My sister and niece came for a visit last week. I love having family around, and I often wish we lived a little closer to my sister and parents-but when she was here, my sister said "I know you like having some distance between us," and that caught me off guard. I had to stop and think for a moment about whether I actually like living away from my extended family or if that's just a function of the way my life has worked out.
I won't deny that I really like the way my immediate family operates as an autonomous little unit. Because Mike and I never had our parents, aunts or uncles to lean on, our four-person family team has pretty stable borders. We enjoy each others' company a lot, and my kids get along with each other really well, for the most part. People routinely comment on the fact that they're so good together--when they were younger, they walked home from school holding hands every day. (My daughter took her Big Sister role very seriously.) In fact, when someone recently gave my daughter a mini-lecture about how much she'd miss her annoying little brother if he weren't around, she came to me later and said "She obviously doesn't know me very well if she thinks I need to hear that." I had to agree.
I also won't deny that I love living in Texas. If you'd told me, ten years ago, that this is where my family was going to end up, I would not have been happy. Texas was never on my list of Places I Hope To Live Someday. I have a very clear memory of seeing the ad for the job I now have and thinking "Come on, it's a church-affiliated school in Texas. Are you really that desperate for a new job?" Because the answer to that question was a firm "Yes, I am," I went ahead and applied for the job, thinking of it as a last resort. When I got a job offer--my only offer that year, as it happened--I accepted. And I'm glad I did, because I would have missed out on many wonderful friends, students and experiences if I'd let my preconceptions about Texas get in the way.
And, finally, I have to admit that I like the way my kids have grown up, which is very far removed from the way I grew up. Because Mike and I have always worked at universities, our kids spend a lot of time around people who grew up in lots of different parts of the country (and, in some cases, different countries altogether.) These are educated people who have intelligent conversations with each other, people who travel often and view all kinds of a diversity as a strength rather than a threat. They're great role models for my children. We did more traveling when the kids were small and easily portable than we do now, but they're still great travelers. They know their way around an airport. I didn't set foot on an airplane until I was 17 years old. Partly that was because my parents didn't have a lot of money to spend on family vacations; partly that was because my parents didn't see travel as something we needed to experience. My dad spent 22 years in the Army, and my mom followed him around for 14 of those years--I imagine they'd had their fill of travel by the time they had children. I imagine they thought we could travel on our own, when we were older, if we wanted to.
Still, I didn't choose to leave my family in Idaho because of anything they did or didn't do. I left because I never felt like Idaho was where I belonged. As a teenager, whenever I was sick of my parents and angry at the world, I'd drive up to the airport and sit at one of the gates and imagine I was about the leave for wherever that plane was headed. (This was in the 1980's, when anyone who wanted to could walk through the metal detectors and sit at the gate.) I'm still not exactly sure why I felt that way about the place, and I still get nostalgic for Boise every now and then; it's not as if I shook the dust of my hometown off my feet when I headed out.
But when I go back to visit, as I've said before, I often find myself feeling claustrophobic. I always thought that had to do with the landscape, with the fact that Boise is situated in a valley, and I still believe that's true--but I understand now that it also has something to do with absent possibilities. When I left Idaho for graduate school, I had to become a different person. The role I played in my family wasn't relevant anymore; I had to figure out what role I wanted to play in the new networks I was creating. And, of course, I had to create those networks--professional contacts, yes, but also friends. I had to find people I could talk with before class started; I had to figure out which of those people I could count on to help me out in a pinch; I had to decide who I was willing to help, and who asked for too much time and energy in exchange for friendship. This wasn't an easy thing to do, since I'm not social by nature. But once I'd done it the first time, I knew I could do it again. Moving on to new places wasn't the least bit scary after that. It was an opportunity for reinventing my life, something I actually looked forward to.
In Boise, I always knew who I was--within my family and my hometown, among the people who'd known me since I was in kindergarten and the people who knew me only in high school. The place has changed a lot since I lived there, but the old Boise is always in the back of my mind--I see the absence of the old places every time I look at something new. So I have to believe that, no matter what I did while I was living in Boise, I would continue to be the person people used to know, at least in some small part of their minds.
But when I moved away, I became who I wanted to be. The girl from Idaho, who'd rather drive in snow than rain. The girl who used to sing all the time, but doesn't anymore. The girl who hadn't seen lightning bugs until she moved to Kansas. Who hates butterflies. Who never played sports and was never anything like athletic but discovered, at age 41, that she loves to run.
I love the life I'm living now precisely because it let me leave my old self, and the people who knew her, behind--and I didn't do that because I wanted to hide anything, or even escape anything or anyone. I just wanted to be who I chose to be. I don't know who I would have become if I'd stayed in Boise, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be who I am now, because there's little room for reinventing yourself in a town where people insist they already know what they need to know about you.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Thoughts on a Long Marriage
This has been a really awful semester, for a number of reasons: difficult students, budget cuts and the attendant layoffs at my husband's university, crazy over-packed schedules for kids and parents alike--and now, today, the sudden death of my husband's dear colleague. If this weren't the last week of the term, I might be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
It's funny, though, that difficult periods like this function primarily to make me grateful for my family. I come home from a terrible day on campus--and there's my husband, reminding me of all the ways in which I'm fabulous. Last week, my daughter had a really terrible day--and I watched with great pride as her little brother worked to cheer her up. We're a team, me and my family. We take care of each other without being asked to do so. We enjoy each others' company.
I sometimes marvel at the fact that I've been lucky enough to wind up living with this group of people. And then I have to remind myself that family doesn't happen by accident: we are who we because my husband Mike and I worked hard to make it this way. Even before our kids were born, family was the priority. I turned down the first full-time job I was offered after I'd earned my MFA because taking it would have meant living two hours away from Mike for at least a year. Two hours might not seem like a great distance--many married couples live with much more distance between them, and that's certainly not uncommon in the academic world--but I wasn't willing to make that sacrifice. Many people thought I was nuts, given the state of the academic job market, but I really didn't care. I wanted to live with my husband, my family, more than I wanted to be a professor.
That turned out to be one of the smartest decisions we've ever made, over the course of our marriage. We've often talked about how our lives could have changed directions if we'd made a different choice at that moment; none of the outcomes we've imagined are good ones. Sometimes I think that the main reason Mike and I ended up getting married is that we're both supremely practical people. We don't do what other people think is best for us; we do what we know is best for us. These things are often at odds with each other, it seems, but we rarely worry about that. Sometimes we actually take pleasure in doing what others find crazy. But we never do the crazy thing for its own sake.
For instance: we'd been good friends for a few months, but we had dated, officially, for just a few weeks before Mike moved in with me. We got engaged shortly after that, and we married six months later. Essentially, we went from getting to know each other to getting married in less than a year. No one thought this was a good idea--no one except Mike and I. We didn't get married so quickly in order to shock anyone: we were genuinely excited to get married, be married, and stay married. We knew we'd found the person we wanted to do that with, so waiting didn't make any sense.
Though it did make sense, we decided, to put off having kids. We both wanted children; we had no doubts about that. But we enjoyed hanging out with each other, living a grown-up life. My sister had three children, and we saw how our lives would change once our own were born. So we waited six years, until we were tired of seeing movies and trying new restaurants and traveling, all the things that couples without children can do. Many people had told us that waiting so long, getting settled in the life of a childless couple, would make it harder to adjust to having a baby in the house. Still, our adjustment to parenthood was no more (or less) difficult than any of our friends', as far as I could tell. And once we got over the initial shock, we loved being parents--because that was a choice we'd made together.
It hasn't all been wedded bliss, of course. Mike and I have been very poor--we once had exactly $7 with which to buy groceries for the last week of the month. We've lived in a cruddy basement apartment with fungus growing on the walls. We've had sick kids and no health insurance. All those moments in our life were difficult, but at every point on the time line of our marriage we were doing what we thought was best. Going to grad school in Columbia meant moving away from the support network of our extended family; it meant ignoring people who told us we were neglecting our children by putting them in day care; it meant believing the time we spent as a family in the evening was worth the time we lost in building friendships with other grad students and connections with faculty members who might help us out professionally. None of those things were easy, but we worked through them because we believed they'd pay off. We believed that together.
I went into my marriage expecting nothing in particular, except to be married to Mike for the rest of my life. I didn't expect that we'd end up in a particular income bracket, in a particular sort of house, or even in a particular state. I'm not sure either of us expected to have everything we have now. We just signed on for the ride, wherever it took us.
The anniversary of our first date, May 5th, is coming up next week. I can't tell you how many times I've been asked "How can you remember that?" Well, it was Cinco de Mayo. That helps. But it was also the very first time I remember thinking "This is exactly who I've always wanted to be." I was sitting beside Mike on a picnic bench at that moment, snuggled up to him against the chill of a late spring evening. I was in love. I was feeling optimistic. I was absolutely happy. And still, even after all these years, that's who I am--and exactly who I want to be.
It's funny, though, that difficult periods like this function primarily to make me grateful for my family. I come home from a terrible day on campus--and there's my husband, reminding me of all the ways in which I'm fabulous. Last week, my daughter had a really terrible day--and I watched with great pride as her little brother worked to cheer her up. We're a team, me and my family. We take care of each other without being asked to do so. We enjoy each others' company.
I sometimes marvel at the fact that I've been lucky enough to wind up living with this group of people. And then I have to remind myself that family doesn't happen by accident: we are who we because my husband Mike and I worked hard to make it this way. Even before our kids were born, family was the priority. I turned down the first full-time job I was offered after I'd earned my MFA because taking it would have meant living two hours away from Mike for at least a year. Two hours might not seem like a great distance--many married couples live with much more distance between them, and that's certainly not uncommon in the academic world--but I wasn't willing to make that sacrifice. Many people thought I was nuts, given the state of the academic job market, but I really didn't care. I wanted to live with my husband, my family, more than I wanted to be a professor.
That turned out to be one of the smartest decisions we've ever made, over the course of our marriage. We've often talked about how our lives could have changed directions if we'd made a different choice at that moment; none of the outcomes we've imagined are good ones. Sometimes I think that the main reason Mike and I ended up getting married is that we're both supremely practical people. We don't do what other people think is best for us; we do what we know is best for us. These things are often at odds with each other, it seems, but we rarely worry about that. Sometimes we actually take pleasure in doing what others find crazy. But we never do the crazy thing for its own sake.
For instance: we'd been good friends for a few months, but we had dated, officially, for just a few weeks before Mike moved in with me. We got engaged shortly after that, and we married six months later. Essentially, we went from getting to know each other to getting married in less than a year. No one thought this was a good idea--no one except Mike and I. We didn't get married so quickly in order to shock anyone: we were genuinely excited to get married, be married, and stay married. We knew we'd found the person we wanted to do that with, so waiting didn't make any sense.
Though it did make sense, we decided, to put off having kids. We both wanted children; we had no doubts about that. But we enjoyed hanging out with each other, living a grown-up life. My sister had three children, and we saw how our lives would change once our own were born. So we waited six years, until we were tired of seeing movies and trying new restaurants and traveling, all the things that couples without children can do. Many people had told us that waiting so long, getting settled in the life of a childless couple, would make it harder to adjust to having a baby in the house. Still, our adjustment to parenthood was no more (or less) difficult than any of our friends', as far as I could tell. And once we got over the initial shock, we loved being parents--because that was a choice we'd made together.
It hasn't all been wedded bliss, of course. Mike and I have been very poor--we once had exactly $7 with which to buy groceries for the last week of the month. We've lived in a cruddy basement apartment with fungus growing on the walls. We've had sick kids and no health insurance. All those moments in our life were difficult, but at every point on the time line of our marriage we were doing what we thought was best. Going to grad school in Columbia meant moving away from the support network of our extended family; it meant ignoring people who told us we were neglecting our children by putting them in day care; it meant believing the time we spent as a family in the evening was worth the time we lost in building friendships with other grad students and connections with faculty members who might help us out professionally. None of those things were easy, but we worked through them because we believed they'd pay off. We believed that together.
I went into my marriage expecting nothing in particular, except to be married to Mike for the rest of my life. I didn't expect that we'd end up in a particular income bracket, in a particular sort of house, or even in a particular state. I'm not sure either of us expected to have everything we have now. We just signed on for the ride, wherever it took us.
The anniversary of our first date, May 5th, is coming up next week. I can't tell you how many times I've been asked "How can you remember that?" Well, it was Cinco de Mayo. That helps. But it was also the very first time I remember thinking "This is exactly who I've always wanted to be." I was sitting beside Mike on a picnic bench at that moment, snuggled up to him against the chill of a late spring evening. I was in love. I was feeling optimistic. I was absolutely happy. And still, even after all these years, that's who I am--and exactly who I want to be.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
This Is Why I Teach
I've had a pretty rough spring semester this year. The difficulty began almost immediately: I had a very smart but very lazy student in two of my classes, a student who didn't like to come to class and couldn't seem to get there on time under any circumstances--and who didn't understand why this was a problem for me. This students is of the "I'm paying for these classes; I shouldn't have to show up unless I want to" variety. My only response to that, usually, is a quick point to the syllabus, which makes it very clear that we have different attitudes on the question of attendance.
None of this would be an enormous issue if not for the fact that the student was scheduled to graduate in May. Note the use of past tense there: was scheduled. Not anymore. As you might imagine, many people are unhappy about this. So I've been dealing with associate provosts and provosts and parents for the last month, trying to explain why I don't think it's unreasonable to expect students to show up for class, and why I drop students from my classes if they don't attend. In this particular case, I've been explaining how I warned and warned and warned the student what was going to happen, and how those warnings were flagrantly ignored. People on campus have supported me; people in the student's family are, as you might imagine, not my biggest fans at this moment.
If I taught courses in another discipline, I might feel differently about the question of whether it's important to come to class. Perhaps it's possible to read the biology textbook on your own and get from it what you need to pass; I don't know. I don't teach biology, so I wouldn't presume to say what is or is not possible. What I do know is that, in my classes, I'm not teaching the contents of a book. When you take a test in one of my classes, I'm not asking you what happened and to whom (or, not only that--obviously, you need to know those things.) I'm asking you to work through specific questions about the text using specific tools. Theories. Techniques. You'd have to be in class to get those tools, and to learn how to use them.
But even if that weren't the case--let's consider, for a moment, the possibility that I only tested my students on the content of a text. If you read the text on your own and understood it, maybe you wouldn't need to come to class. But what it you only thought you understood it? (I can't tell you how many times students have completely missed an author's social commentary or sarcasm.) What if you missed a symbolic motif? What if you understood the text through the lens of your own contemporary experience, but not as a representation of its own time period--then did you really understand the book?
But let's say you understood it just fine on your own. What if the only people who came to class were those who didn't understand the text, or didn't read it? What, exactly, would be the purpose of a class meeting with that group of people? Other than providing time to read, I don't know what I could possibly do with them. You can't discuss a book with people who haven't read it carefully. Students who get the reading are essential to a good classroom discussion.
Juxtaposed with this student is another--an excellent student who's been facing some very serious health problems since mid-February. In spite of the fact that this student is struggling with mobility issues and barely able to move around independently--and in spite of the fact that she commutes half an hour each way to campus--there hasn't been a day when she's arrived late for class. For that matter, she's missed only one day this semester. And that was before her health problems began, when she had to take care of a completely unrelated medical procedure. This student values her education so much that even when I tell her it's okay to take it easy, she refuses to do that. She wants to receive everything I have to give.
Students like that are why I teach. Because they make me realize that what I have to offer is of value--such great value, apparently, that some of them are willing to put their own pain aside in order to receive it. Students like that make me a better teacher.
Many years ago, in graduate school, one of my professors told the story of a student who'd gone through some financial struggles and become homeless for awhile--a student who'd done his reading under streetlights and slept under bridges, but still never missed a day of class. "He made me a better teacher," my professor said, "because I wanted to be worthy of the sacrifices he was making for his education. And now, every day, I remind myself: teach for the students who are sleeping under bridges to be here."
It's hard to keep this in mind when you're faced with a student who's throwing away the privilege of a college education. But I thank the student who helped me keep my balance this semester--the one who compelled me to follow her example and do my very best work every day, who kept me humble and, above all, counting my blessings.
None of this would be an enormous issue if not for the fact that the student was scheduled to graduate in May. Note the use of past tense there: was scheduled. Not anymore. As you might imagine, many people are unhappy about this. So I've been dealing with associate provosts and provosts and parents for the last month, trying to explain why I don't think it's unreasonable to expect students to show up for class, and why I drop students from my classes if they don't attend. In this particular case, I've been explaining how I warned and warned and warned the student what was going to happen, and how those warnings were flagrantly ignored. People on campus have supported me; people in the student's family are, as you might imagine, not my biggest fans at this moment.
If I taught courses in another discipline, I might feel differently about the question of whether it's important to come to class. Perhaps it's possible to read the biology textbook on your own and get from it what you need to pass; I don't know. I don't teach biology, so I wouldn't presume to say what is or is not possible. What I do know is that, in my classes, I'm not teaching the contents of a book. When you take a test in one of my classes, I'm not asking you what happened and to whom (or, not only that--obviously, you need to know those things.) I'm asking you to work through specific questions about the text using specific tools. Theories. Techniques. You'd have to be in class to get those tools, and to learn how to use them.
But even if that weren't the case--let's consider, for a moment, the possibility that I only tested my students on the content of a text. If you read the text on your own and understood it, maybe you wouldn't need to come to class. But what it you only thought you understood it? (I can't tell you how many times students have completely missed an author's social commentary or sarcasm.) What if you missed a symbolic motif? What if you understood the text through the lens of your own contemporary experience, but not as a representation of its own time period--then did you really understand the book?
But let's say you understood it just fine on your own. What if the only people who came to class were those who didn't understand the text, or didn't read it? What, exactly, would be the purpose of a class meeting with that group of people? Other than providing time to read, I don't know what I could possibly do with them. You can't discuss a book with people who haven't read it carefully. Students who get the reading are essential to a good classroom discussion.
Juxtaposed with this student is another--an excellent student who's been facing some very serious health problems since mid-February. In spite of the fact that this student is struggling with mobility issues and barely able to move around independently--and in spite of the fact that she commutes half an hour each way to campus--there hasn't been a day when she's arrived late for class. For that matter, she's missed only one day this semester. And that was before her health problems began, when she had to take care of a completely unrelated medical procedure. This student values her education so much that even when I tell her it's okay to take it easy, she refuses to do that. She wants to receive everything I have to give.
Students like that are why I teach. Because they make me realize that what I have to offer is of value--such great value, apparently, that some of them are willing to put their own pain aside in order to receive it. Students like that make me a better teacher.
Many years ago, in graduate school, one of my professors told the story of a student who'd gone through some financial struggles and become homeless for awhile--a student who'd done his reading under streetlights and slept under bridges, but still never missed a day of class. "He made me a better teacher," my professor said, "because I wanted to be worthy of the sacrifices he was making for his education. And now, every day, I remind myself: teach for the students who are sleeping under bridges to be here."
It's hard to keep this in mind when you're faced with a student who's throwing away the privilege of a college education. But I thank the student who helped me keep my balance this semester--the one who compelled me to follow her example and do my very best work every day, who kept me humble and, above all, counting my blessings.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Loving The Difference
I had a great day with my family today--the sun is finally shining again, so we headed out to the zoo and surrounding park. Part of the reason for this trip was to take pictures my son needs for his next science project, and part of the reason was to spend some time together as a family, which we don't get to do often enough these days.
My daughter is fifteen. She has a pretty terrific boyfriend, and he's easily become part of the family. We even added him to our zoo membership, so he could come with us whenever we head across town. Today, though, he couldn't go. I was a little pleased with this, since it meant my daughter would actually be interacting with us for a change, but I knew we were also running the risk of dealing with Surly Girl all day.
I adore my daughter. She's smart and beautiful and friendly and practical, all the things you'd want your daughter to be. From the time she was a tiny girl, with a head full of Shirley Temple curls and a 100-watt smile, she just drew people to her. Complete strangers would stop us on the street or in an airport and strike up a conversation with a two-year-old. Once, when we were in Memphis--Jordan was not quite three at the time--an elderly woman walking slowly past us on the sidewalk stopped and openly stared at my daughter. "My gracious," she said. "You really are a little angel." Then she asked if it would be all right to touch my daughter's hair. Jordan was used to the attention, so she didn't mind. I said it was fine. The woman fingered Jordan's curls, then smiled and thanked us both before she went on her way.
I'm pretty shameless in my admiration of Jordan. And while I know I'm supposed to feel this way--she's my kid, after all--I know many people who feel the same way about her without being compelled to. It's hard not to like her, honestly. (Well, except for the few girls at school who seem to hate her precisely because of best qualities. Those people, I tell her, aren't worth being concerned about, and most of the time she believes this.)
I know my daughter is aware of how much I like her, in addition to loving her. But I think that's what makes it really difficult for her not to boss her little brother around--all the things I've always praised in her are qualities her brother doesn't possess. In addition to the age difference between them--which always seems to make the older kid feel entitled to direct the younger one--Andrew is different from his sister in just about every way. He's shy and introverted around people other than his family, not at all social. His teachers are always alarmed by the fact that he doesn't talk to other people in class, or not unless they speak to him first, and I have to reassure them that he talks all the time at home. He has ADHD, the inattentive variety, which makes it hard for him to focus at school. He takes medication that makes this a little easier, and now that we have an IEP in place, guaranteeing some extra follow-up from his teachers, his grades have improved to the point that he isn't failing any of his classes--but A's are rare for him. B's are an accomplishment, and C's are the goal. Still, he's in Advanced Placement classes and his teachers often say that he's obviously very bright. He just can't express that in the ways they would like.
Although he doesn't have an official diagnosis, I've done enough research to understand that my son also has Asperger Syndrome (which was recently placed under the autism spectrum.) He doesn't seek out friendships, doesn't understand body language or social cues, and takes figurative language very literally--when he was little, I learned to be very careful about saying things like "My head is going to explode if you keep making that noise," because he really believed that would happen. He develops an intense interest in odd subjects (when he was little, he was obsessed with decoding circle/slash signs; these days, he can tell you anything you might want to know about hurricanes) and really needs to stick with a routine. He gets very upset when his life is off schedule, when he can't watch his favorite TV programs at the appointed time.
I adore my son, too. He has a well-developed sense of humor, which he expresses in the comic strip he's been drawing for several years now, and he's very smart--he just isn't able to demonstrate that at school. He's much more like his dad and I than his sister is. We're shy and introverted too; neither of us has a large friend network, and that doesn't bother us. For the most part, it doesn't seem to bother Andrew either. Once in awhile he talks about wishing he had some friends, and that's when my heart breaks for him, but more often he talks about being glad he doesn't have to deal with the kind of drama Jordan deals with on a regular basis.
Today the two of them were getting along pretty well, as they often do. But I couldn't help notice that Jordan spends a lot of time telling Andrew what to do, and he rarely ever questions what she says--he just does it. I might have just written this off to sibling behavior if not for the fact that, earlier this week, Andrew showed me a paper he'd written about Jordan for his English class. The assignment was to write about an important person in your life, and Andrew wrote about how he looks up to Jordan because she's so good at everything. A general theme of the essay was "She's better than me at everything." (Except at video games, where he acknowledged an ability to beat her occasionally.)
I know Andrew hears us telling Jordan "Good job" pretty often. I know he hears her telling us that she earned a First Division rating in band, or an A on the Spanish test that everyone else failed. It wouldn't be fair to her if we acted like these things don't matter, because they do. She deserves to be proud of her accomplishments. She works hard for what she gets--she practices her flute for competitions, studies for exams. I point this out to Andrew whenever he complains that she gets everything she wants.
So today I started wondering how I can let Andrew know that we love him because he's different from Jordan, not in spite of that fact. I've learned so much from being his mother. I've learned enormous patience; I've learned to swallow my pride and ask for help when I can't solve a problem myself, which is really hard for me; I've learned that, sometimes, problems can be addressed but not solved. I've also learned that, sometimes, a C is reason enough to celebrate. That's not an easy lesson to learn when you're a person who always did well in school--a person who earned a Ph.D. because school was the only place you ever felt you really fit in.
Watching Andrew struggle has made me a better professor, too, because I've learned there are many reasons why students don't do well in class, and some of those reasons aren't entirely under the student's control. I've learned that giving those students a break often makes them feel worse, not better. It makes them feel like you don't have faith in their ability to do what you've asked everyone else to do.
Earlier today I was reading a friend's blog. Her son was recently diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but she's encouraged that he might improve in the long run because he wasn't a "weird" kid--he didn't, for instance, talk to himself or obsess over odd hobbies and subjects. Reading that stopped me cold, because Andrew is that "weird" kid. He always has been. I know schizophrenia affects young men more often than women, and mental illness runs in our family, on both sides. So, once again, the odds are against him.
But I'm determined to love that boy in every way I know how--supporting him, giving him a push now and then, expecting nothing less from him than I do from his sister. I expect him to do his very best, no matter where that leads him. And I'm determined to teach my daughter how to love her brother this way, too--for who he is, not who she thinks he should be.
My daughter is fifteen. She has a pretty terrific boyfriend, and he's easily become part of the family. We even added him to our zoo membership, so he could come with us whenever we head across town. Today, though, he couldn't go. I was a little pleased with this, since it meant my daughter would actually be interacting with us for a change, but I knew we were also running the risk of dealing with Surly Girl all day.
I adore my daughter. She's smart and beautiful and friendly and practical, all the things you'd want your daughter to be. From the time she was a tiny girl, with a head full of Shirley Temple curls and a 100-watt smile, she just drew people to her. Complete strangers would stop us on the street or in an airport and strike up a conversation with a two-year-old. Once, when we were in Memphis--Jordan was not quite three at the time--an elderly woman walking slowly past us on the sidewalk stopped and openly stared at my daughter. "My gracious," she said. "You really are a little angel." Then she asked if it would be all right to touch my daughter's hair. Jordan was used to the attention, so she didn't mind. I said it was fine. The woman fingered Jordan's curls, then smiled and thanked us both before she went on her way.
I'm pretty shameless in my admiration of Jordan. And while I know I'm supposed to feel this way--she's my kid, after all--I know many people who feel the same way about her without being compelled to. It's hard not to like her, honestly. (Well, except for the few girls at school who seem to hate her precisely because of best qualities. Those people, I tell her, aren't worth being concerned about, and most of the time she believes this.)
I know my daughter is aware of how much I like her, in addition to loving her. But I think that's what makes it really difficult for her not to boss her little brother around--all the things I've always praised in her are qualities her brother doesn't possess. In addition to the age difference between them--which always seems to make the older kid feel entitled to direct the younger one--Andrew is different from his sister in just about every way. He's shy and introverted around people other than his family, not at all social. His teachers are always alarmed by the fact that he doesn't talk to other people in class, or not unless they speak to him first, and I have to reassure them that he talks all the time at home. He has ADHD, the inattentive variety, which makes it hard for him to focus at school. He takes medication that makes this a little easier, and now that we have an IEP in place, guaranteeing some extra follow-up from his teachers, his grades have improved to the point that he isn't failing any of his classes--but A's are rare for him. B's are an accomplishment, and C's are the goal. Still, he's in Advanced Placement classes and his teachers often say that he's obviously very bright. He just can't express that in the ways they would like.
Although he doesn't have an official diagnosis, I've done enough research to understand that my son also has Asperger Syndrome (which was recently placed under the autism spectrum.) He doesn't seek out friendships, doesn't understand body language or social cues, and takes figurative language very literally--when he was little, I learned to be very careful about saying things like "My head is going to explode if you keep making that noise," because he really believed that would happen. He develops an intense interest in odd subjects (when he was little, he was obsessed with decoding circle/slash signs; these days, he can tell you anything you might want to know about hurricanes) and really needs to stick with a routine. He gets very upset when his life is off schedule, when he can't watch his favorite TV programs at the appointed time.
I adore my son, too. He has a well-developed sense of humor, which he expresses in the comic strip he's been drawing for several years now, and he's very smart--he just isn't able to demonstrate that at school. He's much more like his dad and I than his sister is. We're shy and introverted too; neither of us has a large friend network, and that doesn't bother us. For the most part, it doesn't seem to bother Andrew either. Once in awhile he talks about wishing he had some friends, and that's when my heart breaks for him, but more often he talks about being glad he doesn't have to deal with the kind of drama Jordan deals with on a regular basis.
Today the two of them were getting along pretty well, as they often do. But I couldn't help notice that Jordan spends a lot of time telling Andrew what to do, and he rarely ever questions what she says--he just does it. I might have just written this off to sibling behavior if not for the fact that, earlier this week, Andrew showed me a paper he'd written about Jordan for his English class. The assignment was to write about an important person in your life, and Andrew wrote about how he looks up to Jordan because she's so good at everything. A general theme of the essay was "She's better than me at everything." (Except at video games, where he acknowledged an ability to beat her occasionally.)
I know Andrew hears us telling Jordan "Good job" pretty often. I know he hears her telling us that she earned a First Division rating in band, or an A on the Spanish test that everyone else failed. It wouldn't be fair to her if we acted like these things don't matter, because they do. She deserves to be proud of her accomplishments. She works hard for what she gets--she practices her flute for competitions, studies for exams. I point this out to Andrew whenever he complains that she gets everything she wants.
So today I started wondering how I can let Andrew know that we love him because he's different from Jordan, not in spite of that fact. I've learned so much from being his mother. I've learned enormous patience; I've learned to swallow my pride and ask for help when I can't solve a problem myself, which is really hard for me; I've learned that, sometimes, problems can be addressed but not solved. I've also learned that, sometimes, a C is reason enough to celebrate. That's not an easy lesson to learn when you're a person who always did well in school--a person who earned a Ph.D. because school was the only place you ever felt you really fit in.
Watching Andrew struggle has made me a better professor, too, because I've learned there are many reasons why students don't do well in class, and some of those reasons aren't entirely under the student's control. I've learned that giving those students a break often makes them feel worse, not better. It makes them feel like you don't have faith in their ability to do what you've asked everyone else to do.
Earlier today I was reading a friend's blog. Her son was recently diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but she's encouraged that he might improve in the long run because he wasn't a "weird" kid--he didn't, for instance, talk to himself or obsess over odd hobbies and subjects. Reading that stopped me cold, because Andrew is that "weird" kid. He always has been. I know schizophrenia affects young men more often than women, and mental illness runs in our family, on both sides. So, once again, the odds are against him.
But I'm determined to love that boy in every way I know how--supporting him, giving him a push now and then, expecting nothing less from him than I do from his sister. I expect him to do his very best, no matter where that leads him. And I'm determined to teach my daughter how to love her brother this way, too--for who he is, not who she thinks he should be.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Endless Possibility
I had lunch with a former student today. M. had agreed to visit my Senior Thesis class and do her thesis presentation for them, so they could hear what a really good presentation sounds like, and then to talk about her process for completing that project. She was smart and articulate and encouraging to the students who came to hear her, just as I'd hoped she would be. I took her out for Chinese food afterward--as a gesture of appreciation, but also because I enjoy her company. We've met for coffee every few months since her graduation.
This afternoon, we spent most of our time talking about her recent break-up with the man she's been dating since she was 17. It's tempting to think of that as a childhood romance, but the relationship lasted five years--longer than a lot of marriages these days (five times longer than my brother's first marriage, actually.) She'd been struggling to end that relationship for some time, but it's tricky when you're living with the person you don't want to be with anymore. And then there's the matter of guilt: women are not programmed to think about themselves. We're taught to be careful of others' feelings, not to make trouble, to be self-sacrificing above all else. It was really difficult for M. to take a moment and think about herself.
But she did it, and I'm proud of her, and I told her so. Rather than doing the easy thing, she did the difficult thing on behalf of herself. And now she's making a plan for taking the next steps toward the future she wants to have: finding her own place to live, researching grad schools, taking the GRE. It's scary to be completely responsible for yourself, but it's exhilarating too.
I spent much of this afternoon thinking about my first year in grad school. I moved to Kansas from Idaho without knowing a soul; I drove cross-country in my little Chevette packed full of my wordly possessions. (I still marvel at the fact that I made it across the Rockies in a little economy car that went 40 mph on those inclines.) I did this because I had a fellowship that offered me a chunk of money when I arrived and a teaching assistantship that would pay the bills while I was in school. I was homesick, of course, but I'd expected that; I was homesick when I went away to college, too, and I was only six hours from home then. For the first six months of grad school, I consoled myself with the thought that if it got too bad, I could drive straight home in 24 hours. By this time tomorrow, I could be sitting in my parents' living room became my mantra.
I thought about dropping out of grad school many, many times. But, for whatever reason, I didn't. I made new friends, found that I really enjoyed my graduate classes (once I got through the first semester, during which I was stuck in the courses that had low enrollments--meaning, in other words, the least popular classes with the most difficult professors.) Eventually, I connected with a group of people I really loved, many of whom are still my friends today.
Before I got to that point, though, there were moments of real difficulty. There were language barriers and culture clashes--yes, even between Kansas and Idaho. The student union building was the Union, not the SUB--the first time I asked someone for directions to the SUB, I got a look that suggested I was potentially dangerous. I'd never heard locusts in the trees before, and when I asked my new roommate "What is making all that noise?" I got a blank look in return. She didn't even hear what was absolutely deafening to me.
I didn't know that, in the Midwest, it stays hot all night long. The first time I opened my windows at 10 o'clock, expecting a cool breeze, I was stunned to find that it still felt like high noon. I didn't know that walking outside in the rain without an umbrella was going to leave me soaked to the skin in a matter of minutes. In Idaho, it can rain for three days without accumulating a full inch.
A lot of the time, I felt like I was existing on a separate plane, all by myself. There were new brand names to learn at the grocery store and new stores to navigate. There were tornado sirens tested at noon once a week. The list of things I had to learn keeps on going, but the point is that learning it all at once, all alone, was overwhelming.
And exciting, too.
I sympathize with M.'s conflicted feelings of excitement and anxiety. I've been there; I know how it feels to have your whole life in your own two hands, to be solely responsible for yourself. But I told her today to enjoy that feeling: "This is the only time in your life when you'll be able to do anything you want," I said. "You aren't tied to a mortgage or a career or a marriage--anything is possible. That's a wonderful thing."
It's scary to look into that horizon of endless possibility. But if you're never brave enough to take in that vista, I have to believe you're going to wonder what might have been.
This afternoon, we spent most of our time talking about her recent break-up with the man she's been dating since she was 17. It's tempting to think of that as a childhood romance, but the relationship lasted five years--longer than a lot of marriages these days (five times longer than my brother's first marriage, actually.) She'd been struggling to end that relationship for some time, but it's tricky when you're living with the person you don't want to be with anymore. And then there's the matter of guilt: women are not programmed to think about themselves. We're taught to be careful of others' feelings, not to make trouble, to be self-sacrificing above all else. It was really difficult for M. to take a moment and think about herself.
But she did it, and I'm proud of her, and I told her so. Rather than doing the easy thing, she did the difficult thing on behalf of herself. And now she's making a plan for taking the next steps toward the future she wants to have: finding her own place to live, researching grad schools, taking the GRE. It's scary to be completely responsible for yourself, but it's exhilarating too.
I spent much of this afternoon thinking about my first year in grad school. I moved to Kansas from Idaho without knowing a soul; I drove cross-country in my little Chevette packed full of my wordly possessions. (I still marvel at the fact that I made it across the Rockies in a little economy car that went 40 mph on those inclines.) I did this because I had a fellowship that offered me a chunk of money when I arrived and a teaching assistantship that would pay the bills while I was in school. I was homesick, of course, but I'd expected that; I was homesick when I went away to college, too, and I was only six hours from home then. For the first six months of grad school, I consoled myself with the thought that if it got too bad, I could drive straight home in 24 hours. By this time tomorrow, I could be sitting in my parents' living room became my mantra.
I thought about dropping out of grad school many, many times. But, for whatever reason, I didn't. I made new friends, found that I really enjoyed my graduate classes (once I got through the first semester, during which I was stuck in the courses that had low enrollments--meaning, in other words, the least popular classes with the most difficult professors.) Eventually, I connected with a group of people I really loved, many of whom are still my friends today.
Before I got to that point, though, there were moments of real difficulty. There were language barriers and culture clashes--yes, even between Kansas and Idaho. The student union building was the Union, not the SUB--the first time I asked someone for directions to the SUB, I got a look that suggested I was potentially dangerous. I'd never heard locusts in the trees before, and when I asked my new roommate "What is making all that noise?" I got a blank look in return. She didn't even hear what was absolutely deafening to me.
I didn't know that, in the Midwest, it stays hot all night long. The first time I opened my windows at 10 o'clock, expecting a cool breeze, I was stunned to find that it still felt like high noon. I didn't know that walking outside in the rain without an umbrella was going to leave me soaked to the skin in a matter of minutes. In Idaho, it can rain for three days without accumulating a full inch.
A lot of the time, I felt like I was existing on a separate plane, all by myself. There were new brand names to learn at the grocery store and new stores to navigate. There were tornado sirens tested at noon once a week. The list of things I had to learn keeps on going, but the point is that learning it all at once, all alone, was overwhelming.
And exciting, too.
I sympathize with M.'s conflicted feelings of excitement and anxiety. I've been there; I know how it feels to have your whole life in your own two hands, to be solely responsible for yourself. But I told her today to enjoy that feeling: "This is the only time in your life when you'll be able to do anything you want," I said. "You aren't tied to a mortgage or a career or a marriage--anything is possible. That's a wonderful thing."
It's scary to look into that horizon of endless possibility. But if you're never brave enough to take in that vista, I have to believe you're going to wonder what might have been.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Happiness
I'm teaching a seminar on the short story this semester, and one of my students recently asked "Aren't we ever going to read any happy stories?" That led us to a discussion of the fact that happy material doesn't usually make for great fiction; to paraphrase the writer Janet Burroway, fiction is about trouble. No trouble, no story to tell.
Not long after this, in my poetry workshop, we talked about the techniques that allow positive emotions to be expressed in ways that are interesting and complex rather than simple and cliche. One of my students asked "Do professional poets even think about positive emotions?" So I referred him to the poem "Happiness," by Jane Kenyon, which begins with these lines:
The fact that Kenyon wrote about the inevitability of happiness while she was dying of leukemia adds a whole layer of meaning to the poem. Even if you don't know that, though, the connection between happiness and the story of the prodigal son is a beautiful surprise. Who would turn away happiness simply because it disappeared awhile? Who would turn away their child, no matter how long he'd been gone?
As I think I've mentioned before, I always hated the story of the prodigal son when I was a kid--I spent a lot of my energy trying to be good, to do the right thing and not get in trouble. It seemed egregiously unfair to me that the irresponsible kid would end up as the guest of honor at a welcome-home party thrown by his father, and his more responsible brother was also expected to celebrate the return. Of course, all this was before I became a parent myself. Before I knew that it's impossible not to love your child, or to feel relief that they're safe at home, especially after they've been gone for awhile.
As an adult, I understand that this is the way the world works. People make mistakes--or perhaps they just do things we don't agree with, things that disappoint us--and we either forgive them and move on with them in our lives, or we hold a grudge and push them away. Those are our options. Sometimes we try to play the middle ground, keeping them in our lives under specific conditions, but that never leads to anything like a real relationship. We're just pushing them away without exactly saying so.
There's a student at my university, a beautiful, smart, eternally optimistic young woman who's deeply involved with our Campus Ministry group. I think she may be the best example of Christianity I've ever known. She's also gay. This past week, she gave an oral presentation about her Senior Thesis project, which will focus on the ELCA's recent vote to allow people in same-sex relationships to serve as clergy. She'll be exploring the opinions of people on both sides of the issue, and I encouraged her to explore the middle territory as well--"the crap position" as I called it. Those people who say "I won't vote to exclude you from the church because, as a Christian, I'm supposed to love everybody. But I think you're a sinner, so I'll love you the same way I love people who cheat on their spouses or beat their children." In short, people who view love as an absence of action, rather than action itself.
"You mean people like my mom," she said.
She laughed when she said this, and her classmates laughed with her. But I couldn't imagine how painful it must be to know that your mother loves you in spite of who you are, not because of it.
There are so many things to love about this girl. She's exactly the kind of person I hope my kids will grow up to be.
All anybody wants in the world is to know there's a place where they're loved completely, for all their gifts and limitations--to know the joy of unconditional acceptance. I have to believe the prodigal would never have come back home if he hadn't been fairly certain that he could count on his father's forgiveness. He knew he was loved; he knew he'd be welcomed when he returned, just as we welcome happiness into our lives whenever (and wherever) it appears. To do otherwise makes no sense.
Not long after this, in my poetry workshop, we talked about the techniques that allow positive emotions to be expressed in ways that are interesting and complex rather than simple and cliche. One of my students asked "Do professional poets even think about positive emotions?" So I referred him to the poem "Happiness," by Jane Kenyon, which begins with these lines:
There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.
The fact that Kenyon wrote about the inevitability of happiness while she was dying of leukemia adds a whole layer of meaning to the poem. Even if you don't know that, though, the connection between happiness and the story of the prodigal son is a beautiful surprise. Who would turn away happiness simply because it disappeared awhile? Who would turn away their child, no matter how long he'd been gone?
As I think I've mentioned before, I always hated the story of the prodigal son when I was a kid--I spent a lot of my energy trying to be good, to do the right thing and not get in trouble. It seemed egregiously unfair to me that the irresponsible kid would end up as the guest of honor at a welcome-home party thrown by his father, and his more responsible brother was also expected to celebrate the return. Of course, all this was before I became a parent myself. Before I knew that it's impossible not to love your child, or to feel relief that they're safe at home, especially after they've been gone for awhile.
As an adult, I understand that this is the way the world works. People make mistakes--or perhaps they just do things we don't agree with, things that disappoint us--and we either forgive them and move on with them in our lives, or we hold a grudge and push them away. Those are our options. Sometimes we try to play the middle ground, keeping them in our lives under specific conditions, but that never leads to anything like a real relationship. We're just pushing them away without exactly saying so.
There's a student at my university, a beautiful, smart, eternally optimistic young woman who's deeply involved with our Campus Ministry group. I think she may be the best example of Christianity I've ever known. She's also gay. This past week, she gave an oral presentation about her Senior Thesis project, which will focus on the ELCA's recent vote to allow people in same-sex relationships to serve as clergy. She'll be exploring the opinions of people on both sides of the issue, and I encouraged her to explore the middle territory as well--"the crap position" as I called it. Those people who say "I won't vote to exclude you from the church because, as a Christian, I'm supposed to love everybody. But I think you're a sinner, so I'll love you the same way I love people who cheat on their spouses or beat their children." In short, people who view love as an absence of action, rather than action itself.
"You mean people like my mom," she said.
She laughed when she said this, and her classmates laughed with her. But I couldn't imagine how painful it must be to know that your mother loves you in spite of who you are, not because of it.
There are so many things to love about this girl. She's exactly the kind of person I hope my kids will grow up to be.
All anybody wants in the world is to know there's a place where they're loved completely, for all their gifts and limitations--to know the joy of unconditional acceptance. I have to believe the prodigal would never have come back home if he hadn't been fairly certain that he could count on his father's forgiveness. He knew he was loved; he knew he'd be welcomed when he returned, just as we welcome happiness into our lives whenever (and wherever) it appears. To do otherwise makes no sense.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Esperanza
It’s been really cold in south Texas this week. Honestly, the temperatures don’t have to drop very far before people around here start complaining and the weather personalities on TV start talking about the “bone-chilling cold” outside. But it’s been 20 years since the overnight lows fell into the teens, and even longer since the area saw several days in a row of this kind of cold. I feel completely justified in calling this wintry weather.
I tried to save all the tender plants in my back yard by moving them into the shed. Yesterday, when I went to check on them, the news wasn’t good. My big aloe plant is a puddle of mush in its pot. The hibiscus tree is quite sad and droopy; whether or not the trunk will replace its leaves remains to be seen, but I’m not counting on anything. Same for mandevilla vine. And the things that were planted in the ground—plumbago, esperanza, more hibiscus—are long gone. From what I’ve read online, they can lose their leaves in a frost and still survive, but temperatures this cold tend to kill the root system underground.
I grew up in a place with actual winters, so none of this is unfamiliar territory. I’m accustomed to starting from scratch in the spring; I just haven’t had to do it for awhile, since we’ve had very mild winters for the past few years. But this morning, I was feeling very sad about the loss of the esperanza bush I planted in memory of my friend Linda, who was killed in a car accident last spring. Linda was an avid gardener, and planting a beautiful shrub in her memory seemed like an appropriate gesture.
Well, a little voice in my head said, if you wanted something that would last forever, you should have planted a tree instead of a tropical bush that isn’t cold-tolerant. You can’t be upset when a plant doesn’t do what it’s not equipped to do.
In other words, as St. Exupery writes in The Little Prince, “If I were to command a general to turn into a seagull, and if the general did not obey, that would not be the general's fault. It would be mine.”
Later this morning, my husband was reading an article in the Sunday paper about the construction of Main Plaza in downtown San Antonio. It’s finally complete, after a number of delays—including the deaths of seven red oak trees in last summer’s extreme drought. So, not even trees last forever. Longer than most plants, perhaps, but not forever.
I have to drive past the site of Linda’s accident every day. It happened on the interstate I normally travel to and from my campus. After she died, it took awhile before I could drive through that area without thinking of her, wondering if she saw what was about to happen or if the accident took her completely unawares. But the burn marks in the grass and the skid marks on the highway have disappeared now; sometimes I actually drive home without thinking about the fact that we don’t usually know the last day of our lives is, in fact, going to be the last one. The day after Linda’s accident, I kept thinking things like “If she’d left campus two minutes later, or two minutes sooner, or driven a little bit faster or slower—if she’d done even one thing different, she might still be here now. “
True enough. She might still be here—for awhile longer. But Linda’s death, as it occurred, was no one’s fault. The driver who killed her also died in the crash, as did her teenage son, all three of them victims of a blowout at highway speed. No one was drunk or otherwise impaired. No one was being reckless.
Tires blow up. People die. The weather gets cold, and then it gets warm again. Plants die, and some return in the spring, and others don’t. It’s up to us to choose whether to replant or give up on the things that don’t stick around. Mortal things can only do what they were created to do.
I’ve decided to create an esperanza spot in my back yard. If the bush I planted after Linda’s death doesn’t come back in the spring--well, I’ll plant another in its place. Esperanza is the Spanish word for hope. Linda’s legacy will be the reminder that hope is with me as long as I let it be.
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