We have a marble jar in our house, and the kids win prizes by filling it up for cooperation, good behavior, and sometimes, just because we love them and give them extra marbles for no reason at all.
It holds 117 marbles, and they fill it to the top every week-and-a-half to two weeks. There's no purpose or numeric, Kabbalistic mysticism to 117 marbles. That just happens to be the number of marbles that fit in the jar, without a bunch of marbles spilling over onto my carpet where I'll almost assuredly step on them in the dark and say swear words. 117 is maximum marble jar capacity, so that's how you get, to quote 2012 J2.
The prizes range from the very ordinary (a Saturday movie or new earrings at the mall), to the very fashionable (new skinny jeans or a new dress), to the gotta-have-it, heart's desire (a new Arsenal league soccer ball, a trip to Adventuredome, or God help us all, fur-lined boots).
At 7 and 8, J1 and J2 have not yet discovered these are all things we'd buy them anyway. There's nothing better than having your kids feel extra special with prizes that are just the normal, everyday business of life. There's no better day in my house than the one where I say, "What should our next prize be?" and they both shout out, "New shoes, new shoes!" and little do they realize, they've grown another size, so those were on my necessary To-Do list anyway. I believe, my friends, that's called an automatic Win-Win.
I bought the marbles at Wal-Mart, and they're pretty spiffy jar-fillers. We call them marbles, but they're really not. You couldn't shoot a game with them. Like us, they're not round and smooth yet. Like us, they're rough and sharp and they're crazy-sparkly like gems. I got them in the fish tank section. They're diamond-shaped, see-through, shiny and colorful. They're blue and red and yellow and pink and orange. They're diverse and different, like we are too. It's a pretty marble jar. It catches the sunlight. It gets prettier and prettier as victories mount and we fill it up together. I guess you really can't wish for anything more than that, right? Victories you fill up together?
We're pretty generous with the marbles. Doing homework will get you marbles. Sometimes a marble a page if we're feel magnanimous. Taking your plate to the sink will get you a marble. So will cleaning your room (although this is still mostly an untested theory). Being helpful gets you marbles. Being kind. Getting along. Being cooperative. Treating each other with loving kindness. Handing the last cookie to your sister and saying, "Here, Justice, you can have it." That'll get you a shitload of marbles. Boy, will it ever.
Mostly, marbles are for the times we get caught in the monumental act of respect. For looking beyond ourselves to see the other person sitting next to us. The amazing and beautiful times where no one is doing something good to earn something. The times where you get a marble and you say, "wow, I didn't even see that marble coming." Those are the priceless marbles. The ones you earn for not thinking about you. The ones you earn for thinking about someone else.
J1 and J2 have come so far in these past 17 months with us, it's sometimes hard to believe they're the same kids. From siblings whose default setting was fight and fight often, to the cooperative, sharing, caring duo of now, I almost can't believe it. I am blisteringly proud. I am stunned to watch it unfold.
I posted a video clip to Facebook the other day. They were at Chuck E. Cheese, feeding prize tickets into the ticket-counter machine, and effortlessly, for a minute and a half of video, they cooperatively found a rhythm. They instinctively handed each other tickets, fed them into the machine, didn't fight, didn't push, didn't compete. They just worked with each other with barely a word said, for the common good...them. It was fascinating to watch.
Do they still fight? Oh Lord, yes. They are a brother and sister, 7 and 8, one year apart, and if sibling rivalry didn't rear its ugly head at least once a day and lead to a minor spat or skirmish or two, I think I'd send them to the doctor for a cognitive workup and a blood panel. Big sisters think little brothers are an almighty pain in the ass and I assure you, it's vice-versa. He likes to kick the soccer ball back and forth at breakneck speed, and she likes to sit on it and take her time pondering new self-invented rules like, "okay, this next time, we all close our eyes and whoever gets it first gets a thousand dollars." It drives him up a tree. As far as stylistic pissing contests go, they can still come up with some doozies.
But there's no rage behind it anymore. Whatever life did to these kids to wallop them in the ass, mind and spirit...the worst days are behind them. Some of it is just growing up and growing older, but some of it is pure Them. We don't have to do "Kid of the Day" anymore to see who's turn it is to push the garage door button and turn off the light switch at night. They don't give a shit anymore. Life's too full of other things now.
The constant chorus of "that's not fair!" which haunted us from Day 1 to Day 365 is now just a watered-down, auto-pilot afterthought. There's no heartbreak to it anymore. There is still the occasional sense of injustice and inequity, but it finds its basis in reality now, not knee-jerk reactivity. "Fair" is a word that means something to them now. It is not a egocentric baby-demand. It is a thing that has objectivity and nuances.
I'm so proud of them.
They have grown, and continue to grow into remarkable, beautiful, wonderful-wise children. Life threw them lemons and they made lemonade so sweet we can all taste it. We can spot it from a distance. The anger, the hurt, the uncertainty, the rage...they turned it into hope. And goodness. And possibility. And, if at first they don't succeed? They try, try again. Lord, how they try.
I don't think there is anything more pleasing to the eyes of a father to watch two children whose anger at the world first turned inward to anger at each other, learn how to love each other again, to be best friends for real this time, to rediscover balance, cooperative spirit, and careful respect as they continue to settle into the ever-changing landscape of their lives.
More I cannot wish you, the Scottish blessing says.
Future J1? Future J2? Always love each other. You will never have another friend like your sister. You will never have another friend like your brother.
Never, ever, ever.
They're not even here right now. They're having a playdate at their friend Noya's house. But I just got up and grabbed a handful of marbles and I put it in their jar. I love you kids. And I love watching you love each other. That's my reward. That's my prize.
17 years Adam and I have been together this year. 17 months the kids have been with us this month. 117 marbles. If that's not kismet, well then, get your own jar. Try it yourself.
Meanwhile, our jar keeps filling. These wonderful, crazy-beautiful kids of ours...they beat the odds.
Dad and Daddy. Justice and Justin.
We overflow.
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Friday, November 8, 2013
Oh No I Won't, Oh Yes You Will
Gonna stand my ground
Won't be turned around
And I'll keep this world from dragging me down
Gonna stand my ground
And I won't back down
Thank you, Tom Petty. Justice came with that song factory installed.
There's something incredibly humorous and painful about raising a defiant child. Sometimes you laugh so much it hurts and sometimes it hurts so much you hide in the bathroom. It's a Vitamix shitstorm of emotions, and honestly, while it's fascinating from a sociological and psychological standpoint, it's just plain maddening from the parenting poop deck of the USS Clueless.
I've been trying to wrap my head around it more and more these days, not just because Justice was diagnosed with ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) straight off the bat, but also because I'm watching several of our friends go through the same things with their kids right now and, well, in for a penny, in for a pound...maybe whatever I learn and regurgitate can bring them some small flashes of hope and sanity too.
Justice takes a drug for ODD called Risperidone, which is the same drug they give the old folks with Alzheimers and Dementia so they stop hitting the nurses aides. It's an antipsychotic medication and it helps her control her outbursts, which she really can't control otherwise.
And I should preface these remarks by knowing full-well a whole passel of you well-meaning parents are undoubtedly going to jump on my case and give me holistic holy hell for giving any type of "mind altering" drug to my daughter. You think you won't? Pfft. I've talked about ADHD and Ritalin in this blog once or twice and a few of you went balls-first off the nuts-and-honey deep end.
So, before you're tempted to rescue my children again, let's leave it at this: your opinion is noted, but as my dear friend Andy used to say, I don't give a squirt. I'm as holistic as the next guy. I even banned high fructose corn syrup this year. But if you think I'm going to tackle Oppositional Defiant Disorder with no gluten and a bottle of fish oil capsules, you're out of your Whole Foods-loving mind. I love you dearly. Now put a sock in it.
ODD is one of those pain-in-the-ass, hard-to-interpret, "is that what it really is?" conditions. Is ADHD a real problem, or are kids just "energetic?" Does any child really have ODD, or is she just "strong-willed?" We spend so much time trying to spin our kids legitimate imbalances into positive pretty-talk, I think we often do them a great disservice. We certainly aren't helping them cope with their multi-year battles with ODD by sighing our exhausted, loving, tomorrow's-another-day smiles and saying, "I guess she's just independent." Bool sheet, mom and pop. She's not independent. She's freakin' whacked out.
Independent kids are good, cookie. I've got two of them and I love them to pieces. Strong-willed kids are good, too. Defiant children, on the other hand, have a legitimate problem that we have to help them fix. And by fix, I do not mean "finally achieve victory over them."It's not a contest we're supposed to win.
"You WILL do what I say, because I'm the parent" is more or less bullshit machismo. You know it...and they know it, too. "Your goal is to join with your child, says the book I'm reading right now, not be her adversary. The more you realize you are working with - rather than against - your child to lower her defiance, the more you will make this happen." Ha! There it is! Right there in a book! I kind of suspected it was the case, but as usual, I feel better when I'm validated by an author. Which is probably why I buy so many books. I just keep hitting the "buy now with 1-click" button until I find one that agrees with me.
Justice Rachel, now 8, came to live with us a year and six months ago. That's not a whole lot of time to give it all up for God and country, as far as automatic compliance goes. You know those movies where the kid from the broken home yells at the new, hated stepdad, "you're not my real father?" Well, in our case, you can hardly blame the little pumpkin. She's got double bragging rights on that one.
So, sure. Some defiance was to be expected. Predicted. Noted. But almost off the bat, we saw things that just weren't healthy. Strange slow-motion movements and walking. Blank, disassociated stares. Rages. Not just tantrums. We all know what tantrums look like. These were frenzies.
And what brought them on? "Can you pick up that book?" "Can you finish your homework." You know. The usual, mundane tortures of being 8. The proverbial kidlife crisis.
Our approach to all of this the past 18 months has really been fourfold:
1. Keep recognizing it as a real condition, and not saying "oh well, she's just strong-willed."
2. Continuing to work with our family therapist so she knows she's heard and her feelings are believed. We rotate sessions. The kids work with us one week, and go solo with the therapist the next. They can express their feelings with us and they can express their feelings without us. We think this is good.
3. Medication. For us, it's what works. It ran out once, and we watched as every bit of progress we made disappeared entirely in five short days. For better or for worse, for whatever reason, it's what she needs, so we're making sure she gets it.
4. (And this is the new one for us) Trying to see defiance through Justice's eyes. Trying to understand it's something that makes her feel as sad and frustrated and confused and uncomfortable as we are with it. Trying to realize it's not a contest we're supposed to win. Trying to realize we do her absolutely no good trying to break her like a horse. Trying to get our thick dad heads around the fact that we don't have to win to...win.
I'm loving Jeffrey Bernstein's book, 10 Days to a Less Defiant Child, and if your kid's a pain in the ass, I suggest you put it in your Amazon shopping cart, pronto.
In it, he makes a brilliant point. Defiant kids lack emotional intelligence. Plain and simple. And this confuses some parents, because their kids, like Justice, might be academically high-achievers. The kind the teachers love. They might be intellectually years ahead of other kids. They might be reading Dochevsky and cracking the Pythagorean theorem while their classmates are still pissing their panties at recess. But this doesn't make them emotionally intelligent. They're sort of, well, through no fault of their own, emotionally dumb.
And that's a hell of a puzzler for a parent, because then we get caught up in the silly trap of, "she's so good at school, she's so smart, her teacher says she is so far ahead of everyone else, why can't she just cooperate at home?" as if one set of skills precludes the other. It doesn't. Bernstein suggests emotional intelligence is a whole different ball of wax, skippy. I may be a brilliant pianist but that hardly ever means I can pop the hood of your car and fix your carburetor. Apples, peaches, pumpkin pie.
Another reason I like this book is because it has a really good chapter called, "Why Not to Yell in a Nutshell." And who doesn't need that reminder? Adam and I are not yellers by nature, but I'll admit, when it comes to defiance and Justice (and her brother too, when he lines up in aggravating sync), there have been times when when our obedience urge trumps the angels of our better nature, and we damn sure bark them back into action. Not proud of that. Just saying we're not infallible. The halo a lot of you have generously given us these past two years is often a little wobbly.
Bernstein says yelling at defiant kids is just dumb.
- It does not alter your child's behavior.
- It gets in the way of exploring the problem.
- It gives kids the wrong kind of attention, and they'll misbehave even more just to get it.
- Defiant children think concretely. "If it's okay for them to yell, it's okay for me to yell back."
- Yelling just leaves them resentful toward you.
- They act out when yelled at.
- The more you yell, the less they hear.
- Yelling says, "I'm mad at you. I don't like you."
- Children who are yelled at only respond to yelling. They stop responding to rational discussion.
- Yelling tell your child you're not a safe person to open up to and they can't trust you.
- Yelling tells your child, "you deserve to be yelled at."
- And the one that strikes me as the saddest one of all: yelling is demeaning. It's a way of saying, "I have power and you don't."
Justice, sweet, crazy, maddening child. I don't ever want you to think of your childhood as powerless. Not in this house, anyway. It's been way too powerless for way too long, and this is where all of that is supposed to change. If I didn't want that beautiful change to happen, then I should never have stepped up to bat in the first place.
So, shame on me when I yell at you. And shame on Daddy. We're human, we fail, and we'll do it again. I'm sure we will. But I want you to know, we know it's dumb. We know it's stupid. And it's not the way to find you where you need to be found.
"10 Days to a Less Defiant Child."
Oh, Dr. Bernstein, you silly, hopeful, impetuous fool.
If we, the imperfect, the frustrated, the stressed, could really tap that motherlode in a mere ten days, we'd all come over to your house next week, buy you a big steak dinner and kiss your sassafras. Such ain't the case, though. It takes way more time than that, best-selling teaser titles notwithstanding. But your book is a hell of a step in the right direction.
And in a dawning era where Adam and I are learning how to help Justice with her defiance, instead of battling with her over it, you've given us a long needed blueprint in concrete, appreciated terms.
Well, I know what's right
I got just one life
In a world that keeps on pushing me around
I won't back down
"No child ever grew up, looked back and blamed their parents for being too understanding," you write. And I do believe that's right. "Stricter is better" is no longer automatic common sense, and I'm going to allow myself to move past it. I'm going to work with her on this, not against her. It's not about my need to win, to be obeyed, to break her. It's about her need to have a good, sane, comfortable life. Loved. Heard. Understood.
Don't back down, Justice.
Your two dumb dads will get you through this.
10 Days to a Less Defiant Child, c.2006 Jeffrey Bernstein, Philadelphia, Da Capo Press, Perseus Books.
I Won't Back Down, c.1989 Tom Petty & Jeff Lynne, from the album Full Moon Fever.
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
From the Hallowed Halls of Facebook
J1 and J2 announced at dinner tonight they have decided to be best friends. But they're still going to fight.
###
Justin, while riding on my back yesterday: "Daddy, your hair has bald in it."
###
Me (singing): I've got the moves like Jagger, I've got the moves like Jagger, I've got the moo-ooo-ooves like Jagger...
Justice (not even looking up from the TV): You've got the moves like a horse.
Justin: And a duck.
###
Justin (at a restaurant): I'll have a Diet Coke.
Me: (to the server) No, he'll have lemonade.
Justin: (talking to me in Danny's little deep kid voice from "The Shining," using his finger to talk): Justin wants a Diet Coke, Mr. Reisman.
###
Upon receiving their first Susan B. Anthony dollars.
Justin: Who's this?
Adam: That's Susan B. Anthony.
Justin: When was she the president?
Adam: She wasn't. She was a leader for women's rights.
Justin: What's women's rights?
Adam: A hundred years ago, women couldn't vote like men. Susan B. Anthony wanted to be able to vote like a man. She wanted to be able to do anything like a man.
Justice (after a confused pause): Did she want to pee like a man?
###
Justin: Look, Daddy. I found a feather.
Me: Where did that come from?
Justin: (rolling his eyes) From a bird, Daddy.
###
Me: Who's your favorite football team?
Justin: Green Bay.
Me: Green Bay what?
Justin: Green Bay Packers.
Me: Excellent, who's your favorite baseball team?
Justin: Milwaukee.
Me: Milwaukee what?
(long pause)
Justin (unsure): Milwaukee talkies?
###
Me: Whenever you feel like fighting in the car, here's what you should do. Take a deep breath and hold it for ten seconds. Let's try it.
(They do).
Me: Once Daddy got so mad at me, he had to hold his breath and count to 55 million.
Justin: Really?
Adam: Mmm-hmm.
Me: In fact, he's still counting.
(Short silence)
Justice: What number is he on?
###
Justin demonstrates his math prowess again:
Me: What's 6+7?
Justin: 10
Me: No, try again.
Justin (yelling): It's 10!!
Me: No, it's 13.
Justin: Ohhhh, I thought you said 6+11!!
###
Justin: Can I get a new bat for my birthday? I won't hit Justice with it.
###
Justin: Daddy, do you have binoculars?
Me: Yes
Justin: Can I have them?
Me: You can borrow them, but you can't have them.
Justin: No, I mean when you die.
###
Thanks for the laughs, kids. We love you.
###
Justin, while riding on my back yesterday: "Daddy, your hair has bald in it."
###
Me (singing): I've got the moves like Jagger, I've got the moves like Jagger, I've got the moo-ooo-ooves like Jagger...
Justice (not even looking up from the TV): You've got the moves like a horse.
Justin: And a duck.
###
Justin (at a restaurant): I'll have a Diet Coke.
Me: (to the server) No, he'll have lemonade.
Justin: (talking to me in Danny's little deep kid voice from "The Shining," using his finger to talk): Justin wants a Diet Coke, Mr. Reisman.
###
Upon receiving their first Susan B. Anthony dollars.
Justin: Who's this?
Adam: That's Susan B. Anthony.
Justin: When was she the president?
Adam: She wasn't. She was a leader for women's rights.
Justin: What's women's rights?
Adam: A hundred years ago, women couldn't vote like men. Susan B. Anthony wanted to be able to vote like a man. She wanted to be able to do anything like a man.
Justice (after a confused pause): Did she want to pee like a man?
###
Justin: Look, Daddy. I found a feather.
Me: Where did that come from?
Justin: (rolling his eyes) From a bird, Daddy.
###
Me: Who's your favorite football team?
Justin: Green Bay.
Me: Green Bay what?
Justin: Green Bay Packers.
Me: Excellent, who's your favorite baseball team?
Justin: Milwaukee.
Me: Milwaukee what?
(long pause)
Justin (unsure): Milwaukee talkies?
###
Me: Whenever you feel like fighting in the car, here's what you should do. Take a deep breath and hold it for ten seconds. Let's try it.
(They do).
Me: Once Daddy got so mad at me, he had to hold his breath and count to 55 million.
Justin: Really?
Adam: Mmm-hmm.
Me: In fact, he's still counting.
(Short silence)
Justice: What number is he on?
###
Justin demonstrates his math prowess again:
Me: What's 6+7?
Justin: 10
Me: No, try again.
Justin (yelling): It's 10!!
Me: No, it's 13.
Justin: Ohhhh, I thought you said 6+11!!
###
Justin: Can I get a new bat for my birthday? I won't hit Justice with it.
###
Justin: Daddy, do you have binoculars?
Me: Yes
Justin: Can I have them?
Me: You can borrow them, but you can't have them.
Justin: No, I mean when you die.
###
Thanks for the laughs, kids. We love you.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Yom Kippur with the Reismans
When I was young and not Jewish and working in radio, Yom Kippur rolled around on the calendar one year, and not knowing what it was, our morning man Andy and I started joking about it on-air.
When we took our first commercial break, there was a tap on the door from Vern Falk, our old station manager, who chastised us for making light of a solemn day and offending our Jewish listeners.
This was in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, mind you, where Andy and I didn't even know we had Jewish listeners.
Anyway, we went back on the air, apologized, and got back to the real business of the day, giving away summer fun coupons from McDonalds and reading the weather.
Such is life in AM radio.
Now I'm older and I'm Jewish and I've sat through a few of them. 17 to be exact. And here's what I can tell you.
First of all, they're not short.
You go to services the night before. Then you go to services in the morning. Then you go to a Torah study. Then you go to a kids' service. Then you go to an afternoon service. Then you go to a service for dead people. Then you go to an evening service. And that's just Yom Kippur. We bookshelf that baby between Rosh Hashanah on one end and Sukkot and Simchat Torah on the other. This is the time of year when all heaven breaks loose. As far as the schedule grid goes this time of year, the Jews leave no stone unturned.
On Yom Kippur, you don't eat.
You fast from sundown the night before until sundown the next day. And when it's over, you go to Adam's mom's and eat bagels and tuna salad, the likes of which you never tasted before. After 24 hours, that tuna salad is like manna in the desert.
And lastly, you atone for your sins like it's going out of style. Holy smokes, do you atone.
You ask forgiveness for your sins from the past year. You delcare them null and void. You pound yourself on the chest as you read off a litany of sins and transgressions from soup to nuts. Not kidding. Really. You physically make a chest-hitting gesture with your fist as you rattle off dozens of sins. Sins of yours. Sins of your community's. Sins and sins, and when you're done with those? More sins.
Now, the Reform Jews -- and I am one of them -- aren't crazy about the terms "sin" and "sinner." They strike us as too Christian. They strike us as too Orthodox and strict and old-fashioned. You'll more likely hear Reform Rabbis desribe Yom Kippur with more than a whiff of gentility and therapist-couch correctness, "a time for self-relection, a time for self-examination and awareness. A time for coming together as a people and discovering who we are and who we have the possibility of becoming."
Horse hockey. You're atoning for sins. Call it what you want while you're applying your Revlon bright red #254 to Wilbur, but strip away the pretty talk and what's left over? A bunch of mildly hungry Jews sitting in a room for ten hours repeating and repenting for how sucky they've been for the past twelve months.
I'm not automatically fond of Yom Kippur. Bucking myself up and greeting it with good cheer every year is not my default setting. That is no big secret to Adam or to our Jewish friends and family.
I grew up in a Christian church -- the First Assembly of God -- a fundamentalist, evangelical batch of bible-thumpers if ever any were thumped. This is the group that speaks in tongues in most congregations and lets poisonous snakes bite them in a few down south. I try not to make judgment calls on other people's religions unless I've carried the membership papers myself, so in this case, I judge openly. FAOG (and believe me, they are damn careful about adding the "O" to that acronym), did me more harm than good, and distanced me further from a belief in God as a healthy, welcoming presence than anyone's church has ever done before.
It may be a good match for some folks, but for me personally, I can only describe my childhood growing up in that church's long shadow as a dark and irrevocable time, an unquestionable failure and a massive mismatch. It took a long time for me to surgically extract the venom they injected and find my place in organized religion again. But c'est la vie, don't we all whistle snatches of that old tune, in one form or another.
One of those First Assembly poisons was their almost maniacal focus on sin. Over and over, from the youngest of ages, we heard a constant reminder and an accusition that had no end. "You are a sinner, you have sinned." "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Put it on a bumper sticker. Paint it on your forehead. Start giving that shaming message to children at 3, 4-years-old and don't let up until they are sad, frightened, religiously-vacant adults.
So, no. When I came to Judaism, it was no great nostalgic heart-tugger to draw the ten hour sin card right off the bat with Yom Kippur. Once a year, Adam and I would go to Chabad (Orthodox and outreachy) because they were free and we were too poor to go anywhere else. God bless them for the free entry when you've got nowhere else to go, but they still include good old Leviticus 18:22 in their list of sins. "Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind. It is an abomination."
Abominably speaking, that's never been one of my favorites.
But to Adam, who was born Jewish, The High Holy Days, the Days of Awe, Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur are as ingrained in him as Christmas and Easter to any Christian. They're the Big Kahuna, the Numero Uno, the cat's pajamas of Judaism. And if you're going to raise Jewish kids -- and we sure as hell are -- all-day temple on Yom Kippur is where we need to be.
Our Yom Kippur didn't get off to a particularly whiz-bang start this year. First, nobody mailed us tickets and we got snapped at when we tried to tell them at the door. Next, the ushers from our men's club were more than a little rude and argumentative when we tried to save four extra seats so our extended family could sit together. Not very happy about the seat saving, those men's club deputies. Not exactly a warm welcome for the Reisman/Nelson clan this year.
Then about an hour into the first evening service, a woman stood up and walked out in anger when she saw Justin playing quietly on my iPhone in the row ahead of her. "That's disrespectful," she hissed at Adam. "I can't even sit here and watch this. I have to go sit somewhere else."
As people around us rushed to our defense, it took all the self-control I could muster not to respond with a great big holiday F.U.
If you had a clue, lady. If you only walked -- not a mile in my shoes -- but just a block in my shoes -- you would have realized twelve months ago, I couldn't get that kid to sit still in a chair for more than two minutes at a time. Two minutes.
And now he'll sit quietly and still for two and a half hours. And if that victory is still electronically enhanced sometimes, even on the holiest of Jewish days, I'm still going to take it at face value and be overjoyed, and I won't be ashamed of my shitty parenting for your sake. Go sit your nagging, pious ass somewhere else.
So, yeah. That's where my Yom Kippur started this year. Not a good hello.
But as I do every year when Yom Kippur rolls around, I start out grumpy, then I make my peace with it. More than that, I find my peace in it. I find my place in it.
This year, it happened when I watched the Rabbi put on his tallit. (The tallit is our prayer shawl, non-Jewish friends).
I remembered Rabbi Malcolm saying once, before he drapes his tallit over his shoulders, he covers his whole head with it, and in those short moments where he blocks out the world, he imagines the faces of all four of his grandparents. Thinks of their strength. Thinks of their goodness. Thinks of the traditions they gave him.
And traditions matter.
And that's why, for Justice and Justin, I continue to put on my happy face, even when I'm not happy about it, because I want them to grow up believing I believe in Yom Kippur, even when sometimes, I don't. All my dysfunctions notwithstanding, they need to know that this holiday matters to their parents, and it should matter to them. It is important for them to be there. In whatever shape or form. It is vital.
So, I wrap my prayer shawl over my head and I picture my grandparents.
There's Harry Senior, who died before I was born. From him I understand discipline. Duty. Respect.
There's Leona, my dad's mom. From her I understand a grandparent's pride. She bragged about me in front of people. She let me overhear it. From her, I learned there is value in public praise.
There's Ken, my mom's dad. From him I learned inquisitiveness. Courage to roam. Learning, investigating, finding out how things worked. Taking the road less traveled.
And there's Hannah. From her I got all the rest. Unconditional love. Open arms that were always there. A childhood of safety and joy and security. As Dorothy said on her way back home, I'll miss you, Scarecrow, the most of all.
So, this year, with my grandparents in my heart and my intent to keep doing better, Yom Kippur lent some magic after all...not just for me...but in spite of me.
For hours, I drew myself together in my tallit. I wrapped it around me. I wrapped it around Adam. I wrapped it around my children. And it made me feel good.
I want Justice and Justin to know what it feels like, that goodness. I want them to be comforted by our holidays shared. Maybe we can all let go of our past pains long enough to learn to wrap ourselves in under a single blue blanket and love these days together.
Yehuda Amichai:
Whoever wrapped in a tallit in one's youth will never forget:
taking it out of the soft sack, opening the folded tallit,
spreading it, kissing the border along its length (sometimes embroidered
and sometimes embossed). Afterwards, a great sweep over the head
like the heavens, like a chuppah, like a parachute. Afterwards, folding it
around one's head as if playing hide and seek, and then wrapping
the body in it, tight tight, letting it fold you like a cocoon
and then opening it like wings for flying.
And why are there stripes and not black-white squares
like a chessboard? Because squares are finite without hope
and stripes come from infinity and go on to infinity
like the runways at the airport
so that angels may land and take off.
When you wrap yourself in a tallit you cannot forget
coming out of a swimming pool or the sea
and being wrapped in a great towel and casting it
over one's head and wrapping in it, tight tight
and shivering a little and laughing and -- blessing.
When we took our first commercial break, there was a tap on the door from Vern Falk, our old station manager, who chastised us for making light of a solemn day and offending our Jewish listeners.
This was in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, mind you, where Andy and I didn't even know we had Jewish listeners.
Anyway, we went back on the air, apologized, and got back to the real business of the day, giving away summer fun coupons from McDonalds and reading the weather.
Such is life in AM radio.
Now I'm older and I'm Jewish and I've sat through a few of them. 17 to be exact. And here's what I can tell you.
First of all, they're not short.
You go to services the night before. Then you go to services in the morning. Then you go to a Torah study. Then you go to a kids' service. Then you go to an afternoon service. Then you go to a service for dead people. Then you go to an evening service. And that's just Yom Kippur. We bookshelf that baby between Rosh Hashanah on one end and Sukkot and Simchat Torah on the other. This is the time of year when all heaven breaks loose. As far as the schedule grid goes this time of year, the Jews leave no stone unturned.
On Yom Kippur, you don't eat.
You fast from sundown the night before until sundown the next day. And when it's over, you go to Adam's mom's and eat bagels and tuna salad, the likes of which you never tasted before. After 24 hours, that tuna salad is like manna in the desert.
And lastly, you atone for your sins like it's going out of style. Holy smokes, do you atone.
You ask forgiveness for your sins from the past year. You delcare them null and void. You pound yourself on the chest as you read off a litany of sins and transgressions from soup to nuts. Not kidding. Really. You physically make a chest-hitting gesture with your fist as you rattle off dozens of sins. Sins of yours. Sins of your community's. Sins and sins, and when you're done with those? More sins.
Now, the Reform Jews -- and I am one of them -- aren't crazy about the terms "sin" and "sinner." They strike us as too Christian. They strike us as too Orthodox and strict and old-fashioned. You'll more likely hear Reform Rabbis desribe Yom Kippur with more than a whiff of gentility and therapist-couch correctness, "a time for self-relection, a time for self-examination and awareness. A time for coming together as a people and discovering who we are and who we have the possibility of becoming."
Horse hockey. You're atoning for sins. Call it what you want while you're applying your Revlon bright red #254 to Wilbur, but strip away the pretty talk and what's left over? A bunch of mildly hungry Jews sitting in a room for ten hours repeating and repenting for how sucky they've been for the past twelve months.
I'm not automatically fond of Yom Kippur. Bucking myself up and greeting it with good cheer every year is not my default setting. That is no big secret to Adam or to our Jewish friends and family.
I grew up in a Christian church -- the First Assembly of God -- a fundamentalist, evangelical batch of bible-thumpers if ever any were thumped. This is the group that speaks in tongues in most congregations and lets poisonous snakes bite them in a few down south. I try not to make judgment calls on other people's religions unless I've carried the membership papers myself, so in this case, I judge openly. FAOG (and believe me, they are damn careful about adding the "O" to that acronym), did me more harm than good, and distanced me further from a belief in God as a healthy, welcoming presence than anyone's church has ever done before.
It may be a good match for some folks, but for me personally, I can only describe my childhood growing up in that church's long shadow as a dark and irrevocable time, an unquestionable failure and a massive mismatch. It took a long time for me to surgically extract the venom they injected and find my place in organized religion again. But c'est la vie, don't we all whistle snatches of that old tune, in one form or another.
One of those First Assembly poisons was their almost maniacal focus on sin. Over and over, from the youngest of ages, we heard a constant reminder and an accusition that had no end. "You are a sinner, you have sinned." "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Put it on a bumper sticker. Paint it on your forehead. Start giving that shaming message to children at 3, 4-years-old and don't let up until they are sad, frightened, religiously-vacant adults.
So, no. When I came to Judaism, it was no great nostalgic heart-tugger to draw the ten hour sin card right off the bat with Yom Kippur. Once a year, Adam and I would go to Chabad (Orthodox and outreachy) because they were free and we were too poor to go anywhere else. God bless them for the free entry when you've got nowhere else to go, but they still include good old Leviticus 18:22 in their list of sins. "Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind. It is an abomination."
Abominably speaking, that's never been one of my favorites.
But to Adam, who was born Jewish, The High Holy Days, the Days of Awe, Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur are as ingrained in him as Christmas and Easter to any Christian. They're the Big Kahuna, the Numero Uno, the cat's pajamas of Judaism. And if you're going to raise Jewish kids -- and we sure as hell are -- all-day temple on Yom Kippur is where we need to be.
Our Yom Kippur didn't get off to a particularly whiz-bang start this year. First, nobody mailed us tickets and we got snapped at when we tried to tell them at the door. Next, the ushers from our men's club were more than a little rude and argumentative when we tried to save four extra seats so our extended family could sit together. Not very happy about the seat saving, those men's club deputies. Not exactly a warm welcome for the Reisman/Nelson clan this year.
Then about an hour into the first evening service, a woman stood up and walked out in anger when she saw Justin playing quietly on my iPhone in the row ahead of her. "That's disrespectful," she hissed at Adam. "I can't even sit here and watch this. I have to go sit somewhere else."
As people around us rushed to our defense, it took all the self-control I could muster not to respond with a great big holiday F.U.
If you had a clue, lady. If you only walked -- not a mile in my shoes -- but just a block in my shoes -- you would have realized twelve months ago, I couldn't get that kid to sit still in a chair for more than two minutes at a time. Two minutes.
And now he'll sit quietly and still for two and a half hours. And if that victory is still electronically enhanced sometimes, even on the holiest of Jewish days, I'm still going to take it at face value and be overjoyed, and I won't be ashamed of my shitty parenting for your sake. Go sit your nagging, pious ass somewhere else.
So, yeah. That's where my Yom Kippur started this year. Not a good hello.
But as I do every year when Yom Kippur rolls around, I start out grumpy, then I make my peace with it. More than that, I find my peace in it. I find my place in it.
This year, it happened when I watched the Rabbi put on his tallit. (The tallit is our prayer shawl, non-Jewish friends).
I remembered Rabbi Malcolm saying once, before he drapes his tallit over his shoulders, he covers his whole head with it, and in those short moments where he blocks out the world, he imagines the faces of all four of his grandparents. Thinks of their strength. Thinks of their goodness. Thinks of the traditions they gave him.
And traditions matter.
And that's why, for Justice and Justin, I continue to put on my happy face, even when I'm not happy about it, because I want them to grow up believing I believe in Yom Kippur, even when sometimes, I don't. All my dysfunctions notwithstanding, they need to know that this holiday matters to their parents, and it should matter to them. It is important for them to be there. In whatever shape or form. It is vital.
So, I wrap my prayer shawl over my head and I picture my grandparents.
There's Harry Senior, who died before I was born. From him I understand discipline. Duty. Respect.
There's Leona, my dad's mom. From her I understand a grandparent's pride. She bragged about me in front of people. She let me overhear it. From her, I learned there is value in public praise.
There's Ken, my mom's dad. From him I learned inquisitiveness. Courage to roam. Learning, investigating, finding out how things worked. Taking the road less traveled.
And there's Hannah. From her I got all the rest. Unconditional love. Open arms that were always there. A childhood of safety and joy and security. As Dorothy said on her way back home, I'll miss you, Scarecrow, the most of all.
So, this year, with my grandparents in my heart and my intent to keep doing better, Yom Kippur lent some magic after all...not just for me...but in spite of me.
For hours, I drew myself together in my tallit. I wrapped it around me. I wrapped it around Adam. I wrapped it around my children. And it made me feel good.
I want Justice and Justin to know what it feels like, that goodness. I want them to be comforted by our holidays shared. Maybe we can all let go of our past pains long enough to learn to wrap ourselves in under a single blue blanket and love these days together.
Yehuda Amichai:
Whoever wrapped in a tallit in one's youth will never forget:
taking it out of the soft sack, opening the folded tallit,
spreading it, kissing the border along its length (sometimes embroidered
and sometimes embossed). Afterwards, a great sweep over the head
like the heavens, like a chuppah, like a parachute. Afterwards, folding it
around one's head as if playing hide and seek, and then wrapping
the body in it, tight tight, letting it fold you like a cocoon
and then opening it like wings for flying.
And why are there stripes and not black-white squares
like a chessboard? Because squares are finite without hope
and stripes come from infinity and go on to infinity
like the runways at the airport
so that angels may land and take off.
When you wrap yourself in a tallit you cannot forget
coming out of a swimming pool or the sea
and being wrapped in a great towel and casting it
over one's head and wrapping in it, tight tight
and shivering a little and laughing and -- blessing.
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Baby, Write This Down
Baby, write this down, take a little note
To remind you in case you didn't know
Tell yourself I love you and I don't want you to go
Write this down
Take my words, read 'em every day
Keep 'em close by, don't you let 'em fade away
So you'll remember what I forgot to say
Baby, write this down
-George Strait
As the memories of my second year of adoption weave in and out of this journal, I find myself left with so many unfinished writings, I don't know what to do with them. They're things that want to be blogs, but they're not quite big enough to stand on their own two feet.
The "draft" feature of this column is always astoundingly full of snippets and paragraphs and slices of life that never fully come to fruition...things that seem incredibly important as I write them down, but they never find life as finished essays, which is probably for the best, since they're all so random. Then again, aren't we all.
I think I rarely finish most of these snippets because this experience itself is simply so profound that half the time, my inefficient vocalizations along the way barely do it justice. I'm grateful for your compliments when you tell me you've read this and enjoyed it, but believe me, if I could somehow uncork and record the true magic all this is, I'd be writing you four times a day. Writing about this experience and having this experience is a night and day difference. Like my friend Pratibha used to say, "like holding a candle up to the sun."
I've waited for the things below to gel into something profound (or at the very least, full-length) because they seemed so important when I scratched them down. But a few months later, here they still are, unfinished ramblings, aging away like fine (or not-so-fine) wine, yours for the sipping. They're not full bottles, but they come from the heart. I put them here for safe keeping. Short and unfinished as they are, I didn't want to lose them.
Enjoy it While You Can
It occurred to me the other day as the new school year begins and we were all in full closet-cleaning mode here on Bonnie Castle Way, Justin's little boyhood is coming to an end. Not his whole boyhood, heavens no, we've got ages to go on that one (I say with a wink), but his little boyhood.
I was surprised as he helped me clean out his closet, how many of his clothes were not necessarily too small...they were just suddenly deemed too preposterously uncool to wear anymore.
Just like Justice traded in her Hello Kitty comforter for Justin Bieber (and P.S., try staring at that growingly wearisome face every morning on your daughter's bed)...and her Tinkerbell sticker earrings from the dollar store for real-live dangly pierced ones from Claire's at the mall, Justin too is giving up the trappings of his too-short little boyhood.
I've been told Spider-Man has got to go. No shirts with superheroes anymore, period. He'll still gladly play Lego Batman on the Wii, but keep it off his t-shirts, thank you, because it's way too uncool. No more Pixar shirts either. God forbid, Mater from Cars and Buzz Lightyear made him physically shudder when we found them at the bottom of his shirt drawer. He's growing up, and he won't be Toy'ed with.
I thought of that as I was picking his underwear off the floor (again). I smiled sort of wistfully as one retrospectively does when we turn life into literature, and I dropped them in his hamper thinking, "I'm really going to miss this." At a certain point, he won't want to have Superman and Skylanders on his underwear anymore, and that'll be sad, because it'll mark the definite end of his littleness. It won't be the end of his childhood, but it will be the end of his little boyhood, and that time's just as precious.
You Made Me Love You
For lots of gay men, the whole world is a Judy Garland song. Over-the-top and let's put on a show. The wistful one above, "Dear Mr. Gable," is the one that plays most often in the soundtrack of my mind as Justice really does begin to love us with genuine attachment, whether she wants to admit it or not.
She came to us in stages. First, not at all. Then resentfully. Then cautiously. And now, more openly. Fearlessly. Naturally.
And I'm happy for us, of course. But I'm even more happy for her.
Adopted children are world-weary by the time they're seven. The world is an unsure and cynical place. They can love and be loved, but in the background, a message plays.
"I've loved like this, but I've lost it before."
"I wish I could trust this to last."
"It feels good to be loved, but this too could pass."
You and I look at life's difficulties and say, "this too shall pass." Adopted children look at life's beauty and say, "this too could pass."
It's tragic that any child has to feel that. It's beautiful beyond words to try to fix it.
I'm happy for us -- but mostly I'm joyful for Justice -- because a jaded little girl has learned how to love again.
She's rusty, but she's getting good at it.
I Am Here to Learn
Let go, or be dragged. - Zen Proverb
When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. - Lao Tzu
Way back when we started this journal, I talked about having to let go of the fantasy we had before we adopted. Like most other adoptive parents, we came to the table with a fully-formed fantasy of what our family would be, how our children would act, how we'd efficiently -- not effortlessly, but at least efficiently -- parent them through each difficulty.
Which turned out to be 99% bullshit, of course. Like we could line up the problems in an alphabetical list and tick them off the clipboard. "Delusional" comes into play very heavily before you adopt. After reality kicks you in the nuts four or five hundred times in the first year, you learn to erase the picture and start over.
Your family will be what your family will be. It will set its own course. It will become what its supposed to become.
If your family is a ship with a rudder, you're very lucky. Mine is a paper kite. And the wind comes from an oscillating fan on Red Bull.
Sometimes ridiculously mixed metaphors are the only things that come close to describing it with even a hint of accuracy.
I've had to learn to adjust my expectations for paper kites, especially when it comes to the childrens' anger. There's always plenty of it, seeded deep in their souls in dark places I can't quite get to yet, and when they give it to me, I have to be very careful not to give it back.
If someone behaves negatively towards you, it helps to remember that he or she is a human being like you and to distinguish between an action and the person who does it. If counter measures are needed to prevent someone doing harm, it's always better to do it with a calm rather than an agitated mind. If you act out of anger, the best part of your brain fails to function. Remember, compassion is not a sign of weakness. - The Dalai Lama
Hello, Dalai. I'm turning the facts above into My New Seven Truths, because I need them.
1. Compassion is not a sign of weakness.
2. Not even in parenting.
3. Stop being angry when they are.
4. They're little, you're not. Don't follow their tantrums with one of your own.
5. Let go of what you think your family should be.
6. Just let it happen.
7. Fly more kites.
Through the Long Night With You
I quote Billy Joel a lot because I like him.
I had every album. Then when I started driving, I had every cassette. Then when cassettes went the way of the dinosaurs, I had every CD. And now that CD futures are sketchy at best, Billy Joel lives on in my world in a bunch of sound files. When those go belly-up, I don't know what I'll do. Inject him directly into my veins, I guess.
Here's a Billy Joel song that makes me think of my kids.
I quote song lyrics a lot here, but sometimes there's just no commentary to attach to it. Sometimes it just rings simple and true, all by itself.
The warm tears
The bad dreams
The soft trembling shoulders
The old fears
But I'm here
Through the long night with you
No, I didn't start it
You're broken hearted
From a long, long time ago
Oh, the way you hold me
Is all that I need to know
All you past sins
Are sins past
You should be sleeping
And it's so late
But I'll wait
Through the long night with you
Take Us Home, George Strait
So ends my unfinished "drafts" pile. My inbox is empty and my work here is done for the day.
You can find a chisel, I can find a stone
Folks will be reading these words, long after were gone
Oh I love you and I don't want you to go
Baby write this down
More half-baked drafts and Sunday morning incompleness is inevitably on the way.
Some days I'm too busy finishing what I started to finish what I started.
"Write This Down" by Dana Hunt & Kent Robbins from the George Strait album "Always Never the Same," c.1999 MCA Nashville. "You Made Me Love You" by Joe McCarthy & James V. Monaco, c.1913, "Dear Mr. Gable" version c.1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. "Through the Long Night" by Billy Joel, c.1980 Columbia Records
To remind you in case you didn't know
Tell yourself I love you and I don't want you to go
Write this down
Take my words, read 'em every day
Keep 'em close by, don't you let 'em fade away
So you'll remember what I forgot to say
Baby, write this down
-George Strait
As the memories of my second year of adoption weave in and out of this journal, I find myself left with so many unfinished writings, I don't know what to do with them. They're things that want to be blogs, but they're not quite big enough to stand on their own two feet.
The "draft" feature of this column is always astoundingly full of snippets and paragraphs and slices of life that never fully come to fruition...things that seem incredibly important as I write them down, but they never find life as finished essays, which is probably for the best, since they're all so random. Then again, aren't we all.
I think I rarely finish most of these snippets because this experience itself is simply so profound that half the time, my inefficient vocalizations along the way barely do it justice. I'm grateful for your compliments when you tell me you've read this and enjoyed it, but believe me, if I could somehow uncork and record the true magic all this is, I'd be writing you four times a day. Writing about this experience and having this experience is a night and day difference. Like my friend Pratibha used to say, "like holding a candle up to the sun."
I've waited for the things below to gel into something profound (or at the very least, full-length) because they seemed so important when I scratched them down. But a few months later, here they still are, unfinished ramblings, aging away like fine (or not-so-fine) wine, yours for the sipping. They're not full bottles, but they come from the heart. I put them here for safe keeping. Short and unfinished as they are, I didn't want to lose them.
Enjoy it While You Can
It occurred to me the other day as the new school year begins and we were all in full closet-cleaning mode here on Bonnie Castle Way, Justin's little boyhood is coming to an end. Not his whole boyhood, heavens no, we've got ages to go on that one (I say with a wink), but his little boyhood.
I was surprised as he helped me clean out his closet, how many of his clothes were not necessarily too small...they were just suddenly deemed too preposterously uncool to wear anymore.
Just like Justice traded in her Hello Kitty comforter for Justin Bieber (and P.S., try staring at that growingly wearisome face every morning on your daughter's bed)...and her Tinkerbell sticker earrings from the dollar store for real-live dangly pierced ones from Claire's at the mall, Justin too is giving up the trappings of his too-short little boyhood.
I've been told Spider-Man has got to go. No shirts with superheroes anymore, period. He'll still gladly play Lego Batman on the Wii, but keep it off his t-shirts, thank you, because it's way too uncool. No more Pixar shirts either. God forbid, Mater from Cars and Buzz Lightyear made him physically shudder when we found them at the bottom of his shirt drawer. He's growing up, and he won't be Toy'ed with.
I thought of that as I was picking his underwear off the floor (again). I smiled sort of wistfully as one retrospectively does when we turn life into literature, and I dropped them in his hamper thinking, "I'm really going to miss this." At a certain point, he won't want to have Superman and Skylanders on his underwear anymore, and that'll be sad, because it'll mark the definite end of his littleness. It won't be the end of his childhood, but it will be the end of his little boyhood, and that time's just as precious.
You Made Me Love You
You made me love you
I didn't want to do it
I didn't want to do it
You made me want you
I didn't want to do it
I didn't want to do it
You made me want you
And all the time you knew it
I guess you always knew it
I guess you always knew it
For lots of gay men, the whole world is a Judy Garland song. Over-the-top and let's put on a show. The wistful one above, "Dear Mr. Gable," is the one that plays most often in the soundtrack of my mind as Justice really does begin to love us with genuine attachment, whether she wants to admit it or not.
She came to us in stages. First, not at all. Then resentfully. Then cautiously. And now, more openly. Fearlessly. Naturally.
And I'm happy for us, of course. But I'm even more happy for her.
Adopted children are world-weary by the time they're seven. The world is an unsure and cynical place. They can love and be loved, but in the background, a message plays.
"I've loved like this, but I've lost it before."
"I wish I could trust this to last."
"It feels good to be loved, but this too could pass."
You and I look at life's difficulties and say, "this too shall pass." Adopted children look at life's beauty and say, "this too could pass."
It's tragic that any child has to feel that. It's beautiful beyond words to try to fix it.
I'm happy for us -- but mostly I'm joyful for Justice -- because a jaded little girl has learned how to love again.
She's rusty, but she's getting good at it.
I Am Here to Learn
Let go, or be dragged. - Zen Proverb
When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. - Lao Tzu
Way back when we started this journal, I talked about having to let go of the fantasy we had before we adopted. Like most other adoptive parents, we came to the table with a fully-formed fantasy of what our family would be, how our children would act, how we'd efficiently -- not effortlessly, but at least efficiently -- parent them through each difficulty.
Which turned out to be 99% bullshit, of course. Like we could line up the problems in an alphabetical list and tick them off the clipboard. "Delusional" comes into play very heavily before you adopt. After reality kicks you in the nuts four or five hundred times in the first year, you learn to erase the picture and start over.
Your family will be what your family will be. It will set its own course. It will become what its supposed to become.
If your family is a ship with a rudder, you're very lucky. Mine is a paper kite. And the wind comes from an oscillating fan on Red Bull.
Sometimes ridiculously mixed metaphors are the only things that come close to describing it with even a hint of accuracy.
I've had to learn to adjust my expectations for paper kites, especially when it comes to the childrens' anger. There's always plenty of it, seeded deep in their souls in dark places I can't quite get to yet, and when they give it to me, I have to be very careful not to give it back.
If someone behaves negatively towards you, it helps to remember that he or she is a human being like you and to distinguish between an action and the person who does it. If counter measures are needed to prevent someone doing harm, it's always better to do it with a calm rather than an agitated mind. If you act out of anger, the best part of your brain fails to function. Remember, compassion is not a sign of weakness. - The Dalai Lama
Hello, Dalai. I'm turning the facts above into My New Seven Truths, because I need them.
1. Compassion is not a sign of weakness.
2. Not even in parenting.
3. Stop being angry when they are.
4. They're little, you're not. Don't follow their tantrums with one of your own.
5. Let go of what you think your family should be.
6. Just let it happen.
7. Fly more kites.
Through the Long Night With You
I quote Billy Joel a lot because I like him.
I had every album. Then when I started driving, I had every cassette. Then when cassettes went the way of the dinosaurs, I had every CD. And now that CD futures are sketchy at best, Billy Joel lives on in my world in a bunch of sound files. When those go belly-up, I don't know what I'll do. Inject him directly into my veins, I guess.
Here's a Billy Joel song that makes me think of my kids.
I quote song lyrics a lot here, but sometimes there's just no commentary to attach to it. Sometimes it just rings simple and true, all by itself.
The warm tears
The bad dreams
The soft trembling shoulders
The old fears
But I'm here
Through the long night with you
No, I didn't start it
You're broken hearted
From a long, long time ago
Oh, the way you hold me
Is all that I need to know
All you past sins
Are sins past
You should be sleeping
And it's so late
But I'll wait
Through the long night with you
Take Us Home, George Strait
So ends my unfinished "drafts" pile. My inbox is empty and my work here is done for the day.
You can find a chisel, I can find a stone
Folks will be reading these words, long after were gone
Oh I love you and I don't want you to go
Baby write this down
More half-baked drafts and Sunday morning incompleness is inevitably on the way.
Some days I'm too busy finishing what I started to finish what I started.
"Write This Down" by Dana Hunt & Kent Robbins from the George Strait album "Always Never the Same," c.1999 MCA Nashville. "You Made Me Love You" by Joe McCarthy & James V. Monaco, c.1913, "Dear Mr. Gable" version c.1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. "Through the Long Night" by Billy Joel, c.1980 Columbia Records
Saturday, August 17, 2013
Point of Reference
Baby, baby
When I touch you like this
And when I hold you like that
It's so hard to believe
But it's all coming back to me now
My dad loved to work and he loved his friends. The rest of it -- fatherhood, husbandry -- he tried. In his heart, he wanted to be good at it, but sometimes flaws run deep. His essential failing was the fact he felt that all those who loved him owed him endless leeway. He thought because he brought home the income, everything else should be a free pass. He thought we owed him tolerance, support and respect for any neglectful, crazy or heartless thing he did. He thought it was his due.
My dad wasn't wired for monogamy. He wasn't wired for sobriety. He tried both from time to time and mostly failed. He liked Coors Light and he liked Seagram's 7. In the wintertime, he mixed brandy slushes in plastic paint cups from the hardware store because they held more. In any era, his corny, over-the-top humor was the life of every tavern. He loved his drinking buddies and some were like brothers. He liked flirting with women. And he'd follow either of them wherever they led.
For me, for Mom, for Erin, for Karen and her kids, we wanted more. We kept waiting for his perfection to arrive. He was a good man and his heart was in the right place. The raw material was there, we just couldn't raise him up to our ideal. We wanted him to be Superman, but the truth is, he was just a guy.
He wasn't bad. This isn't an indictment. He was just a kind, distracted alcoholic, and we've all made our peace with that through the years. He was a genuinely good guy. Really. As for the whole family man thing, he just didn't have the skills to pull it off. In later years, when cancer came, he got so much better at it....cancer, of course, being life's great irony. It helps you become who you always wanted to be, and just when you get good at it, it takes you away.
My dad was fun and funny and he made people laugh. His answering machine, like a Ray Stevens comedy song, often started with a long, drawn-out "there I was..." that was guaranteed to keep you riveted to the phone. Even now, I can hear his booming baritone, slightly slurred, giggling at his own silliness, as his over-the-top drama and run-on sentences rolled out like gold...
"I'm sorry I can't come to the phone, but there I was, sitting in the living room minding my own business, and I heard a noise up on the roof. I said to myself, "Self? That sounds like a noise up on the roof," so I ran out to the shop to get the ladder and my trusty 12-gauge I've had since I was a little bitty baby, and first of all, I couldn't find the ladder, because somebody didn't put it back where it's supposed to be, but that's a story for a different day and I know you don't have much time, so I grabbed a little step stool I keep in the corner, the one I use when I need to reach up and get the Scrabble board from the top of the closet, because most nights, that's just what I do, sit here with Pam and read the Bible and play Scrabble, but by that time, the noise on the roof was getting louder, and I said to myself, "Self? I do believe that noise is getting louder," and I have to admit, I was pretty dang scared by this time, so I stopped on the porch and sat down and had a Silver Bullet or two, just to steady my nerves, and then I carefully crept around back to the side of the house where somebody forgot to mow the grass again, but that's another story, and I know you're in a hurry..."
Those outgoing messages of my dad's could go on forever, and they did. I timed that one, and it was five-and-a-half minutes long. Four minutes on why he couldn't answer your call, because he fell off the roof investigating a noise, and another minute and a half explaining how he was now in Theda Clark Regional Medical Center in Neenah, and if you wanted him to return your call, you'd have to wait until spring, because he'd be on a ventilator until then.
That was my dad. He lived in a world where nothing had to be serious and life was but a dream.
And many loved him for that.
And many were left wanting more.
# # #
In parenting, I think most of us try daily to make up for the inadequacies of our parents. I think it's only natural, we run in the door and make a mad dash of it, like Bob Cratchit coming in late to the office...
The clock struck nine. No Bob. A quarter past. No Bob. He was full eighteen minutes and a half behind his time. Scrooge sat with his door wide open, that he might see him come into the Tank.
His hat was off, before he opened the door; his comforter too. He was on his stool in a jiffy; driving away with his pen, as if he were trying to overtake nine o'clock.
I think that's what I've been doing with Justice and Justin...trying to overtake nine o'clock. Not just trying to avoid my own dad's failings, but not wanting to repeat their dad's failings, too. Most of us are trying to make up for one person's lifetime of poor paternal performance. Adam and I are trying to make up for two.
I think of that often in the middle of the night when Justice crawls into bed with us after a bad dream. It's the only time she'll let me hold her and cuddle her, and brush the hair out of her eyes, and softly stroke her hair and give her the gentle forehead kisses and safety and comfort every dad longs to give.
And as I stroke her hair and tell her she's safe, it comes to me with perfect clarity in the middle of the night, I only have one shot at this and I need to do it right, because when she grows up and finds a love of her own, the person who makes her feel safest will do this too, and it will make her feel the most loved, because it will remind her of me.
Dad is a point of reference for all little girls, and that love is either complete or incomplete. It's what women search for all their lives. And some men, too.
There's great responsibility in that honor.
And it's sad that so many dads are pillars for their friends, dependable on the job, but when it comes to the rest of it, the family part that should matter the most, they're too tired to give any more, and they're just not up to the challenge.
Like my dad, who I loved with all my heart. Who left me wanting more.
If you forgive me all this
If I forgive you all that
We forgive and forget
And it's all coming back to me
I finished crying in the instant that you left
And I can't remember where or when or how
And I banished every memory you and I had ever made
But when you touch me like this
And you hold me like that
I just have to admit
That it's all coming back to me now
Having children reminds me how much fathers live in sons and daughters. And in every relationship they'll ever have as grown-ups, Adam and I will be their point of reference.
As I go through my days making wishes about who I hope they can be for me, I stop and remind myself how important it is that I set the bar high and never stop providing what is essential and right for them.
"It's All Coming Back to Me Now," c.1989 Jim Steinman. From the Celine Dion album "Falling Into You," Columbia, Epic Records.
When I touch you like this
And when I hold you like that
It's so hard to believe
But it's all coming back to me now
My dad loved to work and he loved his friends. The rest of it -- fatherhood, husbandry -- he tried. In his heart, he wanted to be good at it, but sometimes flaws run deep. His essential failing was the fact he felt that all those who loved him owed him endless leeway. He thought because he brought home the income, everything else should be a free pass. He thought we owed him tolerance, support and respect for any neglectful, crazy or heartless thing he did. He thought it was his due.
My dad wasn't wired for monogamy. He wasn't wired for sobriety. He tried both from time to time and mostly failed. He liked Coors Light and he liked Seagram's 7. In the wintertime, he mixed brandy slushes in plastic paint cups from the hardware store because they held more. In any era, his corny, over-the-top humor was the life of every tavern. He loved his drinking buddies and some were like brothers. He liked flirting with women. And he'd follow either of them wherever they led.
For me, for Mom, for Erin, for Karen and her kids, we wanted more. We kept waiting for his perfection to arrive. He was a good man and his heart was in the right place. The raw material was there, we just couldn't raise him up to our ideal. We wanted him to be Superman, but the truth is, he was just a guy.
He wasn't bad. This isn't an indictment. He was just a kind, distracted alcoholic, and we've all made our peace with that through the years. He was a genuinely good guy. Really. As for the whole family man thing, he just didn't have the skills to pull it off. In later years, when cancer came, he got so much better at it....cancer, of course, being life's great irony. It helps you become who you always wanted to be, and just when you get good at it, it takes you away.
My dad was fun and funny and he made people laugh. His answering machine, like a Ray Stevens comedy song, often started with a long, drawn-out "there I was..." that was guaranteed to keep you riveted to the phone. Even now, I can hear his booming baritone, slightly slurred, giggling at his own silliness, as his over-the-top drama and run-on sentences rolled out like gold...
"I'm sorry I can't come to the phone, but there I was, sitting in the living room minding my own business, and I heard a noise up on the roof. I said to myself, "Self? That sounds like a noise up on the roof," so I ran out to the shop to get the ladder and my trusty 12-gauge I've had since I was a little bitty baby, and first of all, I couldn't find the ladder, because somebody didn't put it back where it's supposed to be, but that's a story for a different day and I know you don't have much time, so I grabbed a little step stool I keep in the corner, the one I use when I need to reach up and get the Scrabble board from the top of the closet, because most nights, that's just what I do, sit here with Pam and read the Bible and play Scrabble, but by that time, the noise on the roof was getting louder, and I said to myself, "Self? I do believe that noise is getting louder," and I have to admit, I was pretty dang scared by this time, so I stopped on the porch and sat down and had a Silver Bullet or two, just to steady my nerves, and then I carefully crept around back to the side of the house where somebody forgot to mow the grass again, but that's another story, and I know you're in a hurry..."
Those outgoing messages of my dad's could go on forever, and they did. I timed that one, and it was five-and-a-half minutes long. Four minutes on why he couldn't answer your call, because he fell off the roof investigating a noise, and another minute and a half explaining how he was now in Theda Clark Regional Medical Center in Neenah, and if you wanted him to return your call, you'd have to wait until spring, because he'd be on a ventilator until then.
That was my dad. He lived in a world where nothing had to be serious and life was but a dream.
And many loved him for that.
And many were left wanting more.
# # #
In parenting, I think most of us try daily to make up for the inadequacies of our parents. I think it's only natural, we run in the door and make a mad dash of it, like Bob Cratchit coming in late to the office...
The clock struck nine. No Bob. A quarter past. No Bob. He was full eighteen minutes and a half behind his time. Scrooge sat with his door wide open, that he might see him come into the Tank.
His hat was off, before he opened the door; his comforter too. He was on his stool in a jiffy; driving away with his pen, as if he were trying to overtake nine o'clock.
I think that's what I've been doing with Justice and Justin...trying to overtake nine o'clock. Not just trying to avoid my own dad's failings, but not wanting to repeat their dad's failings, too. Most of us are trying to make up for one person's lifetime of poor paternal performance. Adam and I are trying to make up for two.
I think of that often in the middle of the night when Justice crawls into bed with us after a bad dream. It's the only time she'll let me hold her and cuddle her, and brush the hair out of her eyes, and softly stroke her hair and give her the gentle forehead kisses and safety and comfort every dad longs to give.
And as I stroke her hair and tell her she's safe, it comes to me with perfect clarity in the middle of the night, I only have one shot at this and I need to do it right, because when she grows up and finds a love of her own, the person who makes her feel safest will do this too, and it will make her feel the most loved, because it will remind her of me.
Dad is a point of reference for all little girls, and that love is either complete or incomplete. It's what women search for all their lives. And some men, too.
There's great responsibility in that honor.
And it's sad that so many dads are pillars for their friends, dependable on the job, but when it comes to the rest of it, the family part that should matter the most, they're too tired to give any more, and they're just not up to the challenge.
Like my dad, who I loved with all my heart. Who left me wanting more.
If you forgive me all this
If I forgive you all that
We forgive and forget
And it's all coming back to me
I finished crying in the instant that you left
And I can't remember where or when or how
And I banished every memory you and I had ever made
But when you touch me like this
And you hold me like that
I just have to admit
That it's all coming back to me now
Having children reminds me how much fathers live in sons and daughters. And in every relationship they'll ever have as grown-ups, Adam and I will be their point of reference.
As I go through my days making wishes about who I hope they can be for me, I stop and remind myself how important it is that I set the bar high and never stop providing what is essential and right for them.
"It's All Coming Back to Me Now," c.1989 Jim Steinman. From the Celine Dion album "Falling Into You," Columbia, Epic Records.
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Game On
Justice hates to lose at Trivial Pursuit. Hates it, hates it, hates it.
Hates it so much, in fact, that if her brother gets one answer right -- just one before she does -- out comes the pout, out comes the growl, the tears, the ferocity, the wish-you-were-dead dragon eyes -- and the game is over.
Justice is having a harder time with good sportsmanship than Justin. Neither one of them are aces at it by any means, but Justin is making really good progress. Justice is not. Not yet anyway. Believe me, it's on my bucket list.
Don't get me wrong. The kids are best friends and they play together beautifully...as long as the game doesn't involve actual winning or losing. Justin's getting a handle on it now. In a year, fifteen months, he's come to the conclusion that somebody always wins at Space Checkers, Skippy, and it ain't always him. He's making his peace with that fact, and the world isn't ending. His sister, however, is holding out for miracles.
We played another game yesterday -- one of those dreadful picture bingo games with the wobbly spinner and the red cover squares and the infinite respins hoping for a winner, and the game was in a dead heat. They each had one square left to go. I was sure it was going to be bitter pandemonium when one lost and one won -- that would be par for the course -- but I was pleasantly surprised when Justin took his loss in stride. When Justice spun and the arrow hit the lucky slot she was waiting for, I winced and offered my usual "wanna keep playing for second place?" to placate the loser, but Justin just shrugged and smiled and said, "That's okay, she can win." Taking the loss and getting on with it, so we had time to play another game was more important to him than winning.
That's huge in this house. Huge progress. Huge growth.
Buoyed by my ever-illogical optimism, I launched us into an immediate follow-up with Trivial Pursuit Jr., and we weren't two minutes into the game as noted above, before Justice, fresh on the heels of her bingo victory -- two freaking minutes ago! -- was already pouting, hostile and ready to tantrum because her brother guessed a knuckle sandwich is something you'd likely get from (c) the school bully, and not (a) your best bud, or (b) your pet dog.
Christ on crutches, as Lee Trinrud used to say. When does it end?
Justice loves to play games. She asks to play games. She just doesn't like to lose. Not ever. Not even a little bit. Which, I've got to tell you, makes it a real pain-in-the-ass to play with her.
Now at 8, her complete inability to lose graciously is a very unattractive quality, but not entirely without understanding. I have to stop myself frequently and remind myself she's just a kid. In the grand scheme of emotional maturity, it barely makes sense to tell her to act her age, because, well, she is acting her age. Kids don't like to lose. She's not a rarity. I get it.
But there's a tad more at play, and I'll steal it right out of the brilliantly funny book on sibling bickering called "Mom, Jason's Breathing on Me." Here's the heart of the problem. This answer has Justice written all over it, and it's as wise as any I've ever heard:
"Known to all parents, yet somehow not recognized as a basic fact of human existence is that we all -- kids and adults -- have two distinct and separate modes of operating, really two distinct selves. One is an at-home and with-immediate-family version of us that just wants to relax, to unwind, to be nurtured, wants what it wants now, has minimal self-control, and will tolerate zero stress. It is the regressed version of our kids and of us. I call it the baby self. But there is another side that operates at a completely different and higher level of functioning. It is the part of us and our kids that goes out into the world, has patience, has self-control, is willing to delay gratification in order to work toward a goal, and can and will tolerate stress. I call this the mature self."
I've suspected this for some time now, particularly during the past year's sometimes-at-odds, big-picture communications with Justice's first grade teacher, who sang her praises to the rooftops and couldn't understand why we would want to address her allegedly-challenging behavior, much less medicate her. To Mrs. Teacher, Justice was a flawless beacon of perfect behavior in the classroom. The words were never said, but we could see it in her eyes every time she talked to us about behavior or medication issues...are you guys nuts??
But what she and other teachers fail to understand is, sometimes the kids you consider to be your best-behaved students are, plain and simple, just giving you the full content of their mature tank, and once that tank runs out, there's nothing left but the baby self to come home to the parents. From 8 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon, you get Justice at her best. But that's her per diem. That's all she has to give. She holds it in, and then, like letting out a deep breath coming up from underwater, Adam and I get her explosion, her expulsion of everything else. Don't get me wrong, Mrs. Teacher. I'm glad she was a peach in your classroom, but walk a mile in my shoes and you'll see really quickly when the final bell rings, we get stuck with little Linda Blair from The Exorcist.
So, baby-self and mature-self...not just a concept for I wish teachers everywhere would consider more seriously when they doubt parents' sanity, but definitely a dicey dichotomy when it comes to breaking out a deck of Uno cards here at home.
The lessons are important, so they continue:
1. Sportsmanship matters.
2. Life has winners AND losers.
3. You will sometimes be one and sometimes the other.
4. That's just how it works.
5. Learn to deal with it now as a child, or you will never be able to deal with it as an adult.
I think all kids need to learn those five things. I think we are failing miserably in our collective, parental and educational framework to teach those lessons. No wonder kids go meltdown manic when they lose. We've created a bizarro alternate universe where they don't have to anymore. Where parents and teachers, loving peace and quiet above everything else, came up with an entire new world designed around every child wins...all the time, which if you ask me, is a coddled concept that's bat shit crazy with a Capital C.
It's a world where Justice still thinks she can win anything. Where "her way or the highway" has gone on way too long and has not been dealt with very well for the past eight years, much of my own 15-month tenure included.
Her oppositional defiant disorder still rages. Granted, she is much more settled, much more comfortable here. She climbs into bed with me in the middle of the night and happily cuddles into my arms with a sigh and a snore. She won't do it in her waking world yet. She'd flat-out die before she'd show me affection in broad daylight. But when the night is long and the monsters are in the closet, mine are the arms she turns to, and I'm thrilled to offer them. As Clevon Little said as the old lady knocked on his window and gave him the pie in Blazing Saddles, "I'm quickly becoming an underground sensation in this town."
Love and comfort are not the issues anymore. Her problem has been, and still remains, basic compliance.
Hope springs eternal I suppose, and Justice still believes every argument, every procedure, every damn parental point of order is hers to win. From no more snacks if you don't eat dinner to pick up the mess you just made, everything -- and Lord almighty, I mean everything -- is still a fight. The mature-self you see when Justice is out in public is nothing at all like the baby-self who unleashes her furious, unending desire to be the one in charge here at home.
"The baby-self wants what it wants now, has minimal self-control, and will tolerate zero stress."
Oy vey, that's our pumpkin in a nutshell. Winning at games or winning over us, Justice does not like to come in second. She detests it with every fiber.
Miss Hannah, our family therapist, who cleverly recognizes not just the kids' disobedience issues, but the skittish hesitancy toward more in-your-face strictness from newbie dads, encourages us at nearly every turn to be firmer.
"You're promoting their attachment beautifully," she told us. "You've done more to encourage healthy attachment than any other parents I've ever seen. You are great at this. They are attaching to both of you just fine. That earns you huge leeway when it comes to being stricter with them. Use it."
In my mind, Miss Hannah talks in italics a lot.
So yeah, she's absolutely right, and God bless her for pointing it out. Stuff like that is not basic instinct to new parents of adopted older kids. Our default setting is "make them love us." It is not "make them respect us." It has taken great practice to make that approach with Justice our new default setting. We are not hard-asses by nature -- not at all -- and it's weird sometimes to have to be.
But there is great pleasure in seeing it start to work.
When Justice first got here, she thought she could beat us 100% of the time. And there were many days when she did, bless her.
Now it's a crankier, more cynical pair of parents who come to her door when it's ding-dong, bullshit calling, and the poor girl is starting to realize it. There's a confused but dawning look of wonder on her face when she realizes she's not in charge anymore, and I don't half mind putting it there.
Consistently not letting her have her way is beginning, blessedly, to wear her down. She still has her tantrums. I don't think we'll see the end of those babies anytime soon, but they've lost their luster. The critics aren't impressed anymore and she knows she's playing to an empty house. She still launches into defiance over the silliest, dumbest little things, but I think even she is starting to understand the futility of her performance. Like a train running out of steam, there's a certain je-ne-sais-quoi-what's-the-point to her drama these days, and she knows it.
Half Broke Horses. Thank you, Jeannette Walls, for such a great book title. I think of it all the time when Justice rears up on me. I'd like to brand it on her arm with a Sharpie marker. Keep it up, kiddo, and good luck. You're half broke now, and I guarantee, I'll take you the rest of the way. Saddle up.
I say this with love, not anger. I say it with the comedy, snarkiness, bravado and overblown machismo that makes good journal reading. In real life, it happens with a little more finesse. She's just eight after all. A worldly, cranky, pain-in-the-ass eight, but still just eight. And we do love her insanely. More than I ever thought possible.
But now she's less of a migraine, and more of a curiosity as I hone my skills. I'm already very good at loving, but I'm taking a new delight in parenting. Yes, you will think I'm an asshole today, and I'm completely cool with that. It took me fifteen months to get here, but I get it now. If your kids aren't pissed at you once a day because you didn't let them have their way over some minor kid nonsense, bwaaaappp, game over. You just bought it at the buzzer.
That's the score from our house, anyway. Justice shoots wildly from half-court every chance she gets, still hoping to sink one, but so far, no swish. We have her tears, we have her anger, we love her fiercely and we try again.
What this has to do with losing board games to her brother, I have no idea. But I know they're related. And if I can teach one lesson, I can teach the other.
Teaching someone who has already lost so much there's an honest importance in losing with dignity and losing with grace is a long and difficult lesson. But it's one worth teaching her.
I love you, Justice Reisman.
Deal the cards.
"Mom, Jason's Breathing on Me: The Solution to Sibling Bickering" by Anthony E. Wolf, Ph.D. c.2003 Ballantine Books
Hates it so much, in fact, that if her brother gets one answer right -- just one before she does -- out comes the pout, out comes the growl, the tears, the ferocity, the wish-you-were-dead dragon eyes -- and the game is over.
Justice is having a harder time with good sportsmanship than Justin. Neither one of them are aces at it by any means, but Justin is making really good progress. Justice is not. Not yet anyway. Believe me, it's on my bucket list.
Don't get me wrong. The kids are best friends and they play together beautifully...as long as the game doesn't involve actual winning or losing. Justin's getting a handle on it now. In a year, fifteen months, he's come to the conclusion that somebody always wins at Space Checkers, Skippy, and it ain't always him. He's making his peace with that fact, and the world isn't ending. His sister, however, is holding out for miracles.
We played another game yesterday -- one of those dreadful picture bingo games with the wobbly spinner and the red cover squares and the infinite respins hoping for a winner, and the game was in a dead heat. They each had one square left to go. I was sure it was going to be bitter pandemonium when one lost and one won -- that would be par for the course -- but I was pleasantly surprised when Justin took his loss in stride. When Justice spun and the arrow hit the lucky slot she was waiting for, I winced and offered my usual "wanna keep playing for second place?" to placate the loser, but Justin just shrugged and smiled and said, "That's okay, she can win." Taking the loss and getting on with it, so we had time to play another game was more important to him than winning.
That's huge in this house. Huge progress. Huge growth.
Buoyed by my ever-illogical optimism, I launched us into an immediate follow-up with Trivial Pursuit Jr., and we weren't two minutes into the game as noted above, before Justice, fresh on the heels of her bingo victory -- two freaking minutes ago! -- was already pouting, hostile and ready to tantrum because her brother guessed a knuckle sandwich is something you'd likely get from (c) the school bully, and not (a) your best bud, or (b) your pet dog.
Christ on crutches, as Lee Trinrud used to say. When does it end?
Justice loves to play games. She asks to play games. She just doesn't like to lose. Not ever. Not even a little bit. Which, I've got to tell you, makes it a real pain-in-the-ass to play with her.
Now at 8, her complete inability to lose graciously is a very unattractive quality, but not entirely without understanding. I have to stop myself frequently and remind myself she's just a kid. In the grand scheme of emotional maturity, it barely makes sense to tell her to act her age, because, well, she is acting her age. Kids don't like to lose. She's not a rarity. I get it.
But there's a tad more at play, and I'll steal it right out of the brilliantly funny book on sibling bickering called "Mom, Jason's Breathing on Me." Here's the heart of the problem. This answer has Justice written all over it, and it's as wise as any I've ever heard:
"Known to all parents, yet somehow not recognized as a basic fact of human existence is that we all -- kids and adults -- have two distinct and separate modes of operating, really two distinct selves. One is an at-home and with-immediate-family version of us that just wants to relax, to unwind, to be nurtured, wants what it wants now, has minimal self-control, and will tolerate zero stress. It is the regressed version of our kids and of us. I call it the baby self. But there is another side that operates at a completely different and higher level of functioning. It is the part of us and our kids that goes out into the world, has patience, has self-control, is willing to delay gratification in order to work toward a goal, and can and will tolerate stress. I call this the mature self."
I've suspected this for some time now, particularly during the past year's sometimes-at-odds, big-picture communications with Justice's first grade teacher, who sang her praises to the rooftops and couldn't understand why we would want to address her allegedly-challenging behavior, much less medicate her. To Mrs. Teacher, Justice was a flawless beacon of perfect behavior in the classroom. The words were never said, but we could see it in her eyes every time she talked to us about behavior or medication issues...are you guys nuts??
But what she and other teachers fail to understand is, sometimes the kids you consider to be your best-behaved students are, plain and simple, just giving you the full content of their mature tank, and once that tank runs out, there's nothing left but the baby self to come home to the parents. From 8 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon, you get Justice at her best. But that's her per diem. That's all she has to give. She holds it in, and then, like letting out a deep breath coming up from underwater, Adam and I get her explosion, her expulsion of everything else. Don't get me wrong, Mrs. Teacher. I'm glad she was a peach in your classroom, but walk a mile in my shoes and you'll see really quickly when the final bell rings, we get stuck with little Linda Blair from The Exorcist.
So, baby-self and mature-self...not just a concept for I wish teachers everywhere would consider more seriously when they doubt parents' sanity, but definitely a dicey dichotomy when it comes to breaking out a deck of Uno cards here at home.
The lessons are important, so they continue:
1. Sportsmanship matters.
2. Life has winners AND losers.
3. You will sometimes be one and sometimes the other.
4. That's just how it works.
5. Learn to deal with it now as a child, or you will never be able to deal with it as an adult.
I think all kids need to learn those five things. I think we are failing miserably in our collective, parental and educational framework to teach those lessons. No wonder kids go meltdown manic when they lose. We've created a bizarro alternate universe where they don't have to anymore. Where parents and teachers, loving peace and quiet above everything else, came up with an entire new world designed around every child wins...all the time, which if you ask me, is a coddled concept that's bat shit crazy with a Capital C.
It's a world where Justice still thinks she can win anything. Where "her way or the highway" has gone on way too long and has not been dealt with very well for the past eight years, much of my own 15-month tenure included.
Her oppositional defiant disorder still rages. Granted, she is much more settled, much more comfortable here. She climbs into bed with me in the middle of the night and happily cuddles into my arms with a sigh and a snore. She won't do it in her waking world yet. She'd flat-out die before she'd show me affection in broad daylight. But when the night is long and the monsters are in the closet, mine are the arms she turns to, and I'm thrilled to offer them. As Clevon Little said as the old lady knocked on his window and gave him the pie in Blazing Saddles, "I'm quickly becoming an underground sensation in this town."
Love and comfort are not the issues anymore. Her problem has been, and still remains, basic compliance.
Hope springs eternal I suppose, and Justice still believes every argument, every procedure, every damn parental point of order is hers to win. From no more snacks if you don't eat dinner to pick up the mess you just made, everything -- and Lord almighty, I mean everything -- is still a fight. The mature-self you see when Justice is out in public is nothing at all like the baby-self who unleashes her furious, unending desire to be the one in charge here at home.
"The baby-self wants what it wants now, has minimal self-control, and will tolerate zero stress."
Oy vey, that's our pumpkin in a nutshell. Winning at games or winning over us, Justice does not like to come in second. She detests it with every fiber.
Miss Hannah, our family therapist, who cleverly recognizes not just the kids' disobedience issues, but the skittish hesitancy toward more in-your-face strictness from newbie dads, encourages us at nearly every turn to be firmer.
"You're promoting their attachment beautifully," she told us. "You've done more to encourage healthy attachment than any other parents I've ever seen. You are great at this. They are attaching to both of you just fine. That earns you huge leeway when it comes to being stricter with them. Use it."
In my mind, Miss Hannah talks in italics a lot.
So yeah, she's absolutely right, and God bless her for pointing it out. Stuff like that is not basic instinct to new parents of adopted older kids. Our default setting is "make them love us." It is not "make them respect us." It has taken great practice to make that approach with Justice our new default setting. We are not hard-asses by nature -- not at all -- and it's weird sometimes to have to be.
But there is great pleasure in seeing it start to work.
When Justice first got here, she thought she could beat us 100% of the time. And there were many days when she did, bless her.
Now it's a crankier, more cynical pair of parents who come to her door when it's ding-dong, bullshit calling, and the poor girl is starting to realize it. There's a confused but dawning look of wonder on her face when she realizes she's not in charge anymore, and I don't half mind putting it there.
Consistently not letting her have her way is beginning, blessedly, to wear her down. She still has her tantrums. I don't think we'll see the end of those babies anytime soon, but they've lost their luster. The critics aren't impressed anymore and she knows she's playing to an empty house. She still launches into defiance over the silliest, dumbest little things, but I think even she is starting to understand the futility of her performance. Like a train running out of steam, there's a certain je-ne-sais-quoi-what's-the-point to her drama these days, and she knows it.
Half Broke Horses. Thank you, Jeannette Walls, for such a great book title. I think of it all the time when Justice rears up on me. I'd like to brand it on her arm with a Sharpie marker. Keep it up, kiddo, and good luck. You're half broke now, and I guarantee, I'll take you the rest of the way. Saddle up.
I say this with love, not anger. I say it with the comedy, snarkiness, bravado and overblown machismo that makes good journal reading. In real life, it happens with a little more finesse. She's just eight after all. A worldly, cranky, pain-in-the-ass eight, but still just eight. And we do love her insanely. More than I ever thought possible.
But now she's less of a migraine, and more of a curiosity as I hone my skills. I'm already very good at loving, but I'm taking a new delight in parenting. Yes, you will think I'm an asshole today, and I'm completely cool with that. It took me fifteen months to get here, but I get it now. If your kids aren't pissed at you once a day because you didn't let them have their way over some minor kid nonsense, bwaaaappp, game over. You just bought it at the buzzer.
That's the score from our house, anyway. Justice shoots wildly from half-court every chance she gets, still hoping to sink one, but so far, no swish. We have her tears, we have her anger, we love her fiercely and we try again.
What this has to do with losing board games to her brother, I have no idea. But I know they're related. And if I can teach one lesson, I can teach the other.
Teaching someone who has already lost so much there's an honest importance in losing with dignity and losing with grace is a long and difficult lesson. But it's one worth teaching her.
I love you, Justice Reisman.
Deal the cards.
"Mom, Jason's Breathing on Me: The Solution to Sibling Bickering" by Anthony E. Wolf, Ph.D. c.2003 Ballantine Books
Sunday, August 4, 2013
My Grandma is Cotton Candy
All three of my kids' grandmothers, at one time or another, in one degree or another, have echoed to me the same, longing, needful theme that weaves in and out of this journal in my own words and my own experience...that great, empty, pondering dilemma we all face when we love Justice and Justin...their nearly-constant lack of displayed reciprocation. The grandmothers and Adam and I call this by its own special catch phrase, sometimes delivered humorously, sometimes spoken with legitimate sadness. "Oh, sure. They'll hug everybody but me."
Clinically speaking, it's a fascinating observation. On one hand, the fact that they won't easily offer hugs and instinctual displays of affection to the people who love them the most drips with sad and frustrating irony. On the other hand, it's perfectly understandable in the lost, found, "who's here to stay and who's not" self-preservation of their psyche. I think if you and I didn't have permanent parents nailed down until we were six, seven or eight, we'd be a little wary of offering too much automatic affection to the next set of "loving" arms that may or may not be there the next day, or the next year, or the next parental era.
I think in their world, they count their blessings but cover their bases. Trust but verify, Reagan used to say about the Soviets.
"We'd like to cozy up to you, Grandma, but until we're just a little more comfortable with the great, complicated math of our ever-changing parental (and grandparental) trajectory, arm's length is all you're going to get. We've had parents before. We've had grandparents. And some of them vanished." That's a daunting hurdle for a seven-year-old to jump. In their world, hugging is vulnerability. Trusting gets you hurt. Sometimes the leap of faith to love again is enormous.
J1 & J2 have four people they call "Grandma," in any of its preferred variations.
They have "Mom-Mom," their biological, maternal grandmother; a person who would not normally come with the package in a closed adoption, but through the easy transparency of Facebook and the tight, know-it-all close-knittedness of our small Las Vegas Jewish community, was a person who easily identified us as "the guys who were adopting her grandkids," even before they came to live here.
There's "Mama," Adam's mom, who also lives here in Las Vegas, but like "Mom-Mom" above, far enough away from our house in a different part of town where visiting easily and regularly is not a quick, spontaneous hop in the car, but more of a "figure this out and plan for a day" scenario. Lovely women both, but in a world where homework reigns and bedtime comes at 7:30, visiting either of them after school or day camp in the midst of ongoing therapy, lots of friends and play dates (thank goodness), and all the other first-grade, second-grade hullabaloo requires a circle on the calendar and the logistical organization of an advance team.
There's "Grandma Judy," my mom, who lives the farthest away, clocking in at 1,700 miles back in Wisconsin. The kids visited her once in her home state and she's been out here twice since the adoption, once for our wedding, once for an extended winter getaway, so quite naturally in her book, when she can be with us, the kids do get her in more concentrated doses, but week by week throughout the year, she definitely gets the short end of the stick when it comes to available face time.
And there's also "Grandma Kayzee," who ironically, is probably the grandma we here at home base think of least and our kids think of most. She has been all but marginalized into the non-existent "past-is-past" history of our grown-up, collective, post-adoptive minds, but ironically, she's still probably the 1 out of 4 our kids most easily identify as "Grandma." We'd all do well to remember that. She was their live-in grandmother in foster care from ages 3 to 7, the time when memories most easily solidify. The fact that they had her so long and lost her so easily is probably another one of those "arms length" factors they feel instinctively as they learn to trust and depend (or re-depend) on their three emerging or re-emerging grandmothers.
In other words, Grandma's Three, if they're not quick to hug you and kiss you, or run into your arms, I know your plight, I feel your pain, but it's nothing unique you can claim as your own. It's the same casual dismissal Adam and I have faced ourselves for 14 months. In the great emotional-neediness of our newly-combined lives, there's a hard but necessary pecking order. The kids come first because their needs are enormous and all-encompassing, and all the rest of us line up for diddly. On even the best day, you take what you can get and you smile. You watch them hug others, effortlessly and easily, and no offense, but you sort of have to suck it up and move on. Your love for them is endless and pure. Their love for you is cautious and new.
Adam and I survive their slights and casual dismissals on a daily basis, so when you tell us out loud it makes you sad that the kids won't hug you as easily as they hug others, believe me fully, I'd change it if I could, but for now, it's all they are able to do, and you have to be patient, and with no doubt at all, you are empathetically understood in a way you can't imagine.
It's hard to teach adopted children to love and trust again. Whether it's love for parents or love for grandmothers, no one gets a Fast Pass in the Disney line. Their hugs for you will come with patience. Their love for you will come with time.
And even with that gentle admonishment laid aside, I find myself living in a beautifully-realized paradox. It's up to me, as a not-yet-fully-trusted father, to teach my children how to love and trust their grandmothers.
How magical it will be for them if someday, without hesitation, they forget the pain and forget the past and once again open themselves up to the delicious lifelong luxury of running and jumping into the arms that will always hold them the closest.
Because by any definition, that's what grandmas are put on our earth to do.
# # #
Dear Justice and Justin,
The older I get, and the more I appreciate the stories of people's lives being far more interesting and compelling than my own, the more I realize what an opportunity I missed by never sitting down with my Grandma Hannah and asking her to tell me the stories of her life the way I'd ask her now.
Clinically speaking, it's a fascinating observation. On one hand, the fact that they won't easily offer hugs and instinctual displays of affection to the people who love them the most drips with sad and frustrating irony. On the other hand, it's perfectly understandable in the lost, found, "who's here to stay and who's not" self-preservation of their psyche. I think if you and I didn't have permanent parents nailed down until we were six, seven or eight, we'd be a little wary of offering too much automatic affection to the next set of "loving" arms that may or may not be there the next day, or the next year, or the next parental era.
I think in their world, they count their blessings but cover their bases. Trust but verify, Reagan used to say about the Soviets.
"We'd like to cozy up to you, Grandma, but until we're just a little more comfortable with the great, complicated math of our ever-changing parental (and grandparental) trajectory, arm's length is all you're going to get. We've had parents before. We've had grandparents. And some of them vanished." That's a daunting hurdle for a seven-year-old to jump. In their world, hugging is vulnerability. Trusting gets you hurt. Sometimes the leap of faith to love again is enormous.
J1 & J2 have four people they call "Grandma," in any of its preferred variations.
They have "Mom-Mom," their biological, maternal grandmother; a person who would not normally come with the package in a closed adoption, but through the easy transparency of Facebook and the tight, know-it-all close-knittedness of our small Las Vegas Jewish community, was a person who easily identified us as "the guys who were adopting her grandkids," even before they came to live here.
There's "Mama," Adam's mom, who also lives here in Las Vegas, but like "Mom-Mom" above, far enough away from our house in a different part of town where visiting easily and regularly is not a quick, spontaneous hop in the car, but more of a "figure this out and plan for a day" scenario. Lovely women both, but in a world where homework reigns and bedtime comes at 7:30, visiting either of them after school or day camp in the midst of ongoing therapy, lots of friends and play dates (thank goodness), and all the other first-grade, second-grade hullabaloo requires a circle on the calendar and the logistical organization of an advance team.
There's "Grandma Judy," my mom, who lives the farthest away, clocking in at 1,700 miles back in Wisconsin. The kids visited her once in her home state and she's been out here twice since the adoption, once for our wedding, once for an extended winter getaway, so quite naturally in her book, when she can be with us, the kids do get her in more concentrated doses, but week by week throughout the year, she definitely gets the short end of the stick when it comes to available face time.
And there's also "Grandma Kayzee," who ironically, is probably the grandma we here at home base think of least and our kids think of most. She has been all but marginalized into the non-existent "past-is-past" history of our grown-up, collective, post-adoptive minds, but ironically, she's still probably the 1 out of 4 our kids most easily identify as "Grandma." We'd all do well to remember that. She was their live-in grandmother in foster care from ages 3 to 7, the time when memories most easily solidify. The fact that they had her so long and lost her so easily is probably another one of those "arms length" factors they feel instinctively as they learn to trust and depend (or re-depend) on their three emerging or re-emerging grandmothers.
In other words, Grandma's Three, if they're not quick to hug you and kiss you, or run into your arms, I know your plight, I feel your pain, but it's nothing unique you can claim as your own. It's the same casual dismissal Adam and I have faced ourselves for 14 months. In the great emotional-neediness of our newly-combined lives, there's a hard but necessary pecking order. The kids come first because their needs are enormous and all-encompassing, and all the rest of us line up for diddly. On even the best day, you take what you can get and you smile. You watch them hug others, effortlessly and easily, and no offense, but you sort of have to suck it up and move on. Your love for them is endless and pure. Their love for you is cautious and new.
Adam and I survive their slights and casual dismissals on a daily basis, so when you tell us out loud it makes you sad that the kids won't hug you as easily as they hug others, believe me fully, I'd change it if I could, but for now, it's all they are able to do, and you have to be patient, and with no doubt at all, you are empathetically understood in a way you can't imagine.
It's hard to teach adopted children to love and trust again. Whether it's love for parents or love for grandmothers, no one gets a Fast Pass in the Disney line. Their hugs for you will come with patience. Their love for you will come with time.
And even with that gentle admonishment laid aside, I find myself living in a beautifully-realized paradox. It's up to me, as a not-yet-fully-trusted father, to teach my children how to love and trust their grandmothers.
How magical it will be for them if someday, without hesitation, they forget the pain and forget the past and once again open themselves up to the delicious lifelong luxury of running and jumping into the arms that will always hold them the closest.
Because by any definition, that's what grandmas are put on our earth to do.
# # #
Dear Justice and Justin,
The older I get, and the more I appreciate the stories of people's lives being far more interesting and compelling than my own, the more I realize what an opportunity I missed by never sitting down with my Grandma Hannah and asking her to tell me the stories of her life the way I'd ask her now.
Because of that, my memories of my grandma are beautifully perfect the way cotton candy is; sticky and special and sweet to my senses, but with no real substance, the way I'd want her to talk to me today. It's a shame she died while the only person who fascinated me was me.
That was my loss to be sure, because I could have had full, memorable, melt-in-the-mouth memories for the ages, but cotton candy is all I found time for.
Not that it makes her any less perfect. When I remember my Grandma Hannah now, the stories themselves are spun in fragility; delicious, fleeting nibbles of life, on the tip of my tongue, but gone just as quickly as fatherhood and life continue to consume me. It's hard to find time to remember how much she loved me. And I don't know. Maybe that's the way it's supposed to be. Maybe that's what makes her memory - when I do stop to remember her - so continually treasured.
And I guess that's why I wish you could find it within yourselves to emerge like butterflies and love your own amazing collection of grandmas just a little bit more and a little more easily. I understand the road you've traveled and I don't want to rush you, but on the other hand, opportunities to live and love truly are time-dependent, and the fully-loved little grandson who still resides in my soul remembers how special this was and doesn't want you to miss any of it. "These are the days to remember," Billy Joel said in a song once. "And they will not last forever." So, soak them up, my children. All of this, everything they offer you, never comes again.
If I go back as far as I can, really push my memory into almost magic, I can remember being not much more than knee high, looking up, eager in anticipation, watching my Grandma Hannah making me bread and butter with sugar on top. To her, that was a perfectly nutritious lunch for a child, in a time and an era when restaurants still let you pour your sugar from a big glass jar on the table with a hole on top and a saltine cracker inside to keep it from clumping. I remember my grandma mixing her own cream-and-sugar coffee at a level of sweetness that stunned even children. Waterfalls of sugar. Endless cascades.
I remember the cozy comfort of my grandma's bedroom on Pine Street, where the air was always sleepy and dozy with eucalyptus and menthol, where Vicks and crumpled Kleenex lined her bedside table. There was no night light in my grandma's bedroom. It was just me and her and the pitch dark moon. Dogs might bark, thunder might rattle, but everything was perfect. I was safe and scared at the same time, and it was my favorite place to be.
Cuddled up to her for warmth and security, I remember her low, dramatic tone as we laid there I'm the dark on Pine Street, me at six and she still young, making her nearest grandson and most frequent sleepover guest giggle in the night with "Where was Moses when the lights went out?" Her drawn-out answer to her own funny question, coming immediately after, like a ghostly moan..."In--the--dar-r-r-r-k!"
I remember walking hand in hand to Central Lanes, pancakes at Earl's, darts at the C.Q., and the two of us alone, me all of 8, watching Richard Nixon resign the presidency and giving us the peace sign goodbye from the TV in her living room before he got in his helicopter and flew away from Pine Street for good.
I remember "rambunctious" and "heavenly days!" and words and phrases that were especially hers. "Sakes alive" and "go outside" and "I'm not asleep, I'm just resting my eyes."
When Auntie Erin was born, I remember it took her the whole first week to quit telling people Grandma Judy named her Urrin. She had a hard time wrapping her tongue around that one. You would have thought E-R-I-N was the most rare and elusive new spelling in the universe. But with a little practice and a grandmother's love, she got it.
I watched her in different times at different houses be a grandma for the ages, first for me and your Uncle Smedley back when he was still just Todd, then for all the rest of my cousins...Jenny and Sara (who shared her with Auntie Erin when she was little), then Adam and Andy at the apartment over Aunt Barbie's, and then finally for Darcie and Courtney.
I remember being older then and even more full of myself, but still having the half ounce of wisdom I needed to stop and watch them when I could, as Grandma Hannah came to the end years of living on her own, still active and happy with a room full of Barbie dolls and a fridge full of Kool-Aid, making Courtney and Darcie laugh like so many of us before them, not watching them with envy, but taking a rare, reflective moment in the self-centered whirlwind of my early adulthood, to truly notice and appreciate the luck those two girls shared, catching Grandma Hannah at the end of an era.
To the two of you, Justice and Justin, I'd say what I'd say to anybody when it comes to grandmas. I wish I had mine back again. I wish she'd lasted longer. My life became infinitely richer and evermore blessed with the happy memories I have of Hannah and Gussie, Elsie and Ellen, Stella and Marie, the great grandmothers of my life.
So if yours are still here -- and thank goodness they are -- enjoy them as much as you can. Learn how to hug them and love them without fear. They are the rocks of your history, but beautifully, strangely, they are still just cotton candy...incredibly sweet, fragile and fastly consumed, gone in a heartbeat while the music's still playing on the midway.
So, open up your arms and hug a little more.
Treasure her while you can...that sweet, fleeting heartbeat called Grandma.
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