Parenting Advice from Goldie Hawn

Speaking of teachable moments, I'm not one to think that Hollywood stars are the best source of parenting advice. But I told a friend who has worked with a lot of actors that I thought Goldie Hawn, whom I interviewed last week for a PD story on a mindfulness program she started in schools, was wise. She said that she kept running into smart ones--Hawn, Meg Ryan, and someone I can't remember--and marveling, until finally she realized that just because they can act doesn't mean they can't think. Point taken.

I caught up with Hawn on a particularly vulnerable parenting day in our house. After what we thought was incredibly bad behavior on Sam's part, we gave him the maximum sentence: we forbade him from playing in that day's T-ball game--a double-whammy, since (1) Ralph is his coach and (2) Sam's dedication to baseball and the Muckdogs, his team, surpasses his dedication to God and country. But that morning he had grabbed a ball away from Julia, and, when called on it, he walked away, down the hill by himself to school. When Ralph caught up with him, Sam rounded out the episode by hitting his dad. 

When I asked Hawn what she'd learned as a mother, she said:

"If I have the intention to be happy as a mother, then my zest is rubbed off on the children. Being a joyful parent is actually choosing your battles. Be the best of you, and don't let them get the best of you."

She went on to say that getting angry should mean something:

"I would get angry if they weren't kind. If they lied, that was a felony. If they cursed in the house."

After that, I felt better about punishing Sam so strongly. It didn't keep him from misbehaving the next day, or the day after that, but I've come to believe that much of parenting is about conditioning your child so that small mistakes don't become nasty habits and good habits, like doing your homework and sitting down to dinner every night with your family, take root. But the process of parenting--well, that's more about educating me than him. 

Life at 24,000 Feet - No Place to Run

One of my sisters is a flight attendant, but for a variety of reasons, that is not a job I could ever hold down. One is that I am a spiller of drinks. Another is that I am a bad flier. I'm not neurotic about it, which is to say I've never declined a trip because I don't like to fly. Let's just say I have a reputation. 

Years ago, when I was scheduled to accompany my elderly cousin on a month-long boondoggle to South Africa, the plane we were supposed to take was grounded overnight to have its engine replaced. Maybe it's because I didn't have anything else to do but worry during my unplanned stay in Chantilly, Va., near Dulles Airport--my cousin Abram, 92, had retired to his room, and I hadn't even packed dental floss in my purse to keep me busy. Still, under the best of circumstances it wouldn't sit well with me to fly for 17 hours with an impaired engine and so I calmly phoned the airline and asked why, with its puny fleet of two jets, I should trust them to fix it. Some way into our trip, my cousin told me that our guide had taken him aside and asked why the airline had a record of my being a "nervous traveler." Word had gotten out, I guess. I felt somewhat justified when, mid-trip, South African Airways went bankrupt and we had to fly another carrier home.

Even before that, when I was on a transatlantic flight in my early twenties to visit my then boyfriend in London, the ride was so rough that I grabbed the hand of the man sitting next to me and gripped it for the next four hours. I don't think I ever learned the name of the person who belonged to that hand, but I know that no amount of pleading on his part would have gotten me to release it. I remember his eyes on me when we were waiting for our luggage, but we never spoke. At least that encounter was anonymous.

Despite my history, I was trying to play it cool the other night when the plane from Atlanta, where I'd gone to visit my parents, started to bump around--a lot. I wouldn't be able to save them if thing went down, I thought, looking at Sam and Julia in their pajamas in the seats next to me. Sam was asleep, and Julia seemed oblivious to the roller coaster. Then Julia reached out and took my hand. And by the look she gave me, which made her momentarily more 30 than 3, I could tell it was for me. After all, she had announced just that day that she wants to be a smoke jumper and then a princess when she grows up. In that same conversation, as if to justify her life's ambitions, she told me that she is brave and smart.

I know people say you can learn a lot from kids, but I didn't learn a thing that night at 24,000 feet. I was just glad to have my little girl's pudgy palm in mine. And to know her name.

Public School? A Private Matter (But It Shouldn't Automatically Be Discounted, Either)

As anyone who's ever read Friends Talking in the Night knows, I struggle mightily with parental guilt--that just-kicked-in-the-gut feeling that comes on unbidden each time you think you might be failing your kids, however temporarily or slightly. I'm agonizing at this particular moment over the fact that Julia is in daycare on what for many kids in Washington is a snow day, while I'm at home blogging and doing research for a speech--never mind that she was happy to be there, kicking about in her boots like the little boy in Ezra Jack Keats's The Snowy Day. So I'm totally sympathetic with a piece in yesterday's New York Times "SundayStyles" about the hard calculus many parents are currently facing over whether or not to keep their kids in private-school education in this grizzly economy. 

Still, as the mother of a child in public school, I took umbrage at the writer's utter failure to question--even in a single throw-away line--the possibility that public-school education has any positives. If we hadn't made different decisions with the money we earn would Sam be in a private school? Maybe. But each morning when I hug him goodbye and give him a good luck pat on his backpack, I also feel that he's in a pretty perfect situation and that our family--and, in some tiny way, our neighborhood--benefits from being a part of the school down the hill. That sense is reinforced at pickup each afternoon by the engaged boy who hurls himself into my arms, talking without a breath about Harriet Tubman or Grandma Moses or his science teacher's voyage on an ice-cutter in Alaska.

I learned all I need to know about feeling that your child may be in the wrong place in the few weeks of kindergarten last year when Sam wailed every day, apparently over the stepped-up demands of academia: I couldn't have lived like that for long without making some changes in one direction or another. It's one thing to be unhappy yourself and altogether another to see your child in distress. It's primal. But I'm also reminded of a lesson I learned as a newlywed back in my twenties that seems so obvious now as to never have needed learning: you can't get everything you need out of one relationship--or one school.

I'm not preaching that public school is for everyone. Obviously, we don't know what, if anything, we're missing. And since we won't ever have a control group, only life will tell. 

Food and the Unintended Consequences of Parenting

When Sam was a toddler, someone told us that the way to cure bad behavior was to put a drop of Tabasco on his tongue. But just at the moment Ralph finally decided to reach for the small bottle with the kick-ass contents, he decided there must be a better way to teach baby Sam a lesson than to mess with his taste buds. He closed the kitchen cabinet, forever leaving Tabasco as a condiment for raw oysters rather than a form of corporal punishment.  

I was thinking about that incident yesterday when I read a story in the New York Times about well-meaning parents who have passed on their obsession with health food to the detriment of their kids. Without meaning to, they have doused the equivalent of Tabasco all over what their children eat:

"We're seeing a lot of anxiety in these kids," said Cynthia Bulik, the director of the eating disorders program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They go to birthday parties, and if it's not a granola cake they feel like they can't eat it. The culture has led both them and their parents to take the public health messages to an extreme." 

The piece goes on:

 "Lisa Dorfman, a registered dietician . . .  says that she often sees children who are terrified of foods that are deemed 'bad' by their parents. "It's almost a fear of dying, a fear of illness, like a delusional view of foods in general," she said. "I see kids whose parents have hypnotized them. I have 5-year-olds that speak like 40-year-olds. They can't eat an Oreo cookie without being concerned about trans fats." 

Like most things having to do with parenting, the lessons you teach about food are not as straightforward as you'd wish. Even though there seems to be considerable distance between obesity and eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, we're just talking about a difference of pounds in terms of the trouble they bring. One doctor has coined the name "orthorexia" for people obsessed with health-conscious eating, the Times says. What we're trying to do, of course, is lay down patterns that will serve our kids well as they grow up and make their own decisions. But how? In terms of sweets, we swing between operating a Hitler youth camp and Candy Land.

In our house, food is not just what we eat, it's what we do. In first grade this year, when he was asked to write his autobiography, "What activity does your family enjoy together," saying, "We cook." As much as it slows dinner prep down, Sam and Julia snap beans (Julia often throws away the beans and puts the snapped ends in the bowl) and cut vegetables with a dull, ivory-handled fish knife. Each time Ralph picks Sam up from school, his first question is always, "Who's coming for dinner?" (When I pick him up, he asks, "Where are we going for dinner?")

It occurred to me in thinking about all this that maybe putting food in the context of family meals rather than talking about the sugar content in a box of Puffins, say, is the way to go. The people I know who have raised successful children put great stock in the family dinner as if some alchemy happens when you sit around a table together. And certainly in my own experience growing up, the profound lessons of my childhood were delivered not from a podium but from behind a place mat. Now that my father is on a feeding tube, those kitchen table lessons seem all the more poignant to me.

Only time will tell whether the right lessons take with Sam and Julia. When I was young, my parents forbade us from going to McDonald's and listening to the Beatles (Burger King and "Winchester Cathedral" were their fast-food and music of choice.) 

All of parenting seems arbitrary, fraught with unintended consequences. My parents were prescient about McDonald's (though not Burger King). As for the Beatles, well, maybe we'll learn one day that they're hazardous to your health.

Facebook and My Bookshelves: A Shaky Comparison

Yesterday I got a set of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves built in my office (actually, they're Ikea shelves nailed to the wall so they don't fall on my head) so that I can at last unpack the forty cartons of books that have been stored away from three moves ago, in 2001. This morning, as I spent a couple of hours unpacking them, I was hit with so many rushes of memory that it was like attending my own, personal reunion.

In fact, I can't help being struck by the similarities of my dusty piles of books and my new Facebook "friends," though the last time I saw my copy of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a book I read in college and detested because of the way the professor abused the one African-American in the class, and my inscribed copy of Stefan Kanfer's The Last Empire: De Beers, Diamonds, and the World, written by someone with whom I'm no longer in touch, Facebook didn't exist. 

Having carted around some books for decades that I have never read and likely never will, I'm now wondering, Do I toss Don DeLillo's Underworld in the give-away bin at the Cleveland Park Library or put it on my shelf to take up space of which I now MIRACULOUSLY have too much in order to pretend that I'm more erudite than I really am? Is the point of putting books on a bookshelf to keep the ones you've actually read and treasure, for whatever reason? (I can't part with my Kanfer book, for example, because it reads: "For Linda A lovely lady of talent, true grit, and talent from her secular rabbah," and I'm sure it's the only time my name will ever be in the same sentence with talent x two. Not to mention that when I was just getting started in journalism, I met him in a used bookstore in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and he was incredibly generous to me.) Is it to stockpile the un-reads for the future, which, in my case means I won't need to borrow or buy another book until 3001?

My list of Facebook friends is much the same. There are the friends I talk to every day, anyway, but there's a much longer list of "friends" whom I've spoken to rarely--if ever. And may never. Don't get me wrong: I love being able to be touch with people from high school I didn't get to know back in the day. And as one "friend" of a friend who from elementary school said, we're recreating our Brownie troop on Facebook one person at a time. It's pretty incredible that these people, once lost in time, are now a click away. 

Facebook makes me feel that the world is small and manageable and, as I've blogged about before, I think that there's a kind of circling of the wagons from our youth as our parents age and get sick. It means something to hear from someone who knew my mom and dad when they were in their forties. It's valuable to have the same references to the same stupid songs from 1977. Who else but those in my senior class from The Lovett School in Atlanta would know the significance of "Build Me Up Buttercup" and be able to sing it word for word?

Still, I have to wonder, as with my books, is the point of Facebook to amass sheer numbers? Is the person with 6,035 "friends" a lot cooler than the person with 7 "friends," even if they're both only really in touch with 5 of those people? And like the books I know I'll never read, what's the protocol about un-friending people, though unlike a book, they take up no room in cyber-space.

These are the questions I'm pondering as I put the Anne Tyler books from my twenties on the shelf alongside a copy of a Dorothy Parker book that belonged to my grandmother, Nick Hornsby's High Fidelity, and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. The lesson I'm taking from all this is that I'm used to my life being organized in neat categories. Books are arranged by the Dewey Decimal System. Friends are from college or my first marriage or Sam's daycare class. But now I realize that the old categories don't hold. My shelves are a mish-mash and now, because of Facebook, so are my friends. And I like it that way.

Intensivist Care

In the intermediate intensive care unit of the hospital in Atlanta where my dad is, there's a doctor on call 24/7 known as an intensivist. But I've decided that whether we deal with sick people or not, we're all intensivists. Think about it: when's the last time you went at a project in a relaxed way? Did anything at a leisurely pace? Took something lightly?

When I landed in Washington after an emotional week spent at my dad's bedside, I was, for the briefest time, Sam and Julia's fantasy mom. They were happy to see me and clung to me in baggage claim, full of news about what they'd been doing in my absence: a birthday party at a real fire house, a dinner date with their friend Benjamin and his parents, ballet class that ended with Julia's getting bear stamps on her hands (still visible), breakfast with Ralph, including hot chocolate with extra whipped cream. Time slowed while I took in the sight and substance of my beautiful, healthy family.

It didn't take more than about 1 1/2 hours, though, before I was back in intensivist mode, which is to say back in the trenches of mom-dom. Sam hadn't done his homework while I was away and wasn't in the mood to hear that he still had to, late or not. A skirmish ensued. But the truth is, life has moved on, because there's this week's homework to attend to. Last week is over.

The intensity at which we live is not just about parenting. A friend who is writing a book and trying to finish said she worked so hard yesterday that she didn't have time to eat until she looked up from her computer and it was dinner-time. Why do I do this to myself, she opined. Why do I wait until the last minute?

But we all do. The way our full lives are organized--or disorganized--we can't help but do things on deadline. As one of my sisters said recently, our lives are so based on a 24/7 time clock, we don't ask what day something is due anymore, we ask what time. She was referring to her son, who punched the send button on a college application related something at 11:59 p.m. before it had to be in at midnight.

And even though I bought Valentine's Day cards at the CVS across the street from the hospital days ago in an effort to relieve the tedium of the waiting room, it's not like I also mailed them in advance. No, I will scramble to do that today so that they'll arrive on Feb. 14, if the postal service cooperates. It's not the first instance I've been late. I have solved my latent tardiness before by spending $48 at FedEx on a $2.49 father's day card.

All this rushing makes it hard to stop and put things in context. To enjoy. It wasn't until I was looking at photos of Sam and Julia at my mom and dad's house last week and saw one of Julia at 1, standing diaper-less and defiant in her patent-leather party shoes in the front yard, that I realized I don't even remember that moment--don't remember Julia at 1--which was just 2 years ago. It had the effect of slamming on my interior brakes, just briefly, to luxuriate in the fact that I have a still-small child--in fact, two--to swaddle myself in. And then I had to turn my attention elsewhere.

I'm not sure there's a solution. I'm just musing--intensively. 

Getting By With a Lot of Help From Our Friends

Ralph and I (and Sam and Julia) are incredibly fortunate to have such great friends. On Monday when I had to fly to Atlanta unexpectedly and without telling S and J, and Ralph had to work, our next-of-kin, Katy Kelly, subbed for us. Here's a report that made me laugh. Maybe it will amuse you, too. (Pop is my dad, who probably hasn't eaten a Dunkin Donut in 38 years--if ever.)

"Sam and Julia were excellento. I picked up Sam about 5:15. We got Julia. Drove home. Walked to Arucola for supper. Came back. Took a bath. Julia got a princess hairdo. Made Valentines. Julia made one for Pop. There are many letters on it. Mostly Ps and Bs and Os. She says it says Dunkin Donuts. Perhaps it is a coupon. She says he likes them. Ralph came. Helped Steve re-hang the Fap Anis picture (LR got painted today). Lost socks. Meltdown. Found socks. Home."

Tainted Peanut Butter An Extreme of Corporate Greed

Just before she finally gave into sleep a few nights ago, Julia and I had a lengthy recap of her day, which included a circle-time conversation at school about what to do if a stranger approaches you. I was quizzing her on various situations: if someone you don't know says he/she has candy in the car, what do you do? Puppies? Kittens? Trained by her powerhouse teacher Miss Brenda Julia dutifully answered no to each question, though I suspect she would waver if chocolate, a fistful of sugar, or a stick of butter--her three favorite food groups--was the lure.

As a mom, sometimes I feel that these early lessons--how to look before crossing a street and what red, yellow, and green mean--are among the most important I can impart to my kids. Certainly there are more nuanced values about lying, for instance, to pass on as well as other things down the road about drugs and sex (they'll have to teach me about rock 'n' roll). But these first conversations--all bright lines--are like an old-fashioned orange life-preserver: you can't get in the boat without them.

I know that even as a diligent parent I can't protect my kids from everything. When Sam had just turned 1, we were in a car accident caused when a woman too old to be driving ran a red light (she had perhaps forgotten that red means STOP!) and broad-sided me. The car was totaled, but Sam, our family friend/babysitter, Marguerite, and I emerged unbruised. Sam thought the crash was great fun. It was hard to accept that bad things could happen on my watch, but it did make me slightly more forgiving when bad things happened on other people's watch. (Bad is a relative term here, because I'm not talking about anything more major than rug burn or a cut over an eye, thank goodness.)

But even knowing that my ability to shield my kids from danger is limited, I am enraged by the Peanut Corp. of America's behavior. It has been a bad few weeks for Corporate America. 

John Thain's $1.2 million redecorating job came to light as did Wall Street bonuses and news that Citibank, the recipient of federal bailout dollars, is buying a new jet. All of that is inexcusable, but it's not as irresponsible as the peanut people, who knowingly distributed salmonella-laden products, killing at least eight people and sickening 550. That puts them down on a par with kidnappers and pedophiles. Worse, really, because I can't drill my kids on a threat we can't see. 

I had been thinking last week when Barack Obama rapped Wall Street's knuckles that if his plate weren't so full, he should also do the same to the peanut folks, and yesterday on the Today show, he did, suggesting that the Food and Drug Administration needs to do a better job: 

"That's what Sasha eats for lunch probably three times a week. And you know, I don't want to have to worry about whether she's going to get sick as a consequence to having her lunch." 

I have no illusions that the President wakes up and makes the sandwiches every morning, despite the Obamas' exertions to normalize the White House with Pottery Barn furniture and J. Crew clothing, according to the cover of this week's US Weekly. Nonetheless, I am glad to have a dad (a mom would be okay, too!) running the country. Perhaps our everyday concerns might get a little more attention. And though neither I nor anyone else I know personally will ever have the President's secret Blackberry address, it does make me feel that we and the Obamas are having pretty much the same conversations, if not also the same food, come dinner time. 

Notes from the Field of Momdom

This morning I was driving Julia to daycare and, as usual, we were listening to The Very Best of Sheryl Crow cranked way up. 

"Mom," Julia asked, looking sheepish: "Does Sheryl Crow have any kids?" 

"Yes," I said, "she has a baby girl," astonished that I've read enough issues of People to know. I figured J. would be pleased since she loves babies, especially of the female variety. But no. J. just wanted to establish Sheryl's bona fides because next she said: 

"I want her to be my mom." Pause. "But Sam likes you."

Where does that leave me, I wondered. Still, I had to know what's so special about Sheryl. 

Julia: "She can sing."

All I have to say is: my life ain't no disco.

Princess for a Decade; Queen for Life?

Anyone who's ever spent more than nine seconds with a three-year-old girl will know that I speak the truth when I say that in her world, everything is coming up princesses. Let's use Julia as Exhibit A. She wants to grow her hair "as long as Cinderella's." She can reel off the names of all the Disney princesses with the same facility (and sometimes more accurately) than Sam can spout Bo-Sox stats. Her movie choices run the gamut from Princess Diaries I to Princess Dairies II. For Christmas, she got a Cinderella plastic paper doll set, a Playmobil Cinderella set, a rhinestone-studded princess jewelry box, a set of tiny princess story board books, a princess dress, sparkly silver princess shoes and, since everyone knows that ballerinas are princesses in training, a leotard, tights, and ballet slippers. Mainly, she plainly states that her goal is to marry a prince (by which it is assumed she means a wealthy, handsome one).

As I write this, I think, What are her parents thinking that they would allow this toddler's values to lurch so dangerously off track? Instead of the dance class that she's starting this weekend, maybe we should hustle her off to auto mechanics class.

Thus far, her sensibility has led us the other way. Because of Julia's predilection for pink (and purple, but I can't go there), I find myself gravitating toward all things rosy hued. It was a small but, to me, noticeable act when, instead of buying black (always my default color) gloves on sale at J. Crew a few weeks ago, I went for fuschia. It reminds me of a story my friend Katy once told me about an off-the-charts sparkly pair of shoes that she once bought herself and wore relentlessly simply because they delighted her small daughter so. She says she still thinks it's one of the best investments she ever made.

I understand. Perhaps I would have settled for a sensible heel yesterday when I purchased my inaugural ball shoes. Instead, I went for a pair of towering sandles that, when I brought them home, Julia could walk in far better than I. If having a son has dredged up my love of baseball and kindled a passing interest in Star Wars, it's as if having a daughter has given me permission to unleash my feminine side. It turns out it's ferocious.

I'm confident that Julia's pink period will pass just as it did for Sam (who, when we moved into our house three years ago when he was three, was disappointed that his new baby sister got the pink room and not him). But here's the but (every blog post has one, right?) After writing about Sam as a husband in training, or H.I.T., the other day, I have to set the record straight on Julia, too: I don't want to raise a princess any more than I do a prince. And I'm wondering if the ultimate expression of the sensitive man is being able to bring home the tampons for the woman in his life, what is the equivalent for raising a strong woman? Because while it's totally fun to indulge in the princess fantasy now, it would be wrong to send a daughter who still believes off to college.

Let me know what you think makes for strong, independent daughters. I'd love to hear from you.

Tuesday Night Fever

Washington, as anyone over the age of 16 minutes can sense, is suffering from a collective anxiety these days. You'd think that our nervousness might be over the deficit that's 12 zeroes long or the full-out war in the Gaza Strip, and of course good people are fretting over both. But neither the debate over the economic stimulus nor the need for a cease fire in the Middle East is the No. 1 preoccupation in town.

At the moment Washington is not about politics with a capital P but rather a form of office politics, the central question being how far away your personal planet is from the center of the solar system--a.k.a. the president. This distance determines not just your career but also your social life, where your kids go to school, and soon, I'm sure, which rescue league your dog comes from. 

All this is to say that whether you're a Bush person or an Obama person, what you're most likely thinking about right now is how best to position yourself. After all, what Republican wants to be the one to turn out the lights as the Bushes decamp for Texas? And what Democrat wants to be left behind at the non-profit that's been a holding tank for the past eight years when there's an actual country to run instead of merely to theorize about? The anxiety is so high among some of these government wannabees that they need a stunt double* to perform the extreme and, in a few cases, extremely embarrassing, maneuvers they're trying to secure a job in the new administration. There's also a secondary mania over snagging a ticket (or two, because who really wants to go alone?) to the inauguration itself. 

Our family is so outside the outer loop of the Beltway that we're just thinking about the same things we always dwell on: what garbage bag, doll's head, potpourri pouch, Star Wars Lego has Mavis chewed up and has she peed and/or pooped in Sam or Julia's room or simply thrown up?

Still, we're all excited about January 20th, when we may get to see the 44th president sworn-in on a Jumbo-tron somewhere down on the Mall--or, more likely, on a little TV in the warmth of the Five Guys Burgers and Fries at DuPont Circle if walking to the Mall turns out to be more Sissyphean than pleasurable. (The we here means my sister, Betsy, not Ralph, who's working.)

But come Inauguration Night, hey, we're (Betsy and me again) grabbing the sequined ring and going to a ball! It's being thrown by a friend of ours, and we're dressing up to go spend an evening in high heels with our closest buddies. It might not be celebrity-studded, but it will definitely be fun. 

"It's a lesser ball," I've told those who're interested. "Truthfully," I say, "it's probably your least ball." At least that's what I thought until I was set straight today by a friend, who explained that a ball is an official event, meaning that's it's being hosted by Barack Obama or Joe Biden, while a gala is an unofficial one. 

"In that case, I guess that makes my event a gala," I said. "

"Your event is nothing," she answered.

I'm not sure, but I think what she was saying was that if I were a planet, I'd be Pluto. And yes, I think she knows that Pluto has been demoted.

*My niece recently told Sam and Julia that actors use stunt doubles for kissing in movies because, you know, they might otherwise get germs--or they might already be married.

Revenge--Even Hypothetical--Is the Best Medicine

Even though the bra-burning part of the 1960s turns out to be a myth, suffice it to say that the modern women's movement happened a long time ago, long enough, it seemed to me yesterday, that I was surprised to be treated like a woman who didn't know a nut from a bolt when I dropped off my car at the VW dealership for its 30,000-mile check-up. I shouldn't have been particularly surprised because ours is still a sexist society, starting with the way journalists sometimes wrote about Hillary Clinton during her campaign to become the Democratic presidential nominee. I mean would Mr. Hillary Clinton ever have been described in newspapers as "shrill"?

The car experience was still galling me today when I went to the doctor for my 30,000-mile check-up. Why I told my GP that in Ralph's absence Sam carried my purse onto the plane when we flew to Atlanta for the holidays to free up my arms for Julia and two carry-ons, I'm not sure. But he easily topped my story by revealing that he was 1 of 20 kids in his family and that his 5' 3" mother, who was just as formidable as she was short, called each of her 13 boys "HITs," or husbands in training. She insisted that each one learn to cook, iron, and sew. On top of that, his seven older sisters trained their baby bro to buy their tampons, right down to the embarrassing price check screamed from the back of the store to the front. It made me realize that I have a lot of fundamentals to teach Sam before he gets sucked into some kind of macho force field. (After all, at six, he still kisses his mama goodbye in public.) 

But more than that, my doc inadvertently gave me just the right salve for my anger. I can take the car somewhere else for repairs, of course, but it won't ever satisfy me as much as imagining my Martens' VW man standing in line at the CVS with an armload of tampons, waiting for a price check.

Ring in the Old

As usual, the start of the new year was accompanied by a look back, including an entertaining interview with the Bush twins in People, on Malia and Sasha Obama. But one wrap-up that utterly baffled me was the In/Out List published last week by the Washington Post. It's not only that I hadn't heard of most of the things on the "in" list, I was also clueless about most of the "out" list, proving that I'm not just out, I'm out in the standing room section of the upper bleachers. I mean "LOLcats"? "Competitive cup-stacking"? "Gourmet Toast"? "Emphasizing. Things. With. Periods."? Please. The bafflement goes on. And on.

Just when I thought I hadn't been invited to the party at all, along came the ultra-hip SundayStyles section of the New York Times, which made me feel at least somewhat vindicated. For while the Post had declared absinthe--that sickly green liquid that made everyone in Toulouse-Lautrec's day feel so sickly green--soooo last year, the Times had a front-page story on its current popularity:

There are a number of bars in New York City these days that make cocktails with absinthe, mixing it with rum or tequila or gin to, um, complement the taste. A significant portion of them are on the Lower East Side and are the kind of bars that don't have a sign or a listed phone number...

I am declaring a moratorium on in/out lists. It's not just because of my incredible investigative work revealing a Styles war. It's because I'm fatigued by the idea that everything is disposable. It's definitely a lesson that Ralph and I are trying to un-teach Sam and Julia, who, up to now, have had the same toys bought and re-bought for them. And I think we're not alone. Most people I know aren't just thinking three times before spending money, they're also thinking a time or two before throwing anything away that could possibly prove to be useful later on. This includes good ideas. And it extends to the loaf of bread on the top of the fridge, gourmet or not. (Check out the food Web site Loulies, which recently had a post on not wasting food.) 

Recycling extends to fashion, too. The same SundayStyles section, in fact, had a photo feature on pulling one's vintage designer wear out of mothballs. While I don't have a Balenciaga coat hanging in the back of my closet or anything else designer save Isaac Mizrahi for Target, I did rummage through to find a J.Crew cardigan I bought 10 years ago. (Okay, not everything weathers well.)

Along with in/out lists, I'm also putting new year's resolutions on ice. While I'm all for striving to be better, I've come to think that most resolutions aren't so new as they are another example of recycling from last year--or last decade. Lose weight. Check. Get more exercise. Check. Spend more time with the kids. Check. It's just a compilation of all the things that make us feel less than good about ourselves--or even downright guilty. 

Last night when I was flipping through the January issue of Real Simple, I came across a resolution that I could actually buy into. It's "controlling the controllables." And, while they didn't come out and say it, I will: Try not to worry--or feel guilty--about the rest.

Is Happiness the Same as Success or Do We Have to Choose?

I'm in the all-too-typical position of reading two books at once now (three, if count War and Peace, which is frozen on page 364 where I left off at the end of the summer). The first book is Ned Hallowell's CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap; the second is Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. Neither is what I'd call a great read, but I'm slogging through. 

But it didn't occur to me until last night (hair slathered in Cetaphil and covered with a plastic shower cap to "suffocate" those g-d lice is how my friend Sarah put it) how much the books are in opposition to one another. Or are they? 

In CrazyBusy, Hallowell, a former Harvard psychiatrist and ADD expert who Ralph and I recently heard speak, suggests dialing life back a notch or three. In his view, being out-of-control busy has supplanted designer handbags as the new status symbol and the yearning to get organized is just as ubiquitous as the nearly universal desire to shed a few pounds. All it will take, the chronic clutterers among us believe, is the equivalent of the next new diet to clean off our desks and clear out our kids' toy boxes, and come January or June or September, by God, it's going to happen! 

Hallowell's lecture was about the childhood roots of happiness (after his book by the same name), but his theme was much the same as CrazyBusy: don't lose sight of what's important. He stressed to a state-of-the-art private school auditorium full of stressed-out parents that dragging your child from horseback riding to ballet to baseball to math tutoring is not nearly as important as allowing him to find a passion and then letting all the connections that ripple out from that passion grow. I felt calm when I left. Sam loves baseball, and, as I've blogged about before, that obsession has been his window on the world since he was 19 months old. And Julia, I was sure that night, would eventually find something besides dressing up that makes her world spin properly on its axis. 

But Gladwell upset my zen moment. While our national narrative on success is all about pluck and how sturdy one's boot straps are, Gladwell says that success is more a function of luck

--when you're born (January babies are more likely to excel at hockey) and to whom. He describes a study by sociologist Annette Lareau, who found not only that parenting styles were "divided almost perfectly along class lines" but that the overachiever parent tends to produce the most successful kids: 

The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children's free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates. One of the well-off children Lareau followed played on a baseball team, two soccer teams, a swim team, and a basketball team in the summer, as well as playing in an orchestra and taking piano lessons.

Reading that was enough to make me want to pull off my Cetaphil-laced shower cap. That's not crazybusy, I thought. That's insane. 

Lareau calls what I think of as Xtreme parenting "concerted cultivation" and believes that the ability to "customize" your environment is one of the big keys to success. 

And so I was left wondering all over again if trips for Sam to play baseball in the Virginia and Pennsylvania suburbs will one day be necessary for his success, not as a ball player necessarily, but as a person. Should he already be taking saxophone lessons? And what about karate? And am I behind by not already signing Julia up for ballet lessons, even though, at this point for her, it's all about the leotard and the pink slippers? Should we be fanning her interest in music not by playing CDs in the car but by attending music appreciation classes? Is our mellow approach stunting our children's growth before they even get started?

I personally don't know a single parent who says, "I just want my child to be successful."  Like Ralph and me, they say, "I just want to be my child to be happy." But do we really believe that our children will be happy as cashiers or waiters or construction workers? Don't we secretly have some floor that we think they should attain in order to be happy, say waiter/struggling artist? Can you be happy without also being successful? Where do those two intertwined notions of success and happiness go their separate ways? Or do they? 

I need a little wisdom here. And a cure for head lice.

Thinking Inside the Bun

"The real source of all growth is human ingenuity..."

I don't usually go around quoting Forbes (nor do I usually read it). But when a recent issue was brought to my attention, I had to take note of the above quotation, because suddenly, as if this economically down time has called for people to reassess, I'm seeing/hearing the same idea everywhere about how creativity is THE ingredient that makes someone successful. It's a little different from the well-worn statement "Think Outside the Box"--or Taco Bell's twist, "Think Outside the Bun"--because it's not so much an exhortation as an explanation of what works.

All these thoughts came together on my dinner plate a few weeks ago, when Ralph took the family to Ray's Hell-Burger in Arlington, Va., for dinner. Just when I thought I had reached the apotheosis of hamburger-dom with the foothold gained by Five Guys in our part of the country, along came Ray (his real name is Michael Landrum), who doesn't have a line down the sidewalk outside his burger establishment at both lunch and dinner because he's thinking outside the bun, it's because he's thinking inside of it--only better. Comparing what he's done to the humble hamburger is like comparing a Bugatti to a VW Bug. They're both cars, but that's where the similarity stops. His freshly ground, hand-trimmed beef on a brioche roll topped with a choice of artisan cheeses, among other primo condiments, was a revelation to me, because I've been having the "everything under the sun has already been done" debate with Ralph for more than a decade vis a vis writing. Ralph's argument: just do it your way and people will come.

As if to prove that Hell-Burger, and therefore, Ralph's rationale, was not a fluke, along came Surfside, another new eatery, this one in Washington's Glover Park neighborhood. What the chef, David Scribner, has opened is not so much a restaurant as a commissary. You mark down your order on a sheet of paper, find your own table, and pick up your meal when the electronic gizmo they hand you lights up. But what you bite into is not cafeteria fare at all. It's fresh Tex-Mex meets Tahiti, with guacamole that arrives in huge chunks and just the right side of spicy. I didn't actually taste the seafood, but I take the Washington Post's food critic, Tom Sietsema's word that it's great. (Only Sam, who wants to start his own food blog, had a complaint, which is that the chips were too salty.) The taller among us were thrilled with the inexpensive prices, the availability of margaritas, the quality, and the fact that we were in by 5:30, out by 6:15, and on to Max's Best Ice Cream for dessert, which though it's been around for awhile, follows the same concept of doing it the same but better: you won't confuse what's in your cone with a scoop of Ede's. 

I hate it when Ralph is right! But as long as he is, I'm wondering if you've come across any examples of the same-old thing turned out-of-this-world? 

 

  

Sarah Palin and the "Post-Palate Era"

With Ralph and the kids out canvassing for Obama, this past Saturday marked the first time since Sam was born in 2002 that I was in the house, alone, without a deadline looming. And since I married a man who not only loves to cook but is also a forceful presence in the kitchen (this is my diplomatic way of saying he's a kitchen fascist), it was one of the few times since Ralph and I met that I was in charge of cooking for a dinner party. 

Is food like music, I wonder. Do we go back to the recipes we relied on when we were starting out on our own in the same way that most of us never really progress past the music we liked in high school and college? My anthem: Earth Wind and Fire's "September." My dish: Chicken Marbella. 

For anyone who doesn't know, Chicken Marbella, distinguished by the colors and flavors of prunes, green olives, and capers, comes from The Silver Palate Cookbook. One of the people who didn't know about the book was our 20-something dinner guest, who was, after all, two or three when it came out in 1982. 

But when I was in my 20s, it was THE go-to cookbook--a bridge between the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook of my mother's heyday and epicurious.com and foodchannel.com now. And for me, it was also a highly personal book, because my first apartment in New York, a furnished one-bedroom on the top floor of a five-story-walkup on West 73rd Street, was kitty-corner across Columbus Ave. from the Silver Palate, a snail's shell-size storefront that sold the same gourmet food as the cookbook set forth. Although there was nothing especially revolutionary about either the store or the book, both were emblematic of America's burgeoning food culture

--and culture, in general--in the '80s. As the authors, Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso write in the intro: 

The Silver Palate was born of two women's personal desperation. Our lives had become increasingly active and it was getting more and more difficult to juggle it all. There were school schedules, business appointments, political activities, art projects, sculpting classes, movie going, exercising, theater, chamber music concerts, tennis, squash, weekends in the country or at the beach, friends, family, fund raisers, books to read, shopping that couldn't be avoided, and, last, but not least, trying to prepare creative, well-balanced meals daily and an occasional dinner party at home. It was much too much. The wonder women we thought and were being told we were, had to acknowledge we might not be.

It certainly sounds tough! I can't imagine trying to fit squash and a sculpting class into the same day, either. Or the same month, for that matter. What does resonate is the part about being "wonder women," because I remember so well thinking then, as most of my friends did, "I'm going to have it all." I even remember writing an essay about it to get into graduate school, and whether or not it was based on the weakness of my argument, I was turned down. As time passed, but still before I had children, the phrase shifted to being, "You can't have it all at once, but you can still have it," and I thought that made a lot more sense.

But life has proved both ideals wrong for me and everyone I know--I suspect even for Sarah Palin, who has revived, and become the poster mom for, the debate. In the first case, if you have a fulfilling career, a wonderful husband, well-adjusted, well-groomed children, and Chicken Marbella on the table when you come home at night, chances are great that you are weighed down by the guilt of feeling that you're not spending enough time with your kids, who, it turns out, grow up fast and do not become well-adjusted and well-groomed on their own. In the second case, if you step out of your career or slow it down to raise your children in a more hands-on fashion, you have the nagging dread that (a) you're missing out on important work and (b) you'll never get back on track. I'm not saying anything new here, I'm just saying the dilemma has never been satisfactorily resolved.

When I told my friend Sarah (the other Sarah, that is) on Sunday that our dinner guest had never heard of The Silver Palate, she joked, "I guess it's not the post-racial era we're living in, it's the post-Palate era." 

So here's my question for the women in what I'm calling the epicurious generation--women who haven't had to make decisions yet about balancing work and family. It doesn't matter if you've never heard of The Silver Palate, but does "having it all" mean anything to you? Is there another paradigm?

You May Find Portions of This Offensive

You know how when you're thinking about buying a new car and suddenly start to notice the make of every car that's parked on the street? Or how when you're hoping to get pregnant and all you see are babies everywhere? 

This is not that. 

The other night, when I stayed up late with Sam to watch one of the playoff games between the Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays, every time the camera panned to another player or coach, he was spitting. It was like a contagion. Except it was behavior as usual. Just in case you don't get the full picture of what I'm talking about, Terry Francona, the manager of the Sox, took a sip of something from a cup--Gatorade, Sam said--and then he spit it out. 

"Why'd he do that?" I asked Sam.

Sam: "He's rinsing his mouth out."

Me (to myself): Isn't that what the bathroom sink of for?

I chew gum, drink drinks, play catch, but do I ever spit? NO! And it's not just ballplayers who do it--it's men! I can honestly say that unless a woman is trying to expel an errant insect that flew into her mouth, I have never seen the fairer sex spit. 

Maybe dads take their sons aside and tell them that spitting is a good idea, but then why does the mom message, Don't do it!, hold no sway? 

So here's my question: WHY DO MEN THINK SPITTING IS A MUST?

A Change in the World as We Know It

I'm always fascinated by signs of the times, so it was with great interest that I read a piece in yesterday's New York Times reporting that a growing number of Americans are turning to the tap for their drinking water. This back-to-the-future move, a result of consumers' efforts to cut costs and become better environmental stewards, has so affected PepsiCo's profits, that the company announced thousands of lay-offs. Is this what's meant by trickle-down economics now that we live in the post bailout world? The same day the Environmental Working Group issued a report citing contaminants in 10 brands of bottled water. So much for paying for quality.

Even this morning, as Sam and I talked over what snacks to take his class when it's our turn next week, he reminded me: "No juice, Mom. We drink water from the fountain."

I'm not a huge fan of what flows out of Washington's taps--it has too much of a chlorine aftertaste for me. And at our last house, the lead level in the water was so high that it caught Sam's pediatrician's notice well before revelations surfaced about lead pipes in several of the District's neighborhoods, including ours. 

Nonetheless I can happily imagine an evening when Ralph and I go out to dinner and our waiter assumes that we'd like regular water rather than offering us a range of slickly bottled choices in reverential tones usually reserved for the most expensive wines. 

Maybe I crave this simplicity because I grew up in Atlanta, where Coca-Cola was also born. In my world, Coke was the generic term for soda just as Kleenex stands for tissue and Xerox for photocopying. The polite host would invariably offer you a "Coke" if you dropped by, by which he or she meant anything non-alcoholic to drink, including, I believe, water. You could answer something like, "That'd be great! I'd love some ginger-ale."

At the World of Coca-Cola, yet another marketing tool for the company's soft drinks, this one slightly disguised as a museum, a number of the exhibits suggest that Coke was at least partly responsible for many of the gains our society has made in the past century, including such landmarks as civil rights. At the end of your "tour," you have the opportunity to hold out a cup into which the bubbly soda sprays from a fountain. I didn't know whether to be disgusted or delighted, but I put my cynicism aside and drank the hypothetical Kool-aid.

The only other time I've seen anything like that was when Ralph and I went to the Kentucky Derby in Louisville, Ken., several years ago. After the horses ran and we had the requisite experience of losing at the betting window, we went to a party thrown at the home of a local whiskey scion. On the wide back lawn they had set up a white-cloth-draped table on top of which sat a sterling-silver fountain of cascading mint juleps. I don't know for sure, but I'd bet people would use fewer plastic water bottles if that's what came out of their kitchen tap.  

 

Mom Wars Need a Cease Fire

Each time I hear the morning traffic report, I thank the real-estate gods that I wound up living in the middle of Washington, D.C., and don't have to navigate what's known locally as the Mixing Bowl, one of the country's most heavily congested crossroads and a gantlet required of thousands who commute into town each day from the surrounding suburbs. What's especially baffling to me are those people who have chosen to own a mega-square-foot, high-ceilinged McMansion but then, because they're so far away from EVERYTHING, wind up living in their car. It might be a really nice, luxury SUV, but it's still a car. They eat there. They email there. They raise their kids there. And last week Sam noticed a driver shaving, a spectacle that he, at 6, pronounced "pathetic." But even living a few walkable blocks from the Metro, I could relate to this post on Burbia.com called "Mommy Wars Redux: How Simone De Beauvior Rescued Me in the Suburbs," by a friend of a friend named Delia Lloyd. 

Lloyd, who lives in London, writes that the dichotomy is not so much between women who work and those who don't but rather between those two types she dubs "Prissy mom" and "earthy-crunchy mom."

One of my favorite parts is this:

"I'm not nearly put together enough for the Women's Club set (my tennis game could easily qualify me for Special Needs). Nor do I fit in with the wholesome crowd (when asked to draw my ideal birth scene in my La Maze class, I drew an epidural)." 

She could be describing me. But actually, I see the mom kingdom (queendom?) divided slightly differently into those who pack a napkin in their child's lunch, those who forget the napkin, and those who forget everything and rely on the stuff that passes for food in the school cafeteria (i.e., hyper-organized, moderately organized, and a mess). Needless to say, I fall into the latter category, and I can add that I also forget to pay for the school lunches most of thetime.

But however you categorize us, we can be pretty nasty to each other--and equally hard on ourselves, like my friend in Atlanta who says she feels constant pressure to participate more in her kids' school activities but between three children and a sick father, she's maxed out. Last year when I was Sam's room parent, I could see the guilt and relief on the other parents' faces that someone else was making the royal icing for gingerbread houses, collecting money for teacher gifts, or arranging chaperones for a field trip. I recognized the look from how I felt the year before.

Who hasn't had an eyebrow raised about her deadbeat behavior by a fellow mom or raised her own harried brow? But I say that we should stop comparing ourselves to the overachievers; in fact, let's stop comparing ourselves altogether. "What's important,"says Lloyd, "is to engage with the world in ways that matter to you, regardless of what the others are saying or doing." Mothering, after all, is not meant to be a blood sport.  

After the Greed Is Gone

My friend David R. Anderson, the rector of St. Luke's Parish in Darien, Conn., was quoted in a New York Times piece yesterday about how recent events on Wall Street are affecting "the community said to have the nation's highest percentage of residents working in financial industries." David said:

"We're all greedy. If you can acknowledge that in yourself, you can make some progress. If you want to find someone else to blame, you're probably not going to make much progress yourself."

David's eloquence aside, most of us measure progress not in how accepting we are of our sins but in terms of the money we make and how many houses, cars, private school educations, etc. we can pay for along the way. We've aimed for nobility a few times. Remember after 9/11 when we were ready to sacrifice for our country and in a move that was more Zsa Zsa Gabor than Greatest Generation, the president instead implored us to shop? 

Over the past several years it hasn't just been Congress and the White House that have encouraged us to spend. Somewhere along the way Wall Street allowed crucial social compacts to be broken and truisms like you can't get something for nothing and if something seems too good to be true, it probably is to be ignored. It used to be that if after due diligence, mortgage lenders thought a prospective borrower wasn’t up to a loan, they said no. They didn't say, We’ll look the other way while you take on more debt than you could possibly repay. Some of these borrowers should have known better. But who could blame them--us--for trying when housing seemed to be a foolproof investment, providing us with even more of those things we were hell-bent on acquiring? 

Over the past few weeks and months, we've moved from greed to something else though what, exactly, it's too soon to say. One clue is that the president went on national TV recently and instead of addressing us as consumers he spoke to us as "taxpayers," asking Americans to spare some of our "hard-earned money" for Wall Street. In my small way at home (which we bought in 2005, just before the market crested), I'm on a new kick to make do with what we have. We have too much. It was a telling moment when I threw away three contractor bags full of puzzles and games missing too many pieces to salvage and my children didn't notice that a single toy was gone. Yesterday Sam went to a fellow 6-year-old's birthday party not with the customary Star Wars Lego set but a gift certificate for a Kiva micro-loan so that a farmer in Nicaragua can buy a pig. Sam and Julia will probably have a lot to say about how weird their mom and dad are when they get a little older. And the pig farmer is just the start.