PSU

How even to write about something like this?

By now everyone not living under a rock has heard at least the very basic allegations that have rocked Penn State. Yesterday, for the first time, I finally sat and actually read the grand jury investigative report. Before that, I'd read some summaries of it contained in various news/sports pieces on the subject. I even started to look up some of the statutes in question in the Pennsylvania criminal code but abandoned that task fairly quickly, as I found that one state's byzantine criminal code at a time is quite enough for my brain. I thought for a while before writing anything--in fact, starting a piece yesterday which I eventually deleted. It's frankly been a little difficult for me to know what to say.

Literally hundreds of writers, columnists, journalists, and sports commentators have weighed in on this subject. Compound that with the hundreds of thousands of other "Reader Comments" to newspapers, callers to radio shows, and comments on Facebook, and at some point you start to feel there's nothing more anyone can add. My husband and I have talked about this horrible scandal a number of times, and we've each got some different perspectives on this whole thing. Not different opinions, I don't think, but different perspectives. I'm going to try to write about those, rather than going on about how very awful it is that someone walked in on a child rape and didn't stop it, or speculating about Joe Paterno's legacy. I don't at the moment care about Joe Paterno's legacy, though there are people (a dwindling minority at the moment) who do. And with respect to what else I'm going to say, I want to be very careful. If I don't spend all my time emphasizing how terrible the crime was and what awful fallout it's going to have for the victims and their families, please understand that it isn't because I think those things are secondary. I don't. They're most assuredly primary. It's just that there have already been many, many pieces in the past week speaking to the fury and damage that this horrible crime causes, with more to say on the subject than what I can offer. Likewise, the subject of how badly the Penn State officials mishandled this whole thing has been pretty well covered beyond my ability to articulate anything else. With that, here goes.

First, I don't know anyone who thinks Mike McQueary, the graduate assistant who witnessed the 2002 incident of a still-unknown boy being anally raped in the shower, did the right thing. He saw something unspeakable, panicked, and fled, and then tried later (when it was too late to help the boy in question) to do something within the confines of respecting the system he worked in. The fact that he didn't just keep what he saw to himself obviously says that he knew he had to do something. But he made the bad judgment call to treat this as a football program matter rather than a criminal, public safety matter. I suspect that in his own mind he was trying after the fact to do the right thing, but the fundamental problem was that he made his attempts while trying first and foremost to protect his job and the system of which he was a part. He didn't protect that boy, but tried to protect his job and his program. And in the end he is almost certainly going to lose his job (and the prospects of getting another any time soon) anyway, and the program is in shambles and will be for a while. That's far secondary to what happened to the kids, without question. But even within what he probably was trying to do, he obviously failed.

But I would also point out that McQueary wasn't the only adult who witnessed Sandusky committing an assault on a child. Two years earlier, a janitor (who by now suffers from dementia and can't testify) reportedly saw Sandusky orally assaulting an 11-13 year old boy in the shower as well. He also did not call the police. He was distraught and told his supervisor, who actually feared the man would have a heart attack. The supervisor told him who he should report the matter to if he chose to report it, which he never did. But the entire janitorial staff was afraid that if they reported such a thing (particularly when they didn't personally witness it), they would lose their jobs. So even people not directly connected to the football program, people who may not have known who the perpetrator was, were afraid to do anything. I've not seen nearly the attention (or rage) directed at the janitorial staff that I have directed at Mike McQueary and the football staff. Is the janitor a more sympathetic figure than McQueary? I'm sure he was probably living a lot closer to the poverty line, and the loss of a job is a pretty scary thing. But in his own department, he did the same thing Mike McQueary did. And his supervisor didn't report the crime, either. It's not anyone's finest hour when they're more concerned about their own job than the safety of an anonymous child, but it also says something damning that they felt they had to be afraid for their jobs in the first place.

My husband has been looking at this from the perspective of someone in a semi-administrative position on a university campus, since he's currently chair of his department. It's had him somewhat discombobulated since the news hit. He's tried to put himself in the situation of what would happen if somebody reported something like that to him, and it's a pretty unpleasant place to put yourself. But since he's department chair, it's conceivable that some day a graduate student might witness someone in an authority position doing something illegal, freak out, and tell my husband. He then is Joe Paterno in that situation, if you will. Except that he's not. My husband is a great guy but he's not an icon or an institution, not the face of his university for the past 50 years (for damn sure doesn't get Big 10 football head coach pay). So it is a little hard to compare the two exactly.

As University faculty himself, my husband has also been thinking in terms of how this affects Penn State going forward. Less than a week after these allegations became public, the Board of Trustees of a major, big-time university voted to fire both its president and its resident legend. That's pretty seismic. And it's unrealistic to think it ends there. How will this affect the university as a whole? Will the number of student applications go down? Will there be a drop in enrollment? If so, will that lead to reductions in revenue? If so, will that lead to staff layoffs or tuition increases? And it's not very hard to imagine the state legislature in Pennsylvania holding a bunch of hearings over this, with administration being hauled in for testimony after testimony, with representatives looking for air time getting a chance to yell at them for the camera.

I've also been thinking about the Penn State students, because as it happens, I know a girl who's a freshman there this year. She's a fantastic kid. Abra and Thalia's most frequent babysitter until this year, in fact. She's in the marching band, and as of this writing planning a major in music education. She's just trying to get through her freshman year and do well in classes, but of course a big part of being in the marching band is you're connected to your marquee athletic teams. So this is affecting her, too, as well as thousands of other students. I just can't imagine being some nice kid from Cleveland off to her first semester at college, having a lot of your academic and social life be at least somewhat attached to the football team--and having this happen. I'm sure she'll do the best job she can keeping it together and focusing on the academic tasks at hand, but it has to be injecting a lot of added tension to the already-stressful situation of her first semester away at school.

As for me and my own perspective, it's a bit of an occupational hazard that whenever a high-profile crime hits the airwaves I always think about the people collateral to the accused. I think about how the lawyers might defend the case. The lawyers for the university officials charged with perjury might or might not have a decent defense--sounds pretty he said/she said in terms of who was told exactly what and when, and of course one of them is charged with perjury because the grand jury found one person's version more believable than another's. That tends to be a tough, though not impossible, sell when it's time for trial. Sandusky's lawyer is obviously in for a very long haul and might even get some crackpot death threats, too. And Sandusky has six grown children. How on earth do you live with your dad being dragged in front of TV cameras and being American's Most Notorious Child Rapist? Just unspeakably awful. Dozens and dozens of lives are being destroyed by this, and thousands more (in the form of current students and university employees) are being adversely affected.

I don't know what's going to happen out of all of this. It's all just overwhelming, surreal, and tragic.

Artists, Demons, and Daddy's Little Girls

I'm going to start with a confession. I'm not nearly cool enough to have spent much time listening to Amy Winehouse's music. So at the time it wasn't really a big emotional punch in the gut for me when I read of her death this summer. I had what I think was a pretty common reaction: Wow, that's really sad but hardly very surprising. This weekend, British officials revealed the results of the inquest into her death, that she died of alcohol poisoning. Her blood alcohol level at the time of her death was .416. It's nearly impossible for most people ever to get that drunk. You have to work long and hard at building up an alcohol tolerance before you can get there. But she did.

When Winehouse died, a much-cooler-than-I-am friend of mine posted on her Facebook page a link to some celebrity blog about the funeral, and that same friend noted that sometimes fantastically creative people wind up using drugs to create the internal drama of highs and lows from which great inspiration comes. Maybe that's what drove her to addiction. And of course, people use drugs and alcohol for all sorts of reasons, most of which stem from the basic truth that they make you temporarily feel good. Some people then become addicts and some don't, and the ones that do sometimes are able to get better and sometimes aren't. It's sad, and if you're a parent, it's scary.

The celebrity blog article about the funeral contained the following: Amy's father Mitch delivered the eulogy, which he closed with the line "Goodnight, my angel. Sleep tight." As for the music at the service, Reuters reports Carole King's "So Far Away" was played at the end, and that it was first song Amy and her father had sung together. I still haven't yet been able to read that with dry eyes. She was over the top celebrity crazy, a walking sideshow, a complete hot mess, whatever else you want to say. But her dad was saying good night to her like he undoubtedly did countless times when she was a little girl. And they sang songs together, just like parents do with their kids sometimes. At least to her father, she was through it all Daddy's Little Girl. How many times during her adult life must this man have stewed and worried that this exact thing would happen to his angel? How many times must he have wondered what he could do to make it better, to keep her from poisoning herself to death? How many times must he have cried himself to sleep knowing that the answer was, of course, that he could do nothing except love her. What are parents supposed to do when they can't chase away the monsters under the bed anymore? What happens when those monsters, instead of disappearing, move into the person's head to live? That's a hard one, and a scary one.

(NOTE: I tried to post a YouTube link to Amy Winehouse singing "Rehab," but couldn't. Too bad--it's a great song. Dark, ironic, and damn catchy.)

All Pretty Rank to Me

I recently read two different online pieces about public school education, here and here. I found them interesting because they make two facets of the same argument: schools underperform primarily when they are filled with under-performing students, period. Tinkering around with public education using teacher-bashing moves, which assumes that the primary problem is a proliferation of bad teachers, or by funneling public dollars into privately-run charter schools, will always fail to address adequately the problem of under-performing schools and students, because they fundamentally misunderstand the reasons for the problem. Unsurprisingly, of course, under-performing students are disproportionately poor. But for some reason, politicians don't seem to want to think of poverty as the main problem.

The jumping-off point for making this argument in the first piece is vouchers for charter schools. I don't know that everyone will find it interesting reading, honestly--it features some "inside baseball" liberal-on-liberal sniping and it's kind of wonkish and snotty at the same time. But the main argument is that we don't advance education overall in this society by doling out vouchers for poor people, especially for them to attend charter schools which are largely not proven to be any more effective than other public schools.

I would, however, really recommend reading the second piece, because I think most people *would* find that interesting. It's a personal essay, and an easy and thought-provoking read. The author had the unusual experience of having attended two public high schools--one ranked in the bottom 100 in the entire country, and the other ranked in the top 50. The author's experience? The supposedly excellent one really wasn't any better than the supposedly horrible one in terms of either teacher quality or curriculum. It had better resources, which was a nice perk. It featured more arts-related courses, undoubtedly because it had the resources to do so. But its main advantage, in terms of test scores and graduation rates--which, again, is all that lawmakers seem to care about--was simply that it was filled with better students. The author expresses real frustration that the "bottom" school is going to continue to be punished for problems it didn't create and which it is not equipped to fix.

And that seems to me to get at the fundamental question of what's wrong with how we approach public education in this country anymore. First of all, we've just somehow decided that our measure of what constitutes a good school system is how many of its students graduate and how well they perform on standardized tests. That's an attractive way to differentiate a "good" school from a "bad" one because those are objectively quantifiable things. And I certainly don't have an issue with making graduation a priority. I'm absolutely in favor of everybody in this society having at the very least a high school or equivalency diploma, and either some post-high school education or targeted job training. But the problem, at least in my opinion, is that graduation rate/test scores criteria do an excellent job of, for the most part, telling you whether or not a substantial percentage of your student population comes from wealthy or at least professional-class families, and also whether or not a substantial percentage of them comes from poverty. The more your students come from the latter category and the less from the former, the more likely you are to under-perform. That is simply a fact. And while I don't necessarily think that standardized tests are inherently evil (though I know and respect some pretty smart people who do), relying on them to determine whether or not you have a "good" school or school district unquestionably is. It's beyond detrimental to our system of public education; it's evil.

Are rich kids smarter than poor kids? Absolutely not, at least not in the sense that money makes you smart. Money doesn't make you smart any more than it makes you a good citizen or a good person. But the fact is that if you happen to be born into poverty in this country, you simply start the race of life about five lengths behind someone who isn't. It's of course possible to pull ahead under those circumstances, but you have to have been blessed with extraordinary speed (and some luck) in order for that to happen, and most people aren't. The poor in our society face educational barriers that other people do not, and I fear that that will simply get worse over the next generation or two as income disparity in this country widens precipitously. Think about some of those barriers: environmental toxins, which sometimes contribute to birth defects and other health problems that interfere with brain development; parental incarceration; unreliable and/or unsafe transportation to and from school; lack of adequate nutrition and health care; lack of affordable educational supports like computers; ever-increasing cuts to educational resources like libraries and after-school programs on which they rely to supplement classroom education. On and on. You may not be any smarter than someone facing these barriers, but if you don't have to deal with them, you're far more likely to be in a position to do reasonably well in school.

I also read recently that the Ohio legislature is looking to add yet another metric to school performance measures: numerically ranking schools from best to worst statewide. I just have to throw my arms up in the air and ask, WHY? What on earth do they hope to accomplish? Giving real estate agents yet another lazy-man's method of determining where to steer prospective home-buyers? Finding more and more justifications to privatize public education, as though that's going to accomplish anything other than enriching the companies that profit from such moves? Seriously, what? It's certainly not designed, at least not by anyone with two working brain cells, to improve public education. A cynic might think that in fact Ohio lawmakers don't actually care to improve public education.

But, of course, I'm not a cynic.

So back to sports....

Short bit of navel-gazing today, as I need to get back to writing a brief, on which task I am a bit behind schedule. But, just a few things...

I could start by ruminating about surprising starts by perennial doormats Detroit, Buffalo, and of course our own Cleveland Browns. But really, there isn't anything much to say about it. We're three games in. It will matter more what everyone's record is when we're ten games in. As a Packer fan I will say Detroit now officially scares me some. I will also say that Ravens and Steelers fans have zero reason to be scared of the Browns just yet.

But here's an NFL tidbit I did find interesting. Apparently, the new NFL collective bargaining agreement now specifies that sexual orientation is one of the grounds upon which owners are prohibited from discriminating against players. This doesn't cover other team employees, necessarily, and honestly I have a hard time thinking that simply adding this protection is going to persuade any currently-closeted gay NFL players to come out. Pro team sports are still ruled by an ethic of machismo, and simply a statement by your bosses that being gay isn't going to get you fired probably isn't going to persuade anybody worried about acceptance by fans and teammates. Still, though, I think that one of these days sooner rather than later, we're going to start seeing a few openly gay professional male athletes. Coaches and owners and general managers are sports guys and businessmen. They're in the business of putting together winning teams if they can, and they have a comparatively miniscule number of people in the labor market from which they can draw to do it. If you're running an NFL team and you need a bruising cornerback with blazing speed on your team and there's one available in the draft, you can't afford to care whether the guy has a boyfriend or not. You're going to take him before your division rival does. And I suspect that a lot more players are open to gay teammates than one might guess, certainly more than 20 years ago. The incomparable Charles Barkley may have said it best (as he has a way of doing!) when he said earlier this year that he knew he had some gay teammates and he didn't care. "I'd rather have a gay guy who can play than a straight guy who can't." He can't possibly be unique among athletes in having that opinion.

And on a completely different topic, I can now watch baseball postseason again with some actual interest in who wins, which happens occasionally but not all that often. But I have to show some Cheesehead solidarity, so come this weekend I'll be watching the Milwaukee Brewers. I will admit that I haven't seen them play even once this year (my local team is in the American League, after all)--I don't know how many times this year they were playing in whatever nationally televised game Fox or ESPN was showing. I do know the networks have to make room to televise 432 matchups every year between the Yankees and the Red Sox, so that doesn't leave time for too many other games. But I'm hoping they don't just summarily get dispatched by the juggernaut Phillies--I'd like to see them stick around long enough for me to learn the names of all the players, heh.

Criminal Parenting

I follow several friends' blogs, partly because they're my friends and I want to see what they're up to, and partly because they're all genuinely wonderful writers. One of them has featured, for the past several days, different posts about allowing children freedom in a perhaps overly safety-obsessed parental culture, and musing about "free-range parenting" vs. "helicopter parenting." That particularly sparked my interest. I've thought about the subject a lot and even written a little about it myself. Although I think of myself as more toward the "free-range" end of things (OK, in my case, it's more like being Slacker Mom), I freely acknowledge that I have some helicopter parent tendencies. I try to fight them but it's hard. One of the reasons for that is that, frankly, we in this country are so judgmental about everybody else's parenting that we're in some cases perfectly willing to criminalize it if it doesn't measure up to our standards. I find that profoundly disturbing.

As one example, I'm currently representing a woman charged with endangering her children. I'm still hopeful that the case can be settled in such a manner that it will allow her to avoid having a criminal conviction, but I'm not at the moment optimistic. The short version of her story is that she is married to an over-the-road truck driver who is frequently gone for weeks at a time, so she's often in effect a single parent. She is, as of this writing, in the late stages of pregnancy with her eleventh child. Earlier in the summer, she one day thought her older kids were watching the younger ones (which they usually do) and she fell asleep on the couch. She was wrong, and the two preschoolers got out of the house and began walking down a busy street thinking they'd walk to a park where they'd walked with their mother the day before. For this, she's charged as a criminal, despite the fact that she was appalled that this had happened and despite the fact that when the police searched her house they found it otherwise perfectly safe and up to code. I also remember a case from my former home, where a man was facing felony charges in the death of his 3-year-old son in a car accident. The accident itself was determined to be entirely the fault of the other driver who blew through a stop sign and crashed into the defendant's car. But according to the defendant, a short time earlier the boy had freed himself from his car seat and was unrestrained. That was over ten years ago and I'm still furious at the prosecutor for even thinking of pursuing charges in that one (don't worry, former Janesville peeps, it was in Walworth County).

And I would recommend this fascinating book, as well, about an incident that happened in Oberlin, Ohio, where I went to college. It tells the harrowing and true story of what happened when a somewhat unconventional woman took some nude photos of her young daughter. Even the prosecutor eventually conceded that the photos were not themselves pornographic under the law nor were they made with any proscribed intent, but he eventually rationalized things by saying more or less that pedophiles might find them arousing. Um, well, OK. This family had to spend almost all their money defending this woman against criminal charges and fighting child services just to have their daughter returned to them. All because some people disapproved of some photographs, and some prosecutor felt that the community standard ought to be making sure we're cognizant of the urges of pedophiles.

Author Lenore Skenazy made something of a splash a couple of years ago when she admitted that she allowed her then-9-year-old son to ride the New York City subway alone. He was fine and safe, and she was proud that he navigated it well. But she got incredible backlash from many readers about that, mostly because they wouldn't personally have allowed that. She also writes a blog called Free-Range Kids wherein she discusses the tendency today not only to disapprove of parenting practices that were perfectly normal 20 or 30 years ago, but actually to criminalize them. It's definitely worth a read--she relayed one recent story about a Tennessee mother who was warned by police that she would be actually arrested if she allowed her 10-year-old daughter to ride her bicycle to school by herself again. Holy cow, really? Are we that determined to make certain our kids are never able to function on their own?

I have to say that of late I've been feeling very disenchanted with criminal law and the practice of it, so maybe that's what's prompting my excursion into this somewhat depressing subject matter. And I'm certainly not saying that criminal prosecutions of parents have absolutely no place in our society. There are obviously people who engage in clear-cut physical or sexual abuse of their children, and also people who neglect them so badly that their parenting quite clearly falls below any reasonable objective standard of minimum care, and I'm not saying that the law doesn't need to step in and protect the kids in those situations. But whether we as a society have become more judgmental of other parents or simply more unreasonably frightened for our own kids, I think that either way we're not doing those kids any favors by not allowing them to take risks, take some lumps, get hurt once in a while, and learn from that. After all, a large part of life is learning how to recover from the lumps that you're inevitably going to receive. If the only lesson that you ever learn from your childhood is that Mom and Dad are going to make sure you never have to deal with it, what kind of a person are you going to become?

Children of Hope

The other day I was in a checkout line at the grocery store, and sitting amongst the various trashy and semi-trashy periodicals that always reside there was that week's issue of People magazine. Staring from the cover, innocent and doe-eyed, was a lovely 9-year-old strawberry blonde-haired girl, her freckled face like something out of a Dutch Renaissance painting. She was holding a locket with a tiny picture inside around her neck. The picture is her dead father, and the story title was "The Children of 9/11." The article is a feature on some children whose fathers died in the September 11 terrorist attacks.

I didn't buy the magazine (actually purchasing a People magazine is a place I can't quite get to), but the headline and picture stuck with me because the girl on the cover is Abra's age. The girl never knew her father. All of the children featured in that story are close contemporaries of Abra age-wise, because all their mothers were pregnant with them on that awful day. So, as it happens, was I. I was a little over halfway through, in fact. I don't pretend to be affected any differently from anyone else just because I was expecting my first child that day--so were many thousands of other women, including a number of friends of mine. But because I did happen to be pregnant, that picture did a little bit better job than any of the other dozens of 9/11 commemorations that are currently ubiquitous in American media of bringing me back to that day.

As probably most people do, or at least think they do, I remember trivial things about that day pretty clearly. I'd just had my first Lamaze class the night before. It was a Tuesday morning, with absolutely perfect weather. Sunny, just the slightest hint of crispness first thing in the morning, mild sunny day later on. The sort of day that generally makes you happy to be here. In fact, I even remember what I was wearing. It was a purple maternity dress. It had long sleeves and that day was the first time I'd worn it--the dress was, like most of my maternity clothing, handed down from a friend, but it was new to me. Clad in a purple dress and black boots and by then sporting quite the visible pregnant waddle, I inspired one of my co-workers to quip at me as I was headed out the door that I looked like a walking eggplant. I laughed as I headed out the door, on my way to the Health Care center for 8:30 a.m. (central time) mental detention hearings. On my car radio, just before I arrived, whatever puff piece Susan Stamberg was doing on NPR was interrupted with the news that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.

My first thought was, what a terrible accident. By the time I was finished with detention hearings and headed back to the office, of course, news of the other planes had gone over the airwaves and it was clear that it was a terrorist attack. Virtually nothing got done that day that didn't absolutely have to get done. We all did whatever court appearances we had to do, and spent the rest of the day huddled by TV sets and emailing friends and loved ones. And things went on in that vein for a few days afterward, too. Remember TV? Radio? For more than a week regular programming was essentially suspended, in order for the networks to be able to provide round-the-clock coverage. Football and baseball got postponed. Some of the cable stations went back to regular programming earlier than that, and I confess that I remember being relieved when the Oxygen Network resumed broadcasting Xena. I just wasn't sure how much more non-stop coverage I could seep into my head. But, like everyone else, I was feeling a little awkward about when and how we could return to normal, and also feeling more than a little bit like nothing would ever be normal again. In fact, a couple of weeks later, the venerable Onion hit the perfect note with its satirical headline, "Grieving Nation Longs to Care About Stupid Shit Again."

But of course, we did resume caring about stupid shit, because that's what humans do.  Things did become normal again, it's just that "normal" changed for everyone. But normal always changes and evolves. That's how life is. A few months later I finally became a mom--not without a lot of trepidation, wondering if I'd made a mistake bringing another person onto a deeply troubled planet. I don't think I did. And in a way it doesn't matter whether I did or not; she's here, and appears to be enjoying herself. Like the angel-faced strawberry blonde on the People magazine cover, Abra seems to radiate hope. 9/11 doesn't mean anything to her, just as Pearl Harbor or JFK's assassination don't mean anything to me in the personal sense because I didn't experience them. But I understand what those events mean to the world. They're part of my normal, just as 9/11 is part of our children's normal. Hope, and normal, continue to exist in the word of abnormal, simply because that's how it has to be.

Summer's End

Well, not quite, but it is approaching.

I do love the time of year when the kids are closing in on going back to school. I'm approaching this year with a mix of excitement and some trepidation, though. And I'm saying goodbye to a summer that, while it was in some ways lovely, was not--especially at the beginning--what I expected it to be.

The main reason for that is that, in what was an entirely unexpected development two months ago, my children are switching schools this fall. No, we're not moving and I'm not packing them off to private school. And the school board hasn't voted to close their elementary school, at least not yet. But the shortest version I can manage to give is that over the course of the past couple of years, both our kids have undergone a few rounds of testing. For whatever these tests are worth, Abra has tested out as being gifted in all three main areas in which they test--Math, Reading, and Cognitive (Thalia hasn't yet been tested in Math but that's coming as well). And the district decided to change how they're doing gifted education for fourth and fifth graders starting this school year. Kids like Abra who tested out in all three areas have been invited to enroll in a separate, self-contained class. The issue is that the classes are only housed in two of the seven elementary schools, and Fairfax, the girls' home school, is not one of them. If we wanted Abra to be in this class, we'd have to transfer her to Roxboro. A great school, no doubt, but not *our* school for the past four years. To make matters worse, I discovered this abrupt change on the very last day of school last year--in fact, quite literally, 15 minutes before the final bell on the last day of school. It was, to say the least, quite a shock.

Chris and I went back and forth a number of times over the next couple of weeks over whether to enroll Abra in that class or not, and if so, whether to leave Thalia at Fairfax or move her to Roxboro with Abra. It was an agonizing decision, at least for me, and I'm still angry about how badly these changes were communicated to the parents. A couple of weeks after school let out, we got the girls' report cards in the mail along with school supply lists for Fairfax for the upcoming year, and as soon as I saw those I sat down and cried. But in the end, for various reasons, we decided to give the class a try and also decided to move Thalia as well.

I will say this up front: I'm not looking for feedback or opinions, and while I greatly respect the views of people who might be reading, I'd just as soon not have any. As you might imagine, these changes provoked a lot of negative reaction among many of the parents--parents of kids who are not eligible to participate in the program (many of whom have also been identified as gifted, just not in all three testing areas), and parents of kids who are eligible to participate but have to change schools in order to do so. A few of those parents might read the blog and so I really don't want arguments.

We feel on the whole that it was the right decision, but it's impossible not to have regrets or sadness. I love Fairfax, and in fact had just agreed to take on a two-year commitment to the executive committee of the PTA there, a commitment which I obviously can no longer honor. Both girls have made good friends there, and Abra in particular is a highly social girl with lots of friends and a great social network. A few of those friends will be transferring to Roxboro, but most will not be, either because they're not eligible or because their parents don't at this point want to switch schools. Rationally, I know it's hardly the end of the world from a social network point of view. Abra will know a few other people, and she's the kind of girl who makes lots of friends pretty easily so I'm quite sure she'll have more buddies by the end of the first week. Plus, the new school isn't far at all and she'll still be able to see her Fairfax friends as well, and they'll all be reunited in two years when they start middle school anyway. From Thalia's end of it, the new school has a heavy emphasis on world cultures in education, part of which includes instruction in Mandarin and maintaining a relationship with a sister school in Shanghai. Her Chinese heritage is starting to become very important to Thalia, and she's excited about learning Mandarin and tickled that the school actually celebrates Chinese New Year. So we're pleased about that.

But all of this still circles back to the fact that I had been looking forward to a lazy, laid-back summer of hanging out with the kids and then starting school like old hands. Instead, we're starting over at a new school and we're a little nervous. But even so, over the past couple of months we've still ridden bikes and taken swimming lessons and gone to the pool and done some day camps and played with the dog and hung out with Gramma when she came for a good long visit. And this weekend we'll be hitting the annual Greek Festival with Papou and Yiayia (that would be Grandpa and Grandma for you non-Greeks out there) when they drive out with Uncle Bill to visit. We're still doing back-to-school shopping and waiting for soccer to start. Life changes, but it still rolls on.


Best imitation of mermaids they could muster.

Film Education

A buddy of mine posted on her Facebook page the other day a line from "The Princess Bride," probably one of the most-quoted movies of all time. It seems everyone knows at least a couple of bits from that flick: "Inconceivable!""You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." "As you wish." etc. My kids have seen that movie a number of times, and in fact last year Thing Two--true story--pulled off a classic. She was at her first day at a day camp and the kids were all supposed to write their names on one of those "Hello, my name is" name tags. So in an incredibly inspired burst of awesomeness, my then-6-year-old wrote, after "Hello, my name is..." "Thalia. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

This morning at breakfast, the spousal unit brought up another of the most-quoted movies ever, brought on by Thing One's entree choice of....dry white toast. Chris asked her if she wanted four whole fried chickens with that. So then that got me thinking, in the girls' pop culture education, they at some point must see "The Blues Brothers." Admittedly, unlike "The Princess Bride" which is on its own an excellent movie, "The Blues Brothers" really isn't that great a flick. In fact, I would argue it's less a movie than a two-hour filmed vaudeville act with a lot of pretty big names in it. And I also concede that the older I get and the more times I see that movie, the more tiresome I find the car chase scenes. But I just think that in certain social situations, you have to be able to ask everyone at the table who wants an orange whip, announce that you hate Illinois Nazis, proclaim that you're getting the band back together, or reassure people that you're on a mission from God.

So, are the kids old enough to see The Blues Brothers? There isn't of course any sex or violence to speak of. But I'm just not sure about all the dialogue--aside from all the potty words, which I can probably dismiss up front with a disclaimer, a lot of it is pretty adult in an admittedly juvenile sort of way. Abra is going on 10 years old and is reasonably sophisticated, but I'm just not sure I want in the opening scene of a movie to explain about the "soiled" condom. Might interrupt the flow of the humor. And as Abra also frequently points out to us, she's THE ONLY one of her friends who's never even seen the Brady Bunch because we never sit around and watch Nickelodeon. So perhaps the Blues Brothers are a bit premature.

Anybody ever watch The Blues Brothers with your kids? How old were they? What other movies are floating around out there that are chock full of must-have cultural references?

And, I leave you with what is probably my favorite scene from the Blues Brothers, though I could just as easily have selected James Brown in the pulpit or Aretha Franklin dancing around the diner in her pink slippers (though I can never find a quality YouTube clip of the latter which probably influences my decision in this blog post). Enjoy.

A Night at the Museum

Or, "It Pays to Know People."

My mom is finishing up her visit here, is headed back to Kansas tomorrow (where, please take note Cleveland peeps, it's been at or near 110 degrees most days for several weeks now--at those temps, the fact that it's a dry heat isn't really all that relevant, and in fact they'd love some humidity since they're experiencing severe drought). So for a nice outing today, we went to the Natural History Museum, where we're actually members. It's a totally fun place, though this year is actually the first time we've coughed up for a membership. It was definitely worth the money, though--once we figured in the kids' day camp discounts, we concluded that we only had to go once for the membership to pay for itself. We've actually been a few times.

First we sat in on the live animal exhibit. A very sweet and earnest intern named Kelly did the program. She is in serious need of a public speaking class and/or more practice, but she is clearly committed to her area of study and despite the excess of "Um"s, she did have a lot of interesting useful information. My biggest takeaway: the Great Horned Owl is one absolute badass. Total and complete, Bengal-Tiger-Top-Of-The-Food-Chain badass. Much respect to the Great Horned Owl. Did you know this thing sometimes kills and eats hawks? Seriously. Much respect.

So then we sat in on the planetarium show. As you might expect, this sort of thing is right in my husband's wheelhouse. He knows most of the people working at the planetarium, including the guy who was running the show that day. So not only did the guy who ran the afternoon show recognize and point out my husband, but afterwards we chatted with him and he took us on a little backstage tour. It was really incredible. We went into the cold storage area, where they have a lot of their taxidermy and bone-fossil pieces, as well as some samples of contraband endangered animal products that federal agents have seized from would-be smugglers. It was really incredible. Our intrepid guide informed us that only about 4 or 5 museums in the entire country have larger repositories of animal DNA than does the Cleveland MNH, and they include behemoths like the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. and the Field Museum in Chicago.

It was really fascinating. One of many times when I've been reminded how very, very cool it is to have hooked up with a real live scientist.

An Open Letter

Dear Stupidass Punks Who Are Trying to Ruin My Town:

I just hate you. OK, well, "hate" is a strong word since I don't know you personally. In fact, I may represent you (or at least your older relatives) from time to time and when you're my clients I often sort of like you. And logically of course it's not any more OK for you to mess up East Cleveland neighborhoods than for you to mess up mine. But this is my neighborhood, dammit, and you punks can't have it.

Yesterday, I took my kids to the Coventry Street Fair. It was fantastic. We only live a few blocks from Coventry and it was a picture-perfect gorgeous weather day, so we walked. We went at about 1:30 in the afternoon and stayed more than two hours. It's of course possible to go to something like this and drop a wad of cash, but it's also very possible to go and have a great time and not spend a dime. Local bands and other performers provided live entertainment. Area artisans had incredible crafts, jewelry, and artwork for sale. Coventry Street restaurants had food tents out in full force (the Bodega spread was to die for--I was kind of sorry I'd eaten lunch right before we left). The vibe was relaxed, funky, and totally family friendly. My girls watched stilt-walkers, bands, and a juggler, ate popcorn and slushies and saw a few friends, and Thalia even got herself a slammin' airbrush tattoo. I bought some incredible tomatoes from a local farmer.

And because there was some unpleasantness last year at the only street fair all summer, they made some changes this year. Instead of three hours during the evening, they moved the fair to Sunday afternoon, noon to six. The idea was to spread the time out so that they could simultaneously accommodate more total people and make it less packed. Success! A great time was had by all.

And then this. This had to go and happen. A bunch of stupid, idiot, punkass kids--many from elsewhere--go and piss all over the picnic table. Seriously, what the hell? Street fairs like this one are exactly the sort of thing that draw people to Cleveland Heights and make people like me love living here. Or at least, for now that's true. This is the second one of these in a row where there have been problems, and pretty soon vendors aren't going to want to set up shop there. People definitely aren't going to want to bring their younger children if they think they'll be trampled in a stampede of dumbasses or tased by cops. And the kids who are actually from the Heights? You're even worse. You're trashing your own place and everyone in it. You're playing right into stupid (and sometimes thinly-veiled racist) stereotypes about this town being unsafe. Oh, and congratulations on giving the cops ample reason to behave like a bunch of thugs at the next one. That was well thought out.

I know this is a pointless rant. Teenagers are, well, kind of stupid. It's how they are. Reflecting on long-term consequences isn't for the most part in their hard-wiring. I get that. And, frankly, I'm sure I'll take my kids to the one next month. Because they love going, they have a great time, and because I believe in supporting local stuff like this. But we're for damn sure going to be out of there by 3:00 in the afternoon. And I'm going to be nervous that the one in July might turn out to be the last one.

Nice job, a-holes.

Will I Be Pretty?

(AUTHOR'S NOTE: I actually drafted this about 6 months ago, never finished it until today. I have a lot of other crazy things on my mind, about which I will perhaps post fairly soon. For now, this.)

I put this piece up on my Facebook status some time ago. It has stuck with me, partly because of what a great piece of work I think it is and how very well it was performed, but also because I of course have two daughters myself. This has resonated for me a lot with respect to them.

I've sort of reached a point in my life when "pretty" isn't nearly the issue with me personally that it was when I was a girl and a young woman. I think a number of things have converged to make that happen. I've lived enough life, exciting or not, that "pretty" has sort of receded in my head as a priority. I spent nearly five years as a single parent, two of them as a single parent of two kids. I experienced what in OB/GYN circles is called a "geriatric pregnancy" (let's face it--from a strictly biological standpoint, nearly 37 years old is a little long in the tooth to be doing that sort of thing for the first time). That will rather dramatically and permanently realign not only your perspective, of course, but frankly your body parts. I'm nearing an age now when I can realistically expect the Magic Estrogen Fountain to start shutting down pretty soon. And last but most certainly not least, I have been lucky enough to marry an excellent guy who thinks I'm not too bad to look at.

But for my girls, "pretty" hasn't had a chance to recede as an issue. I don't even fully know to what extent it's even had a chance to emerge as one. The Magic Estrogen Fountain that's going to start shutting down for me hasn't turned on for them yet. But Abra just finished the third grade, and is likely only about a couple of years or so from getting boobs. Boobs I tell you! Holy crap, three years ago she was skipping off to Mrs. Murphy's Kindergarten class, and that was just yesterday I swear. I don't know how soon Thalia will stumble or charge into puberty, because of course I don't know her biological history at all. But whether it starts for her in four years or eight, it'll start.

And I wonder how best to help them have a healthy perspective on who they are while they (and I) also deal with the hormone-induced psychosis that sometimes is adolescence. Because the fact is that they *are* genuinely physically beautiful girls. They're quite...well, pretty. I love looking at them. Abra's drop-dead gorgeous face and luminous smile, Thalia's deep exotic eyes and incredible muscular body, I find them fascinating. But of course that doesn't make them who they are. Except in the society we occupy, on some level it does. And, you know, they're not cosmetically perfect. Who knows what random stupid-ass thing will turn into an issue for them later? Abra has the physique now of a piece of spaghetti, but her maternal genetic blueprint pretty well dictates that won't be the case forever. Some day, girl's gonna have herself a butt. The downy hair on Thalia's face is just slightly darker over her upper lip than on the rest of it, and God knows what crap the nasty boys--or girls--in middle school will yell at her from their lockers if it winds up even slightly resembling a mustache. Plus, of course, she's different. She's not white and she's not African-American, and probably 98% of the schools' populations in our district fall into one of those two categories. She's not the only Asian kid in her school but there aren't many of them. Right now kids don't much care about that except with slight fascination. Check back in three or four years and see if that's still the case.

They both have an astonishing amount to offer, of course. They're whip-smart, outstanding students. Both of them do very well not only in academic subjects but in music and art. Abra is a socially sophisticated girl with, at the moment at least, a lot of friends. She can talk up a blue streak like her mother but is also adept at arts and crafts (and hair arranging!), very unlike her mother. Thalia is a meticulous drawer and drafter and a jaw-dropping athlete, is friendly and caring, and her classmates seem to find her sort of intriguing. Both of them are funny, creative, and downright interesting people. Who, at least in the eyes of their admittedly biased mother, are also physically beautiful. Other people may or may not agree with that assessment. But what makes me sad is not that they might disagree with that assessment but that it's even important. But it unquestionably is.

It's a little unrealistic to assume that their parents can single-handedly equip them with such a healthy self-image that they can completely disregard what the world thinks of their legs, their eyebrows, their hair, their teeth, butts, and boobs. I don't remember my mom particularly emphasizing any of those things to me. She did her best to emphasize academic performance, piano practicing, ethical behavior, all that stuff. Certainly, unlike the at least fictional and perhaps real-life mother of the artist I linked, neither she nor any other mother I knew growing up would have ever forked over for a nose job for their teenager unless her face had gone through a windshield, even assuming they had the money to fork over. She believed that "smart" was a lot more important to my self-image than "pretty" was, and I think gave her reinforcements accordingly.

Still, I absorbed and internalized the "pretty" bullshit nonetheless. It to some degree shaped what I thought of myself for a number of years. I was not considered a Pretty Girl when I was in high school. Looking back I'd say I was of perfectly average physical attractiveness, I guess, but for someone who was reasonably OK-looking I got a lot--and I mean a LOT--of "Ugly Bitch" insults. I had many friends, most of whom were pretty popular themselves, and I was in quite a few activities and a cheerleader to boot, and I think I was able to shrug off a lot of it. But despite the fact that it didn't send me into some spiral of drug-abusing depression or a string of abusive relationships, I'm sometimes surprised at how much of it I internalized despite my best efforts not to.

Even if neither one of them ever in her whole life gets teased in any way about her looks, there's still so much for girls to wade through. Boys, too, of course, but as a parent I don't have to deal with the boy bullshit. I have to deal with the girl bullshit. For now, I'm just trying to enjoy my beautiful daughters.

A Few Early Reflections on the New Doggie

1. Hard choice. Going to the APL was a great thing to do, but there were several that would have been suitable and the girls liked other dogs, too. It's (somewhat) easy to say no to dogs you know off the bat aren't going to work for you, but it's pretty difficult to leave a dog at the shelter--even a non-euthanizing, well-run, friendly place like the APL--that will probably be a pretty good dog for your family.

2. We chose a 2-year-old (roughly) female, medium-sized, quite sturdy, strawberry blonde mutt dog. I can't remember what mix of breeds they guessed she was at the shelter because I went off and left the folder there (duh, have to get it tomorrow). But my estimation is some variety of Shepherd/Retriever mix with probably other stuff in there. She got excellent "Safer" scores on her temperament tests and is outstanding with the kids.

3. Points of comparison with the previous dog: I suspect she's going to be much more trainable than Wacko was, because she's very people-focused and is always watching us like she's awaiting orders. So we're going to have to get started training her right away. Wacko didn't necessarily have a strong objection to doing what you asked as long as, you know, he didn't have anything better to do. I'm guessing that she's not going to be nearly the flight risk that Wacko was. She also really digs being brushed and combed, and doesn't mind having her paws and toenails held and touched, so she'll be much easier to groom than he was. On the other hand, I don't get the impression that she's quite as confident (yet, anyway) as he was, so I don't know if she's going to have separation anxiety issues, which is not something I ever worried about much with the Wack-job, at least after the first few weeks. And I'm fairly sure that she's not going to be much use as a watchdog, which was something Wacko did quite well. Part Chow, he was.

4. She and the cats still have a few....issues to work out. She's not aggressive and she's pretty friendly. But her first feline interaction consisted of an attempt to sniff Tango, whose reaction was, "The way things work around here is you stay away from me and I don't introduce your nose to the business end of my claws." Dog backed away yelping. Then later, when Pearl tried to come in the room, Dog remembered the earlier interaction and took out after Pearl, which resulted in a time-out in her crate. So we're still learning.

5. Her name is Ruby (Ruby Tuesday, heh). And she's excellent.

Back in the Saddle

So, I think I'm ready.

Readers of this space will know that several months ago, we said goodbye to Wacko the Wonder Dog. It was difficult and painful, as he was in my humble opinion the absolute best dog ever. He was at the very least the perfect dog for me, and the best companion I could have ever asked for. His decline was heart-wrenching, and the end was of course inevitable.

People are of widely differing views on when is the best time to replace a beloved pet. Or perhaps replace isn't the right word, since of course nobody could *ever* actually replace Fido/Fluffy/Tweety/Frank-the-Turtle/whoever. But you know what I mean--get another animal. I know people who go out quite literally a few days later, and I also know people who have waited years. Neither approach is right or wrong. It's right or wrong for the people doing it. Had I gone out dog-shopping the next day it wouldn't have meant that I loved or missed Wacko any less. But, I wasn't ready. I needed to mope and be sad for a while. And, frankly, we said goodbye to him smack in the dregs of a Cleveland winter. Just as a practical matter, the last thing I want is to be training a dog when it's minus ten and/or with a foot of snow on the ground. I needed to wait.

But I think I've waited long enough. Chris has been very good about deferring to me on this issue, making clear that he's ready when I'm ready. And I think I'm ready. I want another dog in my life and I think I'm ready to handle one. Lord knows the children are ready--Abra comes home with a new dog breed book from the library each week: "Mom? Can we get a German Shepherd/Chocolate Lab/Dachshund/Yorkshire Terrier/Bloodhound/Dalmatian?" Good lord.

But really I know what I want to do. Chris and I have already been to a couple of shelters. I understand the argument in favor of shopping carefully for a purebreed puppy, going to a reputable breeder with a money-back guarantee, I really do. When you go that route you have a very good idea, if you've selected your breeder wisely, of what sort of an animal you'll get and you lower the risk that you'll get a thoroughly unsuitable pet. With shelter animals, especially the Dogs Of Indeterminate Genetic Heritage, you sort of shrug your shoulders and make an educated guess.

But quite honestly, acquiring a pet, just as acquiring children, is pretty much a crapshoot anyway. You try to do some research and not make a totally stupid decision, then cross your fingers and roll the dice and hope for the best. Chris and I both have a pretty good idea of certain things that are deal-breakers for us (he has a couple more deal-breakers than I do, but not an unreasonable number so it's OK), as well as a pretty good idea of roughly what we'd like to see. So starting tomorrow, with some fond memories of Wacko tucked away in my pocket for good luck, I'm going to head out with the husband and children to the APL to look for a new canine family member. If the stars align for it, we may have one by this time tomorrow. If not, it will be soon.

Oh, by the way, the cats will be pretty pissed, so stay tuned for that.

Post-party conversation

Exchange that took place between me and Thing 1 as I was walking her back home from a birthday party yesterday:

Thing One: (Nearly non-stop monologue about goings-on at the party, but in particular about one of the Birthday Girl's cats.)
Me: Are you going to take a breath?
Thing One: (Continues monologue.) *Hiccup.*
Me: You OK?
Thing One: Yea. (Starts to resume monologue.) Woh, I threw up just a little bit in my mouth. (Pause.) Tastes like cake. (Resumes monologue.)
Me: (Marvels silently.)

Battle Hymn of the Slacker Mom

I just finished Amy Chua's book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother." I do recommend it, I think--it's a fast read and well-written. It got a great deal of pre-release press when the Wall Street Journal excerpted some of the more over-the-top passages and gave the essay the somewhat inflammatory title, "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior." Ooooo--kay. The thing is, when that WSJ essay was making the internet and Facebook rounds, I read it and laughed out loud. Go ahead, click and read it. I thought some of that had to be comic exaggeration. So I really wanted to read the book when I got the chance and see what the hype was about. So when it got in to the library, I devoured it quickly. Here's the Brenna Review and the thoughts it sparked.

First, from a couple of interviews I read with her, I went into the book thinking that the essay surely had given her some undeserved bad press. But as I proceeded through the book, I admit that I found myself frankly disliking the author more than I expected to. For background, Amy Chua is the stereotypical Overachieving Asian: raised by immigrant parents, tops in her class, Harvard Law School, Yale law professor. Married a non-Asian man and had two daughters with him, and was determined to raise said daughters the "Chinese way" (her term) that she had been raised. The "Chinese Way" under her definition can be summed up as follows. If the kids aren't sleeping they're working pathologically hard at something. They're never allowed to come in second, disrespect their elders, or have any fun of any kind. It absolutely does not matter whether the kids like you or not. This book chronicles her journey of attempting to parent her daughters that way, while married to a man who didn't share that view, and while being blessed/cursed with a younger daughter who, shall we say, refused to cooperate.

Her chosen method of instilling brilliant excellence and a ridiculous work ethic into her children, besides academics (a given) was classical music, piano for the older daughter and violin for the younger. To some extent I identify here. My mom got me into piano lessons when I was a kid, mainly because she thought I might get bored at school and she wanted to give me something pretty difficult to do. Mission accomplished. Playing the piano really well is definitely difficult, and at least while you're learning it the more you learn the more difficult it gets. It was sort of a happy accident that I took to it and was good enough at it to get into the conservatory at Oberlin (though I definitely occupied a low rung there and after two years I called it quits and finished up an English major).

Reading Chua's many anecdotes of the insane amount of time, energy, and backbreaking work she put into her daughters' school and musical training, I reflected back on my own childhood. I was raised by something of a Tiger Mother, I guess. I remember in seventh grade getting a C+ in science, because I was being semi-rebellious at the time and my friends and I for some reason didn't like our teacher that year. You'd have thought I'd been caught by the police for stealing a car. Besides the major dressing-down I received, I was grounded for a significant period of time, like a month or something. I thought it was totally harsh and unfair, of course, but it worked. I didn't bring home anything worse than a B--and hardly any of those--the rest of the time I lived under my mom's roof. But compared to Chua, my mom was practically handing me joints and parking me in front of the TV to eat Doritos all day (which needless to say she wasn't). For someone reading the book as a pretty thorough Westerner, it's awfully easy to be judgmental of Chua. She frequently comes across as brutally stubborn and frankly sometimes cruel.

That said, I have to say that in many respects she has a point. As often as I disliked her reading the book, I loved her daughters. Chua reprints an essay that her older daughter wrote for a contest at school called "Conquering Juliet," about her efforts to master a Prokofiev piece, that almost made me cry it was so beautiful. Her younger daughter, the more rebellious one, eventually humbles the author, at least a little bit, and gets her to back down. Plus, it's hard to argue with success. Both kids are staggeringly high achievers. And I also have to say that Chua has an important point in another respect. She thinks Western parents make their biggest parenting mistake by thinking that their number one responsibility is to do everything they can to make sure their kids are happy.

I don't think it's wrong, of course, to want your kids to be generally happy people. But where I think we mess up is thinking that it's up to us to make that happen, when in reality we don't have much to do with that (aside from of course not actively messing them up by physically abusing them or involving them in criminal activity or something). We can in the short term make our kids happy by indulging them, letting them do mostly what they want, intervening to prevent things from going wrong in their lives, and comforting them when that plan slips up and something goes wrong anyway. But the thing is, that doesn't in the long run make anybody happy. Because, to quote the popular bumper sticker, Shit Happens, which means that it's nearly impossible to be happy all the time. And whether or not someone is actually happy is largely dependent on that person's outlook and internal coping mechanisms. According to Chua, and I think she's partly right here, where "American" and "Chinese" (again, her terms) part company is in their respective methods of giving children good internal coping mechanisms. The stereotypical "American" method is that we do that by being positive and supportive, and making sure they know that even if they mess up or something goes wrong, they're still the most awesome people in the entire world. The "Chinese" method is simply to drill any possibility of messing up out of a person, so that they can have the confidence going forward that they'll usually be the smartest person in the room, and will always be the hardest worker in the room.

I can't fully get behind Chinese parenting, at least as Chua defines it, because it often does come out pretty cruel. And not to be a spoiler, but even she comes to learn and admit that the Chinese method isn't foolproof and sometimes fails at what it sets out to achieve. And I'm also going to put it out here--I could never fully parent the way she does anyway, even if I agreed with all of her basic premises, because it's psychotically hard work and I'm not interested in being a slave to my parenting. But, I can definitely be something of a slave driver myself with the girls when they're at the piano. And they're both pretty ridiculously smart so I can tell you that sloppy schoolwork and sub-par grades will not be, shall we say, without adverse consequences. I'm definitely a believer in household chores. And I will say that I agree with Chua that I'm pretty confident that on the whole my kids love me, and if they occasionally hate me I'm 100% OK with that and I'm not going to go off and get depressed about it.

Finally, just an aside, a friend of mine makes an appearance in the book. About halfway through or so there's a passage about cutting a CD for her older daughter's audition, done by a sound technician named Istvan. As I was reading it, I thought hey, New Haven (where he lives), sound technician (which he is, among other things), physical description--that sounds my college buddy Ish! Which as it turns out, it is.

Anyway, go read the book. And tell me what you think, or what you thought if you already read it.

It's Educational

So there are big changes brewing in our little corner of the school district universe, and I'm not entirely sure I'm all on board with them. There's not a lot of information being distributed about it at the moment, but it appears that all the elementary and middle schools in our district, as well as the "small schools" that make up the high school, are going to be converted into some type of magnet school. Every school (except the one serving very pronounced special needs kids) will be either a S.T.E.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), International Baccalaureate, or fine arts/performing arts school. Elementary and middle school parents can send their children either to the closest neighborhood school or to the closest school on the educational track that most interests them. You know what? I'm not sold. I allow for the possibility that I'll be won over once they actually start giving out a lot more information about it, but for right now, I'm not sold.

For one thing, all I know about the whole thing comes from what the school district put up on its website: a message from the Superintendent, a video of the Board of Education meeting where this was announced, and the power point presentation that was done. The speech began with rather dire sounding statistics about, surprise surprise, China and India. I admit that I sort of mentally roll my eyes these days at any presentation that begins with ominous warnings about the Asian Hordes that are coming to beat us up and take our lunch money. I also confess that both the power point presentation and the bit of the video that I watched went pretty heavy on the silly corporate crap-speak: "Integrated pathways" and "rigor leads to relevance" and other such nonsense. Puh-leez.

But I just find myself scratching my head with all of this. I feel myself being pressed by my school board into an unnecessary sense of panic, and I don't like it. I get that China and India are improving their education systems. Good for them. Does that threaten the U.S.'s historically preeminent place in the world economy? I don't know. Maybe. The fact is that China at #1 and India at #2 are by far the two most populous nations on Earth--the U.S. is #3 and India's population is more than three times ours. And I'm not silly enough to think that the world in which my children will have to find themselves and find careers will be anything like the one into which I ventured at age 25. But because the two most populous nations on the face of the Earth are improving their education systems, this means I have to choose an educational and career track for my own kids right freaking now or they're doomed to flip burgers the rest of their lives? Really? They're nine and seven for cripes sakes. What if we choose wrong?

If these separate educational tracks had been in place in the school district I attended growing up, there's no question what I would have done. Nurturing visions of avoiding as many math, science, grammar, and composition classes as possible, and with fantastical dreams of unlimited music and acting classes dancing in my head, I'd have nagged my mom incessantly to let me go to the performing arts school. And for all I know it would have been a real mistake. The only adult person I know who really knew at age five what he'd be when he grew up is my husband. He always knew he wanted to study the stars, and that's what he does. This of course has required a science-intensive education. But he will tell you that his favorite, and possibly most educationally useful, high school classes were his AP English and AP History courses. So would it have been educationally a mistake to send him to a S.T.E.M. magnet school?

It is of course entirely possible that I'm overreacting. I assume that, regardless of which schools my kids attend, they're going to get opportunities to take Math, Science, Literature, and History classes. At least minimally, they're going to have to pass basic high school proficiency exams. But for right now, without admittedly having enough information to make a judgment, I'm having a vague feeling of hostility. Fair or not, it's there. I shall keep you posted, gentle reader....

Spellbound

As I posted on Facebook last month, the Fairfax Elementary PTA's team entry into the Reaching Heights Adult Spelling Bee included your intrepid author. To much resulting ridicule, we were unceremoniously ousted in the first round on the word "isosceles." Ugh.

So a couple of weeks ago, Abra came skipping excitedly out of aftercare asking me if she could be in this elementary school spelling bee, the information for which was in her homework folder. Sure, why not, I thought. She excitedly explained it was for third, fourth, and fifth graders. OK, great. Then I saw the flyer. Said spelling bee is set for March 19 in beautiful Euclid, which is kind of a haul. And the appearance of the flyer (which was date-stamped as having been received in the school district office back in January but was inexplicably being circulated less than two weeks before the event) made pretty clear that this was a shoestring operation. But, there was a number to call, and Abra really really really really REALLY wanted to do it. It's not like she was asking permission to go to a Kanye West concert, she wanted to do a spelling bee. So I called the number a few times and left a couple of messages. After a week of hearing nothing back I was about ready to say OK, well, if they're not getting back to me, I'm off the hook.

Sigh. They returned my call on Wednesday, explained how things worked to some extent, and it sounded like a really fun thing. And did I mention Abra really really really really REALLY wanted to do it? And her buddy Maddie was doing it, too, which of course seals it. OK, fine. So the Mihowski family schlepped ourselves on a Saturday afternoon out to a community center (which in its former life, in the first half of the twentieth century, was a high school) in Euclid for a spelling bee.

Holy crap was that badly run. They asked the kids to arrive by around 2:00, for a start time of 3:00. The participants and officiants actually took the stage at almost a quarter to four. Really? After telling the kids to be here an hour early, you're going to start 45 minutes late? REALLY??? Then we had a number of (just shoot me now) introductory remarks. I. Hate. Introductory. Remarks. They had a really wonderful singer, a local fifth-grader, take the stage and sing the national anthem which was lovely (though announcing to the audience that she was actually going to sing the national anthem would have alleviated an awkward moment when people took a moment to start standing). And then the spelling bee started.

The first rounds were, well, awful. Rules were unclearly explained and somewhat arbitrary and unfair--early round words were limited to words that were included on a list that was distributed with the flyer. And they made clear that there would be no definitions or using of words in a sentence. That's a pretty bad rule when the list includes words like "chili" (or is that "chilly?") and pail (or is that "pale?"). The problem was seriously compounded by a word pronouncer whose diction was frankly pretty bad. There were a few kids unfairly eliminated in the first round because of that. This, of course, produced angry parents who shouted interruptions. There were several stoppages of play, exchanges of words, yeesh. In order to try to mollify people the judges then tried to institute a rule that the child had to pronounce the word before s/he started spelling it, but that didn't really help.

At this point I have to say that I appreciate the fact that this operation was run entirely by volunteers, on pretty close to zero budget. I get that. That means it's not going to be slick with a lot of bells and whistles. That's no excuse. Rules clearly stated up front, and which are fair and standard for spelling bees, require no money. Also, I could tell just by listening to some of the people talk that there were people available who had better diction than the person who was pronouncing the words.

But Abra survived the early rounds and made it to the championship round, at which point they went off list and asked for regular random words. This threw a lot of kids who didn't know that words that weren't on the list might be asked. It also produced eliminations more quickly, including Abra and Maddie both. Abra took it with pretty good grace and just wanted to know if we were going to go out to eat. Heh.

So, the family spelling honor having been at least somewhat restored, we went out to the Winking Lizard, and now we're safely ensconced back home where Mommy can watch the Badgers' second-round game. And hope that nobody wants to do this next year.

A Few Random St. Patrick's Day Observations

(Hardly seems like enough to justify a blog post, but what the hey.)

1. Had to go downtown to the jail today to see a couple of incarcerated unfortunates. The Justice Center was totally dead. If I didn't know better, I might think that the various Judges Corrigan, Sheehan, Clancy, O'Donnell, Gallagher, etc. were not coming in. Or, maybe they all just realize that lawyers and cops are notorious sport-drinkers, bowed to the inevitable, and didn't schedule much.

2. When I went downtown to see said incarcerated unfortunates, I went to park at my cheap surface lot. Except that it had "Special Event" parking rate in effect because of the stupid effing parade. So much for my cheap parking. Muttermuttermutter.

3. *DO* Irish people in fact drink more than others? Or is that just some silly, somewhat amusing but ultimately unfounded stereotype?

4. Well, along those lines, I give you (courtesy of my FB friend Brian Aubrey) a funny video clip. Those of you reading who are current or former cheeseheads will appreciate it even more. It's Lewis Black so it's obviously not safe for work or children, or persons offended by potty words.

Six Years Ago Today

(Author's comment: This is a re-posting of a Facebook note that I wrote last year, except that its title then was "Five Years Ago Today," because I'm not clever enough to do anything else with the title. More people are on my Facebook now than there were then, and hopefully some read the blog sometimes, so I've reposted. I've made just a few minor edits. If you read it last year, you don't have to re-read. Unless you want to.)

On February 28, 2005, I was sitting with a busload of other parents at the Civil Affairs Office in downtown Guangzhou--nervous, sleep-deprived, a little fried, but anxious and happy. My buddy Kellie and I had arrived in Guangzhou the day before and were a bit jet-lagged. Thankfully, we'd taken what amounted to a red-eye flight from the U.S., and thanks to the magic of Tylenol PM, I was actually able to sleep on the plane. Kellie and I were in a roomful of soon-to-be-parents, about half of them first-time parents, and I was the only single mom in the group. There was a positive but undeniably weird energy in the room. Everyone was anxious and happy. A whole room full of relatively large, relatively chubby (by local standards) white people were fidgeting nervously, breathing deeply, waiting for a group of slight, cheerful, businesslike Chinese orphanage workers and adoption officials to bring in our little girls. Some parents had taken years to get to this moment and were already on the verge of tears. Some, like me, were probably trying not to wonder whether this was in fact such a great idea after all. And then they came. One at a time, by alphabetical order of the parents' last names, those amazing women brought in little screaming armfuls, pointed smiling at the big dorky teary-eyed white strangers, and said to the babies they had raised, "Mama! Baba!" I have to suspect most of the babies must have been thinking, "Holy crap, you have GOT to be kidding me!" And then, finally, I heard "Mao Huan Li!" And my girl came into the room.

She was, like most of them, sobbing in inchoate toddler rage and fear. They had all come up on about a six- or eight-hour train ride from their orphanage in Maoming, the only home most of them had known. They were all identically dressed, including Thalia, in an outfit I still have. A burgundy Winnie-the-Pooh hooded jacket with matching pants, a pink sweat jacket underneath with duckies printed on it, and adorable little yellow shoes, which in Thalia's case were about a size too small. She didn't much want to look at me for a few minutes, and instead clutched her completely-pulverized package of animal crackers and looked around in desperation for one of the orphanage caregivers, for familiar arms she loved. This was weird, this was scary, and she didn't like any of it one bit. She wanted to go home. She didn't know at the time that "home" was no longer the large, bustling Social Welfare Institute but a cold, snowy place halfway across the planet, very unlike the semi-tropical city where she'd spent her life so far.

I don't know much about the first fifteen months of her life. I know a few things. She was born on about November 30, 2003--maybe a day or two earlier but surely not any more than that. She came to the orphanage on that day and appeared to the intake staff to be just hours old, so that was marked as her date of birth and that was that. She was at some point very shortly after her birth placed in a cardboard box, and left at the gate of a middle school. She was wearing a one-piece sleeper and had a light blue baby blanket with cartoon characters on it tucked around her. These are things I know courtesy of some kind bureaucrat who noted them in official orphanage records, along with the name they gave her. I remember the first time I read that information, in the otherwise-exciting weeks after I got my referral and before I traveled to China. I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach. It still makes me tear up--the thought that my baby was left, maybe in the night, maybe in the rain, in a cardboard box. But the fact is that she wasn't simply left somewhere to die. She was left, at some significant risk to the person leaving her (since abandoning babies is illegal) in a very public place, where someone would almost certainly find her and take her to one of several large, reasonably-funded and well-run Social Welfare Institutes. This tells me that whatever brought the birth mother to that point, she was at least hopeful that things would turn out OK for this girl.

I don't know, and really can never know, what her birth mother's situation was. I can make an educated guess. Entire books have been written about the phenomenon of Chinese baby girls being left out in public for various reason, most stemming from China's infamous and still not officially acknowledged "one-child" policy. It's reasonably likely that Thalia's birth parents were married, and may well have already had a daughter--in many places, couples with one daughter already are permitted a second try for the coveted son. Once in a great while I picture, sort of involuntarily, a woman laboring in exhaustion through childbirth, hoping with all her soul that her baby will arrive with a penis. If she has a boy, she can be his mother. And then after who knows what period of time, she sobs in exhausted, anguished defeat when the beautiful, healthy, five-pound baby arrives with a vagina instead. Again, though, I almost certainly have no realistic way of ever finding out her story. What I can know for sure is that this unknown woman was poor, and felt she had no other option. I try to ascribe relatively noble motivations to her, but the fact is that I will never know why she left her--and my--baby in a cardboard box for someone else to find.

And so six years ago today, my Thalia had a very rough day. She lost the only home and caregivers she'd ever known, people who looked like her, and was thrust into the arms of a stranger who didn't look or sound right at all. She spent the next couple of days mostly limp, flat, and sad. She did cling to me like a monkey, primarily I think because I fed her rather than out of any affection (and she ate like a horse), and she slept and cried. But then, gradually, after a few days, she relaxed a little. Got up the energy to get mad sometimes. Then, oh Lord yes, she even smiled. By the time the three of us were ready to board the plane back to the U.S., she was happily running back and forth between Kellie and me, giggling sometimes. And once we got back to our house, she became instant buddies with her new big sister and even got over her trepidation about the doggie fairly quickly.

And now, of course, she doesn't at all remember that day six years ago that I will never forget. She runs around like a maniac, charms her many friends, bear-hugs her parents, snuggles when she's tired or cranky, and farts for her sister to shrieking laughter from both of them. I wonder, once in a while, what I would say to the mystery woman who gave birth to Thalia if I ever met her. Thank you doesn't begin to cover it, and feels a little strange. I'm sorry is grossly inadequate. What would she like to know? That she is so smart that her Kindergarten teacher said she was maybe the best reader she's ever taught and her art teacher once called her a legend? That she's a great athlete, solid muscle, forty-five pounds of dynamite that one of the other soccer dads once called "The Dominator?" That she's left-handed? I don't know what I'd say. Maybe just, I hope you have peace, and because you did what you felt you had to do, the girl you had to leave really is OK. Really, she is. I hope you are, too.

The fateful day.


Happy at Halloween

Oh, Christina....

OK. Now that the Super Bowl is in the books and I can actually exhale, and before I get down to writing my court report that I should have started over the weekend but didn't, I'm going to go off on a rant about a subject on which I have ranted in the privacy of my own living room many times: the National Anthem.

Apparently, social media is all abuzz (or, perhaps more aptly "aTwitter") over Christina Aguilera's completely unfortunate rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. Of course, since we live in the society we do, people are also talking about how she looked, but really. That was just awful. And the thing is, I knew it would be. I didn't know it would be as bad as it was--honestly, Honey, the number one thing you have to do when you are a multi-platinum artist and a grownup singing the National Anthem at a sporting event is you have to get the words right. She apparently has since chalked up briefly flubbing some of the lyrics to getting "lost in the moment" or some such nonsense. Whatever. As I said, I knew it would be bad as soon as she opened her mouth--heck, before she opened her mouth. That's because I knew she was going to oversing the living crap out of that song, because EVERY SINGLE POP STAR DOES IT. For some reason that escapes me, pop solo artists seem to think they have to belt the snot out of every syllable they sing, and engage in all kinds of vocal pyrotechnics to the point where you can't tell what the actual melody of the given song is supposed to be. This, apparently, proves that they are good singers. Whatever, it's not my taste, but I don't buy their music or go to their concerts so they don't have to make me happy. However your record label or your producer or whoever wants you to sing whatever crap you're recording, that's just fine, go ahead and sing it that way. Whatever makes you happy.

But for the love of Francis Scott Key, when it's time to do the National Anthem, stop the madness. Just sing the damn song. The National Anthem is supposed to be a singalong anyway, not a piece of performance art. The audience is supposed to be able to sing with you, since you're all saluting your country together. Or at least that's what I always thought. It's not a very easy song to sing, I'll grant you, since the vocal range is pretty wide. So a lot of people don't do it, or they mouth the words or something. But still. The option is supposed to be there. But if you as the performer are improvising all over the place, throwing in changes in rhythm and weird trills and crap, then even the people who might want to sing along with you can't. They can't even mouth the words. And then it's not about the National Anthem, it's about you and your performance. And, pardon me for being a dorky old person, but I just hate that.

I actually happen to think that Christina Aguilera, despite her adherence to the vocal pyrotechnic school of belting, has a really good voice and is a good singer. Maybe if she'd just sung the song straight and not been worried about all the crazy things she was going to do to impress everyone, she might have at least gotten all the words right. It certainly would have been better than the hairball she coughed up. Frankly, the only person who's ever gotten away with creative vocal renditions of the National Anthem at sporting events is Marvin Gaye. He gets a special exemption. Everyone else should just stop trying.

My Favorite Quotes of the Day

1. From my friend Brigette's Facebook status: "You know you live in Wisconsin when your Saturday morning Zumba class includes 'Party Like a Cheesehead.'"

2. From (coff coff) Steelers safety Ryan Clark, speaking about the Packers' awesome receiving corps: "They're good receivers. They're basically all the same guy except for Jordy Nelson is Caucasian."

Happy New Year!

So, it's that time of year again. It's Chinese New Year. Tomorrow begins the Year of the Rabbit. Next year I believe is the Year of the Dragon, which I think is considered quite the big hairy deal, dragons being considered super-duper lucky. Everything about Chinese New Year--or, more properly, Lunar New Year since the Chinese aren't the only ones who celebrate it--hinges on this or that particular practice, color, or food being lucky or unlucky. It's really too much for my Western brain to keep track of. But, having a Chinese kid, I'm trying to be good and do a little observing. I'm making some Chinese food for dinner tomorrow, which mostly consists of stuff I can make and/or that Thalia has requested. If I were going to be really authentic, I'd make turnip cake and cook a whole chicken or fish. And by whole, I mean "with the head/feet/tail still attached." Because that's lucky, you see. Instead I'm going to make dumplings (that I got already frozen) and shrimp (ditto) because Thalia likes them, and orange beef because oranges are lucky and I found a recipe. But they aren't really traditional Chinese New Year foods, per se. I imagine it would be rather like a Chinese family trying to observe Thanksgiving by making hot dogs and cheeseburgers because those are stereotypically American foods. Oh, well. Now for some random observations.

1. I did at least do a bunch of cleaning in my house over the past few days. This is something you're supposed to do in the days leading up to the new year. You're cleaning/sweeping out all the old year's bad luck in preparation for the new year. Then during the two weeks of the actual lunar new year, you're not really supposed to do much cleaning because you don't want to sweep out any of the good luck. I can get behind the second part. Actually, as much as I dislike cleaning, I can get behind the first part too. It gives me a good reason to do some serious cleaning.

2. I really love genuine ethnic markets, especially when they're run by and cater to actual immigrants. The authenticity-to-cheapness ratio is just outstanding. But, they're also a little intimidating to me, especially Asian markets. There's a fair amount of food that I just can't even guess at what it is, and unless there's some (funny and stilted) English translation printed on the package, the labeling is also unrecognizable. At least in a Mexican market I can kind of muddle through, since Spanish bears some passing resemblance to English. That said, if you can get past the unidentifiable foods (and the inexplicable proliferation of Hello Kitty stuff), the supermarket at the Asia Plaza is just outstanding. I don't care how massive and good and extensive your local supermarket is, if it has to cater to a lot of really diverse tastes, you're not going to find a 50-pound (no, seriously, 50-pound!) bag of "Elephant Family" rice there. A 50-pound bag of "Elephant Family" rice, my friends, is a whole plateful of awesomeness. No cheese aisle, though.

3. One of the fun traditions of CNY is that all the kids get little red envelopes with money in them. Abra and Thalia are probably going to get $5 (remember, we're cheap!), and for Thalia's class I got a bunch of red envelopes and some chocolate coins to put in them. I'm going to skip trying to make any Chinese pastry goodies for her to take--last year I actually gave up and made German sugar cookies instead. If that's what I'm going to resort to then there really isn't any point. Obviously we wouldn't really be going through all this if it weren't for the fact that we have a Chinese kid. And I wonder if, after her silly family's years of muddled efforts, she'll actually observe this holiday when she becomes an adult.

One of the families at our school is my absolute favorite example of the perfect Cleveland Heights family: the Jewish lesbian couple with two African-American kids. One of the moms is the PTA treasurer and she once told me that at their house, they always have to keep plenty of candles around at holiday time since they go straight from Hanukkah to Kwanzaa. Later that year one of the girls brought home a holiday chart they'd done in class, which surveyed how many kids celebrated which holidays. I was struck by the fact that even though the school is probably close to 2/3 African-American, no one in that particular class celebrated Kwanzaa. I wonder if these other kids are going to be the only black kids they know who observe Kwanzaa, and only because their Jewish mothers make them do it.

Well, I'm going to go out to the kitchen and begin chopping things for dinner tomorrow night. It's unlucky to cut foods on Chinese New year, so I'm going to get it done in advance today. Side note: I actually have a hair appointment tomorrow, and I suppose that actually having someone take scissors to my hair on Chinese New Year's day will mean that I'll be crushed by a falling street light on my way to the car, but it was the only day I could get in this week and I'm desperate.

Gung Hay Fat Choy, everybody!