next day I got an old broken-down banjo from my brother's friend. Then I got on my bike and visited my grandmother, who gave me $20 to help buy a banjo skin and some strings. I used a wooden Venetian blind slat for a fingerboard, and some screws to fix the pegs. Every day I would come home from school and play the banjo.

When my mother would come home from work she would say, "I've had a very difficult day, dear." My father would say, "Stop that racket."

I would retreat to my room and play as quietly as I could, but banjoes are loud. My parents would yell at me from downstairs. "Stop that racket." I would go up to the furthest room in the attic, stuff an old pair of socks in my banjo, and play for hours.

Eventually my parents finished the basement in knotty pine, moved the old sofa and T.V. down there, and for three years while I learned the banjo there was a sort of no-man's-land on the first and second floor of the house. Occasionally I would meet my parents on the stairs and they would ask me how my school work was coming. "Fine," I would say.

But my school work was not exactly fine. My heart was too filled with banjo music for me to concentrate very well on biology. And even though I promised my parents I would try, I never did become a doctor. Instead, when I grew up I became a banjo player and made many people happy. My parents were very proud.

"That's my boy!" said my father.

"I always said he had a natural talent," said my mother.

to be alive

2009-06-02T17:48:00.000-07:00

From SARK's The Bodacious Book of Succulence:

When considering choices in your life, the "most alive choice" feels like a bit of a risk, makes you giggle, or makes the hairs at the back of your neck stand up. It can be a simple and tiny shift, such as taking a new route. Or as large as moving your whole life somewhere you haven't lived before.

We are consistently presented with choices. Often, our inner critics run the whole show, and we use a lot of language with these words:

have to

should

I'd better

or else

(these can be bullies of the language world)

Sometimes we have to wonder who is making our life choices! We might stumble from one obligation to another, lost in a series of have-tos. People buy wedding gifts they don't want to buy, attend birthday parties out of guilt or fear, spend time with people they don't even enjoy, or push their children into unwanted activities. (And then we all get crabby!)

I remember moving succulently as a young girl in Minnesota, from bike flung to the ground, to deep lawn, to creek bulging with turtles, to eating rhubarb for breakfast and fat, vine-grown tomatoes for lunch. The most alive choice was a natural step -- one to another.

I think that as adults we become rigidified, encrusted with grudges, wounds, and protective devices that don't work anyway. We walk carefully along, checking our purses, pockets, and car keys. Gone are our bamboo walking sticks and flags for countries that we've made up. I think those things are only gone because we've stopped calling them. We've stopped counting fireflies at dusk, standing naked in the rain, fingerpainting with our feet and stuffing a bag full of costumes and making our "poet's corner" in the backyard, with lanterns and tents made out of chenille bedspreads.

We deserve to be the caretakers for our spirits and dreams, and this means truly sensing and listening for our most alive route. It may not be a common path, or a popular one, yet it will be clearly ours.

2009-04-07T17:48:00.000-07:00

I have this feeling like the decades of my life have roughly corresponded to... paradigmatic modes, I guess. How I regarded the world and myself, how it felt to me, what I was, what I was becoming. So I've been fully expecting my 40s to be something different. And I feel that happening, that becoming, in fact now that I am in it I realize that I had predicted it, not in a magical way, but because I recognized something about myself that could logically progress only in a certain way.

To be here looks different from what I saw from the outside of other people here. I'm not even sure now that I'm in the same place. Is it all my own, or do others share it with me? I don't really know.

The landscape is changing. I'm aware of things I wasn't before.

I keep thinking of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. How could anyone think of that as anything but an allegory? It's so obvious. Maybe not as a child, but now, as an adult, that is the path that I choose to be on. I don't like it sometimes. But I want to know anyway. Because not knowing, and this is what the story doesn't tell you, not knowing doesn't mean that you don't commit evil. It means you don't understand it and so cannot challenge it.

When I was a child, opportunities to be unhappy were so much fewer. I was fed and clothed and had time to myself, and that was a kind of Eden. I didn't know about corruption and greed and the damage it does. I knew about barbies and swings and irises and earth and rain and tricycles and climbing and my front steps.

Now I am angry and hard a lot of the time. I am driving down the road, and here is my internal litany: That girl is a bully and her parents are clueless or don't care, I don't know which but I hold them in disdain anyway. Finally spring is here, warm enough to open my windows and smell the trees, and people are burning, filling the air with acrid smoke. The sky could be blue, but it is hazy. My hair will no longer be pretty for me, my face is red, my nose is big. Vanity. Patriarchy, patriarchy, patriarchy. Consumerism and waste. Ignorance. Doctors who have the power to control your access to medicine, who have the power to report you. Dentists who do shoddy work and charge too much, all you have, and what then? Stupid electronics that are not made with any degree of thoughtfulness. Planned obsolescence. I hate current styles, these expensive ugly clothes. The Goodwill charges too much, those bastards, and now I hear they are burning toys because they can no longer sell them under the lead law. Oh, the arrogance! of those who think they are fashionably thin or healthy or rich all because of their own inherent strength and goodness. My children refuse to be independent and self-sufficient on the level I want them to be so I can get on with my things, and I lash out, I am tense and impatient and rushing and critical and just in general a terrible parent. I don't have time to write, time to allow the right mental space to exist, for the words to flow as they should, as I deserve, as I am meant to do.

What would happen if I let go of that, what would I lose? I tell myself that I would lose nothing that is valuable to be -- it's not going to change things for me to be so angry, and I cannot change those things anyway, so why focus on them? And yet, it seems like an outrage, a wrongness, that I should not rage against them. But I think this is a lie, so I try and try and for a moment at a time there is no hard heart, there is only the joy of children and the scent of spring blossoms and mown grass, and the landscape on either side of me is transformed into simplicity, is-ness, not just the landscape but the shape of my mind in response to the world. I'm in a dream of loveliness. I remember feeling this way. It was exactly like this. I want to stay there, I don't think I should, that's not what responsibility looks like to me, but I will if I can, and I will my mind to stay there but then someone cuts me off on the road and it's gone and I am fuming again.

What I think is that I don't belong in this world. Or, rather, I do, but not in this society, this culture. It's ugly to me, and hostile. I retreat. More than that, I quit. I would love to say that. I QUIT! But I can't, not yet anyway.

Yesterday I did a lot of things, only a few of which I think were really worthwhile. I loved my daughter, who I have a difficult relationship with because she is my opposite in every way. I watched Mario hacks with my sons and understood and shared in their enjoyment of it. I ate chocolate cake with buttercream frosing with my friend, which we made together. I also ate my new favorite ice cream. I washed and fixed my husband's bed linens and swept his room. (This is not my job. It feels to me like choosing to take care of him, as he chooses to take care of me. I don't always feel this way about my work, which is why it was worthwhile.) I drank a half a glass of wine in the afternoon. I obliged my friend her magic in dosing me with Bach flower remedies and the Victorian charm of their claims. (I am Water Violet and Beech. )

I finished Doris Lessing's book The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five. [ETA: Link removed because the only reviews I can find I feel miss the mark entirely about the point of the book.] Now I want to read everything else she's ever written. In thinking of what I would say to people to convey to them that this was an important thing for me to read, something I was already thinking of as having a permanent spot on my bookshelf with only a few dozen other books, I could come up with nothing satisfactory. My inability to explain why this book touched me reminded me of C.S. Lewis's words: "The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. [...] For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited...."

I thought about writing a letter to Doris Lessing, and about what I would say about who I am that would explain what this book was to me. And that started off all the introspection that you read about in the beginning, which I am never very far from.

where I'm from

2009-03-07T17:47:00.000-08:00

I am from polyester, from Velveeta and magic markers.

I am from the old blue turn-of-the-century house with the stone stairs, avocado shag carpeting, tugboats lowing, and rain drumming on trash cans.

I am from bearded irises, wet green moss, crimson japanese maple, crumbling pavement, fog.

I am from wedding showers and packrats and collections, from Little and Big Grandma, from the Klingsporns and the Gays and the Valentines.

I am from the taciturn. I am from alcoholism.

From "Oh, Linda," and "just eat a few," and mostly, saying nothing at all.

I am from the Catholics "who just want your money," and from Edgar Cayce and Shirley Maclaine and the ouija board and seances.

I'm from Bess Kaiser Hospital, from German and Scotch-Irish, from goulash and gravy and soft peanut butter cookies marked with the tines of a fork.

From the Marlon Brando-esque longshoreman who wore the nickname 'Psycho' with pride, and the explosion of cancer in the brain of a beloved matriarch stealing sharpness and strength and grace, and 'Ma' of the wispy white hair and the perpetual bra-strap sliding down the arm, published writer of pulp romance.

I am from black gummed paper triangles, graytone photographs with deckled white borders, magazine clippings stuck with rubber cement to construction paper scrapbooks, silver lockets with small round pictures tucked inside, and costume jewelry in pink foam egg cartons.

~~~

A mad libs type-meme, first from Diana, and then from here.

sarah buckley

2009-02-16T22:27:00.000-08:00

Dr. Sarah Buckley is one of my favorite writers and birth researchers. She is a phenomenal speaker, verbally gifted and intellectual.

She wrote of her unassisted birth (after three attended homebirths) that she has “felt the awakening power of birth -- more potent for me than any spiritual or shamanic practice” and that it “has taught me, on a cellular level, that birth is about love and ecstasy.”

From her article Ecstatic Birth: The Hormonal Blueprint of Labor,

Undisturbed birth is exceedingly rare in our culture, even in birth centers and homebirths. Two factors that disturb birth in all mammals are firstly being in an unfamiliar place and secondly the presence of an observer. Feelings of safety and privacy thus seem to be fundamental. Yet the entire system of Western obstetrics is devoted to observation of pregnant and birthing women, by both people and machines; when birth isn't going smoothly, obstetricians respond with yet more intense observation. It is indeed amazing that any woman can give birth under such conditions. Some writers have observed that, for a woman, having a baby has a lot of parallels with making a baby: same hormones, same parts of the body, same sounds, and the same needs for feelings of safety and privacy. How would it be to attempt to make love in the conditions under which we expect women to give birth?

Michel Odent wrote of her, "Sarah Buckley is precious, because she is bilingual. She can speak the language of a mother who gave birth to her four children at home. She can also speak like a medical doctor. By intermingling the language of the heart and the scientific language she is driving the history of childbirth towards a radical and inspiring new direction."

when he was born

2009-01-10T22:41:00.000-08:00

About twelve hours into a thirteen-hour labor, it was 2:30 in the afternoon and raining outside. There was a woman sitting in the corner of the room wearing matching lavender no-nonsense sweatshirt and sweatpants, and a small, elven-like woman with dreadlocks. There was no sound except for me moaning and growling and swearing and yelling. Scott was with me which I was glad for, but I couldn't feel the comfort of his arms, maybe because he couldn't muster up that comforting energy while we were being watched. There could be no intimacy between us then, which I regret. He was a helper only. Putting pressure on my back, lifting me when the woman in purple sweats said to.

When I became by turns especially loud and dead silent, the woman in purple sweats (her name was Joni) said the baby was coming. She told Scott to watch my back, watch the bones move. There are sensitive sacral nerves there, there was also a long-ago back injury and congenital hip abnormality. It hurt so badly for the baby to move such a small distance, just to clear my sacrum. The other pains were comparatively insignificant. We waited, we had agreed to wait, for my body to move the baby down according to its own perfectly timed hormonal choreography so the tissues would be fully softened and stretched, so there would be no trauma. There was no counting, no voluntary bearing down, no exhortations to breathe or to not breathe or to push against someone's hand or to not push or to pretend I was having a bowel movement or to feel my baby's head. Stay out of it, I had informed the midwife during the prenatals. Now I groaned, Help, help me, and then in a moment of lucidity fixed her in the eye and said, stern-voiced, NOT YOU. We laughed about that later.

I was on my knees in the water, I could feel the hardness of the tub making my knees raw, but I was locked into place, I could not move. The baby was coming. I could feel with my fingertips the hardness of his skull still inside me. And then it was as if something lurched inside of me and all the energy of my flesh became totally directional, downward. A "throwing down", like throwing up but in reverse.

The feeling of his coming through me was sensational. I loved it so much that I tried to hang on to the visceral memory of it for months, becoming sad as it faded. People don't like it when I talk about that. It sounds dirty to them, inappropriate. Birth is supposed to hurt. Not because women deserve it, no, we are too evolved to believe that any longer, but still for it to feel good is perverse. If birth wasn't inherently painful, people say, wouldn't we hear more about it? Of course not. The shame is too pervasive.

But for me it was healing. It had been denied me, violently, in my first birth. Unfortunately I wasn't allowed to just be with him afterwards. He wasn't taken away from me, no, we knew enough at least not to do that. But the talking, the inspecting, the directing, the worrying. Nobody wants the mother to hemmorhage, so all that has to be done, or so we thought. Ironically, all that was being done was increasing the risk of hemorrhage: I later learned that there are unobtrusive ways to monitor the mother's status, and that intruding on her space stimulates her neocortex, suppressing the function of the old mammalian brain that is responsible for regulating the hormone release that is in turn responsible for a normal separation and expulsion of the placenta as well as chemical bonding.

Instinctively salvaging what I could, I retreated into myself, yet another woman out of necessity reinforcing the cultural belief that women are too weak and "out of it" to tend to their own newborns. Women have help, so women need help. Circular reasoning as truth.

Withdrawing, I forgot my baby. Wait, what is this in my arms? This lump of living flesh? Do I know you? Never mind that for now, the placenta is still not here. Let me touch you, what do you feel. Knead, pull, discuss. Gravity?, ohhhh. Father hold the baby. Move there, no here, like this. There it is. Relief. And look, it is in the shape of a heart. A good omen.

It took me a long time to find him again. A long, long time. Somewhere in the time between when he emerged and the midwives deemed me done and safe, the thread connecting us was broken. It's not just in hospitals that this happens. It's also not just the way it is. It isn't just the way it is that it is emotionally hard to become a mother, to have to care for an excrement-producing noise-making constantly-needy entity, to deal with such intensive responsibility so suddenly, to have your life no longer be your own. It isn't. This is a rite of passage that isn't meant to be a trial. I'm angry about it still. No blame, nobody knew better at the time. But I learned.

And I found my way back to him. The human spirit is resilient. And as long as it is up to me, I am not going to allow that thread to be broken again.

the usefulness of school, grafted

2008-12-20T22:20:00.000-08:00

Heh.

I wonder if xkcd has read The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education?

math and accomplishment

2008-12-07T15:27:00.000-08:00

Last night as were lying in bed getting ready to go to sleep, Noah, who is 9 years old, requested "math problems" as he is wont to do. We did some basic two-column addition and multiplication, and talked about the incredible memory needed to calculate huge sums like this guy does. He tired quickly of the usual and asked for something new and exciting -- fractions. We've talked about fractions very little, just enough really to make chocolate chip cookies with, but apparently he was ready enough for it that it sunk in, because he aced the first simple problems I gave him, and then when I tried to give him a challenge, "What is 5/3 plus 1 and a third," he came up with the answer faster than I did. Meanwhile, my seven-year-old can barely add 2 and 3. And I'm not worried. It would be a big problem, of course, if she were in school. But she's intelligent, and she'll need it, therefore she'll want it, as mentally healthy people want what they need. Making her do it before her natural readiness and interest would compel her to do it herself would be taking such a risk -- as with reading, if a person experiences a supposed norm as frustrating and difficult, what is she going to conclude about herself, and how long will she keep trying before deciding she's just not very smart? I also don't want to make the mistake of undermining the intuitive process of the brain in picking it up organically, which is so superior to rote memorization.

A common question about math (usually from people whose five-, six-, and seven-year-olds have no interest whatsoever, or from people who can't wrap their minds around learning math well without being schooled in it, from a curriculum) is, "Well, we have to make them do it, because what if they never want to do math? What if they want to be an engineer and can't do math???"

Well, if they aren't attracted to math does it really make any sense for them to pursue interests that require it? Do we want our children to live in an authentic way, true to what they are, or are we just trying to produce machine-workers with no concern for their individual loves and strengths? The moment a person decides they want something, they can then choose to make it happen. There's no need for me to try to predict what sort of learning will serve their future interests best (as if I could anyway,) no need to waste valuable learning time and life forcing them to work according to my guesses.

Some people would consider this neglectful. A while back on my local public radio station I was listening to a program about unschooling, and a caller who claimed he'd been unschooled said that he regretted that his mother hadn't made him do more math. But here's how pathetic this fellow was -- he was 35, just finding himself fascinated by math for the first time in his life, but despairing because he had so far to go to reach the goal of being able to impress people with his proficiency, when he could have already been there if not for that damned freedom. This is a person, really, whose desire isn't for the thing itself. If it were, the actual doing it, in itself, would satisfy him. His desire rather is for a sense of accomplishment. And what he doesn't understand is that real accomplishment -- having a passion and satisfying it according to one's own drive -- doesn't come from having someone standing over you saying, "do this, now do that." He might get a good feeling from having pleased someone, but that's a hard way to happiness because it requires continual reinforcement. He's misdiagnosed his problem -- it's not that he's "behind", it's that he's dependent on the praise of others. I once dated someone like that. His thing was that his parents hadn't made him practice piano. If they had, he would have been a great musician by now. And of course he wasn't taking steps to learn piano now; again, his desire wasn't for piano, it was to be great for the purpose of garnering praise. And he wanted it now, and because he didn't have it now it was a lost cause.

By his logic, of course, I should be moaning about not having been coached in childhood to be a world-class sailor, so that I wouldn't have to start from scratch as a middle-aged person who has only recently developed a love of sailing. It could apply to anything: my interest in birth issues, or vernacular architecture, or foraging for food, or ceramics. Oh woe is me, if only my parents had made me learn those things, I would already be an expert in them! Probably would have published books and be famous and rich! I feel badly for people who think like this, but not for the same reason they feel badly for themselves.

2008-11-23T17:46:00.000-08:00

Ursula K. Le Guin:

Socrates said, "The misuse of language induces evil in the soul." He wasn't talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

and so it begins

2008-11-22T22:35:00.000-08:00

In May I wrote about Willow wanting me to help her learn how to read. Like Jake's pattern of reading learning, she was intensely interested for about an hour, and then for months nothing. With Jake we were a little worried, especially two, three, four years after the initial teaching fiasco, but then suddenly he was reading adult-level fiction. Oh. Okay. So with Noah we weren't nearly as concerned, even when he never asked for help at all, but still we were relieved when he started reading. Finally, with Willow, it just feels normal and totally unremarkable. It's not any longer just that the theory of self-intuited developmental readiness makes sense. We are now true believers.

Today Noah sat reading over my shoulder as I was editing a blog post. I'd read this post over at least a dozen times, as I wanted to be careful that I was representing myself accurately. When I finally clicked "save" and went to view the page, he said, "Wait, wait, go back!" Wha? I thought, but he was so excited I just did it. "Scroll down, scroll down... there! You forget to put a 'to' in there!" So now my son, who has had no reading instruction, is proofreading my writing for me.

I had to smile. I love so much, contrary to what we've all been taught, that it's something that just happens. Like learning to walk, learning to talk. It will be. Not all at the same time, all in the same way. But it will be. The first stick drawing a child does of a person is neat to see, and yes the environment and means are crucial to that happening, but the reaction isn't "oh thank god," as if there was ever any concern that she would never draw a stick person. This is no different. At all. And it's such a lovely place to be, a calm place with progress just being a given, every step of the way knowing that it's exactly what it needs to be.

Exactly the way, in fact, that it is for people who learn to read early enough that they can't remember ever not reading or being taught aside from being read to. "She's a natural!" we say, when someone seems to have an innate aptitude for something. The mistake we made is in assuming that natural, in the case of reading learning, is necessarily defined as precocious. A mistake that has many kids, once they turn six, being made to believe that they are inherently lacking in some way, struggling, miserable, angry, losing faith in themselves and in their mentors.

My kids are naturals, and they know it. And I mean they know it. Like they know that the sky is blue or that if they leap up they will fall back down to the ground. I didn't have to tell them; it's just the way things are. If they were in school, they wouldn't know it, because, as "late" readers, the potentiality would have been stolen from them before they had a chance to.

That seems to me that it would have been quite a loss. Others don't agree with me, I know that. They think that we took a chance and got lucky. But what evidence is this oh-so-intellectual analysis based in? Tell me, who decided that age 6 is the universally developmentally best time to learn how to read? Who has proved this? No one, actually. That's right, a culture-wide belief system about what is best for people is supported by nothing more than simple convention. I just find this outrageous. Are there really that many people incapable of reason?

But that was us. We worried! We fretted! We encouraged! We taught! We got frustrated! Eventually quieting ourselves for Jake's sake, but still feeling that twinge on the inside. Thinking, So many people believe this. We don't know why, but maybe they're right for reasons that we, that maybe nobody, really understands. I think, in fact, that a lot of our early parenting was sort of agnostic in that way. I'm so annoyed by this now. We knew, in our soul, in our bones, in our cells, what was authentic, what was normal and okay. But the religion of modern parenting was so loud and insistent. Who can just be, and let life unfold as it already knows perfectly well how to, with dogma thrumming in your ears? It's not that easy.

So now we're in November. Willow turned seven in July. Recently, with no prodding from me, and with no signs of being interested, she simply took a book off the shelf and started copying what she saw. She worked on it for a long time and was very pleased with it. I was too. I like the very careful and consistent way she made her letters. I like how she circled related things. I like the little person she slipped in there. And then she stopped, and hasn't done any writing or reading since. Which is exactly what she needed to do.

You know what the schools would think about it, don't you? Too late. Not correct. Not enough. We'd be sad if we thought that. But we don't have to, because she's not in school, and because we know better now. So we don't. And so she gets to be a natural too, along with all the four-, five-, and six-year-old naturals, letting her ableness evolve and shine through in its own perfect time and in its own perfect way.

stolen.

2008-11-21T10:51:00.000-08:00

Earlier today I was surfing through my blogroll and on one of those blogs I found a link to a blog that has a name nearly identical to mine: 4 Little Birdies.* Woah, I thought, what are the chances?! So I clicked on it out of curiosity. And there I saw a post that was mine. Damn. This has happened before — I had a blog about birth issues that contained some writing that will in some form eventually make it into my book, and someone took one of my posts there and put it on her own blog uncredited. I wrote to her to tell her that she needed to remove it or I’d take legal action, and she responded by attacking me for reading her “private diary”. Fortunately she did remove it, but the experience left me shaken, and was part of the reason I took down that blog.

When I again saw my words on another person's blog today, uncredited, posted as if they were her own words, I had a shock reaction. It felt as if I’d been assaulted. My body felt wobbly, my heart started pounding, I felt sick to my stomach. She had even taken out my kids’ names and substituted her own kids’ names. Surreal and violating. My thoughts, my feelings, presented as her own. I thought, how dare she, and I got really angry. And then I found four other posts she copied. Five all together.

When she wrote back to me she offered the explanation that at the time of the postings she had been having mental health issues. However, she didn’t remove the posts until I demanded it. She knew they were there; she chose to keep them there. She claims that she’d forgotten about them, but that’s a little hard for me to swallow. I’m guessing that it’s for the same reason she felt able to copy me in the first place — I’m nobody to her, so perhaps to her it didn’t feel like any of my words really belonged to me. But they do. They came out of my heart and my head. They are me.

There’s also the problem of the blog name, which she hasn’t given me an answer to. The right thing to do, of course, would just be to change it. I’m hoping she decides that her kids and handiwork (both of which she posts many beautiful pictures of) deserve better than to be represented by something stolen from someone else.

Update: She is not going to change the name. She claims that she had already decided on the name and came across my blog only when she did a google search to see if her blog name came up, and mine came up from which she then conveniently took posts from to start her blogging career.

Update: I now know of six people whose work she’s plagiarized. Some of those people have gotten in touch with her and most of the posts (those that I know of anyway) have been removed. There’s one left because the author wasn’t concerned enough to pursue the matter. Two of the plagiarized posts were from Inside My Head, similar in content to mine: personal thoughts and experiences. The difference being that they were actually posted quite recently, in May of this year. So I guess the “mental issues” are ongoing. Those two posts were not removed along with mine, and not removed in fact until the other blogger contacted her. What this says to me is that this woman has no intention of removing any other plagiarized posts until they are identified, and her contriteness when I confronted her was absolutely false.

I am furious and feeling like a dupe. So at this point I really have no problem outing her. Her name is Sebrina Wilson. She has just made her blog private, so I guess now she can impress her friends and family with “her” writings stolen from others, and she can do this to her little heart’s content without the silly real authors getting upset about it.

Update: She writes to me, “My blog is disabled. I hope that “outing” me on your blog has brought you some comfort.”

I responded, “It has not. But I hope it keeps you from doing this again. You have a lot of nerve implying that I did something wrong by exposing you, considering the extent of your plagiarism (six individuals that we know of,) your dishonesty (you “forgot” you’d copied my posts, while having just recently plagiarized someone else) and the fact that you only removed the posts you’d stolen from others when they became aware of them. You don’t seem to understand the seriousness of what you’ve done and I am only sorry at this point that there does not seem to be any way of prosecuting you. Please do not contact me again, I will consider it harassment.”

Update: When I first wrote this post, I also started a thread at Mothering.com asking for advice about it. I did not mention her name, as it's against the user agreement for that forum, but strangely she (username: sebrinaw) found the thread (scary stalker undertones there), outed herself when she didn't have to which is weird enough in itself, and apologized not to me but to the community. Nearly a month later she apparently had a change of heart. I logged on to find the content of this post [then at Blogsome.com] completely gone. I can only assume that she complained to the blog host who made the decision to delete this post without informing me. Next thing you know she'll be having a lawyer sue me for "libel".

*My blog's name was then Four Little Birds.

The original post about this with comments is here. I moved to Blogger because of Blogsome's actions in removing the post without contacting me. Another blogger that this has happened to. Another one here. And another.

Comments from the original post (in case Blogsome removes it again):

ugh. substituting the *kids* names, even? yeeg. that goes beyond creepy, that’s like, stalker shit.

oh, i’m so sorry, that is just not right. i don’t even know what to say. (well, except that your writing is obviously so good people steal it; that’s never happened to me. ha!

Comment by hallie — November 21, 2008 @ 10:21 pm

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I’m so glad that she at least did the right thing ultimately about the copied blog posts. I’m sorry this happened. I had a similar experience with someone that I called a friend and no matter how much I tried to tell myself that I should take it as a twisted sort of compliment, it does feel like a violation. You described the physical sensations of it perfectly.

I hope that the leftover ooginess passes quickly and that you can take comfort in the fact that you will always be the genuine article. Some Little Miss Grabby Hands will never take away the whole of what you are by stealing those little pieces - at the end of the day you have more where that came from, and what she has is empty imitation.

Comment by K. — November 22, 2008 @ 12:31 am

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whoa! that’s serious. i can so relate to the feelings of violation. i’ve had many photographs used on other’s sites, most of them credit, which i appreciate, but some don’t. and even the ones that do, didn’t ask permission first, which i am uncomfortable with. but words and thoughts and feelings… stolen? whoa. i guess if you were an extremely positive pollyanna type, you could view it as one of the loudest compliments you could ever receive…. but i think the painful feelings you are having around the thougts of violation and trust and disrespect are probably looming way bigger right now. and justifiably.

as an aside, i love your writing and am so impressed you’ll be publishing a book at some stage. wonderful!

Comment by Krista — November 22, 2008 @ 7:12 am

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ew. I wonder about things like that sometimes for my own writing. Weird.

Comment by annakiss — November 22, 2008 @ 10:11 am

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I’m glad she took them down. It does say something about how good your writing is. But in a creepy way for sure.

Comment by zenmomma — November 22, 2008 @ 10:27 am

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Wow. That IS creepy.

I was following a blog a year or so ago, that was written by a mother with premature baby in the NICU. I read this blog everyday and cried tears every time I visited the blog(I was pregnant with Jorie and this lady was due around the same time I was.)

Come to find out, this lady stole the pictures and the story from someone else’s blog. I felt violated as a reader…..I cant imagine how the real mother felt!

Comment by nina — November 22, 2008 @ 10:44 am

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The positive spin on this is, of course, the saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

But, really, it’s just waaaaayyy creepy.

Comment by Frank — November 22, 2008 @ 11:18 am

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This happened to the blogger Kate of sweet/salty. She found several of her posts that had been stolen - and got the mental health issues “explanation”. Hers turned out to be a woman (who really knows, though) who was pretending to be a gay man who’d adopted two babies. Very strange and I know she was mighty upset. I don’t know if you read her blog, but you’d definitely be able to commiserate.

So sorry this happened. :(

Comment by Festi — November 22, 2008 @ 3:17 pm

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How horrible. Festi is right, it did happen to Kate, a beautiful writer, and the [woman] stole the whole story about losing one of her twin sons, and used her photos. Her brother ended up taking his blog down because he couldn’t stand the idea of someone abusing his life story. Technology is always two steps ahead of the law and it’s not fair because finally writers from all walks of life are getting their words out there, only to have them stolen because they aren’t bound and in print.

I’m sorry this happened to you.

This post says it better than I could: http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2008/07/just-blog.html

Comment by shawna — November 22, 2008 @ 3:34 pm

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Someone alerted me today that this person had copied a couple of my posts, as well. I’ve not received a response from her yet, but I’ve left messages. I was trying to figure out how to report her site. Blogger doesn’t make it easy.

Comment by Tracy — November 22, 2008 @ 7:03 pm

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Ick!

Then again, how cool for a stranger to want to emulate your life, if only for a moment, if only electronically…

The only person who wanted to be me is my sister and it *is* pretty creepy to realize the emulation is merely an avoidance technique, usually insanity related, of one’s own life. How sad.

That said, I’m *stealing* some bowling pictures for one of my blogs ;)

Comment by diana jenner — November 22, 2008 @ 7:08 pm

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this is something that would never, ever occur to me. and btw how do you figure it out?
icko.

Comment by sarah — November 23, 2008 @ 1:07 am

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I commented earlier and went through her blog, picking out suspect posts and Googling portions of them. I got a few hits of things she’d stolen from other people and notified them on their blogs - Tracy, above, and another girl with the word “apples” in her blog site name - can’t remember the full name, sorry!

If anyone suspects or discovers that someone else has plagiarized their work - go through past posts and copy out portions that seem “suspect”. You’ll get a feel. Google those lines and you may find them on other people’s blogs - blogs of the REAL authors.

Probably not a bad idea for those with public blogs to Google some of their own lines from time to time to see if any of their work has been stolen…

Comment by Festi — November 23, 2008 @ 2:46 pm

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Also, if you need “proof” of the plagiarism and the person deletes it or shuts down the blog before you can get a screenshot - check for websites that can lead you to cached versions of posts. Usually there is a cached version out there somewhere that you can use as proof that they stole your work.

Comment by Festi — November 23, 2008 @ 2:48 pm

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this is so sad, and so strange too. I’ve had my pictures stolen, but I cannot imagine the words from my mouth - ha, ha! you poor thing. I did just check her site, though, and it’s either gone or now private.

take good care!

Comment by nicole — November 23, 2008 @ 4:32 pm

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I’m glad you got some sort of resolve. She sounds like a liar and a fraud to me, but I usually think the worst. It’s too bad, too, because her pictures were really good. She seems to have talent in her own right, I’m not sure what would move her to then steal someone else’s words. Weird.

Comment by jessica — November 23, 2008 @ 7:21 pm

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Doesn’t sound very remorseful at all, huh? That’s what would be most upsetting to me. Sounds like she’s trying to shift blame to you - when she’s the one who STOLE other people’s work in the first place and tried to pretend it was hers.

Comment by Festi — November 23, 2008 @ 8:55 pm

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This is exactly why I choose to keep my blog banine.

You have to consider that whatever goes out over the Internet creates opportunities for thieves. For instance, you wouldn’t leave your money (or anything valuable) in a public place and expect no one to steal it would you? In essence it’s the same thing. The temptation is there and unfortunately this happens all the time.

I’m sorry it happened to you though Linda. Your writing IS good, and valuable–you must protect it. {Here’s more motivation to publish that book!} :o)

Also—I use google alerts—amazed at the things I find people doing with MY content. Still.

Take care dear friend! xo
~Vicki

Comment by ~Vicki — November 24, 2008 @ 10:06 am

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I’ve been thinking about your plagiarist who admitted she doesn’t know why she tends to “lie and steel.”

She’s probably so blonde she’s platinum. She has some gall-ium! Tell her to cesium and desist or you’ll whack her with her own iron. She deserves a barium enema but she’s such an asshole I’m certain she has a titanium. Ewwww. After that ya better wash up in the zinc at her palladium style home.

When you contacted her was her response germanium to the question or did it go over like a lead balloon? Well, in either case, I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for someone who thinks she’s a wit but is only halfnium right. I think she has a tin ear cuz she’s a mercurial fan of Donny Osmium. I’m surprised she didn’t throw a tantalum when you confronted her.

This story makes my heart thorium for you. I’m so blue, I’m cobalt; but you, my dear, are as good as gold.

You should call the coppers!

Ok, I’ll stop now. Sorry! (grin)

Comment by Frank — November 25, 2008 @ 10:10 pm

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Hey Linda,

It was thanks to Festi and this post that alerted me that a post of mine had also been stolen. Unfortunately (or fortunately, however you look at it), she had already taken mine down before I went over to look at it. I was able to look at her blog before she took it down. I, too, had been impressed with her pictures and wondered what would move her to take others’ work. I’ve tried to google the title she used when she copied my post, but don’t find anything. I actually don’t use the term visual-spatial much (and she had misspelled that anyway as spacial). I DO, however, post a lot about the right-brained learner, so it could have been any number of posts she took from me.

It is a little uncomfortable to know she’s still out there potentially posting behind a curtain and still stealing, and now we can’t know.

It does cause me pause to consider how to protect myself, especially my information I am also including in a book . . .

Sorry for what happened to you, and all of us. Thanks for initiating contact to stop her in any form possible. It stinks to have to do it, but it is worth pursuing, I think.

Warmly,
Cindy

Comment by Cindy — November 27, 2008 @ 5:11 pm

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That’s fucked up! I don’t understand how people can grow up to become Internet trolls, what a wierd type it must be, to be!

Comment by :::::::::::: wife mom maniac :::::::::::: — December 6, 2008 @ 9:36 pm

thoughts on learning

2008-10-30T22:44:00.000-07:00

The boys have been doing a crazy amount of learning lately. You may notice that when I talk about learning, it's usually about the boys, because the girls are still very much in play mode, which the boys were almost exclusively for the first 7 or 8 years of their lives. Not, of course, that the girls aren't learning, they are learning great amounts of things all the time, but the things that they are naturally working at are things that are not considered academic. Things like interpersonal relationships. Empathy. Social lessons of all kinds. Language fluency. Creativity. But what I'm talking about with the boys is their understanding of modern systems beyond self and family. That of science and politics, mainly.

But first I'm going to just make a quick note about reading learning, as that has been an ongoing subject on my blog. Jake, who became what I think of as "a reader" when he was 10, is not 11 and has completed several books including Ender's Game, The Wednesday Witch, No Flying In the House, The Phantom Tollbooth, and all the Harry Potters. He's also read probably a dozen graphic novels, and dozens more of my old comic books, although he's moved on from the comic books now. For a while he'd sit and read them for hours, now they don't seem to interest him at all. Noah, who is nine and as far as I know became a reader this year, is on the same path, no books yet, but lots of graphic novels.

(A funny story about Noah -- early this fall at market the woman in the stall next to us wanted to know why the kids weren't in school, and she was very disapproving at hearing that they don't go at all. She asked them if I am their teacher, and Noah said enthusiastically, "Nobody teaches us! We teach ourselves!" I swear, her face hardened into stone and I thought, oh no, here we go. I tried to laugh it off and explain that what he means is that I don't behave like the stereotypical schoolteacher in that I don't sit them down and make them do workbooks or lecture them, but that our mutual exchange of information is natural and organic in structure. In that sense "teaching" could be said to be occurring but it's not an artificially constructed and mandated thing. She was looking at me so hard it was like she was trying to bore a hole through my head solely with mental effort. Then she whipped back around to Noah with that same intense glare and said, "How do you learn to read? Are you reading yet? What are you reading?" Noah, bless his heart, was not at all perturbed by her manner (he tends to be in his own little world, oblivious a lot of the time,) and took his time formulating an answer, looking thoughtful. Finally he said, perfectly cheerfully, "Well, I read a lot on video games." I just about died. Luckily though the woman considered that outrageous enough that she couldn't bear to have anything more to do with us, and she sourly avoided looking our way the rest of the day. I was a little nervous that she might try to report us to some authority, but it's been some time so I think we're safe.)

Anyway, yes, Noah is reading quite fluently, which still just tickles me every time I think about it, because he's had no reading instruction whatsoever. Of course if he'd asked we would have helped him, and he might have asked if we'd make an issue over his readiness, but as it was he had no need. And it didn't occur to him, in absence of any need or worry on our part, to ask for help. Perfectly logical. And Noah is a really average, typical person, I think, in terms of intelligence. He's got his strengths and specialties, for sure, but he's not a prodigy. So it really makes me wonder how many other people would be just fine if trusted to know intuitively what they need in order to learn -- better than fine, actually, if we were to take into account how many "failures" would cease to exist if everyone was allowed to learn according to the actual needs of their minds and hearts. The key, I think, would have to be a paradigmatic shift in understanding about how reading learning happens. "Oh yes, they just pick that up, just as they do talking. Of course they do. What else would they do?"

Now, imagine what it would be like if people believed that children would be better off if they were taught to speak earlier and faster than they would naturally pick it up. We assume it's inherently different, but is it really? Consider that some people do believe in that. Do a search for "teaching babies to talk" or even "early childhood pedogogy" and thousands of results come up. There is a parallel - just as there are people who don't read well, there are people who don't speak well, and the number of people who don't speak well are growing in our minds -- I've lost count of how many parents I know who have been seriously worried that their toddlers were speaking "late" or not enunciating properly -- it's like an epidemic. I don't think it's far-fetched that our collective perception could eventually become that speaking is something that is ideally taught, and that many children will suffer from poor speaking skills unless we nip it in the bud early by ensuring that all children have the opportunity to have early management of speaking skills, and that it is dangerous to assume too much of a spectrum of normality. Is it possible that our anxiety over reading learning and need to universally manage it is the same sort of nonsense? Yeah, I think it very much is.

Well, I went off on a tangent there, didn't I? Let's see, way back up at the top I wasn't talking about strange conditioned beliefs about how people learn, I was talking about the huge amount of unschooled learning that's been happening around here lately. It's just exploded, really. Oh, don't worry, the boys are still playing plenty of video games. But we've also been having these amazing conversations and question sessions and looking things up online. One recent popular topic of conversation is the material world. We've looked at genetics, animal species, how various kinds of reproduction takes place, sperm and eggs and DNA, chemical elements and atoms, the similarities between the extreme macro-world and the extreme micro-world, other dimensions (a favorite of Noah's,) and many related and tangential things. Another topic has been politics, which I suppose could just about be expected given that an important election is coming up. We have been talking about the reasons people go to war, hatred and fear, genocide, religious fanaticism, racism, poverty, greed, corporate welfare, illegal immigration, heath care, our voting system, the political parties, branches of our government, and other such things. And this has all been initiated and propelled by the boys -- I'm just the facilitator.

I was talking with a couple of friends recently, not together, about schooled life versus unschooled life. One friend sees school as THE place where intellectual pursuit happens, and her concern is that the kids will miss out on other information and perspectives than I would provide. But what I remember about school is incredibly inferior to what the kids have been experiencing as a spontaneous thing in just living their lives. I remember spending an awful lot of mental energy in school trying to figure out what the "right" or "smart" thing was to say, or just being scared of being called on, which meant that I ended up saying not much at all. It wasn't an atmosphere that encouraged or even allowed active questioning and searching, nor self-confidence, self-direction, self-knowledge. Nor were most of my teachers interested in that. We were simply being fed (a mediocre and unengaging curriculum for that matter,) and most of the time we weren't interested in simply being fed so we tuned out. What a ridiculous waste of time. And it was painfully boring. I remember, exactly like Calvin, feeling time slow down to a virtual standstill, but it wasn't funny. It hurt. An entirely pointless kind of hurt.

For many of us who are unschooling, the discussion inevitably comes down to time, and so it was with my other friend. We were trying to figure out, in between getting up early, driving to school, all the sitting around while the teacher gets things organized, the busywork, the lecturing, the testing, eating lunch, more organizing and managing and sitting doing nothing and busywork and lecturing and watching the clock, driving home, doing some mind-numbing activity to relax from the exhaustion of the previous hours of tedium, eating dinner, doing homework, getting ready for bed early so that you can get up early: were is the time to really think and connect? We both observed that in our own lives there is quite enough of interests and personally beneficial and meaningful work to fill the day, so that the oh so important authentic connections and private quiet time for searching thought are dependent on there being enough of a quantity of time in which they can arise spontaneously often. The directing and managing of so much of our time by others significantly impinges on the amount of time in which that can happen, and so could be said to be responsible in a very real way for the modern disintegration of family, critical thought, creativity, and autonomy.

To read: John Taylor Gatto, Why Schools Don't Educate: "Right now we are taking all the time from our children that they need to develop self-knowledge. That has to stop."

And: John Taylor Gatto, The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher: "All global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and the good life so alienated from common human reality that I am convinced it is wrong and that most people would agree with me if they had a choice. We might be able to see that if we regained a hold on a philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found -- in families, in friends, the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends and real communities are built."

the nature of play and work

2008-09-02T09:31:00.000-07:00

I don't subscribe to the work ethic, that is the idea that work is a good in itself. Work may be fulfilling and it may be necessary; if it is neither of those things, then it has no value. Work and play can overlap; I consider the writing that I'm doing right at this moment to be work in that I intend it to have some meaning and wider purpose than my enjoyment; but it is also something that I like to do. People want to work, that is, they want to do things that have meaning and wider purpose than just their enjoyment. The younger a person is, however, the less likely that they have the mental tendency to think of what they do as work at all. When children do work, it is either because they are made or expected to do so, or because the activity that is personally compelling to them just happens to be labeled by adults as "work". For them, the terms work and play used to describe self-directed pursuits are not useful terms because everything they choose to do is, at base, characterized by being personally compelling. Adults have a need to label and categorize, but for children what draws them to measure ingredients for a cake, or to want to be in the middle of some household repair, or to be engaged in creating a conversation between two dolls, is all the same driving force.

That driving force is important; it is what is behind any creative endeavor whether in the arts or the sciences or anything else. Some people are able to hang onto it. One way in which this might happen is that their brains are wired in such a way -- e.g. obsessive, oblivious to social expectations, mentally ill -- that attempts at outside management do not take hold, or not as strongly. The other way doesn't require any special protective mental state -- it only requires that the outside management is not imposed in the first place.

This is the reason why I don't tell my child, when she is arranging blocks and figurines and pieces of junk on the bookshelf with an internal story running through her mind, that she should come and do math. It's why I don't tell my children who have had the offer of working for an hourly wage that "before you accept you have to understand that it's hard work" and "it'll teach you what an hour of real work is like". And, while I may encourage them to be aware of the effects of environment on the soul and the body, it's why I don't tell them that their desire to play is ever wrong.

And what are video games, but play? Ah, but I already hear the mumblings of dissent: the nature of video games is different from the nature of imaginative play. This is very true, but it doesn't necessarily make them dangerous or less valuable. Consider that the reading of fiction can also be considered "dangerous" or "less productive" or "less edifying" in the exact same ways -- because the reader is entering an already created virtual world which does not engage his imagination fully and which may very well be devoid of the meaningful. I once read in a nineteenth-century diary about a parent's frustration that his child "just wanted to sit in his room and read all day." His concern about his child giving so much of his attention to something "not productive" on a paper surface was really no different than the modern concern about giving one's attention to something "not productive" on an electronic surface. And many board games require no reasoning skill or creative thought at all. But no modern parent seriously considers fiction or board games harmful as a medium for play or entertainment in itself. Perhaps some perspective is in order, then.

But I hear another disapproving rumble: "All right, I'll give you that some board games and fiction are mindless, and that there's a double standard there. But some have the potential to be intellectually stimulating. Not so for video games." And there I must say: my friend, you have no idea what you're talking about. This is the argument of someone who hasn't given any real mental attention to the world of video games since having played Pac-Man in 1980.

When we were first talking about homeschooling our kids, one of my reasons for it was my feeling that it's a waste of a person's time to fill her head with things that are not relevant to her life and that she will never use. If you have no interest in math beyond being able to manage your finances, for instance, there's no point in studying algebra, and you're not going to be suited for any profession that requires knowledge of it. A friend's counter-argument was that even if a person will never need that specific knowledge, the activity of working for it increases his brain's computing ability and trains it to be comfortable with logical sequencing for other applications. And while I agree that such skills are valuable (at least to me,) I know firstly that the majority of the time I spent in math class (with the exception of our brief study of the Euclidean axioms, which incidently I couldn't remember now to save my life) was spent unthinkingly memorizing rules in order to pass tests, which sadly didn't do anything for my memorization skills much less my reasoning skills; and secondly, I know that the fact that these skills are useful to other things means that they can be learned by doing those other things, and as such are learned better for those things' purposes, as they are necessarily tailored to them. But, yes, it's true that the ability to reason transfers from application to application. And here's where this funny little thing about video games comes in: you can learn it there, too, and possibly even better than in math class. Here's why I think so:

When I was younger, around my oldest child's age now, I liked to play games of logic. Especially ones like these. My fascination with them faded after a few years, and I no longer have any interest in doing them, but my love of logic has remained constant. I'm the kind of nut that finds this sort of thing interesting reading. I score well above average on logic-based IQ tests. At the top of my list of self-defining characteristics, I put "good reasoning ability". I say all this to set the background for the following story:

Jake asked me if he could sign up for one of those "1000+ FLASH GAMES!!!" sites. He asks because he knows I want to keep our computer virus-free and he doesn't have as much experience as I do in determining what's safe and what's not. So I sit down to look over this site and just for heck of it I click on one of the games. Hm, I think, this looks just like one of those logic games I used to like! So I start playing, and I'm enjoying myself quite thoroughly, except for Jake trying to be a back-seat driver.

Linda: "Don't tell me, I can figure it out for myself! Sheesh!"

Jake: "Okay, okay!"

Linda: laboriously works her way through the first several levels

Jake: fidget, fidget

Linda: finally getting stuck, "What do you think I should do now?"

Jake: "Oh, that's easy." zip zip zip zip

Linda: "Oh, ha ha, now I see. So how many times have you played this game?"

Jake: "This is my first time."

The exact same thing happened with this game. Imagine my dismay (an eleven-year-old is better at this than I am) and my delight (my eleven-year-old is better at this than I am!)

So, seriously. First, the boys have become literate probably primarily through play, ideal not only because the context encourages it -- it's useful in terms of the play -- but because they enjoy it and therefore want to do it. (There's that driving force.) Then their brains become adept at logical sequencing, effortlessly, again through play. (There's that driving force again.) As Fred Rogers said, in the language of adults, play is the work of childhood.

Video games are no exception.

minions of entropy 75,564*, Linda 0

2008-08-19T10:09:00.000-07:00

Linda, sweeping floor for the eighteenth time today: I just don't understand how the house gets to be such a mess.

Jake: Did you forget the magnet? [refrigerator magnet my mom got for me]

Linda: What?

Jake: You know, "A clean house...

Noah, chiming in: ...is no place...

Jake: ...to raise children!"

Linda glowers at broom

Jake: Or better yet, "A dirty house is the perfect place to raise children!"

Linda takes a moment to laugh a laugh of bitter despair, goes back to sweeping

Jake, after thinking on it some more: You should tell your mom friends that.

Linda: Why?

Jake, innocently: Because they'll laugh like you!

[*Just in case you're wondering how I'm keeping score, it's a very scientific approximation. I simply multiplied the days since Jake's birth times eighteen.]

the languages have broken down

2008-06-20T17:44:00.000-07:00

"But in our time the languages have broken down. Since they are no longer shared, the processes which keep them deep have broken down: and it is therefore virtually impossible for anybody, in our time, to make a building live." -- Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

I first heard of Christopher Alexander in architecture school. I didn't know quite what to do with him then, didn't know how to make him and my love of vernacular architecture fit within the confines of what I was expected to do to graduate. Even so, I knew that what he was saying and what I was feeling were important, and his discerning analysis of the failures of modern society has stayed with me.

What I've realized more recently is how much his insights apply to all facets of modern human life, not just the making of spaces.

He starts off here speaking of what happens when personal autonomy is a given:

The connection between the users and the act of building is direct.

Either the people build for themselves, with their own hands, or else they talk directly to the craftsmen who build for them, with almost the same degree of control over the small details which are built.

The whole emerges by itself and is continally repaired. Each person in a town knows that his own small acts help to create and to maintain the whole. Each person feels tied into society, and proud because of it.

The adaptation between people and buildings is profound.

Each detail has meaning. Each detail is understood. Each detail is based on some person's experience, and gets shaped right, because it is slowly thought out, and deeply felt.

Because the adaptation is detailed and profound, each place takes on a unique character. Slowly, the variety of places and buildings begins to reflect the variety of human situations in the town. This is what makes the town alive. The patterns stay alive, because the people who are using them are also testing them.

But, by contrast, in the early phases of industrial society which we have experienced recently, the pattern languages die.

Instead of being widely shared, the pattern languages which determine how a town gets made become specialized and private. Roads are built by highway engineers; buildings by architects; parks by planners; hospitals by hospital consultants; schools by educational specialists; gardens by gardners; tract housing by developers.

The people of the town themselves know hardly any of the languages which these specialists use. And if they want to find out what the languages contain, they can't, because it is considered professional expertise. The professionals guard their language jealously to make themselves indispensable.

[...]The languages start out by being specialized, and hidden from the people; and then within the specialities, the languages become more private still, and hidden from one another, and fragmented.

Most people believe themselves incompetent to design anything and believe that it can only be done properly by architects and planners.

This has gone so far that most people shrink, in fear, from the task of designing their surroundings. They are afraid that they will make foolish mistakes, afraid that people will laugh at them, afraid that they will do something "in bad taste." And the fear is justified. Once people withdraw from the normal everyday experience of building, and lose their pattern languages, they are literally no longer able to make good decisions about their surroundings, because they no longer know what really matters, and what doesn't.

People lose touch with their most elementary intuitions.

If they read somewhere that large plate glass picture windows are a good idea, they accept this as wisdom from a source wiser than themselves -- even though they feel more comfortable sitting in a room with small windowpanes, and say how much they like it. But the fashionable taste of architects is so persuasive that people will believe, against the evidence of their own inner feelings, that the plate glass window is better. They have lost confidence in their own judgment. They have handed over the right to design, and lost their own pattern languages so utterly that they will do anything which architects tell them.

Yet, architects themselves, have lost their intuitions too. Since they no longer have a widely shared language which roots them in the ordinary feelings people have, they are also prisoners of the absurd and special languages which they have made in private.

Even the buildings built by architects start to be full of obvious "mistakes."

[...] There is not a single building built in recent times, nor a single part of a city laid out by planners, in which such trivial mistakes -- caused by the loss of patterns -- cannot be described a hundredfold. This is as true of the greatest works of so-called modern masters, as of the most mundane works built by tract developers.

And those few patterns which do remain within our languages become degenerate and stupid.

This follows naturally from the fact that the languages are so highly specialized. The users, whose direct experience once formed the languages, no longer have enough contact to influence them. This is almost bound to happen, as soon as the task of building passes out of the hands of the people who are most directly concerned, and into the hands of people who are not doing it for themselves, but instead for others.

So long as I build for myself, the patterns I use will be simple, and human, and full of feeling, because I understand my situation. But as soon as a few people begin to build for "the many," their patterns about what is needed become abstract; no matter how well meaning they are, their ideas gradually get out of touch with reality, because they are not faced daily with the living examples of what the patterns say.

If I build a fireplace for myself, it is natural for me to make a place to put the wood, a corner to sit in, a mantel wide enough to put things on, an opening which lets the fire draw.

But, if I design fireplaces for other people -- not for myself -- then I never have to build a fire in the fireplaces I design. Gradually my ideas become more and more influenced by style, and shape, and crazy notions -- my feeling for the simple business of making fire leaves the fireplace altogether.

So, it is inevitable that as the work of building passes into the hands of specialists, the patterns which they use become more and more banal, more willful, and less anchored in reality.

--From The Timeless Way of Building, Chapter 13, The Breakdown of Language

the fisher and the businessman

2008-06-11T17:44:00.000-07:00

I don't know where this story came from, but it's a great one:

A businessman was vacationing in a small coastal village when a small boat with a fisher docked at the pier.

Inside the small boat were several large fish. The businessman complimented the fisher on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The fisher replied, "Not very long.” The banker asked, "Why don't you stay out longer and catch more fish, so you can make more money?" The fisher replied with a smile, "This is more than enough to support my family's needs." The banker then asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?" The fisher said, "Ah... I sleep late, play with my children, nap with my wife, and stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my friends. I have a good life."

The businessman said excitedly, "That's all well and good, but imagine what you could accomplish if you worked harder. If you caught more fish, you could use the proceeds to buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several more boats and hire people to do the fishing for you. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor; eventually you could own your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You could leave your poor village and move to a big city to run an ever-expanding enterprise!"

The fisher asked, "But how long would all this take?" The businessman replied, "Oh, probably fifteen to twenty years." "Ah," the fisher said. "And what then?" The banker laughed and said, "That's the best part! When the time was right you would sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You could make millions!"

"I see... and then what?"

The businessman said, "Well, you would retire, of course!... move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, nap with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your friends. Think what a wonderful life you would have!"

we shall laugh

2008-06-03T17:42:00.000-07:00

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,

and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality

and get into the forests again,

we shall shiver with cold and fright

but things will happen to us

so that we don't know ourselves.

Cool, unlying life will rush in,

and passion will make our bodies taut with power,

we shall stamp our feet with new power

and old things will fall down,

we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.

--D.H. Lawrence

the key ingredient

2008-05-29T09:48:00.000-07:00

Today I spent all morning doing some organizational work for an online forum that I belong to. It was making me kind of grumpy because it was taking far longer than I expected it to, and along the way I had to spend some time putting my two cents into a Very Important Issue that was being discussed there. When I was done with that I put some moldy blankets in the wash that got left out in the rain in Willow's secret hideout "Wonderland" while we were at the conference over the weekend. After that I looked at all the dishes in the sink and decided I wasn't quite hungry enough yet to deal with them. Then walking through the playroom it occurred to me that the board games take up too much room where there should be a nice display of pretty rainbow-hued wooden toys, and in the moment this seemed very important to me to deal with immediately. I decided they should go into the drawers in the dining room built-in hutch instead, which tends to get stuffed with stuff when we're trying to clean up quick for company, so I had to deal with that first if I was going to put the board games there. Going through piles of crap, some of which I might need someday but don't know what to do with in the meantime, had me feeling even more grumpy.

Then Rowan spilled a glass of milk on the table which soaked into some of the piles and as I was scrambling to move them as milk flowed across the table and down onto the rug, I noticed that Jake and Noah took a brief moment in their video game playing to glance over at the commotion and decide that it didn't need their further attention so they went right back to their video game and that irritated me enough on top of everything else that I yelled, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING! CAN'T YOU SEE WHAT'S GOING ON HERE! I NEED HELP!" So they jumped up and Jake got a towel and Noah took Rowan upstairs to distract her with Paper Mario because she was upset by my yelling.

After helping me mop up the mess, Jake said, rather pointedly, "I think it's getting to be chocolate season around here." And then, when I didn't respond to his satisfaction, "We need to go into town and get the key ingredient to happiness."

I mean, really, I'm laughing just writing that out. Who could stay mad? Thankfully the kids got their papa's sense of humor. Because clearly I take myself and my life way too seriously and occasionally need to be nudged back into the reality that these things don't matter and that by giving them power I am causing my own suffering (not to mention that of those around me.) "With a little help from my friends"... in this case the ones I gave birth to. Yeah, chocolate is good, but I know what the real key ingredient is around here.

suddenly, summer

2008-05-17T09:51:00.000-07:00

Last week it was cloudy and cool, as it has been since, oh, November or so. Flowering plants signified that spring was here but I didn't feel it. Then the first part of this week the sun came out and winter melted out of my body and spirit. Thursday after ultimate practice instead of going straight home as usual we walked to the park. The boys took their cleats off and went barefoot. Willow rode her bike up and down and up and down and up and down a grassy slope and when her chain came off she fixed it herself (which means that she already knows more than I do about bikes.) Rowan climbed on the dinosaur bones.

I lay on the grass, eyes closed, breathing in the sweet scent of sun-warmed conifers, then opening them and looking up into the tall, tall trees swaying in the breeze. After a while it felt like they were moving of their own volition, dreamy and surreal and lovely. It was one of those days that makes you wonder how, if something like this can be, a person could ever be unhappy.

Friday when I went outside at 7:00 am to let the chickens out of their house and it... wasn't cold, I knew it was going to be a hot day. I didn't want to believe it, but I knew it. We met Scott at his work at midday and Scott and the kids headed to the fountains while I went shopping for groceries, and because I didn't want to believe it they didn't wear sunscreen and their shoulders were tinged with pink when I picked them up. I filled them up with water and used up half my aloe plant which isn't very big to begin with because it hasn't seen the sun since November either. Noah looked peaked and felt like he was going to throw up, so I spread out a soft blanket on the sofa for him, covered his head with a cold washcloth, and he slept for several hours and felt much better afterwards, although his shoulders were still bothering him.

This morning we got up early for the boys' first ultimate tournament. It was unpleasant for me because I could see the social and psychological hierarchies forming, the leaders and the followers, the confident and the not confident, the attractive and unattractive, with the attendant positive and negative reinforcement that only serves to strengthen their perceptions of their place. There is one girl, very fat, who I feel so badly for. She's not a bad player, in fact the few times she got the disc she did well, but for the most part she was ignored, and over and over the disc would go to the more confident players, who would as often as not drop it or make a bad throw, but regardless they were the ones who usually got the disc. I admire her for sticking it out -- she's been to every single one of the practices. But I just have to wonder how it's affecting her psyche to be treated as invisible like that.

But the boys enjoyed themselves. Noah cried at one point, but not because of anything anyone had done to him. He was upset that something he did resulted in a small gain for the other team. Scott said the same thing had happened to him before, and told the story in such a way that it made Noah laugh through his tears. He told us too about how it took him a year to master the forehand throw, which I didn't know. Wow, what a revelation -- it had never occurred to me before that he might not have just been born talented. Anyway, Noah got right back out there and joined an unofficial scrimmage that was going on between games. He has such heart. He started to lag about three-quarters of the way through, I think his sunburn from the day before and the heat were just too much at that point. Really, I think it was probably a little too much for most of the kids. Why are playing fields always right out in the middle of nothing? Why not instead a clearing in the middle of a woods? Or why not plant trees for shade and breeze? (And why are playgrounds so often devoid of shade for that matter? Honestly, the thoughtlessness of urban planners just kills me sometimes.)

Well, their team lost, and actually I think only scored a couple of points in two games. That was to be expected, as they haven't been training or playing together for very long. Even so, the boys are already excited about the next tournament coming up. I think this has much to do with the how positive and upbeat and kind and encouraging their coach is. And little children know, right? Rowan was his shadow on the field, which was very cute. She wouldn't do that with just anybody. And after the tournament he gave the team gift cards to Dairy Queen. Including Willow and Rowan who are not even on the team. I mean, who does that?

But I was talking about the weather, wasn't I? It is hot. I got sunburned sitting in full shade. Google weather says it's 88 degrees, but I don't believe it. Our thermostat says it's 83 degrees inside the house, and it is much cooler here than outside. Scott has gone to play poker, three of the kids are reading comics (and even as I write have gone out to spray water on each other,) and Rowan is conked out. My face is red and my hair and feet are up. Fan is on, shades are drawn. Summer is here.

[My camera is broken, so thanks to Space Ninja and Bill Gracey for allowing me to use their photographs. Click on the photographs themselves to go to the originals.]