At the end of February, I decided to do something that was a greater sacrifice for Lent than I normally do: I gave up being on Twitter. I didn't delete my account (though I did ditch the app on my phone), and I had a couple of visits there (sometimes a link from a news article took me to Twitter; I watched a Dave Matthews livestream from his home and tweeted how much I liked it; my website automatically shares a link whenever I publish a new essay), but for the most part, I did exactly what I said.
Here's the thing: I'm not Catholic. I have a few acquaintances, mostly from my quidditch days, who are Catholic. That isn't to say that I've a lot of claim to the tradition. Like much of my understanding of Mormonism and the culture of the Church, I recognize that Protestant--and, sometimes, even Puritan--influences have dictated what my religious experience encapsulates. My choice to participate in Lent had more to do with a desire for a kind of religious solidarity within my own tradition: The safest sort of religious experimentation that a person could do. The impetus is actually years old: I was talking to Dan Harmon, one of my quidditch buddies, who was came to my school to talk to my creative writing students about screenwriting (which he had studied in college). I took him out for lunch once the school day was over, and he readily agreed to eating pizza, which he'd given up for Lent. In subsequent conversations, it turned out that Dan wasn't Catholic, he just liked participating in these sorts of religious traditions. (I don't know what his current stance is on any of this, as I've lost contact with almost every vestige of my quidditch life.) That inspired me to try the same thing, using my Mormonic upbringing to conceptualize it in a way that made sense to me. To that end, I decided that, if I was going to do something for Lent, I would need to give up something that I would genuinely miss. For Dan, he gave up pizza; for me, I gave up Twitter. See, I have a hate/tolerate relationship with Facebook, but Twitter is a different animal. In Twitter, I feel as though I'm getting glimpses of other parts of the world. Yes, there's the center of a Venn diagram there: I follow certain people because of mutual interest. Authors, book agents, fellow teachers, dinosaur lovers, and comic book geeks inhabit my Twitter feed. (I also, quite begrudgingly, follow all of my representative legislators, though none really uses the platform for much of substance.) I also have made it a point to include LGBTQ+ and people of color in my timeline to give me an additional dose of "I didn't know that". In other words, Twitter helps broaden my view of life and living, with a lot of interesting things going on. And, boy, there are a lot of things going on right now. COVID-19's ravaging of the world is worth talking about, and the solidarity and commiseration that happens on social media is definitely one of the best parts about this crisis happening when it has. We've all had a good laugh at a post that was shared by a friend, neighbor, or whoever that perfectly recreates our own feelings. It's times like this when social media is at its best. Giving up Twitter, then, was a really hard decision. I made it before the crisis escalated to the point that our country's leadership could no longer deny it, and I think that was a good thing. It meant that I had already made the decision, so I didn't have to try to rationalize whether or not to commit. I'd done so; only thing left was to keep the course. At first, it was pretty difficult. I'm quite used to Twitter and would jump on during loading screens of video games, when I had a random thought to share, or just because I was bored with the conversation happening around me. Its ubiquity brought me comfort and I definitely dealt with a type of withdrawal. What helped--and what, I think, is the point of Lent--was that, during those first few days off the platform, every time I considered what I wanted to do and had to reject the "Go on Twitter" impulse, I had to think why I was missing it. End result? Participating in Lent meant that I thought about Jesus a lot more than usual. I'm convinced this is the intent of Lent, as it was a more authentic sacrifice than almost anything else at that moment in my life. I could have given up wearing a man-bun for Lent, but that wouldn't have mattered at all because I don't normally wear--or even much care for--the man-bun look. And though Twitter can have great value, its largest contribution in my life was to burn time trying to learn something new amid the constant stream of thoughts and words, 280 characters at a time, scrolling across my screen. Losing that but replacing it with the thought of "Hey, this reminds me of Jesus and His sacrifice that's coming up" made a difference in my life. The downside of this, however, is two-fold: One, I learned that I still need/want to scroll through social media. Two, that itch wasn't lost as much as transferred…to Facebook. I'm not a fan of Facebook. At all. Yes, there are some positive things about the website, and it could even be a good tool for improving the world. And, of course, the vast majority of people who read this essay will have become aware of its existence via Facebook. (I get the irony, folks.) Anyway, Facebook (as an entity; not individuals utilizing it) is not really improving the world, and it likely never will, but hey, at least there was potential at some point. As it stands, I don't like the platform for a number of reasons. Some are petty and nitpicky (I hate the fact that it doesn't automatically post the most recent posts--the fact that you can switch things around, only to have it change depending on the device you're using only makes it worse), while others are larger (Facebook is better at ads, especially the way it culls posted information to sell more stuff that I don't really need…and, yes, Twitter does this, too; they're just not as good at it). But there's one thing about Facebook that really grinds my gears: I know (almost) all of these people. That may sound counter-intuitive, as that's the entire point of Facebook. But Facebook is like dancing in a car at a red light: You think that you're pretty much doing your dance by yourself, only to realize that everyone you went to high school with is sitting in the car next to you, watching you with mixtures of embarrassment and interest. If a person on Twitter dislikes my hottake on something, I can block them and move on with my life. Detritus is as detritus does. But on Facebook, many of the responses to posts come from "friends" that I've accumulated over the years. Blocking or unfriending them comes with strings; there's a diplomacy, a politics involved with no longer being a part of someone's Facebook life that isn't as apparent in Twitter. If I don't like following a celebrity or an author because she says something stupid, then there's no real loss there. Facebook, however, changes the dynamic. If someone I know says something stupid, then it's in my face, again and again (because of that idiotic "Top Stories" default). Under normal circumstances, I can roll my eyes and choose not to engage with Facebook at all. I get my itch to scroll scratched elsewhere. But this year's timing between Lent and the COVID-19 crisis has meant that I couldn't scroll through Twitter whilst waiting for my video games to load. Instead, I was on Facebook a lot more, which meant that I was exposed to bad ideas more frequently. (And why is it that the worst ideas of your friends are the ones that show up the most often?) When it finally got too much and my distaste for the platform reached its zenith was when a friend from my mission posted memes and comments criticizing, downplaying, or entirely dismissing the quarantine. Now, I am no defender of America's response to the pandemic: We had a lot of warning that was ignored from the top down, and we still have a false-hope narrative that disregards science and history to try to mollify people. Until a vaccine that is tested, proven safe and effective, and ubiquitous, my family--with our half-hearted son--will be endangered by any premature "return to normal". Choosing to let our son out of the house is actually a life-and-death decision that we will have to formulate going forward. America has lost over 20,000 people at the time I'm writing this, and it's probably higher due to underreporting of numbers. Our lives permanently changed when 9/11 saw a tenth that number die--COVID-19 is going to radically alter America and the world. So when friends--not internet strangers or possible troll/bot accounts, but people I've broken bread with, been in their homes, took classes with in high school or college--spread idiocy like, well, a virus, it gets beyond tiresome. It gets dangerous. And it isn't just that someone else might read their meme and think, Hey, the quarantine is stupid! Sure, that might happen, but the danger comes from the further spreading of disinformation that is too easily shared. For example, I heard someone talking about a handful of different COVID-19 related stories: Almost all of them were either false or unproven. It's as if people are unaware that Snopes exists. Being exposed to that is damaging to my mental health, because the message I hear from falsely optimistic people, or those who don't actually maintain appropriate distances, or who go to the airport to welcome home missionaries in direct defiance of Church and state requests is a simple one: The life of your family is irrelevant. Living with an at-risk member of the populace means that I can't, in good conscience, head to the store with a mask on and think all will be fine and dandy. Living with an at-risk member of the populace means that I could be a vector of disease. As I told my students, half-hearted people don't get to survive pandemics. The only way to save my son's life--again--is to lockdown my home and take every precaution that I can. And as much as I recognize the heartache and sadness that comes from not celebrating Easter as a large, rowdy extended family dinner, it also means that we don't have to miss going to the funeral of someone we could have otherwise protected. So, yeah. I'm not a fan of Facebook. That's where I see the most frequent eye-rolls and yeah-rights of the whole pandemic issue. Is Twitter a better place than its competitor? I honestly have no idea. I haven't been on Twitter in multiple fortnights. I will say this, though: The only way I get through this potentially months-long tragedy-in-waiting is through the help of my friends. And Facebook gives me a view of many of them that tells me that may be a false hope. I hate seeing that. I hate feeling and thinking that. Yet I can't shake the sentiment. I learned that, while giving up Twitter for Jesus was good for my soul, Facebook certainly wasn't. The hard thing is, there's still something that I desire from social media. I want…something that social media provides. If I can find a way to scratch that itch a different way, I'd probably be less stressed and worried. Maybe I should start an Instagram account… At this particular moment, I can scarcely see out from my office window. There are shapes of trees, sure, and darker smudges that must be the road. I think I can spot my mailbox, a black rod against the white background. The snow is coming in fiercely, and with the typical wind that my city is frequently blown by, it has caused a great bit of accumulation on my windowpane.
I am not a fan of snow. I was, at one point. Most kids in Utah are, as it has all the sorts of enjoyment that kids find in playing outside, plus it's so soft and fluffy. I, like most children (probably), used to wish that snow was warm enough for me to swim in--had I three wishes, I would have used up one of them for that fancy. Now, however, I see it only as, at best, an irritant and a threat at its worst. Part of this comes about because I once had a doctor's appointment for Puck many years ago. I thought the appointment was absolutely crucial, so I braved the storm that was ravaging northern Utah at the time. The freeway was moving, albeit very slowly. We didn't drive to the hospital so much as slid, with Puck crying his baby cries and me singing a broken and nervous version of a lullaby that he liked. What was normally a forty minute drive doubled its length, with me arriving in time but feeling rather frazzled. When I told the doctor about our harrowing trip upward, he said something along the lines of, "Really? Well, we could have rescheduled. That would have been okay." I was not particularly pleased to hear this. As with many aspects of my early fatherhood, some experiences impacted me so sharply that a particular sentiment has ossified into a permanent opinion. I think that I dislike snow in large part because of that day. A similar thing happened with my early career as a teacher. Puck was born with half a heart, so my wife and I were unsure if he would live soon after he came out. Gayle teaches eighth grade science, but was on maternity leave. I was a recent graduate with a teaching license, so I became her permanent sub. Since it was in April, she was able to end the school year when Puck was born and I took over for the last six weeks. So my first real teaching job was babysitting my wife's class of eighth graders and dealing with all of the stress that entails, all the while wondering if I would need to buy a baby-sized coffin. An emergency heart surgery happened while I was teaching one day--I found out during my prep period--and I had to abandon the classes to coworkers because I wasn't sure if I had said goodbye to my firstborn son for the last time when I had kissed him that morning. I am not particularly fond of eighth graders as a result. I find it interesting the ways in which my mind creates the circumstantial connections and concretes them into something unshakeable. I don't much care for eighth graders to this day, and nor do I much enjoy the snow, and it's mostly because of some bad experiences with each. Anyway, I'm glad that it's a federal holiday so that I don't have to worry about sliding into work this morning. I'm sure I'll have that joy tomorrow, though. Stupid snow. One of the unexpected lessons I've learned from my kids is a specific brand of nihilism. It's one of those "lessons through observation and repetition" rather than anything they've specifically said. That is, my kids haven't sat me down, looked me gravely in the eye, and said, with a sad, solemn aspect, "Nothing really matters, Dad. Anyone can see. Nothing really matters to me."
Well, they do love "Bohemian Rhapsody", so I guess they kind of have said that to me. But, again, it was never them saying it; it was them doing it. I'm not a particularly good househusband. I don't do a lot of cleaning--except the dishes and folding of the laundry--and I feel like I have a semi-worthwhile explanation for that: My wife is a cosplayer, so the areas and qualities of the messes made very often have to do with patterns, plastic gems, gears, and other miscellanea that I know better than to disturb. There are, of course, other areas of the house that I could do more to keep clean--the family room and my own office come to mind--but I kind of feel like my kids ought to learn how to clean up after themselves, if only to a degree. Every time I try to get them to help straighten up the house, however, is when I get the emphatic lesson in nihilism. I will ask my middle son, Oberon, if he would please empty out all of the garbage cans in the house, replacing them with a plastic bag as a liner. It is not, I would submit, a too-hard requirement for an almost-nine year old to accomplish. Physically, it doesn't demand too much of him. Mentally it's almost insulting. Dexterously, it requires only the most rudimentary of movements. From what I can see, it is not something that assumes too much to fulfill. Yet, despite requests, shouts, arguments, cajolings, threats, pleas, and a host of other air-wasters, it still takes Oberon a good forty-five minutes to an hour. Part of the wasted time is in the form of saying his name six to eight times before getting a response. The first one or two are always in a fair, understandable tone. Each subsequent repetition, however, sharpens the name until it's slicing through the house. By the time he feels the cut, it's laced with frustration and irritation. "What?!" he often snaps back, feeling attacked because, so far as he can see, we're out-of-the-blue screaming his name. For us, we're about ready to walk out on the whole thing and live in filth because who cares? What does it matter? Nothing matters. It's fine. One of the reasons that I don't get more writing done--and this is as much excuse as explanation, from my point of view--is because it's far too stressful to spend too much time in my office on Saturdays. The boys require perpetual haranguing to keep them in line, and the frustration of one parent eventually bleeds into the other and we end up feeling like horrible parents who haven't accomplished much with their one day* off. But it's fine. Nothing matters. It's fine. --- * As M-words**, we don't usually use Sundays as cleaning days. We try to get those chores done on Saturday so that Sunday can be devoted to church and church-related activities. ** I have…feelings about the rejection of the Mormon label, but I'll write about it--if I ever do--another time. Also, yes, I totally just footnoted my footnote. I'm not even sorry, either. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the name of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! My five year old, Demetrius, is a loquacious kid. He is halfway through kindergarten and has pretty much gotten rid of almost all of his speech impediments from previous years. He no longer says, "Dad, I'm hungary," or "I'm sweepy." Though he still doesn't always understand when to use the th sound as opposed to the f sound ("three" and "free" are only now sounding like separate words), he is, for the most part, pretty understandable. (His rendition of "Hallelujah" is "Hall-lay-you-yuh" though, and that's just adorable.)
One thing, however, is he doesn't understand the word supposed. In his ears, he hears shouldposed, as in, "I'm shouldposed to pick up my toys." As I was thinking about it, though, this word, though it doesn't really exist, fills in an interesting gap. I feel like there are things you should do, and things that you're supposed to do, and the fact that there isn't a word for the Venn-diagram center of this concept is a failure of the English language. On a less personal side, though, it brings up the idea of how language ought to be manipulated--and who ought to do the manipulating. As an English major, I've been confronted with this question for a long time. I maintain a prescriptive approach to language--that the flexibility of its meaning can only be in response to what has come before. In other words, I feel like the shifting meaning of words is not the areas where English is strongest. Prodigal is one word that, I think, needs to maintain its original sense of "one who spends generously". Other words have somehow come to mean the exact opposite of what they are supposed to mean: peruse is perhaps the most egregiously abused word, as it means to study deeply and with a single focus, rather than a light skimming as it too often used to mean. Another would be the loss of the word niggardly, which is an antonym to prodigal but has an unfortunate sonic similarity to a word that I won't be writing here. That similarity is so strong that a person once lost his job over the use of it, even though the person used the word correctly…and everyone around him thought it was an epithet. (That being said, I'm also aware of how few people are cognizant of the meaning of the word and, quite likely, would respond out of ignorance; I, therefore, take pains not to use niggardly…pretty much ever.) Again, the shedding of words that are no longer accurate isn't necessarily what I have a beef with in terms of language description/prescription: It's the mutilation of them that bothers me. As I mentioned earlier, peruse is one word that really grinds my gears. So are apropos of and enormity. The former means "with regard to" and the latter "a great wickedness", but they're misused so much that the term's metamorphosis is assumed as the actual definition. Of course, there's a problem in being a prescriptivist: Where does one draw the line that isn't fundamentally arbitrary? And, in this case, there isn't a way to delineate the English I'm trying to prescribe that isn't arbitrary…at least, not one that I'm aware of. Additionally, I have my own capitulations to certain grammatical battles: I don't push hard on ending a sentence with a preposition (as you can see from the preceding sentence), nor do I have too much of a problem with people who like to expertly cut infinitives (as I did right there). "What's the worry?" some may argue. "Who cares if the rules change, so long as communication still transpires?" On one level, I can get behind that. Having had to learn a second language, it's nice to have the contextual flexibility that allows for linguistic neophytes to still be able to say something and be understood. And I think, in many instances, the incomplete way in which we speak to each other is fine--inferences, allusions, and references to a previous part of a conversation all work to communicate, even if the grammar and word choice aren't professional quality. Heck, my essays alone show a deplorable lack of continuity with specific stylistic choices, are often riddled with typos (and why isn't it spelled typoes, anyway?), and try too hard to circumlocute an idea. So I think there is a space for less-than-perfect language. However, I feel like there's an expectation--perhaps it's a presumption--that our speech is fine as it is simply because it's our speech. It's the same sense of entitlement that people have when professing their opinion, which is valuable and important and right for no other reason than because the person expressing the opinion is the one who came up with the thought in the first place. (And, let's be real for minute: Shakespeare wasn't lying when he said, "Opinion's but a fool, that makes us scan /The outward habit by the inward man" (Pericles 2.2).) When it comes to the incorporation of new words, that's where I'm happy to drop a prescriptive stance. Without our language's ability to pull in new ideas and find ways of expressing them, we would stagnate. Having words like "download" or "bandwidth" allow us to expand our understandings. And while slang doesn't compel me to really admit a lot of additions to the language--they tend to be so ephemeral as to not warrant protracted attention or inclusion, save as a novelty--the overall use of slang and other shibboleth are valuable contributions to the language. I'm reminded, however, of a man I met in Miami once. We were at a church dinner and he was enjoying the drumstick of the chicken that had been served up. He looked at me and said, "This is a great milkbone." "What?" He pointed again at the drumstick. "A milkbone. This is a milkbone." "No, it's not." "You gotta help me change people's minds. We need to start calling this a milkbone." "No, I'm okay. Thanks, though." It's that sort of willy-nilly restructuring of the language that shouldposed to go away. The rest can stay as they are.* --- * This essay, despite quoting Shakespeare, doesn't really approach the critique that Shakespeare reinvented the language in all sorts of ways, so what's the big deal? A couple of parts to that: 1) No one else is Shakespeare. Einstein rewrote what's possible in terms of physics, which he could do, because he was Einstein. There's a reason we remember these men of genius. Their contributions are in part because they helped to establish the new rules by which we're operating. 2) Early modern English (not, as people wish to assert, Old English), which is to say, Shakespeare's English, was not yet standardized. While I could probably teleport (that is to say, "would gladly teleport") into London 1599 and be able to understand much of what was being said, there are certain things that would be nontransferable. Spelling is one of them. The use of certain words (excrement is one that pops to mind. To us, it means one thing that we expel and it isn't a pretty one; for Shakespeare, it meant a thing that's excreted, whether it be hair, sweat, or anything else) would put me at a disadvantage. Nevertheless, that's the beginning of our language. Shakespeare's power with the English language comes in no small part because he was part of the formative shaping of the whole thing. Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Holy Bible are two of the largest anchors for creating the kind of English we enjoy today. So of course he was inventing and reinventing the language: It was in its nascent format, just beginning to coalesce into what we now understand English to be. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the name of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! Now that the official day of Christmas has passed us by, rushing in and out like an avalanche of avarice and very pretty wrapping paper, and I can slow down just enough to almost hear myself think, I thought it might be enjoyable to go to Barnes and Noble to spend some of my Christmas money. My son, Demetrius, won a $15 gift card to Target during a family game, so he's anxious to get out and buy more--because the hundreds of dollars we all spent on each other wasn't enough, apparently. My wife tried to make a Ben Reilly Scarlet Spider (pictured above) hoodie for me, but accidentally ordered the wrong color (and then, later, size) of hoodie, so she has some stuff she wishes she could return. In other words, there are reasons for my remembering a day after Christmas from many years ago. If I had to guess, I'd say that it was probably the Christmas of 1993. Despite the outrageous success of Jurassic Park, I didn't ask for a velociraptor (a choice that would haunt me until I was in my thirties, when my wife at last hunted down an original Jurassic Park velociraptor for me to add to my collection). Instead, I was big on my superhero kick--more of a punt, really, as it's still one of my favorite things--and a fan of the X-Men cartoon series. Any comic book loving millennial worth her avocado toast remembers the series. Not only has it one of the coolest intro songs of all time, but the animation was much better than I was used to. It's what introduced me to characters that would make me excited for when X-Men, the Bryan Singer movie, released at the turn of the millennium. And, perhaps most importantly for my consumer-based identity, it's what primed me for the Spider-Man cartoon series--the conduit into the web-slinger's world that has made one of the largest differences in my life this side of religion. So, back to Christmas. In the weeks leading up to that blessed day of sleep-deprived desire, I, like most middle-class kids of the era, pored over the toy catalogue from Toys 'R' Us, looking at all of the kid models enthusing about whatever toy was placed in front of them. One of the pieces I saw was a set of X-Men action figures--a total of ten (provided memory serves), standing on two tiers of plastic-molded-to-look-like-metal-or-something. It was $50. Fifty dollars is not a small amount of money--for me now, even, let's be honest--and so this would instantly classify as a "Santa gift"*. I remember sitting at our counter, doing my best fifth grade math (and who says you don't use math in your daily life?). "A normal action figure," I probably said, "costs $4.99. That's more than five dollars after tax. But there are ten action figures in this, Mom!" (Mom was in the kitchen, listening casually and taking detailed mental notes, I'm certain.) "That means that, because of taxes, it probably would be cheaper than buying each one of these characters separately!" That, by the way, is probably the apex of my mathematical prowess. Anyway, I was both hard selling the present and expressing my enthusiasm. Since I knew that $50 was about the limit for a Santa gift, I figured that I was probably going to get what I asked for. After all, it was cheaper than buying each one of those characters separately! Christmas day came. The gift was under the tree. I was quite excited and happy. Until it came to taking the toys out. Now, for me, I still like buying action figures. I have displays on my desk at school…on three or four shelves at school…on my shelf by my desk in my home office…on the shelf above my closet in my home office…on another shelf by my desk in my home office…I have a lot of toys, is what I'm saying. In fact, I have so many that Demetrius sometimes comes in and wants to borrow one of my old-school action figures, if only because they're different than the kinds of toys he gets to play with. And were I now to buy a set of action figures like the one I got in 1993, I would most likely be pretty content with them. But not when I was ten. See, the thing was, these were a display of action figures. It wasn't the ten superheroes from the normal packaging, just discounted and put into a tasteful arrangement. No, they were stuck to the display. Like, completely non-removable. My heart sank. Tears started to creep into my eyes, which I didn't do very often by the time I was ten, and happened even less as the years went by. I stared at my "toy", realizing that my Christmas joy had been dashed. As I looked closer to each one, I saw that not only were the action figures glued onto the display, but they weren't even equipped with their mutant power actions--Wolverine didn't have claws (who makes a toy of Wolverine that doesn't have claws? Who does that? Honestly!), Cyclops' visor didn't light up to show he was using his heat vision (or whatever he calls the optic blasts that come from his eye-hole). When I explained that the characters didn't come off, my dad said he could probably find a way to remove them. But what was the point, I wondered, if they didn't have their mutant powers? (At that point, I remember him looking kind of confused.) There was nothing for it: I had to go through Christmas, enjoying the other presents that I received, and basically trying to be a good sport about being so horribly wrong about what I was getting from "Santa". It was a hard day. My dad got a new bit of technology that Christmas: a handheld camcorder, which he enthusiastically rolled constantly throughout that day. We have footage of a very young little sister babbling in her Christmas bathtub, the detritus of the Big Day's excesses in the front room, my mom chatting to Dad whilst making a Christmas breakfast, and more as Christmas '93 went on. What lives in family memory, however, would have to be the five minutes or so of me trying to cajole my younger brother into letting me borrow his Power Rangers toys for ten or fifteen minutes. His toys, of course, were actual toys that could be played with. I kept begging him; he kept refusing in the obstinate, one-word rebuttals that five year olds are so adept at: "No." I, sitting with my Miami Dolphins pajamas, red bathrobe, and Dolphins hat, plucking at my little brother's shoulder, trying to get him to lend me a toy for a while--seriously, it was only for, like, fifteen minutes--is one of those iconic family video moments that gets trotted out and played with a disturbing amount of frequency. At last, I noticed a chuckling sound. There was my dad, watching the exchange with amusement and a video camera. "This is for posterity!" crowed my dad. I buried my head in my lap and shoved the newly acquired Dolphins hat over me eyes… …so that Dad couldn't see me crying. The video cuts after that--Dad found something else to record--but I remember burning with sadness and embarrassment. I hadn't meant to pick a Christmas present that wasn't as advertised. I didn't want to bug my brother for his toys. I just…didn't have any of my own that day. On 26 December 1993, my mom and I made the seven mile (I'm guessing) trek to the closest Toys 'R' Us, receipt and re-boxed X-Men action figures in hand. As we stood in line to return the present, she pointed out a couple of other parents holding the same item. "I guess we weren't the only ones," she said. I can't remember if it made me feel better. The item exchanged, I went through the store and picked out some different toys--what they were, I can't remember. Maybe a Power Ranger? Maybe a Wolverine with retractable claws and a Cyclops with heat vision (or whatever he calls what comes out of his eye-hole)? What I replaced it with doesn't stand out in my memory very much, though I want to think that I was mollified. Now that I'm a parent, I'm always hopeful that what we decide to get our kids will be appreciated, that it will be memorable and enjoyable. That they will feel like they're noticed and listened to and remembered. And, in the case of the X-Men action figures, I definitely felt noticed, listened to, and remembered. So, at least on that level, it was a successful Christmas. I can be grateful for that. --- * I think that's familiar nomenclature, right? The "Santa gift" is the big thing that you've always wanted, left unwrapped by the Christmas tree with your name on it…so called because eventually you figure out the whole "Santa's not real" thing. At least, that's what we called it. And, by the age of 10, I'd figured out that Santa Claus isn't really stalking me. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the name of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! In the past I've done a "timed write", which is when I put my fingers on the keyboard and let them run until the timer stops. In this case, I'm looking at twenty minutes of work wherein I will let the thoughts go with as little effort at revising as I can muster.
Fortunately, I have a lot on my mind. Tonight, we did a tradition that I personally dislike, which is the annual pumpkin carving. There's nothing that really appeals to me, as my artistic abilities are limited when it comes to sculpture, and I don't really enjoy getting all slimy. Plus, pumpkin guts smell. More than that, however, it is a really wasteful tradition, one that is somewhat ameliorated when you buy the fake pumpkins from craft stores that you can keep from year to year. Gayle has a handful of those, which do a lot to add to our family's décor. So I was happy that Demetrius, my youngest, picked two too-small pumpkins for Halloween. He liked them because they were cute (the only criterion that matters at that age) and since carving small pumpkins is significantly harder, we convinced him to decorate the pumpkins with felt-stickers. He sat on my lap and drew triangles for eyes and funky looking mouths. I carefully cut the stickers out, then he applied them with all of the studious care that a five year old can generate, making sure that the whiskers of the kitty cat all came out from the right place on its face, and that the hat of the witch had a strap going across it. Once we were done, Demetrius asked if I would read some My Little Pony books to him. These are the easy-reader types, the ones with one or two sentences on each page, none of which were more than ten words long. I read to him about the big fair that one pony put on, and another about the bad dream Pinkie Pie suffered. He picked out a handful of sight-words to work on (he's struggling with "The" when it's capitalized, but he's got "Look" and "Like" down pretty well) as we read. I told him, "Once we finish with your books, I get to read Paradise Lost to you, okay?" "Okay," he said, not knowing really what I meant. But he's a kid of his word. When we finished all of the My Little Pony (plus a PAW Patrol book), he sighed and said, "Okay, Daddy. Now you can read me some Paradise Lost." He settled on my lap again and I began to read. There's a certain power to that poem that comes through reading it aloud. Maybe that's part of why I like teaching it so much: The vivacity of the poem is palpable when it's experienced the way it was brought into this world--through the tongue. Milton's dictation of this epic poem is a feat in and of itself, one worthy of our remembrance. That the poem is this good on top of his struggles in the crafting it puts it on a whole other level. Anyway, as I spoke the sonorous words from book 4 (we were at the part where Gabriel is trying to find Satan in the Garden of Eden), Demetrius poked at the sight-words he recognized in the tiny print of Milton's epic. "'I'. 'Look'. 'Like'." I would compliment each one and then resume my reading. I kept him captive for a page or two, then released him. He was happy to go and change into his pajamas, as it meant being liberated from more Milton. (He was curious, though, to see so much writing in the margins of the book. I have a used copy of the Hughes edition of The Complete Poems and Major Prose, which was carefully annotated by a student elsewhere. I conversate with her markings, weaving my own ideas and thoughts in between hers. Despite the fact that I have my own copy from Norton, edited by Gordon Teskey, there's a charm to the marginalia of the Hughes that I can't escape. That and there's a lot more of Milton in the Hughes--the Teskey edition is only of Paradise Lost with some supplemental parts--which makes it my favorite. It's one of my favorite books, a short list that includes the Complete Works of William Shakespeare Norton International Student Edition that I bought in Stratford-upon-Avon my first time there, and a copy of Paradise Lost from the 19th century. Anyway, Demetrius was shocked that there would be so much writing inside of a book. I pointed out that it was a way for me to think more carefully about the words that are there. I then said to him that it's only okay to write in a book that he owns, and never in a library book. He nodded his head sagely, as if he fully understood that injunction.) Demetrius then plopped a dinosaur book we checked out from the library onto my lap and settled in for a little bit more reading before bedtime. I don't know how much longer he's going to fit on my lap. I've talked about this before, but it's still something that preys on my mind. I've spent so many years (eleven, thus far) as a married man also being a father--we started our family about three years after we wedded--and so it feels like I've always had a pocket-sized human to care for. Now that our third and last is working his way into the grown-up world of knowing good and evil, I find myself being more worried about him. It isn't that the world is so much worse off than it was five years ago (though it is, in important and changeable ways), or that we ourselves are worse off. It's simply…I don't know. A sense of the impending ending that all parents have to confront at one point or another. After all, children must grow older--as I did from my parents. But there's something special about these rare moments of them politely caring about what's in front of them, of when they aren't crying or whining or pouting. It's a rare thing, I think, to have my son on my lap, listening to words that matter so much to me, comprehending none of them, yet being happy to be there because he was there with me. As I brushed his teeth tonight, he said, "You're the best daddy that I've ever had." It's hard not to fall in love with that. Final word count: 1105 ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! Tonight, my family and I went to the kids' elementary school's "family skating night". It's an annual tradition with the school, plus my boys really enjoy the time. I, personally, would be happier watching a movie at home or otherwise relaxing. Parenting, however, is very often a matter of skipping over one's personal feelings in order to accommodate the whims of the youth.
I rented some rollerblades, which I used when I was a kid. I used to skate down the short porch on my parents' house, then leap off the steps, landing on the driveway one stair down. The driveway is slanted, and the rest of the sidewalk is downhill. Timid Steven never really garnered enough chutzpa to pick up that much speed, but I did learn how to rollerblade with sufficient confidence that, some twenty-five years later, I can help my two older boys on the endless circling of a skate night. (My youngest rode his scooter the whole time, which required less help and supervision.) One primary difference between skating as a kid and skating now is the addition of PVC pipe-constructed walkers. They have rollerblade wheels on the three joints and they assist neophyte skaters with keeping balance. Obviously, the kids still topple into painful piles every once in a while, but it meant that one parent could be with Demetrius, another with Puck, while Oberon kept himself upright with the walker. Then things would shift. In short, the walker acted as a third parent for the purposes of keeping our kids from crashing to the ground. The 'blades I rented, sadly, were not the best. They didn't rub wrong or anything; instead, the arch of the 'blades and the arch of my foot met in a Venn diagram of discomfort. I could never get my feet in a position that wasn't uncomfortable. I didn't want to squelch my kids' enthusiasm, so I put up with it for as long as I could. And, to be honest, it's an enjoyable experience to zip around the circle, navigating among the teenagers who are way too talented at skating and the kids who are there just to have fun. As I worked to pass on my knowledge--all stored in my muscles' memories rather than my mind's--to Oberon, my second child, I held his little hand in mine. I wondered at that: Was I squeezing too tightly? He was slipping and sliding and tumbling and wobbling. Were my interventions helping? Did he need to be free to fall in order to pick himself back up again? Where was the line between "letting him learn his lesson" and "being negligent"? Our connection was physical, but--in my mind, at least--tender. He would flop and sprawl onto the ground, then grin up at me with the kind of gap-toothed smile that most eight year olds sport. He maybe got some bumps but it was never too much, never tear-inducing. By the end of the evening, he didn't use the walker and he wasn't interested in using me. He wanted to be making his laps on his own, sink or swim. He fell a lot. A lot. But he always got up again. Maybe I could trust him more, let him learn his limits on his own. But that means letting go. And of all the things I've practiced in my life, I've never been good at letting go. One of the lies that I tell my kids is that they can't cross the parking lot or street without me. It's less because they can't do it (though the five year old still needs help and protection) and more because I want to be able to hold my children's hands for as long as possible. They're so well trained about the hand-holding that they don't think twice. I, on the other hand, always think about their hands in mine and how fleeting the time is. Once my agèd bones could no longer handle the agony of my footwear, I sat myself on a bench and watched the stream of humanity flow before me. Little kids no more than, maybe, three years old would zoom between wobbly pre-teens. Teenagers would stand around and talk or dance to the tinny music (loud, but not particularly good speakers are a hallmark of places like this). Adults would bend over awkwardly, glimpses of their underwear or skin peeking over their waistlines, trying to help their kids along without toppling themselves. Some held hands. I watched them go about. There was a straight couple, a diamond glinting on her finger, whose whispered conversation and entire air was one of recently conjoined. There were girls who held each other's hands, fingers barely laced together, their attitude one of best friends--maybe even pack behavior because it is a frightening thing to be a woman in this world and there is safety in numbers. There was one lesbian couple--I'm guessing on this one--whose hand-holding had an intimacy that I saw as young love, the kind of teenage reliance of two who looked like they lived on the margins finding solace in that shared deterritorialization. One boy held his boyfriend--good friend? Impossible to tell--as the boyfriend shuddered and shook on his wheels. The boy held one hand, the other on the boyfriend's back, steadying him as he looked on with concern and compassion. I don't know if they really were dating or were simply two people who cared about each other, but it was one of the most beautiful moments of the night. I didn't expect to see such depths of compassion at the skating rink. Puck turned around and used his walker and his body--albeit inadvertently--to dam the flow so that the young stranger, no older than Demetrius if I had to guess, who had fallen hard on his face could shed his tears until his dad made it around to comfort and console. In its own unexpected way, seeing so many people holding hands in so many ways--some literal, some metaphorical, and some (let's be honest: It's a skating rink, after all) because it was "Snowball" and so it was an excuse--did a lot to help shore up my faith in humanity. I'm reminded of the lines from one of my favorite Dave Matthews Band songs, "Cry, Freedom": "Hands and feet are all alike/But walls between divide us." Would that I could remember that better. Would that we all could. As a teacher, my job is to educate students. As a public school teacher, my pay comes from those students' parents' taxes (and mine and hundreds of thousands of other tax payers throughout the state and country). When it comes to school, I'm dealing with the two things that most parents care about more than anything else: their kids and money (sometimes--but not always--in that order). This makes the process of educating teenagers less-than-straightforward. In a kind-of-similar-but-not-really way, this is like how a contractor has to work with someone from a business, but not the actual boss who calls all the shots. (Of course, there are real and important differences between a "normal" job and teaching, so we can only push that analogy so far.) There are levels within the system that have to be navigated.
When it comes to talking to students, I think I do a pretty okay job. A lot of my students like to chat with me, mention that they miss being in my classes after they've moved on, and even write touching letters that I tuck away to happen upon some years down the road. When it comes to talking to parents, that's a different matter. I can be quite diplomatic when I want to (comes from reading a lot of Shakespeare and trying to be more aware of the words that I choose to say), which allows me to work through rough patches with parents who--often (but not always) rightly--are concerned about the treatment of their child in my class. But today has brought two instances to light that make me wonder what I'm doing differently than others. See, my coworker confided in me that a student's mother was emailing in order to get--from what I understand of the request--her son to be exempted from all of the work of the class. Her reason has to do with his heavy involvement in a lot of extracurricular activities, so he's unable to do his school work. That's baffling. My wife just confessed a problem from a parent who emailed her (my wife) to rant about how my wife is responsible for the parent's son coming home late from school. My wife stayed after herself for an hour and fifteen minutes, leaving only because she had motherly duties and needed to go. The student waited in line for thirty minutes before having to leave, his remediation still unfinished. That was what this mother seems to take issue with: My wife, who was staying long hours, hadn't been available to the student who left before my wife did. If that's difficult to understand, you can imagine how my wife feels. Here's the thing: I'm used to the idea of trying to consider another's point of view. One of the great things about literature is that it gives us alternative ways of looking at the world. Some of them are ones we aspire to, others we recognize as unbecoming and wish to avoid, while yet others leave us questioning and thoughtful. So I'm used to challenging "texts", if you will. In both of these cases, however, I'm at a loss. The most slack I can cut is one of not fully understanding the circumstances of the students' parents, in the hope that I can say, "There's probably something more going on here." But in terms of what I've been given, I'm left confused and more than a touch angry. In the first case, I cannot see why a parent would request for less work for a child when there are extracurriculars of any type still on the table. The entire purpose of extracurricular activities is that they happen outside of the curricula that the kid is supposed to learn. Until sacrifices of a want are satisfied, I don't know why a parent would assume that sacrifices of a need ought to be considered (and, since the course work is required for graduation, need is the right verb). In the second case, I'm bemused by the purported logic of the situation. My wife works extremely hard--harder than I do, that's for certain--and she has had a lot of different things that have demanded her time. There haven't been as many days available for students to make up work as Gayle would have liked, but she hasn't made herself entirely scarce the way some teachers do. Gayle spends many of her evenings grading papers for her 190-odd students, to say nothing of the new core she's teaching and the lesson plans that come from that change in pedagogy. There isn't--from my entirely biased (but no less right, I think) point of view--any real reason to demand more from Gayle than what she's giving.* And that leads to my questions for myself: Why don't I get these emails? I can count on one hand the number of times in the past decade where a parent has been genuinely upset at me. One was a perfectly acceptable critique about a video I showed in class. One was an angry email that was sent to me because I ridiculed Glenn Beck (this was back in the early Obama days). I don't regret the way I handled that one, in part because the kid ended up leaving the school shortly thereafter (no need to genuflect and grovel if the person's leaving anyway), and they left with a huge debt that they stiffed the school with. No love lost there. I did have a parent upset about how her daughter didn't write as well as her older sister after leaving my class. There were some useful critiques that I was able to incorporate into my teaching after that, but the mom who groused was still bizarrely wrong about why her older daughter could write so well: The eldest had taken a concurrent enrollment class from me which was specifically designed to increase her writing abilities. The younger daughter had taken the normal Language Arts class that's offered at my school. I'm sure there are a couple of others that came my way, but I can't really remember them. So what's the difference? Why do my coworker and Gayle get these untenable and inappropriate emails from students' parents? Is part of it the way I treat the students in the class? While I'm pretty committed to the learning and curricula I teach, I do have a lot of fun and crack a lot of jokes…maybe the kids just prefer to think of me as a goofy class and not to stress about it? But that doesn't make sense when I see how much effort they put into the assignments I give them--projects related to the units we're studying, the amount of time they spend reading the assignments, and other demands--and still return with happy attitudes. Students are stressed out by my class. I hear about it through the grapevine, but never from them directly. To be really honest, I'm willing to go out on a limb here and say that part of the reason for this might boil down to gender. I know that students treat me differently than they do my female coworkers. I can see it in the way they talk about teachers they dislike (they're less careful about their animosity when it's a female teacher). I have few behavioral problems that a sharp rebuke or an insistent, irritated correction doesn't fix. I have comparatively smooth sailing. And I think it has to do with the fact that I'm a guy. If that isn't a demonstration of my cishet white male privilege, I don't know what is. The frustrating thing about this situation is that my "solution" isn't really tenable. "Be a guy. That's what works for me!" If nothing else, this shows to me just how necessary feminism and #MeToo and other similar social awareness campaigns are, as it demonstrates the disgusting inequality that runs throughout almost every layer of our society. The question then comes up: How do I communicate that to my students--and my students' parents--in a way that generates progress and not animosity? That's something I don't have an answer to. --- * Gayle said that the mom has since been emailed back to try to ameliorate the situation. I'm sure this'll blow over, but I felt like I should at least tag on this addendum. I recently tweeted the essence of an exchange between me and Demetrius (my five year old), pictured above. (In case it's not showing up, I wrote "Me: Come on. Put your toys down and come eat food. My 5yo:" and then a gif of Wesley from The Princess Bride shouting "Death first!")
Demetrius is…insistent. I mean, the kid is five, so I understand where he's coming from. The thing about him is his guile. He'll find ways of manipulating others so that he can have toys. He'll ignore important things (putting on shoes, buckling up in the car, eating food, going to the bathroom) because he's so engaged with the molded plastic that has most recently caught his attention, and he'll get snagged by the strangest things. Most often the pink stuff (his favorite color--he was hording bottles of glue at the Office Max we visited yesterday, stuffing his arms full of pink-and-glitter glue; he doesn't even use glue), but if it's a toy, he's interested. Take his birthday, for example. He had, the week or so before the celebration, realized that Wendy's has kids meals that include toys in them. Guess where we went for his birthday dinner? Yup. And did he eat the food? He ate the Frosty and a couple of French fries, then let the chicken nuggets we'd purchased get all cold and thrown away. Why eat when one can play? But what I mean by guile is the way he plays me. I have an entire box of toys from my childhood and teenage years. Nine-tenths of it is somehow Spider-Man related, but there are a couple of G.I. Joes and Transformers in the lot. They're "old" toys according to time; for my kids, they're a treasure trove of novel things. Since I'm a sentimental old coot, I don't really want to have my toys be ruined or lost--an entirely different topic to discuss--so I let Demetrius "check out" toys one at a time. If he wants a new one, he has to return the previous. Demetrius, however, takes this deal very seriously. He'll play with a toy of mine for a number of days, and then he'll at last bring it to me and say, with a tinge of remorse in his voice, "Can I get a new one?" It does take a bit of finagling to get the box down, so it sometimes happens that he wants to trade but we haven't the time. He won't, however, forget. If he thinks he needs a toy to play with in the car (despite the fact that the area around his car seat is littered, like the dead leaves of an autumnal orchard, with toys all about him) and I refuse to let him run back to the house to get one, he will cry. He will pout. He will have injured feelings. This sentiment will stick with him for miles as we trundle toward whatever destination we need to. Recently, he borrowed a Power Rangers toy from a neighbor in my mom's neighborhood. He carried the thing around everywhere I would let him, and the sadness written over his face when we had to return it? Oh, man--you would have thought that I'd just killed his dog* or something. He mourned. Yes, precious, he wept to be so alone… On one level, I get it. I have deep attachments to things and I will sometimes put my better self-interest at jeopardy to do/have those things. What gets me about Demetrius, though, is how monomaniacal he can be. While his True Love™ will probably always be video games, he, of all three kids, will be the first to abandon electronics if a plastic toy catches his eye. Yes, he will whine, moan, and pitch a fit if I take away his video games prematurely, but the kid will actually put down a controller if he gets an itch that only molded plastic can scratch. And good for him, says I. If we had more people willing to gain the benefits of imaginative play, we'd probably have a healthier, happier populace. Until they remember that their childhood dogs died. Then there'd just be sadness, I guess. --- * He doesn't have a dog. We don't do pets in my household, which is one of many dull ways in which I'm gently traumatizing my children and ensuring future therapists of ample things to discuss in their expensive sessions together. Sometimes I get a few minutes of quiet where I can look at my glowing screen and type furiously. These are sparse times, often carved out of what could otherwise be called "family time" and thus they're fraught with twinges of guilt ("I could be/should be spending these moments with my kids") and an emptiness of inspiration ("It's been so long since I've had this kind of time, I don't know what to do with it").
Being a parent is an exercise in many different frustrations, a good number of them happening simultaneously. The inability to decide if you want to kick or kiss them (I don't actually kick my kids, save when I'm holding their shoes in hand and smack their butts with their own shoes, all the while asking, "Why are you kicking yourself? Why are you kicking yourself?" because I have yet to be mature enough to actually be a parent) is one of those great question marks of parenting. I honestly have no idea why I talk to my children four-fifths of the time. They honestly and constantly do not (and, based upon cumulated years of on-the-job research, cannot) hear my voice. Take this evening. Puck had a new print of a dinosaur milieu that we'd picked up for him. We didn't want it to stay in the car, as having that thing get bent would be a cause for great sadness. I said, "Puck, grab your print. You don't want it to be left behind in the car where it could get bent and be a cause for great sadness." He promptly walked away from the car. Flatulence gets a quicker response from that kid than my actual voice. Admittedly, they have some funny moments. Demetrius celebrated his fifth birthday at the top of this month. As Fourth of July fireworks cracked the sky, I asked him why the celebration. "Um," he said, thinking hard about this bit of mind-breaking trivia. "Um…" Oberon jumped in. As an eight year old, he definitely knew the answer to this one. "To celebrate our independence." "Good. From whom?" (I put the pressure on with this one; not only was it diving deeper into trivia, but it also had correct grammar.) "Um," said Demetrius, finally hearing a question he could answer. "Jesus? Heavenly Father?" Being a parent can be a type of emotional whiplash. The kids can be hilarious--usually when they aren't trying to be funny, though that can happen. Once, Oberon said, "I'm hungry." "Hi, Hungry. I'm Dad!" I said, triumphing at having at last found the perfect opportunity to crush my son's whining with the epitome of Dad Jokes™. Without missing a beat, Oberon replied, "Why did you name me this way?" In fact, Oberon has been cracking me up quite a bit lately. As I've mentioned before, I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons with my older boys. It's a lot of fun, and Oberon has spent a large portion of this summer reading through the Monster Manual. He memorizes different creatures' stat blocks, weaknesses, challenge ratings, and attacks. I've taken to calling him "Encyclopedia Orange" (since orange is his favorite color), even though he doesn't know the reference. The hardest part for me, though, has to be finding patience with them. I think I'm (marginally) better at it because I don't expend so much of my finite patience with students at school, but I hear the scarcely concealed (which is to say, not-at-all concealed) frustration in my voice almost every time I talk to Puck. It's not that he deserves it: As is the case with most eleven year olds, he's trying to figure out what his sense of humor is, what is funny, and how to interact with people. Unlike other eleven year olds, he is still struggling to figure it all out. As a result, both Gayle and I have less success than we'd like when it comes to teaching Puck how to best behave. The fact he doesn't really seem to listen to us doesn't help, particularly when we try talking to him in a patient or calm voice. That tone/volume doesn't register, meaning we have to bark at him more often. And that gets really tiresome, because then he feels like all we do is shout at him--mostly because he never hears us when we do anything otherwise--and we feel like we're constantly on his case. And that's the big thing about being a parent that I hadn't foreseen or understood back when I was making a large decision, the consequences of which I didn't really appreciate: Breaking free of entrenched habits can sometimes feel absolutely impossible. Scratch that--there's no sometimes about it. Each kid is a new chance to improve one's parenting, and in my particular case, I've already messed it up so much and so frequently that I don't feel as if I can make any fresh progress with the experience at all. All that being said, I obviously still care about being a parent. After all, I have a few minutes alone in the quiet of my room to write about anything at all in the world, yet here I am, thinking about the things that make my life so noisy. If that isn't proof positive of what it's like to be a parent, I really don't know what is. |
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