What I did on my summer vacation

I just put up the post I started writing at the end of spring break.  Now it’s the end of the semester.  I had a minor panic about a week or two ago when I had to proceed through the Seven Stages of Panic quickly.  I’ve come to recognize a pattern in how I react to the end of the semester.

Stage 1: Week 11 - Shock - It’s, essentially, the end of the semester.  Run for the hills!!!

Stage 2: End of Week 11 - Denial - Relaaax, 4 weeks left, that’s a whole month!

Stage 3: Week 12 - Anger - Shit!  Once again, have not accomplished all the great things I wanted to accomplish and now it’s too late.  Another semester lost.

Stage 4: Mid week 12 - Bargainning - If I just assign one more composition in Classes XXX, YYY and ZZZ, I’ll have sort of managed to accomplish my lofty pedagogical goals.

Stage 5: End of week 12 - Depression - I’ll assign those things, but have just added to my work load and still will not really have fulfilled my teaching goals.

Stage 6: Beginning of week 13 - Testing - Let’s get that Wiki set up and finalize the projects I list in the syllabus.

Stage 7: Acceptance - End of week 13 - This is it.  Find those rubrics, make some adjustments to them and get ready for the final push of the semester.  At least it will be over soon.

My hope is that I’ll be able to get through a semester without going through this process ever time because good heavens that’s a lot of angst!

This week was spring break for me.  I’d been looking forward to this week for a long time because it was the first "pause" since September.  I thought it’d be just the time to catch up, get my bearings and gear up for the second half of the semester.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t quite worked out and I’m upset because, as usual, I feel that if I had been more disciplined, I would have accomplished what I needed to do.

I have a lot of grading to do, enough that it would have been several days in a coffee shop (which sounds like a pleasant way to grade to me!).  I had also hoped to plan out the second half of the semester for my Civ/Cult class and the 1st year class and the next unit for the comp/conversation and 2nd year classes.  I wanted to prepare for the upcoming departmental meeting (assessment as I’ll be leading that portion of the meeting).

[…]

Unfortunately, first S then A were sick for the requisite 1x/semester that they fall ill.  On the one hand, it was fortuitous that they were sick when I was on break so Jon didn’t have to use his sick time to stay with them, on the other, my original plan to see some friends and spend lots of time in a variety of coffee shops grading until I ran out of read ink were for naught.  Worse still, I was so stymied by the abrupt change in events that I didn’t even take advantage of the one-on-one time I could have had with each child. 

I felt like a failure on all fronts: didn’t accomplish any work-related tasks, didn’t spend quality time with my family, didn’t relax.

 

The year that led up to our move from PR to the US, I started to pray.  I was thirteen at the time.  My family was being terrorized by a couple of thugs.  I had read all the Judy Blume books and was wondering just what lay ahead for me.  Every night I would pray.  Like a child, I would pray for God to bless all my cats (there were so many that I simply said "Please bless all our cats, that we’ve had and will have.").  I would also pray about the future.  Like my request for a blessing upon the cat, I had some sort of formula, something like "Please give me strength, courage and patience and let whatever happens be okay."  A friend of mine, raised in an evangelical tradition, urged me to read Psalm 23 every night.  As an aside, it’s a shame, really, that I didn’t have access to more in-depth religious education because I think many of the stories in the Bible would have brought me comfort that year.

That May I sorted through my belongings and lovingly packed 12 shipping cartons with the items I wanted to bring to my new life.  I was at a transition, so I left behind all my toys and many of the books I’d outgrown (including my entire collection of Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden mysteries).  It made packing easier, I assure you, because my parents had found for me many of the Fisher-Price buildings and it would have been impossible to ship them all to the US safely. In September I started school at a public junior high in a New England state.  I wasn’t praying any more; it didn’t seem to fit the new culture, but I kept a journal that entire year.  I think I still have it somewhere, but I confess I do not want to read it.  I’m not sure if it’s fear of witnessing the painful transition to a new country or if I’m just embarrased by the raw, naive emotions as expressed by a fourteen year old.

Prayer, however simple, helped me cope that last year of my life in PR, and it’s in that context that I first saw the poem Footsteps.  I appreciated the comfort that this poem promises: that in fact we do not walk alone and that at the most difficult point, not only do we walk accompanied, but in fact, supported.

The day I got to college I met a young man, C, whose childhood and adolescence had been completely unlike mine, and whereas I’d had experiences that left me, if not agreeing with, at least sympathetic to religious practices, his experiences had left him with an abiding cynicism for the same.  His interpretation of the same poem has stayed with me every since.  Why?  he asked, do people credit God instead of themselves?  What does this suggest about their own responsibility if they credit God and not themselves?  If God is responsible for us, what is our role in determining the course of our lives?  I suppose this is just a variant on the "free will" dispute that has raged for centuries, but couched in contemporary rhetoric about personal responsibility.  In any event, this resonated for me.  As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to appreciate pop-religiosity even less.  "Prayer works" crows a woman following a surgery that determines that a tumor was not cancerous.  "God has a plan" says someone else, in response to bad news about a lay-off.  The twists and turns necessary to keep God’s role present and positive are so inconsistent, no wonder Americans have trouble with those highly vaunted "critical thinking skills" we spend so much time on in post-secondary ed!

Still, even though I personally think praying to God is a cop-out, I empathize with the impulse.  I had a taste of what it’s like to experience a situation that feels vastly out of your control and it sure is nice to think someone walks by your side and carries you through the especially difficult bits. More broadly, I have come to view the existence of the ideas of God, gods, and so on to be one of the great creations of the human species.  We have created order and reason where none exists.  We’ve created rituals, ceremonies and traditions to helps us cope with chaos and tragedy, and to celebrate. 

If by now you’re thinking that I should join a UU congregation, well congratulations on your perspicacity!  I did.  For two years I attended services at a lovely UU Fellowship in my area.  It would seem a perfect fit, no?  It wasn’t.  I don’t know why and I’ll spare additional navel-gazing.  Even if it would have been fine for me (and it was pretty good), it wasn’t fine for my family.  My kids despised the religious ed. classes.  My husband perceived it as a pseudo-religion and hated the improvised and hybrid celebrations.  I never felt that I fit in.  After two years (and one of those spent as a religious ed. instructor), I left (and now that I think about it, nobody noticed).  When A. was a first grader, she had a classmate of the annoyingly righteous (in every sense) evangelical sort.  That child’s proselitizing was so insulting that Ana developed an exceedingly negative view of Christians, which was complicated because A. thought all of us were Christians because it seemed linked to our status as americans.  When I told A. that she was not Christian, that she was Jewish, it was like when Hagrid told Harry he was a wizard.  After that, A. wanted to know more about this secret identity.  What did it mean to be Jewish?  Was there a church for Jews?  Could we go?

*****************

We joined a small, reform congregation and first A, then S began attending Hebrew school on a regular basis.  I thought that just as my kids were learning about their heritage, that I’d recover mine.  It wasn’t easy because services are Friday evenings and we almost always have music lessons on Fridays, so we rarely attended services.  On those few occasions that we did, I felt uncomfortable the entire time.  I thought of going to the adult religious ed. classes, but these are for the more "hard-core" members of the congregation, the very opposite of Judaism 101.  I thought we might celebrate Shabbat and take a stab at some of the holidays, Chanukah, for example, learn about the main holidays and go to temple those days.

Instead I find myself increasingly disinterested in attending any services.  My involvement is as a Sunday school parent only; I view our temple involvement the way I do any of the kids’ extra-curricular activities, except that I actually know something about dance and music and care about them, whereas the same is not true about Judaism.  This isn’t necessarily a problem, except that the inclination in any community is to draw people in, and so people have reached out to me.  For example, I was invited to participate at one of the Yom Kippur services.  I don’t want to be rigid about my participation in the Jewish faith, I don’t want to declare that I won’t do certain things (attend services, fast for Yom Kippur, help organize Purim celebrations), but at the same time, I don’t want to engage in most of those activities at the same time that I am open to the possibility that I might.  Sometimes it’s hard to balance right on the threshhold, and that’s where I am right now, I know what I believe, but I’m not sure what I want to practice.

I think next year will be easier because I’ll finally be using a book I like for a second year in a row.  On the other hand, now that I’m in a steady job, I’m worrying that I’m going to burn out teaching the 101 course over and over again because it’ll be the same: same material, same issues (different students, same issues).  I’m not quite to the point where I want to tell students that they’re not the first to […] so just get over it, but I’m starting to be able to imagine it.  101 is the most wearying course to teach because the students go from 0 to 60 in 15 weeks.  The students go through a predictable cycle: earnest and excited then anxious (and a bit angry) finally resigned.  For my own sake, I need to stay out of the emotional minefield.  This semester my attempts to stay emotionally uninvolved have been complicated by the initial difficulties I had setting up the online materials, but I’m hoping next year all those kinks will be smoothed out.  To what degree are the kinks the excitement that keep the class interesting?  When the kinks are smoothed out, will I burn out? 

 

Dear Second-hand and used book buyer,

I do have books I’m not using, but they were free from the publisher so making a profit on them would be unethical, at best.  Moreover, it’s extremely problematic for annotated instructor editions to enter the second-hand student market, and don’t tell me these books aren’t for students.  Of course they are, faculty get these books for free (see above).  Besides potentially driving up the cost of textbooks, students who purchase these texts (often not realizing they are the IAE), end up with a larger text that has smaller print on the relevant (student) portion, includes answers to many of the exercises and thanks to the wrap-around text (aka the annotations), must contend with a much more complicated visual landscape than they would otherwise.

Furthermore, I really don’t appreciate solicitors harrasing me at my workplace. So you know what, I know you’re trying to be polite, but I think you’re kind of scummy.

If you’d like some old, crummy editions of 19th century Spanish novels, however, we can talk.

Happy studies!

La Profe

Yesterday we were supposed to go to the Octoberfest celebration hosted downtown every year.  We’ve always gone, even if just to plow through the crowd for an hour to find funnel cake.  Last year Ana loved it and asked if next time we could go for longer so she could see everything and do all the fun kid activities.  Both girls had been talking about it for the last several weeks.  There are always all sorts of craft stands and Silvia had been looking forward to buying something with her allowance.

We were having friends over for dinner and our house had descended to a level of light chaos: not so bad that we’d have to dedicate an entire day to cleaning, but enough that a rapid sweep of the house wouldn’t suffice either.  In particular, the elaborate toy sculptures the girls had erected in the basement needed to be dismantled and the components put away.

The day started well enough.  Silvia bounced up with her usual energy and politely asked for crepes.  I acquiesced and we all had a nice breakfast. Then we started to tidy up.  I’d been organizing the playroom, which had involved throwing out a lot of old toys.  Jon and the girls went through the dress up trunks and got it down to just one bin, but it was painful.  In fact, everything was painful.  As the day wore on, my patience wore thin.  When I walked into their bedroom, hours after I’d made the first request: clear off the bedroom floor, and discovered a completely random assortment of toys, clean and dirty clothes and papers, I started to lose my temper and it pretty much went from there.

By early afternoon, we’d already threatened to not go to Octoberfest at all if certain conditions weren’t met, including practicing piano.  That wasn’t pretty: Silvia was fine, but Ana was getting stuck and was kicking the floor every time she got stuck.  I didn’t mind the getting stuck, it was the minor temper tantrum each time she got stuck that was getting to me.  

Not long after that I lost my temper in a really big way with Ana.  I forget the details, but essentially I accused her of being a spoiled, self-centered brat.  I told her that Jon and I had spent hours doing chores we didn’t particularly enjoy, in preparation to have fun as a family.  She was pretty sulky after that.  I really laid into her because I had become so frustrated and disappointed in her and how our day was progressing.  I was also getting fed up that I felt like I was trying to get a bunch of stuff done and the kids were not being helpful or cooperative.

It might have been okay if as we were about to walk out the door to Octoberfest Silvia hadn’t walked nonchalantly into the kitchen hopefully clutching a tiny plastic case intended for Nintendo DS game cartridges, into which she’d carefully folded her allowance money.  Thank goodness our eyes don’t actually roll back into our heads or I would be staring at the back of my skull right now, because I was very annoyed with that little girl.  She still doesn’t exactly "get" money and she also hasn’t fully mastered thinking ahead and potential consequences.  I started out patiently enough, I mean, I didn’t immediately start yelling. sigh…  I told her she needed her purse, that she couldn’t just carry that little plastic case around in her hand.  It gets very crowded at Octoberfest and I could just see her losing that cartridge and all her money with it.  I started looking for her purse, which we’d just located last week due to a similar incident, and couldn’t find it.  That’s when I lost my temper completely.  It wasn’t just that we couldn’t find the purse, which was a disappointment considering I’d attempted to impress upon her the importance of proper and appropriate conveyance of cash, it was that the entire time we were looking for it she was arguing with me about not needing a purse.  We warned her that the very outing was at stake so then she became hysterical, which drives us insane because she starts screaming and crying "no, please, I want to go" but time after time completely fails to understand that B will happen after A, and it’s up to her to make A happen.  Unfortunately A is not usually crying and screaming, it’s usually something like: find your purse or get dressed in seasonally appropriate clothing.  Finally Jon and I erupted and declared the outing cancelled.  Just like that. 

Only now, after hours of resistance and arguing from them, I’d had it.  I screamed so loudly that Jon ran around the house closing every door and window so the neighbors wouldn’t hear every word I said.  I was so angry and so disappointed… I still am.  I am still so, incredibly disappointed that I could cry right now.  I love events like this and our dinky little town has very few of them.  I hate missing out on fun.  And we were missing out.  I remembered last year, and Ana’s disappointment last year, and wanted her to get to enjoy it this year.  I remembered how much Silvia had been anticipating it this year and I wanted to share the experience with her.  Jon and I had worked hard all morning to have a fun day and be ready with a tidy, welcoming house for our friends in the evening, and still have time for Octoberfest.  So I was disappointed and angry and frustrated.  I told my girls they had ruined the day, like so many others.  I told them I was sick of them.  That my day and my life would be better without them.  I thought of the PhD I didn’t finish and other fun events we’ve missed because they’d misbehaved so badly we’d cancelled them.  And I wondered what I had done so poorly as a parent to have such awful, bratty girls.  I felt like a monster and figured that was why my children had been monstrous.

I was so angry that an hour later I still felt like I could burst.  The girls were sent to their rooms.  They were so shocked that they hadn’t burst into tears.  Jon took me upstairs and we watched a fluffy episode of Sex & the City.  He took a nap, but I was still so angry; I was livid.  I came down and I cleaned.  Our house was already clean, but I found more to clean.  Finally the girls tossed a note from their room:

Dear mama

Your the meanest mom in the WORLD.

from: Silvia

I wrote back:

I wanted to go to Octoberfest with you and Ana.  Why couldn’t you both do what needed to be done so we could all have had fun?

Mama

 

She wrote back:

Dear Mommy

I hate you

From: Silvia

Which was followed by:

Sorry mama.

Love: Silvia

I replied:

I’m sorry too.  I hope that you will be more helpful about helping Daddy and I.  Sometimes we just have to do things we don’t like because they make our lives nicer in the long run.

Love,

Mama

And finally:

I LOVE you mama.

From Ana and Silvia

At which point I slipped into their room and hugged each of them.  Silvia still had that hiccupy thing going after a person has been crying and Ana’s eyes were pink.  At the risk of further revealing my inner monster, but I’m… not glad, but relieved that they were so upset they cried.  They should have been disappointed.  They really, really screwed that one up.  We didn’t talk about it anymore though I think I want to talk about what happened this week, both my losing my temper so thoroughly and what I said to them and their role in how events played out (my losing my temper was not cool, but cancelling our outing was definitely intended as a direct consequence for their lack of cooperation and general good attitudeness).  They came out, we practiced violin and I started getting ready to serve our friends dinner.  The girls and I had a lovely time, as did our friends.  Jon is another issue but suffice to say the evening was a success.

I don’t know what went so very wrong.  I think it was a failure to communicate our expectations clearly to them.  I also think that the whole "tidy the house" issue is just too complex for them.  When they play they create very elaborate… things.  Dismanteling them and putting each thing away is, perhaps, more than they can do without a lot of guidance, which I find incredibly frustrating.  I don’t mind if they make a huge mess, as long as I don’t have to be intimately involved in the clean up.  At the same time, I’m loathe to insist they clean up every day or enforce playing with only one thing at a time because their play tends to be extended over a longer period than just one day and the materials they use cross simple categories.  I also know that my patience for foot-dragging and whining is wearing very thin.  At the risk of sounding like a martinet, I’m to the point where when I ask them to do something, whether it’s clearing their dishes, sending dirty clothes down the laundry chute or practicing (piano, violin, spelling words), the only answer I want to hear is "Yes, mommy."  Possible exceptions to that response could include: "Of course, mama."  "No problem, Mama."  "I’ll do it as soon as I finish X."   and I’m always open to "Yes, Your Excellency." or some variant thereof.  The whining and protesting, however, must stop.  I’ve had it.  To here.

From: Mommy Dearest

My mom has body image issues.  One of her goals as a parent was to raise a kid who wouldn’t have body issues.  That’s a pretty ambitious goal for the mother of a daughter who is growing up in the US at this point in history.  In general though, she succeeded.  I really don’t have any major issues with my body.  I think I’m pretty realistic about my appearance and for the most part, I’m very comfortable with my body, both what I can do with it and how it looks.  Sometimes I think I have issues about my body, but then I’ll be around a group of women having one of those conversations about eating or hating a certain part of your body and it’s one of the few times in my life that I have nothing to offer to the conversation and I realize I just don’t know from body issues. 

Like my mom, one of my goals as a parent is to raise kids with healthy habits of body and mind (and to have healthy habits of mind about the body).  I have two girls and it hasn’t exactly gotten easier to raise girls with healthy attitudes towards their bodies.  Both my girls already have some unfortunate prejudices about "fat" and Silvia (age 7) talks about being fat or being worried she’s fat and not wanting to grow up to be fat.  Not a lot, but it comes up.  So we talk about it.  We talk about food a lot because, you know, we eat a lot, so we talk about it.  

Last summer, during one of my long phone conversations with my mom, Silvia was being a PITA about a snack, and I was telling her that if she was hungry she needed to eat something nourishing, that candy was not an acceptable food to eat while hungry.  My mom was really uncomfortable with this.  She thought I should let Silvia eat the candy, for fear that candy would become the forbidden fruit.  My mom hasn’t been in my house in years and sees the girls for a week just once/year, so she doesn’t realize that we keep a candy dish in the kitchen and it is almost always stocked with something.  When the girls go to a party or get treats, they put them there (and yes, they separate the candy out so Ana doesn’t eat Silvia’s candy, it isn’t a free-for-all candy dish).  We all eat candy almost every day, but not a lot.  A small bag of M&M’s will typically last one of the girls for 3 days, often longer.  I almost always include a piece of candy in their lunches, for example, Silvia has been getting two squares of chocolate and Ana has been getting about 10 of those fancy new M&M’s.  In other words, my girls are hardly what one would call deprived.

When we were in Oregon, the food issue arose again.  Silvia’s appetite rhythm is slightly off from the rest of us, which really isn’t surprising since she’s still on the small side of the growth chart.  She needs snacks more often and eats less/meal.  You’d think I’d be used to this by now, but no.  Invariably around 5pm she is starving.  Usually she has a substantial snack like a bowl of cereal or a yogurt/fruit smoothie.  That means that at dinner (6:30 or so), she’s not very hungry.  I don’t think that’s a problem as long as the pre-dinner snack was nourishing, but sometimes the pre-dinner snack is 2 slices of raisin bread (and not high quality organic raising bread, no, we’re talking the Pepperidge Farm cinnamon swirl raising bread with high fructose corn syrup, we buy that bread and treat it as a sweet).  So one day my mom caught me negotiating a pre-dinner snack with Silvia and again she was really disturbed by it.  She said that she hoped her granddaughters would grow up "looking more like their mother than their grandmother".  This was when I realized that my mother is, in a sense, a victim of her own success: she had succeeded in raising me so that in some fundamental ways I am very different from her, which means that in those areas in which we are different, she doesn’t understand me.

I hadn’t appreciated how different I am than my mother in the "body issues" department until this summer when I realized that for her food is an issue because body is an issue.  For me the food issue with Silvia isn’t about being fat, it’s about making sure she’s getting a decent balance of nutrients, which is why I don’t object to following up the bowl of cereal with 5 M&M’s (especially if that’s then followed up by a piece of fruit and then later on she eats a whole bunch of veggies).

Our second evening together, we walked into the cute downtown near our hotel and stopped at an ice cream place.  My mom uncomfortably surveyed the place: a den of iniquity, as it were.  My girls were thrilled: ice cream!  I had been looking forward to the treat, and was even more excited when I saw the most elaborate chocolate eclair I’d ever seen.  It was quite delicious, and enormous; I had no intention of even trying to finish it.  My mom wanted to finish it off, and the entire time she commented on how enormous it was and how she’d eat until she was too full and would be uncomfortable (but it was so good she couldn’t stop) and so on.  And this is when I realized that my mom worked hard as a parent to send me on a different path, but she can’t follow me on it, and I wish she could.

I was involved in a frustrating conversation about parenting yesterday.  Shocking, I know!  It was so frustrating that rather than working it to make my point, I just withdrew from the conversation.  I gave up when I realized my interlocutor was so inconsistent that to claim she was making any kind of argument was to stretch the definition of the word to the point of unrecognizability.  Essentially she was spouting off every tired trope there is about "parents today" without even the slightest awareness of how these tropes contradict each other if not reality.

This article  by David Code is an awful lot like that conversation in its rhetorical weaving and dodging. 

I was attracted by the title "Put your marriage before your kids".  This has been very popular advice the entire time I’ve had children.  All the popular parenting magazines included "have a weekly date with your husband" as a "must" after having a baby.  Apparently my generation of parents is suspected of indulging the children at the expense of our spouses.  I think they have us confused with the Baby Boomers. 

Let’s parse the second paragraph:

 

Child-centered families create anxious, exhausted parents and demanding, entitled kids who act out. Schools are overwhelmed by children’s special needs and a spirit of community is draining from our neighborhoods. As these self-absorbed kids enter the workplace, America’s global leadership and ability to compete will be seriously compromised.

 

First of all, what is a "child-centered family"?  In the opening sentences he notes that "American parents shoot ourselves in the foot by making our children the center of our universe."  So a "child-centered family" is one in which parents make children "the center of [their] universe."  That’s evocative, but not very precise.  He notes that these "child-centered families" lead to "anxious, exhausted parents".  I’d say I’m pretty anxious and exhausted during the school year, but not because of my kids, I’m exhausted and anxious because of my job.  Granted, that’s just a single example, and you can hardly extrapolate from one example, but still, in many ways I fit the profile of the parent who is deeply involved in her children’s lives.

 

He ges on to make the claim that schools are overwhelmed by children’s special needs, which implies that children’s special needs are the result of being indulged by their parents.  Here’s the thing, a diagnosis of being a spoiled brat will not get a child special needs services, and research has demonstrated that there is no connection between learning disabilities and autism and parenting.  Schools are overwhelmed, but I would argue that this is hardly new.  Has there ever been a time when schools weren’t overwhelmed?  Moreover, there have always been problem students.  At one time schools dealt with problematic students by simply expelling them or not providing services in the first place, that’s no longer an option.

I just love the claim that anxious parents who spoil their children is draining neighborhoods of a spirit of community!  First of all, are neighborhoods being drained of their spirit of community?  Check out Suburbanbliss some time.  Her neighborhood is chock full of community!  If you go back through her posts you would note that she seems a lot less anxious now, whereas a few years ago when she lived in a neighborhood devoid of a spirit of community she was pretty anxious. I would argue that the lack of a sense of community causes parental stress and anxiety.  As to the larger questions regarding a sense of community, that’s more complicated.  Even if we accept that neighborhood are losing their sense of community, could there be other causes, like say, a high rate of foreclosures (that links to a PDF file)?

This paragraph concludes with the usual bugaboo about "self-absorbed children" entering the workforce.  Excuse me, but the "self-absorbed children" currently entering the workforce were raised by Boomer parents, not the Gen X parents indicated by the use of present tense in the opening sentences ("American parents shoot ourselves in the foot", emphasis mine).  My kids are still years away from entering the workforce.  His claim that these self-absorbed kids will compromise "America’s global leadership and ability to compete", like his claim that anxious parents are leading to the destruction of communities, ignores far more serious causes for the rapid decline of the US’ status as a global leader in all areas (business, manufacturing, economic and military strength).  It would be lovely if the solution to major global issues were as simple as a weekly date with my husband, but I’m afraid that these large, public policy issues, contrary to this article’s implications, are beyond my control as a parent or spouse.

A few paragraphs down there is an example of a fun rhetorical strategy: "Today I see more kids acting out, more parents turning to medication, and more single parents in serious financial difficulty."  Like the example from my own experience above, one case study is not enough to generalize.  Furthermore, Code engages in comparative statements without establishing the basis for the comparison.  "I see more kids acting out" than when?  How many kids?  How is "acting out" defined?  I’ll accept as fact that mroe parents are turning to medication (in the "good old days", men drank and women took Valium, how’s that for a generalization?), but I would argue that this is because mental illness is better understood and more appropriately treated.  As for the single parents "in serious financial difficulty" a) that’s not new and b) this reflects structural issues in our economy more than it does parenting.

I love the paragraph on divorce.  He notes that in 1950 only 30% of marriages ended in divorce.  Didn’t divorce laws change substantially in the 60’s/70’s?  This was never covered in my high school US history class, but my understanding has been that it was difficult to divorce in the 50’s.  Moreover, it was extremely difficult for women to be financially independent due to job discrimination (and little things like being unable to open a savings account without hubby’s authorization).  I was a little confused about the claim that the current divorce rate is 67%, I thought it was more like 50% and that Gen X, as the generation brought up during a peak in the divorce rate, is in an especially vulnerable position  In fact, As I think about my friends who are married, in all of our marriages, one of the spouses grew up as a child of divorce.  In so far as divorce is a failing (and, hang on a minute, wasn’t the rhetoric "stay married for the kids"???  how do we reconcile that with Code’s advice?), it has not been my generation that fell apart post-altar.

In the last part of his essay, Code engages an interesting rhetorical strategy, sort of turning his argument inside out: "As I visit so many households full of misery, I see good, committed couples with the best of intentions end up either fighting or fleeing each other, like wild animals. That flight-response seems to control much more of our behavior than we realize."  So it isn’t that we put our children at the center of our universes (instead of our spouses?), it’s that as we distance ourselves from our spouses we turn to our children (and other distractors like work and tv).  The argument twists and dodges, even at this crucial point:

 

Most of us would never dream that putting our children before our marriage could be a flight response. We often believe we just don’t have time for our spouse. But the truth is, we often feel more love for our kids than for our spouse. When two parents drift apart from each other, often one parent will drift closer to the kids.

 

I’m so confused.  At the beginning of the article, he argues that it is the act of putting our children first that imperils our marriages, yet at this crucial juncture in his argument, he claims that first comes the spousal rift, then the "child-centered family".

 

In any case, the child-focused parent damages not only the child, but also our entire nation:

 

Second, we put tremendous pressure on our children to fulfill our emotional needs, which may lead to the child acting out. This draws even more attention to the problem, as parents anxiously seek a diagnosis and physicians increasingly rely on medicating children. What had been a molehill suddenly becomes a mountain, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that can cripple the child’s development and the future of our citizenry.

 

I think the mythical quality of the claim that "physicians increasingly rely on medicating children" is a really nice touch.

 

The delicious irony is that I don’t disagree with his prescription for a happier marriage:

1) Recognize that we’ve already chosen the perfect spouse. No, we would NOT choose better next time;

2) Recognize how often our fight-or-flight instinct overrides our passion in marriage. To create a happy marriage, we need to go from the fantasy, "It’s his/her fault that I’m unhappy" to the truth, "I wouldn’t do any better in my next marriage, so I might as well give 100 percent to this one;" and

3) Recognize that if we build a great marriage, we create a great role model for our kids, and they learn self-reliance and cooperation in the process.

 

It is interesting how much of this is worded in such a way as to reveal an underlying assumption that the reader assumes the solution is a different partner ("we would NOT choose better next time", "I wouldn’t do better in my next marriage").   

One of the things I did this summer which I hadn’t even included in my initial rubric was exercising more regularly.  It all started when I was in Louisville for the AP reading.  I’d brought my running shoes and it seemed such a waste to have dedicates so much suitcase space to them if I didn’t get on the treadmill at least once.  So the day we finished I managed to snag a treadmill and did one of the pre-programmed routines, which ended up being a cardio work-out that had me running almost the entire time, something I didn’t think I could do.  When I got home I upped the amount of time I spent running.  At the moment I’m running about a mile a day.  I know it’s not much (I run about 1.3 miles in 20 minutes, avg. pace = 13 min/mile).  I should go for longer (endurance).  I think my goal is 2 miles/30 minutes, but I think I could actually do that now.  The thing is, I like the 20 minute work-out, it’s really short!  So I’ve been hesitant to work up to 30 minutes, instead I’ve been working on getting my pace up.  After 2 weeks away, I couldn’t do the pace I’d programmed into my treadmill so I’m working my way back up.  I’d like to spend more time running at 5mph than at 4.2mph!  Yesterday when the treadmill dropped me down to 3.8 for a minute towards the end, I could have kept going.  So, I’m back! 

 

I have no motivation whatsoever.  It is almost noon and I am in my jammies.  So are the girls.  Since we got back, Jon has been running around and doing everything.  He unpacked and laudered all our clothes.  He dragged us to the grocery store.  He put out the garbage last night.  He’s cleaned the cats’ litter boxes.  I’ve… worried about what we’ll do the three days I have meetings (first meeting is tomorrow).  I’ve put off e-mailing my students textbook information and all other work-related tasks.

Yesterday I succeeded in accomplishing two tasks: running on the treadmill and taking the girls to the pool (where I happened to run into a woman I’d like to get to know better).

Today I would like to: 1) run on the treadmill or do crunches (what is it with the huge lower abdomen?  it can’t all be gas?  is this what happens when I get older, along with suddenly discovering that I did get stretch marks after all?) 2) take the girls to school and register them (huge hassle due to the pile of paperwork they require) and 3) start shopping for school supplies. 

On the other hand, with such an exciting to-do list, who would blame me for preferring to surf in my jammies?