Bowl o’ Cherriesbowl o’ cherries

Tomorrow, May 1, is D-Day for high school seniors.  All those who have been put through brutal application and acceptance processes, these kids who have a new appreciation for the concept of a “wait list,” will have to make up their minds.  By tomorrow, they’ve got to fill out paperwork and mail deposits into the colleges of their choice.  This is it.

I’m hearing from family and friends how hard it is to balance feelings of pride and delight against the sadness of upcoming loss as their kids make these sometimes tough decisions. I spoke on the phone last night with my sister-in-law who lives in Virginia. Her daughter — my niece — has decided to start school next September in California.  A beloved friend in San Diego is coming to terms with her son’s decision to head to Boston. The silver lining is that we’ll have more opportunities to visit, but that doesn’t ease her heartache at having her son leave home in such a definitive way. And I am struggling with the implications of one of my kids’ decision to attend boarding school in New Hampshire in the fall.  Distance.  Life as we know it is about the change dramatically.

My sister-in-law, my friend, I — we are all members of the tail end of the Baby Boom.  We have all made choices to curtail professional ambitions so that we’ve been able to have more time with our growing children. Sociologists and gender analysts in a few decades will surely have a field day when they pick apart our lives.  I shudder to think what they will conclude.  Here on the ground, in the moment, what I see is a desire for deep connection with family.  A friend has told me since her kids were born that her greatest accomplishment will be if her kids want to come home for Thanksgiving when they are grown.  I think she speaks for an entire generation.

I don’t know if our desire for proximity and reciprocity among our growing children is good or bad.  Don’t know if it’s mostly about us or our kids.  Do we want something for them that we didn’t have? Is this deep-seated desire yet another manifestation of the narcissism of our generation?

NBC has tapped into these complicated feelings with its new drama Parenthood. The show airs Tuesdays at 10 PM Eastern Time.  It chronicles the ins and outs of the Braverman clan — two aging Early Boomer parents, their four mid-life Late Boomer kids, and their six growing grandchildren.  Each episode is studded with scenes in which adult children gather to celebrate even the smallest extended family happenings. The camera lovingly films the extended clan gathered at a local park to cheer on one of the kid’s baseball games.  It shows the entire family in a public pool as the youngest member successfully swims for the first time.   The Bravermans all grapple with demons.  None is perfect.  But none suffers alone. They share their imperfections, seeking each others’ advice in person and on the phone.  They take comfort in their ability to drop by each others’ homes and offices. Their lives are tightly braided together, and the show’s writers demonstrate again and again that this mostly brings the characters deep satisfaction.

I have come to think of Parenthood as family porn.  We Late Boomers who feed our children slow food at family suppers want more time with the people we have raised to adulthood.  And just as they are heading off to have their own adventures like so many tufts on a dandelion, we crave stories about families who choose to live in proximity.  The cameras filming Parenthood linger over the faces of siblings who choose to babysit each others’ children and attend their birthday parties.  We grew up watching Dynasty and Dallas, night time soap operas about the evil machinations of family members hell-bent on destroying each others’ lives.  Now we are hungry for shows that allow us to fantasize about the essential goodness of kin and connection. If we can’t have our own family suppers, at least we can watch the Bravermans enjoying theirs.

While Lily was hanging out Sunday at Smith College, getting a sense of what it means to attend an all-women’s institution in the 21st century, I was reading Hilary Mantel’s autobiography, Giving Up the Ghost (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2003). Mantel recently won the Mann Booker Prize for her brilliant, challenging novel about Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall. The book so intrigued me that I pulled everything of Mantel’s from my branch library’s shelves. The autobiography was among the haul and proved to be a fortuitous read on this particular trip.

Mantel was studying law in her late teens and early twenties, first at the London School of Economics, then, following her geologist husband, at Sheffield University. She described her disappointment with Sheffield: “one of my tutors was a bored local solicitor who made it plain that he didn’t think women had any place in his classroom.” (153) Mantel’s comment on her tutor’s approach to women’s education is worth sharing:

Some people have forgotten, or never known, why we needed the feminist movement so badly. This was why: so that some talentless prat in a nylon shirt couldn’t patronize you, while around you the spotty boys smirked and giggled, trying to worm into his favor. The birth control revolution of the late sixties had passed our elders by — educators and employers both.  It was assumed that marriage was the beginning of a woman’s affective life, and the end of her mental life.  It was assumed that she neither could nor would exercise choice over whether to breed; poor silly creature, no sooner would her degree certificate be in her hand before she’d cast all that book learning to the winds, and start swelling and simpering and knitting bootees. When you went for a job interview, you would be asked, if you were not wearing a wedding ring, whether you were engaged; if you were engaged or married, you would be asked when you intended to ’start your family.’ Whether you were celibate, or gay, or just a sensible preplanner, you had to smile and jump through the flaming hoops held up for you by some grizzled ringmaster, shifty and semi-embarrassed as he asked a girl half his age to tell him about her sex life and account for her next ovulation. (153-154)

I wish Mantel had kept her verb tense in the present: why we need the feminist movement so badly. The fight’s not over. Here’s a not-so-subtle statistic I learned during the information session at Smith: at women’s colleges, women hold 100% of all leadership positions. At peer institutions, men hold 90% of all leadership positions. Lily will decide what she’ll decide when it comes to college. Meanwhile, if I had it to do all over again, I’d be inclined to explore women’s colleges with an open mind.

Mantel titled her memoir “Giving Up the Ghost” as a way to refer to the process she went through as she coped with surgical menopause and subsequent infertility. She was diagnosed with endometriosis in her late 20s. Her illness would end her law career, opening the way for her fiction writing but closing her path to parenthood.  ’Twould have been excellent if she’d added in one sentence about the importance of not giving up the ghost when it comes to feminism.

Every Sunday, I can’t wait to read The Boston Globe Magazine’s column “Dinner with Cupid.” Globe staff set up blind dates from a pool of folks who apply to eat supper with a stranger.  The participants get asked a set of questions: if you were stranded on a desert island, what would you want? what was your best date ever? why are you a catch? when are you happiest?  The answers to these questions are up top.  The blow-by-blow of the actual date follows underneath and ends with a post-mortem.  The daters grade their experience.

The grades aren’t usually very high — usually in the B range.  Participants don’t usually want to go out again — or, if they do, just as friends. It’s obvious up top why staffers make the matches.  You know — the guy markets wine, the woman is a chef…the man’s a grad student, the gal’s a teacher.  Even with the similar interests, the participants almost always say the chemistry just isn’t there.  One date, and it’s over.

My refrain most weeks is that these people need to go on a few more dates before they give their final answer.  I met my husband on a blind date — the only one either of us had ever been on.  He knew right away.  For me, it took a while.  (Maybe it’s still taking a while….) I’ve thought as I’ve read these weekly date reports that the reason things never work out is that this generation expects things to move fast or not at all. I changed my mind, though, this past Sunday.  The participants finally clicked. The guy (internet ad exec) and gal (asst food and beverage mgr) both gave the date an A+. But why?  Was it just instant “chemistry” — or something more?

Just read the participants’ answers to those up-top questions, and it’s clear why things worked.  If stranded on a desert island, the gal would want: “Peach Snapple, sunglasses, and a bathing suit.”  The guy is happiest when “Riding his bike up a hill or surfing.”  If all it takes to make ya happy is a Peach Snapple and pair of sunglasses…it’s a hell of a lot easier to find a mate.  The guy reported seeing the gal and concluding that she was “stunning and confident.”  I looked at her photo — in the magazine, online — and though she’s nice enough looking, I wouldn’t call her a stunner.  But if you’re the kind of person who can be made happy by a bike ride uphill…why not?

So, it’s not just sticking with it, not just giving it time. The key to happiness is low expectations, so say the wise.  The key to happiness is wanting what you have. The key to happiness is Peach Snapple.

I was predisposed to like Judith Warner’s new book, We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010). I read it and had a visceral, negative reaction. I couldn’t put my finger on what bugged me. Two weeks passed, and I still couldn’t sort out my thoughts. I sat down with the book again yesterday, and now I can explain.

Like the more than 60 families Warner interviewed in We’ve Got Issues, my family has children who have needed medication.  I, like so many of these parents, have struggled to come to terms with the implications of medicating kids for diagnoses that 30 years ago would have gone unseen, let alone untreated. In fact, they did go unseen and undiagnosed in my extended family, and the attendant wreckage and dysfunction have been profound. My mantra concerning medicating children for mental illness has evolved to this: it is far scarier to contemplate what things will be like if the meds don’t work than if they do. Hence my predisposition to read Warner’s book with a favorable eye.

We’ve Got Issues is a combination conversion narrative, memoir, and reportorial expose.  I wasn’t sure how I felt about Warner situating herself at the center of the book, but I thought I understood the strategy.  She was outing herself as a card-carrying member of the opposition, one of the judgmental parents certain that kids these days are helpless pawns. Warner started her project, originally called UNTITLED on Affluent Parents and Neurotic Kids, ready to lambaste “the whole archipelago of therapy and tutoring and labeling and medication” (7). She was prepared to delve into the “social construction of disease,” assuming that overly anxious, ambitious parents were incapable of accepting their children’s imperfections and therefore labelling less-than-perfect behaviors as pathologies.  She was set to dine out on stories about the way Big Pharma fed these anxieties, making gazillions shoveling anti-depressants and untested anti-psychotics into the mouths of babes.  Warner stepped out of her comfort zone to attend a meeting billed as “Should I Worry?” The stories she heard at this meeting in a church basement made it difficult and eventually impossible for her to continue with her stated project. Here were parents describing interactions with out-of-control children who were destined for disaster. Diagnosis, treatment, and medication were saving lives.

Warner’s conversion moment came when she encountered a sentence the left-leaning French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had penned: “Mental illness is the revolt that the free organism in its total entity invents in order to live in an unbearable situation.” She confessed that she’d been inhaling these kinds of ideas for decades:  ”‘Theory’ was like a religion to me” (25). It was time, she decided, to grow up. How could she swallow theory whole when the concrete experience of suffering precluded the validity of the musings of Lacanians and deconstructionists and Marxists? The theorists were engaging in “foolish, inhuman, cruel” thinking, leading her to “deconsruct kids’ diagnoses by analyzing them symbolically” (27). She stopped bashing psychiatrists and started listening to families in the trenches, and she hoped that others sympathetic to left-leaning cultural criticism would join her in her new religious affiliation.  She also hoped that families living through what she was describing would find solace, validation, even community in her book.

Other reviewers have taken Warner to task for her approach. Did she, in fact, have this come-to-Jesus moment, or was the conversion merely a brilliant marketing strategy?  If Warner cared so much about evidence, why did she focus narrowly on family stories instead of digesting scientific research?  You can click here, here, here, and here for generally favorable summaries and reviews.

So, why my hesitation in giving Warner kudos? What’s holding me back, given the fierce struggles my husband and I have fought to help our families? As she set out her research methods, Warner explained that she had interviewed “psychiatrists, psychologists, parents of kids with autism, Asperger’s, ADHD, anxiety disorders, OCD, bipolar disorder, dyspraxia, dyslexia, and sensory integration issues — in short, the range of disorders that I had once dismissed as ‘fashionable maladies.’ (And that I will, from here on, refer to as ‘mental disorders,’ ‘mental health disorders,’ ‘mental health issues,’ or ‘mental illnesses’” (27-28). She makes this elision again on pages 35-37.  Since when has “dyslexia” — an umbrella term covering difficulties with decoding, fluency, and spelling written language — been considered a mental illness? And though ADD and AD/HD were, in the dark ages, referred to as “minimal brain damage,” scientists these days think of this condition as a brain difference and a learning disorder.  Dyspraxia — a neuromuscular problem — a mental illness? Come on!

It’s true that cutting edge researchers are exploring whether many of these conditions are “spectrum disorders.” That is to say, scientists wonder whether there is a genetic relationship between, for instance, ADHD, OCD, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.  Families with members who have any of these syndromes are more likely to have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren who inherit variations of these syndromes. Scientists want to know if similar neurotransmitters or genetic mutations are involved. By conflating these conditions, Warner does a terrible disservice to the field of neurology and to the people — children, in particular — who are living (and living well) with “issues.”

When I returned to Warner’s book, I was struck by her description of the process by which she initially got her book contract for UNTITLED.  Her editor and publisher were so taken by her as a personality and writer that they green-lighted her idea. I am curious to know if they took a similar approach to the manuscript.  Who reviewed it?  Did no one along the way object to Warner’s approach to “mental illness?” It’s hard for me to believe that anyone working in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, neurobiology, or education wouldn’t have challenged this manuscript.

Last: by putting herself at the center of her book, Warner blurred the lines between insider and outsider.  She wanted to maintain distance and objectivity so that she could report stories that might be unfamiliar to many readers.  But she committed the cardinal sin of the outsider who wants to pass, by way of empathy, as an insider.  She made a careless, even harmful mistake that no insider, no one who actually lives with “these kids” and “these issues” would ever make. And while there is much to praise in Warner’s new book, I can’t forgive her. I hope, when the book goes to paperback, she will revisit the construction of her definition and make a few critically important changes.

Martha Coakley lost the Democratic Senate seat to Republican Scott Brown last week. The vote was close: 52 to 47 percent. The stunner was that a Republican could win, even with a four-point margin, in a supposed blue-state stronghold. This is not news.  What national leaders have made of this victory in the ensuing week, meanwhile, deserves scrutiny.

GOP Conference Chair Mike Pence concluded after the election that the American people had spoken through the people of Massachusetts, telling Washington that “enough is enough.”   Just to be perfectly clear, that’s not the message I sent. I’m American. And I voted, too.

I thought, a year ago, when I trained down to Washington to hear Barack Obama take his oath of office, that at last I could lift my voice, and the sound of my voice would be recognizably American for the first time in a long time. Today, reading the front page of The New York Times a week after the election, I realized that was a brief, dreamy moment. The people I voted for, the people I sent to Washington, the people who are supposed to be my voice in government, have abandoned the message I sent them to deliver and the work I wanted them to get done.

Look at what Senate majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had to say about the Democratic Party’s brand new take on health care reform. “We’re not on health care now. We’ve talked a lot about it in the past.  There is no rush.”  No rush?  Hey, Harry! I voted to rush!

I kept reading, only to receive the second in a one-two punch.  Senator Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., sounded a death knell for effective government regulation of carbon emissions.  ”Realistically, the cap-and-trade bills in the House and the Senate are going nowhere.  They’re not business-friendly enough, and they don’t lead to meaningful energy independence.”  And why does Sen. Graham get to thumb his nose now? “Reality is hitting, and the reality is the American people are interested in jobs, not extreme legislation.”  That answer from Larry Nichols, CEO of Devon Energy and chair of the American Petroleum Institute. Nichols may head an organization with the word “American” in it, but I can assure you, he doesn’t speak for me.

Barry, Harry, Larry? Listen up. I am American. I voted for you.  And this is the message I’m sending to Washington today, hours before the president is set to deliver the State of the Union:

Leaving health care unreformed, allowing the insurance industry to continue flushing a chunk of the GDP down the toilet every year, that’s not business friendly.  And kissing cap-and-trade goodbye? You will be rich and powerful enough for the rest of your lives to afford the platinum version of health insurance. When you’ve had your third bypass surgeries and all your joints replaced, and you are sitting in rockers on the front porches of your vacation homes, I’d like you to explain to my great-grandchildren why there aren’t any more polar bears.  Please remember to tell them that back in 2010 you were too chicken to listen to the American people who voted you into office and told you they were ready for change.

Dear Tiger,

I owe ya one.  You have given me the best holiday gift a mother of teenage boys could ask for. I take no pleasure from your suffering.  At the same time, I am grateful to you for screwing (up) so publicly.

You went to Stanford because you could play a great round of golf.  Your link-ability got you famous.  That fame got you a thin Swedish supermodel wife and two perfect children. You got really really rich, earning a billion dollars between 1996 and November 27, 2009, when you had your car accident.  By then, we could get a Tiger Woods golfing watch (it’s really light and can withstand a big “G” spot, I mean force), and Gatorade Tiger (if you drink it, you, too, can really swing).  In short, you, dubbed “the world’s most marketable athlete,” schooled us all in the fine art of getting.

I fear that the ones you schooled best are teenage boys.  Mine have grown up thinking that to be successful, their faces should grace ads for sporty cars, credit cards, and breakfast cereals. They’ve known that making it means not just getting a bunch of stuff but having the stuff named for them. And all for whacking a ball around country club green grass.

Meanwhile, their dad has been commuting to his government job on a bicycle.  He comes home for dinner, makes bad jokes, and, when possible, attends their soccer games, tennis matches, and music concerts.  It has been clear for a very long time that they will not live to see a sports drink named for their pa.

I never buy The New York Post, but I brought home a copy yesterday and left it on the kitchen table.  ”Tiger’s Sex Texts” the headline trumpeted. “Another day, another bombshell!” The boys were standing over the tabloid cackling before I could ask them to empty the dishwasher.

“Can you believe this?” one said.

“Wait, is this real?” said the other.  ”Or did someone just make this stuff up?”

Essential questions about most everything having to do with you, Tiger.  So I offer my sincere thanks for creating this golden opportunity to talk to my boys about who, as high school juniors, they think they’re supposed to be and what it means, at the close of 2009, to be a successful American man.

Thanksgiving has come and gone.  My kids are not quite half way through their junior year of high school.  PSAT scores are wending their way to the house.  If only Harry Potter’s Hedwig would deliver the College Board’s first official judgment, infusing a bit of fun and magic here at the starting gate of Upper Middle Class College Admissions Hysteria (to be followed later by Upper Middle Class Wedding Hysteria).   Anxiety has predictably been rising this autumn. Grades on tests and papers have seemed even more important than ever.  And I decided yesterday after a particularly awful week of UMCCAH that I am resigning from my role as Nagger-in-Chief.  I mean it.  I quit.

I don’t want to compromise kids’ privacy, so I won’t tell you much about what’s been going on. Suffice it to say that I have reached a point where I am convinced that the best thing I can do is butt out. The supports are in place.  So are the consequences.  If I write here that I truly don’t care if the kids start college in 2011, will you believe me?  If I tell you that I honestly do not care where they go, will you think I’m just trying to sound a little boho chic?  It matters to me that they find something they can work hard at and that they find people who will love them.  I care that they are able to live independently and that they are physically and mentally sound.  It would be really nice if they’d love each other and want to come home for Thanksgiving.  And anything beyond that is, well, gravy.

What does this mean on a practical level?  I haven’t been getting anyone out of bed in the mornings for almost a year. Best step I ever took. From here on out, I’m not going to ask when papers are due, if anyone has studied for a test, if they’ve got the poster board they need for an upcoming project.  Yesterday was the first day of my new life, and as soon as I’d made my resolve, I was able to sit down and write half a script for a radio piece.  My heart slowed a few beats.  I told my kids about my plan, and we had an honest discussion.  We sat down to supper — late.  They looked across the table at me and smiled.

I’m getting the kids ready for college.  Not by writing essays for them (which I would never do anyway).  Not by reminding them to fill out forms.  Not by shoving SAT course prep books down their throats.  I’m getting them ready to assume responsibility for themselves and their actions. Of course, if they ask me for help, that’s a whole different matter.

Back in Brookline, missing the hell out of the beach, and the kids started 11th grade today. President Obama gave a great speech to the nation’s school children. Everybody’s got homework already.  I hope they work hard and find much of their study meaningful.  Is that too much to ask?

Along those lines, I share with you “A Learner’s Bill of Rights,” a brilliantly articulated manifesto that Kirsten Olson uses to begin her new book, Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture (New York and London: Teachers College Press, 2009). Olson’s ideas and feelings are passionate and ring true.  If kids have the wobbles in these early days of the school year, share with them the following:

A Learner’s Bill of Rights

by

Kirsten Olson

Every learner has the right to know why they are learning something, why it is important now, or may be important to them someday.

Every learner has the right to engage in questioning or interrogating the idea of “importance” above.

Every learner has the right to be confused and to express this confusion openly, honestly, and without shame.

Every learner has the right to multiple paths to understanding a concept, an idea, a set of facts, or a series of constructs.

Every learner has a right to understand his or her own mind, brain wiring, and intellectual inclinations as completely as possible.

Every learner has the right to interrogate and question the means through which his or her learning is assessed.

Every learner is entitled to some privacy in their imagination and thoughts.

Every learner has the right to take their imagining and thinking seriously.

I’ve been blogging this summer — but not here, on Bowl o’ Cherries.  I’m keeping a blog for WCAI, the NPR affiliate for Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket.  The blog’s called “The Outer Space,” because I’m spending the summer covering stories on the Outer Cape (roughly Orleans to Provincetown).  Come find me, and leave me a comment:

http://wcaioutercape.wordpress.com/

WCAI is a great radio station.  It relies on a small staff to produce features and investigative spots.  Because it’s based in Wood’s Hole, home of the famous oceanographic institute, the station features a wide array of science and marine stories.  WCAI is also home to Mindy Todd’s “The Point,” a daily 1/2-hour live call-in show.  Mindy does the show without a producer — amazing to me after spending the spring at WBUR’s On Point, which has a staff of 10+.

I’m so excited to be working as a radio reporter.  No ambivalence whatsoever.  And the timing couldn’t be better.  Just as I’m learning to push the buttons on digital recorders and editing software, the kids are learning to push buttons on their own alarm clocks and test their independence.  They are all doing interesting things this summer, each taking emotional, intellectual, and physical risks.  I’m getting a chance to do a bit of that myself.  Lucky, lucky me.

What’s the right answer?  A teenager with LD issues, especially organization, is struggling. How much to intervene?  I don’t have a right answer.  I know that “always” isn’t right.  And I know that “never” isn’t right, either.  It’s the in-between that’s so confusing to me right now.

I’ve had a jam-packed week of these quandaries.  I don’t know whether I’ve done a good job or whether I need to make a sizable contribution to the kids’ lifetime therapy funds.  Maybe I’ll never know.

Sam overslept and missed his ride to school Tuesday.  By 1, when I hadn’t heard from him, I began to worry.  He didn’t answer the home phone or his cell.  Lily hadn’t seen him at school. Neither had the dean of students.  I walked home quickly from work to check on him.  I was out of breath as I opened the back door into the kitchen.  There was Sam, looking as if he’d been tossed around in the dryer half dozen times, eating an ice cream sandwich.  ”What are you doing?” I barked.  ”Eating an ice cream sandwich,” he blinked. Sam got himself to school in time to get homework assignments and learn his penance: a 9 AM Saturday study hall for two hours. And if he has any more unexcused absences, he could lose credit or even be suspended.  Mark and I disagreed in our approach but ultimately spoke in one voice.  We told Sam everybody makes mistakes, we still love him (this of course elicited much eye rolling), that we believe in him so much that we know he can handle the lumps, and that we wanted to hear his thoughts about making sure he didn’t oversleep again.  Told him he’d have to re-schedule the community service he had signed up for. And let him know he’d be responsible for paying for the cabs he’d need to get him from the T station to school and back. This proved to be a more difficult part of the deal.  He lost his wallet two days later.

Lily, meanwhile, has been struggling with a science class at school.  Large volume of reading. Hundreds of terms to learn.  Dyslexia and ADD don’t make this easy, but Lily was bound and determined to manage the material.  And she did very well on the test.  I spoke with the head of the skills center about what I thought was an inappropriate load and approach, she encouraged me to speak to the teacher, so I asked to talk. Awful conversation ensued.  The teacher was defensive and angry with me for intervening.  I knew it was going to be a bad interaction when she asked, near the beginning of the call, “Don’t you want your daughter to learn human physiology?”  My whole reason for getting involved was to ask the teacher to make it possible for Lily to really learn.  Lily’s advisor got involved.  We talked on the phone.  That was another bad conversation. And the result was that the advisor recommended Lily move down a level next year in science, even though the previous three weeks she’d been badgering Lily to sign up for the higher level of science.  I got Lily to schedule an appointment to speak with her advisor one-on-one.  They did talk, but I don’t know that Lily felt much better in the end.  I had tried to help.  I made things worse.  Should I have said and done nothing at all?  Maybe.

And then Max.  In love with power struggles.   Auditions are in a week for his jazz orchestra.  He is barely preparing.  When I came home yesterday to find him parked, at 4 PM, in front of XBox Live (Oh, how I hate you, XBox Live), I erupted.  He beats a path to the basement to get onto his gizmo, when the dog’s not walked, the dishwasher isn’t emptied, and his trumpet lies silent.  ”I hate practicing,” he tells me.  ”It’s not fun.”  I sputter about “fun.”  I remind him that he has a real gift on this instrument.  I ask him if he just figures it’s easier not to practice and conclude that he’s not good enough to give it is all and fail.  ”I can’t even play the high notes,” he snarls.  ”The whole thing is stupid.”  ”Stupid” being the code word for a host of deep boy adolescent feelings, none of which is “stupid” in the least.  I am completely torn.  If I nag, will Max do even less?  If I say nothing, and he does nothing, is that irresponsible of me, since he has a hard time staying focused and dealing with long-term rewards?  If I try to engage him on what it means in life to tackle the “high notes,” will he put his fingers in his ears and hum? 

I don’t want to helicopter parent.  I want my children to stand on their own two feet.  I want to believe in logical, natural consequences.  How much is LD?  How much is adolescence?  I try to decide on a case -to-case basis.  But sometimes I feel like I can’t find my way out of the forest bounded on one side by “always” and the other by “never.”