Life in L.A.

This past September, Leon and I moved into our new home in St. Charles. Beyond the blessing of the house, and the quiet location on a cul de sac that backs woods and the Katy Trail, and the :30 second "commute" to get Sydney to her caregiver's house each day, we've discovered the unexpected blessing of absolutely incredible neighbors.

We started to figure this out shortly after moving in, when Friday after work and Saturday afternoons found neighbors gathering in big groups on the corner up the block. And then there was the family harvest fest in October with bobbing for apples and pot luck and the street closed off for the event. Then, we had a winter progressive dinner - which was great, and now that spring has sprung we had another progressive dinner, followed by late night carousing around the fire pit at the neighbor's right next door. Oh, and a fireworks display. About 3 dozen people were part of the fun.

Yup. Living in L.A. (that's Lower Addyston Place) is pretty fantastic. It's something we all seem to appreciate - that old-fashioned notion of really knowing your neighbors. Sitting by the fire, the families with young kids were passing the video monitor around because we all could see our babies on various channels (and check on those babysitters, right?) And we had the joyful fun of laughing and talking and the BEST part was that none of us work together, and so we didn't "talk shop", which happens way to often among like-minded pals who also share a watercooler.

We love our new neighborhood, but I think what I am going to love best is not the new house, but the old-style of relating with the people who we might be living near for the next 40 years. I have a feeling that's something that's pretty hard to find, and pretty great to have.

Just because everything is different doesn't mean that everything has changed.

Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ~Elizabeth Stone

Just this morning, I was contemplating change.

I was thinking about how for the past 8 months, the constant mantra I have heard from well-intentioned friends and family has been, “Your life is going to change in ways you can’t imagine.” Some people share this [fairly] obvious insight with a gentle smile, others with a knowing grin; a few deliver it with a devious snicker, and still others with a grimace of impending doom. The result has been that in my over-emotional, physically tapped mind I have started to fear change … which is definitely not my style. I have started to worry about change and to wonder if I am up for the task of facing (not just parenthood) but this whole notion of CHANGE that seems to be so paramount in the language of so many well-meant “advisors.”

I have also started to notice that some people say my LIFE will change, while others say I (my SELF) will change. Is there a difference? Me VS. My daily grind? Me VS. My priorities?

In preparation for Sydney’s birth, I have been talking to loads of people. I have been reading loads of magazines. I am subscribed to far too many blogs, Web chats and e-newsletters. Overall, source after source assures me that upon the birth of my child, my life will be forever stripped from me. That my own sense of self, my interests and my cares will be “lost” in the mad scramble of parenthood.

Lately, I have been reading these pieces of wisdom out loud to Leon with disdain in my voice. I then usually hurl the offending resource against the wall (laptop excluded). Where is this emerging anger coming from, I wonder (besides the obvious pregnancy hormones!) … Are Leon and I selfish people that we balk so adamantly against the suggestion that we will be ourselves no more because of Sydney? Shouldn’t we be “okay” with this? What kind of people are we to not willingly surrender our entire selves for the good of our baby?

Well ~ maybe we are awful people, but Leon and I are absolutely bored with hearing how we won’t have any time for our own thoughts; that we won’t have any sense of our “old life”, and that even our marriage will be forever stripped of what it once was by the presence of our baby. We are bored of it and we refuse to believe it!

Interestingly, while I think the point of most of these articles and blogs and ballsy advice givers is to suggest that a baby will be more than worth such sacrifices, the speakers never really get around to saying that as convincingly as they warn us of all we are about to lose forever in a vast abyss of toys, dance lessons, Mommy and Me classes, piano recitals and baby gear. I have been more and more troubled by the attitude expressed by so many that children stamp out, destroy, and even strangle personal hopes, dreams and wishes … the idea I hear and read and absorb from so many is that a child replaces any sense of personal or marital identity.

I think I am going to boldly suggest that can’t possibly be true. (And yes, I can already picture which of you dear readers is laughing into your morning coffee at my next thoughts, which will probably seem either endearingly naïve or innocently just plain stupid, but bear with me) …

Leon and I are walking toward parenthood with the idea that, after 10 years of married life, Sydney is adding to, not replacing our hopes and dreams and goals; that the change that everyone “warns” us to expect is a welcome change that we do actually understand more than folks might realize.

Do I understand the “realities” of day-to-day care for our baby? Of course not. But do I “get” that life is changing in ways I can’t anticipate ~ definitely; after 32 years of living I have rather figured out that life provides lots of stages where things change completely and this prepares us for the next stage …

Sydney is an added piece of our life; not our entire existence. She is a gift from God; entrusted to us for care and parenting. She is His and we have the opportunity to love and nurture her; and to provide her with opportunities for growth and joy and learning and faith.

Now, this doesn’t mean we won’t be guilty as charged when we behave like typical Gen X parents and hold forth about every little burp our baby makes. But we’ll try really hard not to obsess that way too often. And I am also not suggesting that we will be like sitcom parents (think Ross and Rachel on FRIENDS for example), whose baby never enters conversation and who is largely forgotten except for at “milestone” events ;-) (I always wonder when I watch these shows, where on EARTH is their baby??) But I think what I dare to suggest is that I will be a lousy parent if I lose my identity because of Sydney. What a road to resentment and what a tremendously uninteresting mother I would be!

I don’t want to be afraid of my daughter’s arrival because it means I am at the same time committing hari kari on my own spirit. And I don’t think I am missing the point of the sacrifice of parenting and motherhood to make that statement …

Maybe Leon and I are wholly wrong. Maybe in a year or two, someone will come up to either one of us and ask us to define our selves or to express our deepest goals, and we won’t even recall what those were before life with Sydney. Maybe.

But my guess is that even if and when those things do change, when the inner person shifts and is so redefined, it won’t be a mindless slide into a person-less oblivion … but considered and connected to who I was before my child and to who I plan to be with my child and who I would like to be when my child is grown … I suppose time will tell.

It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself. ~Joyce Maynard

"Hey, Kid! Go play with sticks."

Recently, my parents, our good friends, Doug and Carol, and Leon and I had a conversation about today's overly parented child.

You know the type ~ the poor child whose parent obsesses over every tiny detail; calls the teacher with insane worries and requests; actually watches their high school student's class-by-class attendance online via Power School and calls the teacher immediately if Junior is late to class, demanding an explanation; the early childhood parent more worried about Sally being gently disciplined (because it will most likely damage her fragile sense of emerging self) than by the fact that Sally can't recognize her alphabet letters; Helicopter Parents.

That bane of childhood who have taken all the fun out of growing up: no more home-baked birthday treats (somebody might have a peanut allergy or somebody’s parent might use fatty oils and real sugar); no more bicycles without helmets (though we still have school buses without seatbelts, go figure); no more climbing trees and playing sword fight with sticks or eating dirt or exhausting oneself playing with the neighborhood kids till all hours; no more hopping fences. We want a well-packaged childhood; after all that’s what’s safest for the children (plus, they don’t ruin their baby UGG boots and Ralph Lauren, monogrammed backpacks).

When I look at the rules and regulations of today's pre-middle school set and the obsessive tendencies of parents even on the high school level, I wonder how my generation escaped childhood alive. I mean, for crying out loud, didn't my parents love me?! They let me carry a backpack loaded with books and didn't give me a wheeled suitcase to haul my things! I could be crippled or maimed! Are they going to pay my chiropractic bills? They didn't feed me organic everything ~ I actually ate Mac and Cheese made with (gulp) powdered cheese PRODUCT! I ate cookie dough batter made with (brace yourselves here) RAW EGGS! I could have high cholesterol or worse! Dangerous hoydens.

Lest you think we intend to raise Sydney with no rules or sense of safety ~ let me be clear to say that Leon and I fully own that the world is a "dangerous" place. We also appreciate the opportunity to make smart choices and protect our child in a world that largely feigns deep care for the young, but consistently creates systems that threaten them. (And I do love baby UGG boots … come on, seriously cute!) The point is not to be typically-American and pendulum swing 100% the other direction (I mean, after all we seem to live in a culture that absolutely refuses a moderate position on anything from politics to how I feed my baby) ... The point is, all this perfectionist parenting scares me just a little because I have a tendency to ... (I'm sure this will SHOCK most of you) people-please and push for perfection.

Seriously. The other day Leon and I got into a discussion about which language to introduce Syd to (in addition to English of course) from the start. I don't want a million toys, books and games with 15-different languages, so I want to pick just one. You know: Mandarin is all the rage but Spanish is so practical ... oh dear. Here we go ... Gen X parenting! STOP the madness.

I am slowly developing this theory about my generation as parents; we who graced TIME magazine as the apathetic generation; whose Boomer parents were criticized for leaving us to fend for ourselves as latchkey kids and ATARI addicts (and who, true to form really didn’t care all that much about the criticism). The result is … I think we are truly overcompensating.

You can almost hear the inner mantra: “WE won't raise our kids that way. WE will be involved parents. WE will make SURE people know how completely in tune we are with our child's every need. BE GONE peanut butter; BE GONE getting to know neighbor kids whose parents I don't know (and don't care to walk down the street to get to know ...); BE GONE childhood wildness!”

We'll see how Leon and I do once our little girl is here. Truth is; I was raised to be inventive and imaginative. Super-sized plastic Fischer Price kitchen that (as a friend recently wrote me) is larger than my living room? Who needs it! I loved building a clubhouse (and one very inventive time, a house boat!) out of large moving boxes. Crazy bike-like toy that attaches to my television so that my child can peddle like a mad gerbil in a cage and get some exercise? Go ride your bike outside! (Oh, wait … our neighborhood eschewed sidewalks for larger lawns … )

But maybe Sydney will want these things? Maybe she won't appreciate a mom and dad who tell her to play with sticks? Maybe she won’t want to lick the cake batter bowl because she learned about salmonella at school? Will we be able to provide our child with a sense of old-fashioned play and adventure and risk in a 2008 world of risk management, helmets and home-baking free classrooms?

I think we owe it to her to try ...

Then again ...

Maybe I am just inviting disaster. How does one say, "It's all fun and games ..." in Madarin anyway?

For more on this topic, check out Chris Mercogliano’s new book, In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness. [Click here] to read an interview.

SNOW! SNOW! SNOW! SNOW! SNOW!

If I could sing the title of this blog to you ~ which unfortunately I cannot ~ you would hear my one-woman rendition of the blended tones of the cast of White Christmas heralding nature's greatest winter gift ~ that's right, SNOW!

Today finds Leon and I tucked in at home enjoying an inside view of the white powder drifting down ~ and it's still coming!

It was one of those excellent days ~ 8 hours of productive time in the home office, challenging yoga practice, soothing hot chocolate ... and now, time for blogging before preparing dinner.

What am I thinking about this evening? (Aside from wondering why Katie Couric's eyes look so bizarre on tonight's evening news ...)

In my current graduate class, Media & Culture, this week is George Gerbner week. You might be familiar with Gerbner as the "media violence guy" ~ he has been tracking television violence for decades and is the creator of a theory known as the "mean world syndrome." Good stuff, provocative and worthy of chatter.

I just finished reading an article by Gerbner, Reclaiming Our Cultural Mythology (http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC38/Gerbner.htm) in which he discusses how the systematic "homogenization" of media has caused a loss of the central story of society.

I am not entirely sure how I think about this ... just the other evening I said to Leon ~ and not in the positive way ~ "what would we be doing without the Internet?" By that I meant, would we know our neighbors better? Would we have our families over for longer, lingering meals? Would that stack of "must read" novels be conquered more rapidly? Gerbner suggests that we used to gather our sense of issues and society from many sources ~ and now he says we rely only on media that exists to sell things. He suggests that the effects on our future will be profound.

But what if the new media IS telling the cultural story? It certainly is different ~ and unlike anything that has gone before ~ but is it really that far off base?

Or is it that we are learning to share, receive, and respond in new ways? Without blogs, would I know as much as I do about my sister who lives hundreds of miles away? Would I care about the daily status of my friends if not for Facebook? Without new technologies, I would mindlessly learn about presidential candidates, whereas now Barack Obama's site asks me to create my own blog to respond to his platform ...

As with every age, we need to proceed with caution, but perhaps our cultural myth is alive and well ~ just online ... I don't know. It's a careful balance, I suppose. And there are times when I wonder about our common pulse as a people ... in my class forum I wrote,

"Does society WANT a story-teller? Or does society equate a central story-teller with a loss of diversity? How do we tell a grand, sweeping cultural story in today's America that (seemingly) demands total devotion to concepts of diversity (and by association) autonomy? Do we have a cultural meta-narrative yet to tell?I think we do. Disturbingly, perhaps media IS telling us the story of our culture. Do we like it? Are we content with it? Those are different questions."

Just the musings of this wintry night ... I think I'll go prepare that supper ...

Onward & Upward!

Go On - Tell Me What You Really Think!

Today was productive; but ended on an annoying note as responses to a national survey we built started pouring into the office via email. Once again, I was reminded that - even though there is quite a line between critique and insult - many seem oblivious of the difference.

Why is it that, even when someone tells you that of which you are already aware (in the negative sense) it sounds so loud?

Developing opinions is part of life; and learning how best to express them is part of maturing. I think that finally, now in my "thirties", I am ever more comfortable expressing my own interpretation of things without angst. I think that in your twenties (at least from my perspective) - you're so focused on getting your thoughts out there onto the world tape that you speak as loudly and passionately as possible. Once you realize that, for the most part others are fairly open to listening (and that you perhaps don't have as much original content as you hoped) it's easier to relax and just be ... share ... communicate and reflect without such overwhelming intensity.

You save the intensity for those issues that really, truly, deeply move you.

You don't pour them out on random surveys asking benign questions about simple Web sites.

So that was the frustrating end to what was otherwise a famously productive day. People proved to be ... people.

And how do I answer this obnoxious demonstration of human nature - I am renewing myself this evening with a great glass of Merlot, a tivo-ed Frasier, take-out Chinese, and the opportunity to spew my feelings via a worldwide channel! What a world.

Onward & Upward ...