September 1, 2010 by privilegeofparenting
It was the evening after the first day of school and after cooking with Andy we were all seated in the deepening dusk of the garden, candles burning in jars, Will stating that this macaroni and cheese was the best he’d ever had… Andy’s magic, complimented by my grilled protein and sautéed green beans (beans that Nate had helped prep).
We debated the merits of school starting before Labor Day and my assertion that since summer had already ended, Labor Day might be less depressing, less drenched in the last meal before the execution sort of melancholy.
We talk about being present to the moment and I can happily report that I was—the edge of fall in the night air (or what passes for fall in LA), the color of the velvet sky, the tastes and textures of pasta and cheese—soft, crisp and creamy, the sounds of neighbors living life on the other sides of fences and trees.
Will excused himself to get back to his homework and Nate asked for tips on reading more effectively. We talked about sitting up rather than lying in bed, all of which lead to him talking about what he’d read on his first day of eleventh grade: the opening and the afterward from Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States.”
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Tags: educational issues
Posted in Parenting in a Social Context, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
August 25, 2010 by privilegeofparenting
Late August has its own unique character—the end of summer, wilting with melancholy, languid with hot summer evenings, child-joy being subtly eroded by shadow’s undertow, sundialing toward lockers and school clocks.
Being neither a kid nor a teacher, I don’t really get a summer vacation and this takes the edge off of late summer’s mournful meander. I watch from the riparian netherworld—not so sad as the child I once was dreading that first day of school, mostly for being so far from that last day of school, but nevertheless still moved by the river of life, my boys’ lugubrious lament and their sweet regression to long-forgotten games where they left little bits of childhood parked in corners, closets and card-packs.
Full-on parents feel the secret relief of school and the opening of a slice of days while still savoring August the way we intensify our last licks of the ice-cream cone dwindling to that tiny morsel of softened crunch, and then it’s gone.
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Tags: transition, educational issues
Posted in Uncategorized | 12 Comments »
August 18, 2010 by privilegeofparenting
A friend who has had a rough couple of years sent me a mesmerizing birthday present: Hard Travel to Sacred Places by Rudolph Wurlitzer. My generous and thoughtful friend recently lost his wife, and the book is about a couple who had recently lost their son, traveling to sites sacred, profane, heartbreaking and ironic in Thailand, Burma and Cambodia while trailing their own unshakable angst-cloud.
We all try to have a good time, to live good lives; we struggle as to how to do this in the face of so-called “reality” (materialism, shallowness, impermanence, loss, decline and death); and we struggle to be effectively compassionate to ourselves and others when the road gets rough—in parenting, in work and love, in our harrowing and sometimes transcendent journeys through life’s cycles.
While my friends and clients come and go from all manner of far flung places (some rough and some posh) I’m generally content to arm-chair travel and whether it be five star dining in Paris or nearly dying in a Calcutta hospital I rarely wish that I had been there—it’s more like through my friends and clients I know that some part of me was there, is “there” (and I’m increasingly happy to live the narrower part of me, of us, who is wherever I happen to be).
I guess we’re all having different sorts of summers, and yet together there is ultimately one endless collective summer, some sum of all our parts. One of my favorite passages in Hard Travel comes when Wurlitzer and his wife visit Tham Krabok (which means Opium-Pipe Cave Monastic Center), a sort of uber-detox haven for all manner of addictions catering to people from all over Asia and the world—hard core getting clean and sober (in the early days of recovery everyone drinks a potion of 150 secret herbs in the a.m., sauna sweats in the afternoon and then a group-puke into concrete troughs in the p.m.).
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Tags: travel
Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments »
August 11, 2010 by privilegeofparenting
“We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came,
And go round and round and round
In the circle game” Joni Mitchell
With “Sixteen springs and sixteen summers (nearly) gone now” I find myself living my own bit of circle game…
When I was a kid in elementary and middle school (and through most of high school) sitting in a classroom was akin to torture. Big clocks ticked with surreal slowness and books packed with useless information beckoned with about as much allure as badly cooked bitter greens to a child’s ice-cream-attuned palate.
I later learned to love learning, and after a long (and expensive) journey through educations in both film and psychology, I found myself back in the boring classroom—the one in which no one, neither student nor teacher, truly wants to be. As a psychologist assigned to a caseload of severely disturbed children, I was mandated to provide an hour of weekly therapy (plus a host of other case coordination tasks), however, many of the kids initially refused therapy (“you’re my fifth therapist in three years, why should I talk to you?”). This was particularly tricky with the kids who lived in their dysfunctional households; the ones who lived in the group home I could corner in their rooms and, lacking anyone to talk to, would more quickly soften; often you couldn’t get them out of your office… once the bond was made.
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Tags: educational issues, autism and Asperger's
Posted in Parenting in a Social Context, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
August 4, 2010 by privilegeofparenting
Standing at the register at Big Five, exchanging a bike pump, a sporty mom with glasses glided up behind a jaunty three-wheeled stroller, saying to her toddler, “The unicorn wants to stay on the shelf,” to which the adorable toddler’s face wrinkled into consternation at her mother’s obtuse understanding of unicorns and she cried out, “The unicorn does not want to stay on the shelf!”
I smiled at the mom and went back to my transaction, half listening as the mom elegantly walked the tightrope of love and limits, really hearing her child’s wants and acknowledging them yet showing no sign of immanent caving in, thus sparing the child the wasted energy of a tantrum.
Outside the window, the farmers’ market was in full swing: strollers to the left of me, pony-rides to the right… so many parents. My mind went to two slightly fraying business cards my wallet—little “Privilege of Parenting” cards that I sometimes handed out when I first started blogging—building my “platform” much the way I once made a lamp in seventh-grade woodshop, not because I wanted or needed a lamp, but because the teacher told me to do it. But over the months my cards had become like French Letters in the wallet of a teen with no prospects, slowly forming a fit with the leather.
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Posted in Parenting in a Social Context, Uncategorized | 7 Comments »
July 28, 2010 by privilegeofparenting
Whatever brought you to these words today, please consider taking a moment to dedicate reading them to whatever it is that you want (health, wealth, success, love, happiness, your child or children’s well-being). Setting an intention is a step toward elevating the mundane, which may be the lion’s share of what it takes to get more spirit into, and out of, our lives (not to mention the collective situation that we all share).
Meanwhile, what I wish for you is for you to want what already is. In this way I wish my version of true happiness for you. And your happiness, I believe, will benefit everyone you care about (i.e. happy parents are a gift to their children).
While there is no shortage of opinions about the new movie, Inception, (and I’m not here to add another one to the mix) as a zeitgeist phenomenon, films that question reality are coming at us with increasing bigness, frequency and would-be importance. So, what might this be reflecting back to us myriad members of the zeitgeist?
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Tags: dream interpretation, film and parenting
Posted in Parenting in a Social Context, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
July 21, 2010 by privilegeofparenting
…is to bring out the best in me and you” Joni Mitchell “All I Want.”
After declaring Please Give to be the best movie I’d seen this year, along comes another small movie with a big heart, The Kids Are All Right, to serve as a perfect west coast companion piece to Please Give’s New York City.
While Please Give captures the texture, tone and spirit of the rather specific slice of New York City in which I have lived and loved in an earlier chapter of my life, and through which I wander in my imagination when I read about plays, restaurants and exhibits in “the paper of record” (but from which I am currently blocked from fully savoring by economics and time zones), The Kids Are All Right is a movie that would probably make me miss the very specific LA in which I live, wander and wonder… if I were sweating this summer out in New York.
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Tags: film and parenting, separation, sexuality
Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments »
July 14, 2010 by privilegeofparenting
The other day I found myself hunched over the wet grass in front of my house carefully teasing out dead bees from tangled strands of green—hundreds of bees that had rained down in a grim circle. I had nearly filled a large paper cup with them, working two plastic spoons that I’d grabbed as tools for this arcane and morbid task, when two passing women stopped to ask me what I was doing.
Too discombobulated to think of a plausible story, I told them the truth. And so we got to talking about the puzzling things in life which then led to talking about my pervasive and surreal feeling that we’re all living in a shared lucid dream, in response to which they invited me to their scriptures class.
While my soul does not currently whisper for me to go to scriptures class, I deeply appreciated the two kind women and their abiding faith and was left feeling that although we travel upon different bridges, we’re indeed making our way to some common island (of oneness or collective consciousness or love… or maybe even to annihilation)—some elusive yet ever-present place where the spirits of dead bees live amongst us in the here and now.
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Tags: spirituality, animal tales, non-violence
Posted in Parenting in a Social Context | 5 Comments »
July 7, 2010 by privilegeofparenting
While in the abstract I look forward to being a grandparent, in the meantime I find myself musing on the role of the uncle and an inkling about “uncling” in general.
My brother recently visited with his middle child, and because we live far apart and have busy lives I only see my nephews in very widely spaced snapshots of their childhoods.
Thus I got to know nine-year-old Charlie for the first time since he was much younger, and after he left I kept thinking of one of my favorite films, Meet Me in St. Louis, because there’s a character in that movie who’s equally full of life and completely captivated with things scary, much like Charlie (if you’ve not seen the movie, it’s quite charming, particularly the Halloween sequence).
From his hammerhead shark pj’s to his love of horror films (shared with Will), Charlie was keen to keep up with his big cousins, thirteen and sixteen, and took much interest in boy things (particularly things macabre, scary or potentially “inappropriate”). It’s sweet to see a nine-year-old having manners while testing limits in contrast to mouthy teens who have been eroding the shores of decorum with random stormy onslaughts of curse words (that by now we mostly let wash right back out to the sea of been there done that vulgarity).
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Posted in Late Elementary, Parenting in a Social Context, Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
June 30, 2010 by privilegeofparenting
Images of the BP oil spill got me thinking about meconium—that first tarry poop that took alcohol wipes to get off my thumb in the wake of my first at-bat in the big leagues of diaper changing.
I remember being fascinated by this tenacious stuff in the first days of parenthood, like I was being initiated into some secret society—the one-time first poop of a lifetime, the leavings of “holding it” for 9 months while not officially eating (swallowing some random cells here and some amniotic fluid there) and forming into formless goo as the baby’s very intestines form.
I recall wiping that downloaded meconium from my fingers and thinking about beach days and wiping little black spots of tar from the soles of my feet while pondering those ominous distant passing oil tankers and their toxic leavings.
And then I was thinking about how crude oil and tar are really decomposed vegetation, swamp stuff and trees that, under pressure and deep under ground, turned into this stuff we harvest out of the earth and burn. And it makes sense that it does burn because trees and plants capture sunlight and turn it into energy, thus wood and oil alike are forms of trapped sunlight suspended in matter—matter that burns when releasing that energy in the form of fire—light escaping back into the ephemeral wave form in which it arrived on earth.
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Tags: environment, transition
Posted in Parenting in a Social Context | 8 Comments »
It was the evening after the first day of school and after cooking with Andy we were all seated in the deepening dusk of the garden, candles burning in jars, Will stating that this macaroni and cheese was the best he’d ever had… Andy’s magic, complimented by my grilled protein and sautéed green beans (beans that Nate had helped prep).
