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.

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.

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.

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.”

I was feeling exceptionally sorry for myself this morning.  Sad and dreary.  Low and teary.   I cancelled our Passover seder because Max has been sick.

Max came home Monday afternoon saying he “felt like shit.”  Pale face.  Glassy eyes.  Wickedly sore throat, he reported.  A quick date with the thermometer revealed a fever of 101.6.   Sixteen year olds don’t generally run those kinds of fevers.  And Max hasn’t had more than an occasional cold all year.  He tucked himself into bed and slept, on and off, until morning.  

When I woke Max yesterday, he still had the high fever and sore throat.  He’d had his tonsils out when he was 7, but I knew he could still have strep throat.  And given that we were preparing to host a modestly sized seder at which we’d have two guests at opposite ends of the life spectrum, I figured I ought to have him tested.  The receptionist at our pediatrician’s office took pity on me and squeezed in Max so that I could still get to work, albeit a little late.  The pediatrician confirmed the fever, ogled the scarlet throat, and did a quick strep test. It was negative, so she sent out for a long test.  For now, the verdict is that the bug is viral.

With a heavy heart, I called all of my seder guests and warned them off.  Could not in good faith expose a 3 1/2-week-old baby or an 88-year-old woman to a high fever.  I knew other guests would be visiting elderly relatives over the weekend, and so I alerted them, as well.  

I look forward to seder with absolutely no ambivalence.  The message of Passover, of freedom, always resonates.  We celebrate spring.  The haggadah offers a chance to retell one of the great stories of the Western world.   We eat the soul of soul food.  And we gather with friends whom I adore.   Since Mark isn’t Jewish, it’s mattered to me to celebrate with others of the tribe who have deep connections to the rituals that make up the chord of my own life.    

So, to cancel seder brought me a sense of loneliness and loss that I can’t quantify.  I woke early this morning and felt disconnected, dejected.  Mark had tried cheering me last night.  ”We’ll have seder just the five of us.  It’s still a seder.”  I couldn’t get there.  The work of getting ready seemed unsatisfying, even insurmountable.

I sat down to work for a few hours this morning but couldn’t settle. My  mind wandered to mundane tasks.  I sent a text message to Max’s cell phone to remind him to register for orchestra auditions.  At about 10 my cell phone buzzed.  Max had texted back: “ok.  are you at home.”  

I replied: “Yes.  Are you awake?”  

“no im asleep but still texting you.”  

“That’s what I thought.”

“do you want to go to zaftigs.  i dont have a fever.”

“Come down and make eye contact, please.”

Down he came, still pale, but not looking like death.  If he wanted to go out to eat,  would he agree to change over the kitchen for pesach?  Nope.  We sparred for a bit.  Max said he’d help bag all the forbidden foods if I’d do it with him.  We agreed that we would work in tandem after our meal, but that Max would have to come along on a few errands, as well.

Max has mostly been snarling at me of late.  He and I, we haven’t been able to make it to our regularly scheduled Tuesday morning breakfasts at Zaftig’s, a favorite local deli, for almost a month.  So we started our late breakfast in the restaurant this morning not sure what to say to each other.  Where was the thread of our conversation?  After a few false steps, we settled in. Sports, video games, my teaching, stories of one of the guys in a documentary I worked on last fall, politics and military actions in Africa, and so on.  What a gift to exchange information without emotional charge.  Just to be sitting at the same table, breathing the same air, and not fighting….

Max came with me as I returned library books.  He strode along, he more than half a foot taller than I, as we stopped by the liquor store for a bottle of Manischewitz.  And when we came home, he pulled out plastic bags and the vacuum cleaner so that we could make quick work of the cupboards.  Without complaint, he walked garbage bags filled with pasta and flour into the basement and brought up grocery bags filled with matzoh, potato chips, toasty coconut marshmallows, and fruit slices.  We finished the job together with nary a cross word.

I hate to type this, but the glands in my neck are tender, and I’m trying to decide if I have a scratchy throat.  This virus — a plague not on the list afflicting the Egyptians — may be a blessing in disguise.  I can’t say what it will feel like tonight as we sit down with haggadahs.  I’m grateful to have had a few hours with Max today, who, had he been healthy, would have spent his day at school.  

And I have an idea for the Afikomen tonight.  I’m going to make the kids hide it this year for Mark and me to find.  And everybody — all five of us — will get a prize.

Two articles in this morning’s newspapers speak to one another — but they don’t know it.  

One is a fascinating piece in today’s Boston Globe focusing on the genetics of an aggressive form of colon cancer. 

Another in The New York Times’ Business section counsels readers how to get health insurance when they’re already dealing with pre-existing conditions.  

The Globe piece highlights genetic research linking descendants of one almost-Mayflower family who suffer from a deadly form of colon cancer.  Scientists combed genealogical archives to piece together the puzzle linking families in New York and Utah.  Now that they’ve isolated the genetic mutation giving carriers a 2 in 3 lifetime chance of developing the cancer, scientists can offer aggressive screening practices in hopes of helping carriers catch nascent tumors before they’ve spread.

The Times piece counsels readers how best to hang onto coverage when they have what insurers euphemistically call “pre-existing conditions,” or medical conditions that existed before application for health insurance.  The definition includes conditions for which patients have sought coverage in the previous six months.  Insurance companies in 44 states may either deny coverage or charge more to those deemed to have a “pre-existing condition” at the time they apply for health insurance.

Most insurance companies — but not all - can’t exclude based on the results of genetic testing. They can, however, deny coverage if applicants actually suffer from the disease for which they’ve been tested.  The thinking, apparently, is that insurance companies don’t want people waiting to sign up for policies after they’ve already become ill. That’s too expensive.  Instead, they want healthy people in their pools.  They are insuring against the potential for future illness.

I suppose some of this makes sense if you squint really hard.  Perhaps these kinds of rules would have been appropriate in the 1930s, when Blue Cross (hospital insurance) and Blue Shield (physicians’ services) were founded.  American health costs were relatively low.  There was no such thing as genetic medicine.  I’m not sure there even was such a thing as a pre-existing condition back then. (I don’t know when insurance companies formulated the concept of “pre-existing conditions” and couldn’t find a history on the web — would be grateful to learn more from those with answers.)

Without a doubt, though, the concept of “pre-existing conditions” makes no sense in the twenty-first century, when advances in genetics change our understanding of health. If, for instance, a person is battling invasive colon cancer, carries the colon cancer mutation identified in the Globe article, and has no health insurance, how is it possible to pinpoint a time when she or he would not have had a pre-existing condition?  The genetic abnormality was there, lying in wait, from the moment of conception. 

I guess this begs an epistemological question.  With many types of illness, knowing what we know about mutations and genetic predisposition, is it still possible to demarcate a before and after with certainty?  Is there just one, long, unbroken line of “condition” stretching back to the original mutant?  If so, how can insurers continue to craft policy based on the concept of “pre-existing” conditions?

For me, this isn’t just an exercise in hypothetical thinking.  I carry the BRCA-2 mutation, conferring about an 80% lifetime risk of developing breast cancer.  I’ve reduced my risk with surgery, but with three teenagers, my worry is not over.  It seems enough to worry about whether or not my kids will be carriers.  It is almost unbearable to have to worry if they will be able to get health insurance because of a genetic predisposition or pre-condition.  I want the Obama administration to bring insurance companies to their knees on this one: no more language about pre-existing conditions when it comes to coverage.  Of course, if we have universal coverage, none of us will need to worry about this concept again.  

I feel like a killjoy when I talk about possible career paths and jobs with my kids.  ”Whatever you pick,” I tell them, “just make sure it comes with health insurance.”  What a terrible way to talk with young people on the brink of hatching plans and dreaming dreams.

There hasn’t been much in the news of late to inspire hope, despite Barack Obama’s assumption of office.  He warned us in his inauguration speech.  He was right.  Unemployment continues to rise, there is still war in the Middle East, people in positions of power — no matter their political affiliation — still don’t seem to understand that, as the newly minted senator for Illinois warned us, “one day a peacock, the next a feather duster.”

And yet.  Three times this week men publicly did the unthinkable.  They apologized.  This gives me great hope.

Barack Obama led the way.  ”I screwed up,” he said over and over again.  He took full responsibility for having pushed nominees toward confirmation even after it was clear they had broken the president’s declaration that there would be no tolerance for even the appearance of impropriety in his administration.  Next thing I knew, Jehuda Reinharz, president of Brandeis University, was apologizing for deciding to sell off artworks in the campus’s Rose Art Museum.  ”I take full responsibility for causing pain and embarrassment in both of these matters.  To quote President Obama, ‘I screwed up.’”  Most astonishing of all, Elwin Wilson, a white man who reveled in his own supposed white supremacy, apologized to African American Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis for having beaten him to a bloody pulp 48 years ago.  ”I just told him I was sorry,” Wilson told reporters this week

Just.

As if this were some small thing.

Any one of you lucky enough to parent knows how big a thing apology is.  ”Hard” doesn’t begin to describe the task of teaching children to “say sorry.”  They certainly do not emerge from the womb equipped to take responsibility for their actions and repair the emotional damage they leave in their wake.  Who hasn’t heard a small child mutter, “sorry,” chin tucked to chest, eyes darting side to side, torn between furious self-pity and a desire to please authority?  Who hasn’t watched teenagers threatened with the revocation of privileges shuffle from foot to foot as they coughed out the most insincere of “sorries?”  

Getting these wily ones to stand firm, meet a gaze, confess, and apologize is one of the hardest things I have labored to achieve in my life.  Maybe that’s because I came from a family that settled disputes by fist and fiat.  Since I didn’t know how to set things right when I married (and neither did Mark), we’ve both had to work on cultivating civility and extending apologies.  A good read: Douglas Stone, et. al., Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (NY; Penguin Books, c1999).  Also helpful: the Buddhist concept of “right speech.”  Is it true?  Is it helpful?  If not, don’t say it.  I’m guessing that Barack Obama’s mother and grandmother didn’t need books.  They knew most of the stuff already - and it helped them do an exceptionally good job raising him.  Ditto Michelle Obama’s mom.  

The single most effective way to teach children to apologize is to do it ourselves.  When we say we goofed, when we deploy those powerful words of apology, when we move beyond facts into the realm of emotion and connect our actions to others’ feelings, we show our kids how to heal wounds we have inflicted.  We demonstrate that it’s possible to make really big mistakes and still love and be loved, introducing into children’s black and white certainty a mysterious shade of grey.  For Barack Obama, Yehuda Reinharz, and Elwin Wilson all to name their failures in public and “say sorry” shows a strength that fills me with hope. It is behavior that, as Dr. Aaron Lazare has written in On Apology (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), requires “attitudes of honesty, generosity, humility, commitment, and courage” (263).  

Now to get Hillary Clinton, who surely has heard her share of apologies, to start practicing at the State Department.  I invoke John Lennon: Imagine!

I went on a job interview.

OK, so not a paying job.  An internship.  Two days a week.  And I couldn’t have been more delighted when I learned I’d gotten the spot.  

After five and a half years of — now, how shall I say this? — Unemployment?  Staying at home with the kids? — I stick my toe into a formal work environment again.

I notice three things about my hesitation as I waffle over how to describe the last five and a half years.  One starts with a negative.  (UN.  As in UNhappy.  UNfulfilled.  UNpaid.)  The other sounds like a positive decision but comes off as if it were a really fun fakey vacation to a theme park.  (You know.  You’ve just gotten off the Whizzmatron and are standing by a large metal trash can, holding your hair back — and also the hair of several small children who have just drunk blue Slurpees — as everyone retches from the effects of Zero G, and someone asks to ride again,  and you think, “Why not?”) The last is a simple declarative sentence. (I stick.  Manly, no?)  The truth is in there.  Somewhere.

Even as I walked into the interview, I had these grammatical and internal complexities on my mind.  I’ve been mulling them over since second grade (I’ll save that one for another posting).  I got more serious in graduate school, when, pregnant with triplets, I prepared for an oral exam on the history of American women and work.  I found it difficult to maintain a stance of scholarly disinterest as I checked articles and books off my long list.  I’d be wrapping my head around the cultural and political factors that had shaped American women’s lives over the centuries when one fetus or another would deliver a swift kick.  The most important lessons I took away from this reading were: 1) When America goes to war and most men join in the fight, women work and get paid to do anything and everything that theretofore had been considered unladylike and off-limits,  2) When the economy shrinks, men — traditionally white men — get the pickins’, and 3) drink gallons of water when carrying higher order multiples — it reduces the blood concentration of the hormone that causes contractions. 

I gave birth and began raising children in a period of extraordinary economic expansion. Though I watched CNN reporters live from Iraq as I gestated, for me, my family, and those I knew, we were not “at war.”  Jobs were plentiful.  Money was plentiful.  And in my life, children were plentiful.  I left gainful employ for what I believed - and still believe — good reasons.  I had absolutely no idea when or how I would make my way back to a place where I would be going on a job interview.

Some of what I’ve needed to do in the last five and a half years has been downright head-bangingly impossible.  Much has been plain old fun.  Never have I needed reminding that it’s been a privilege or that it is because I am privileged that I’ve been “at home.”  

When I read Lisa Belkin’s farewell column in an October Style section of The New York Times and found her declaring ownership of the phrase “opting out” and the “revolution” it inspired, I had a grammatical hiccup akin to the one I experienced writing the beginning of this post. I remembered the article  Belkin wrote for the Times Magazine called “The Opt Out Revolution.” In it, she described women very much like me: married mothers with advanced degrees and promising careers who “opted out” of the job market to “stay at home with the kids.”  Her descriptions weren’t always flattering. Women used to running organizations and managing large staffs were putting their PDAs and Filofaxes to work overscheduling and micromanaging their children.  They channeled their ambitions into their offspring, morphing from accomplished fast-trackers into aggressive stage mothers.  Belkin’s use of “opting out” bugged me.  To “opt out” put a premium on the work place.  It cast women’s decisions in terms of a negative — what we/they weren’t doing, rather than what we/they were.

The verb “opt” comes from “option.”  An option is a choice.  Choices often come only to those who have possibilities.  I wish there were a word, a grammatical phrase, that could simultaneously honor and complicate “opting in.”   I don’t imagine anyone putting a lot of energy into this phrase-mongering any time soon.  I come back to those oral exams.  We’re in a time of economic contraction. Options are evaporating.  I worry that even with advances in discrimination law, we will fall back into sexist habits.  Will women have fewer choices as employers hire young male college grads to fill empty positions?   Will women be “staying home with the kids” because they have to — there won’t be jobs, and they won’t have day care?

In January, as I zip myself into business casual two days a week, I’ll still be thinking about what it means “to opt.”  And I’ll be hoping that you will help coin a new phrase, something better than “opting out.”  Send me ideas via “comments,” please.

Parents have so many important things to teach their kids: how to scramble eggs, how to do laundry, how to ride the T.  Each lesson learned is a milestone moving them closer to independence.  It’s the best kind of planned obsolescence I know.  The milestone at my house this fall has been to teach our 16-year-old triplets Lily, Max, and Sam to use and manage their own bank accounts.

Relatives have been giving the kids money for holidays and birthdays for years.  OK, so it’s really my dad who is the biggest culprit.  From the time the kids were in elementary school, he began sending substantial amounts of money…in ones.  The year they turned 10, for instance, he sent them each one hundred dollars, bundled, all in singles.  You can imagine their uncontainable excitement.  ALL three of them!  ALL that money!!!  

Mark and I were were deeply suspicious of the effects of these grandfatherly gifts.  To combat the potential to spoil the kids rotten, we put into place a system that has covered gifts as well as allowance.   The kids get 1/3 of the money to spend as they choose, put 1/3 of the money in a savings account, and give 1/3 of the money to an organization or cause they think will benefit from their donations. And then they write a thank you note to Grampa Jack.  We told them they could touch their savings but once a year, at the time of their birthday.  If there was something they really really really wanted, they could take out money and spend.  Otherwise, once the birthday month had passed, the savings money stayed put for another calendar year.  

To our surprise, the kids often saved more than they spent (and some kids saved more than others).  We were also surprised to see that there was a nutty brilliance to my father’s madness.  Handling large sums of money in ones gave the kids a concrete idea of how much money $100 (or $200 or…) was.  And we also saw a sweet bond grow between the kids and my dad, who seemed to understand something essential about a kids’ eye view of finance.

Despite all these pluses, the system became unwieldy to manage.  Over time, Lily, Max, and Sam came to have a lot of cash lying around.  Mark was the only one who could access the savings accounts, so the kids couldn’t deposit, plus he forgot to put money in for savings and donations, and we lost track easily of what belonged where.

My solution, given the kids’ 16th birthday this fall?  Open each of them checking and savings accounts at our bank.  Give the kids debit cards and checks to put them in charge.  Mark was initially reluctant.  What if they blew all their money?  What if they lost their cards?  What if what if what if?  He finally agreed that it was better to let the kids try to manage while they are young and at home and under our eagle eyes than to dump this on them as they are leaving for whatever comes after high school.

I brought home bank literature describing various kinds of accounts.  There was no way they were going to read all that fine print.  So I typed up a summary and emailed it.  At the top, I wrote: PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING CAREFULLY!  THERE WILL BE A QUIZ!  I explained the following terms: minimum balance, fees, bouncing, balancing, delays, checking vs. saving, debit cards, and checks.  That seemed to cover the basics.

Yesterday, before we all went down to the bank, I delivered the quiz.  The kids actually took it seriously. They prepped. They even sweated a little.  I asked for a banking definition of the verb “to balance” as well as the noun “a balance.”  Also questioned them about the relationship between delays and bouncing.  All were able to give correct answers, some of which were excellent.  For instance, question #1 was “What is a bank account?”  I thought I’d start pretty low to the ground.  Max had an especially strong answer:

A bank account is a place where you can put money in a safe place.  It is a place of comfort where you no longer will lose it — that you thought was in your underwear drawer.

As Mark and I co-signed on the accounts and watched the kids pick pin numbers and passwords, I wondered if we’d taught the kids the right lessons about bank accounts.  Given recent banking debacles, were we deceiving teenagers when we encouraged them to believe that banks are safe?  That they are better than underwear drawers? 

I’ll keep you posted this year as Lily, Max, and Sam tote around their check registers to record expenses and deposits.  And maybe you’ll let me know through comments what your parents did with you that seemed to work — or what you, as parents, are doing with your own children to teach them smart money management.  I’d appreciate all the stories and advice you’d care to share.