Errata

Masks:
You probably know that I use a CPAP machine when I sleep at night. And because of the long summer days in Alaska and the fact that my apartment had no curtains, I also use one of those Lone Ranger style sleep masks. It occurs to me that I look like the insect god when I sleep.

Amenities:
If you know anyone staying for a while in a hospital or extended care facility, among the things that will make life good for them, are:
books
CDs
their favorite herb tea
a real cup to drink it in
lemon drops or other hard candies to combat dry mouth
hand lotion
mustard and salt to "fix" the food
a small amount of fresh ground coffee to cover other smells
dried fruits
nuts
crackers

Sushi

Sandy Szwarc, over at Junkfood Science, posted Fishy sushi scares on Friday. In it she discusses the latest fear-du-jour, the "study" by the New York Times on the mercury levels in fish. In a scenario that will surprise no one who reads Sandy's breath of fresh air blog, the story that was published by the Times bears little resemblance to the actual meaning of the results.

In fact, there has never been a case of an American eating so much fish as to be harmful. The only cases in the scientific literature of mercury poisoning from fish and subsequent neurological problems — a fact confirmed by Dr. Thomas Clarkson, a toxicologist at the University of Rochester School of Medicine — were the result of an industrial mercury spill in Minamata Bay, Japan in the 1950s, which resulted in fish with methylmercury levels 40 to 1,000 times higher than the fish Americans, and most people around the globe, eat. These tragic poisonings first pointed out that at extremely high exposures, mercury was a neurotoxin and might affect the developing fetus.

In other words, we don't have to be afraid of eating fish. Glad to hear it. Living in Southeast Alaska, where the regional cuisine is fresh from the sea, I not only enjoy eating salmon, halibut, and crabs of all types, but friends make their living by fishing. I would hate to have to worry the next time I get the urge for Dungeness almost as much as I would hate my friends to have to go out of business. Commercial fishing is one of the most dangerous professions in the world. The reward for risking your life on a continual basis shouldn't be that some study is incorrectly reported so that people are afraid of what you take those chances to bring to their tables.

In her post, Sandy provided a link to Sushi Etiquette

(Fingers)
When you eat by your fingers, pick up a piece of nigiri at the both side with your two fingers, thumb and middle, and simultaneously lift up the far side top to this side by the index finger, and turn it upside down. Then dip the fish side to soy sauce, and next, twist your wrist to turn the fish side up and face to you. Alternatively do as the same way as by chopsticks. To eat, bring the nigiri to your mouth, throw it into your mouth in a way that the fish side touches on your tongue, and this is a recommendable direction in nigiri-eating.

Notice that one is recommended to throw the entire piece of sushi into one's mouth. This is where I have a problem. I don't have a very big mouth. I seek out dentists with small hands. And I have always bitten the sushi in half. Now I discover this is rude.

What to do, what to do. Shall I continue to be rude? Shall I fill my mouth to my eardrums when I eat sushi in a mannerly manner? Should I explain to the waiter that I'm not being rude on purpose and I'm not ignorant, I just can't eat the thing whole? Will it taste as good if my mouth is so full my taste buds are shoved down? I was better off before I knew this little tidbit. When I thought that the only reason the other people in the restaurant were eating their sushi in one bite because they had bigger mouths.

Sushi pictograph and photo, courtesy Sushi Encyclopedism. Crab dkimages.com

What I've Learned So Far

Deja Pseu over at Une femme d'un certain age has tagged me for a meme. Lessons in Hindsight So, this is the advise I would give to my 20 year old self if I could go back in time.

1. People walking down the street are too busy worrying about their own lives to give much thought to you. There is no need to be so damned self-conscious.

2. It came to pass. Whether it is good or bad, it will most likely pass. So enjoy the good stuff while it is here and relax about the rest of it. By the time that child is 35, she will have learned to tie her shoes. And she won't be living with you and available for the random hug.

3. There is no one road to happiness. Perhaps you'll do it the standard way, perhaps you won't. The same for your kids. The well marked path may be much more boring.

4. Question authority. About everything Trust your own experience. If your experience isn't the same as what you're told it should be, the problem may not be you. It may well be the advice.

5. If you've tried to do something twice and it hasn't worked, you need to try something else. Sometimes anything else would work.

6. Trust yourself. You really do know what you are feeling and whether you like someone or not and when you are hungry. You are who you are and that's good. You are supposed to get angry when people do cruel things. You are supposed to feel sad when you lose something or someone you value. You are supposed to come first once in a while. You are supposed to get older and have gray hair. And you are supposed to be round.

7. Laugh. A lot. Laughter heals a wondrous lot of problems. And it leaves nicer lines on your face.

8. Sometimes if you just hang in there long enough, the person who is driving you crazy will leave. When that happens, you've won. There you still are in the situation you love and there they are, gone.

9, Sometimes if you hang in there waiting for them to leave, they don't. The trick is to figure out which time this is and just how crazy the person is driving you.

10, You reap what you sow. Be kind. Be honest. Look for the good in people.

11. Diets make you fatter. All of them. Always. The more you go on, the fatter you get.

I'm not going to tag people on this one. If you want to do it, feel free. Let me know so I can see what wisdom you have gleaned over the years.

Two Women in a Garden by Kasimir Malevich

Were The Puritans Puritanical?

Rain left a comment on my post More Lessons From The Puritans that I have been thinking about. She said,

I think though there is another side which led to denial of natural bodily needs, seeing nudity as sexual sin, suffering being godly, etc. ***I suspect I am too old to change my prejudice that Puritanism is why America still has some of the 'wrong' (in my mind) attitudes toward many natural things-- like being gay. As an artist, I deal with the prejudices against depicting the nude figure even today

Rain said more, but this is the part I have been thinking about most. I looked up Puritanical, and from The Free Dictionary by Farlex, the definition is:

Adj.	1.	puritanical - of or relating to Puritans or Puritanism
	2.	puritanical - exaggeratedly proper; "my straitlaced Aunt Anna doesn't approve of my miniskirts"

Which would seem to imply that according to common usage, the term does mean false body modesty. That bugaboo so many of us had to fight to overcome. Sexually repressed. The stuff I learned at St Mary of the Palms, the Catholic boarding school I attended. The school where I was taught, at the age of six, to take a bath in an over sized tee shirt to "cover your shame." Mama tells me that when I came home, I would not get undressed in front of anyone because "Sister says it isn't modest." Which, I suppose it isn't. However, since I had no such notions when I left my Puritan descended family to go to St Mary's, you can probably guess I associated them with the Catholic church. So, I double checked Fischer's book, Albion's Seed and discovered this paragraph:

The general pattern of sexual attitudes -- strong encouragement of sexual love and sensual bonds within marriage, strict punishment of fornication and adultery, a maniacal horror of unnatural sex, and rigid taboos against contraception within marriage -- was in its totality unique to New England. By and large, the culture was not a system of sexual tyranny and repression. The sex ways of Massachusetts rested upon an intensity of moral and religious purpose which marked so many aspects of this culture*.

If Puritans repressed what they considered unnatural, which would include homosexuality but not the body itself, where did the repressed view of the human body and sex come from? It seems it was more Victorian than Puritanical. Looking at the pictures here of the somber Puritan and the gaily dressed Victorians, one would suppose the opposite.

It was the Victorians who held that women shouldn't enjoy sex and a woman who did was immoral. It was the Victorians who called the bull a "gentleman cow" and legs "limbs" and the chicken breast "white meat" and legs "drum sticks" and "dark meat". They put skirts on tables and chairs and pianos so that men would not see their legs and have sexual thoughts about women, who also had legs. It was the Victorians who considered a glimpse of ankle extremely provocative. Not only were the Victorians sexually repressed, they suffered the things that go along with it. Hypocrisy was rife. This was the age of Jack the Ripper. Prostitution, including child prostitution, was part of the hidden world of Victorian England. Stories are told of upstanding Victorian gentlemen paying for a child prostitute, only to discover when the girl was delivered that she was their own daughter, kidnapped that very afternoon. It was a world with an ugly side.

And the idea of the virtue of chastity, far from being Puritan,** was Catholic.And the ancient Romans and Greeks were shocked at the prudishness of the Hebrews -- one of the sources of the idea that homosexuality was unnatural.

So, we can see that part of the common idea of Puritanical is indeed from Puritans, but much of it is from the Victorians and part from the Catholics and part from the ancient Jews and part undoubtedly from other sources as well. And the Victorian ideas are not founded in a religion, but rather with one woman.

* Fischer, Albion's Seed, Page 93.
** One Puritan elder decreed that life with a bad woman was better than life with no woman.
Photos: Victorian, courtesy Victorian Life
Puritan Woman, courtesy Susan Ditto, 2004

Where We StartedWhere We Came

Here is a map of the counties of the UK. Notice right down at the bottom, .to the west is King Arthur's country, Cornwall. Next to it is Devon, where my Puritan ancestor's started. As you go along the coast, to the east, you find Dorset, Hampshire, Sussex., where my father's people came from in the middle of the 19th century, and then Kent, where my Cavalier ancestors began. From all the many counties in Britain, my ancestors managed to come from such a relatively small part of England. And, between Devon and Kent, there managed to be so much difference in the culture.

We forget how large space is without modern transportation. We forget that in those days most people never traveled more than seven miles from where they were born. That the invention of the bicycle greatly reduced birth defects because it allowed men who didn't own horses to court from a larger distance.

As I think about Fischer's Albion's Seed, I find it very helpful to consult this map.

It is also helpful to keep this map of Colonial America to hand.

The distances in the New World, the miles between the colonies, were much greater. And yet, because all of the colonies are on the Atlantic, and it was such a short time between their settlement and modern transportation, our states are much more alike after only a few hundred years than the English counties were after over a thousand. Space has shrunk.

The other thing to remember is that when the Puritans and the Cavaliers, the Uptons and the Herndons, first came here Massachusetts and Virginia were the only colonies that had been founded. To me, born in California and currently living in Alaska, all of the east coast states look about postage stamp size.But when the only transportation is ship and horse, those colonies were far apart. And they were far apart for long enough that the very distinct cultures which they started with were firmly rooted, and still are strongly reflected. It isn't just that I can understand the Uptons by reading about the original Puritans; I can understand why the New England states are blue states, where the roots of the liberal grounding came from. It wasn't just the Herndons who took traits from the Cavaliers. The South is still highly influenced by its heritage. Still red states. Still Republican stronghold.

To this day, New England and the South still mean different things by family values. Still have different views of proper male-female relationships. The hierarchy is still strong in the South.

Isn't it odd, that the South which was founded by elites who worked very hard to remain elite, is the hotbed of the GOP, which accuses New England of being "liberal elite"?

UK map courtesy milesfaster.co-UK
Colonial map courtesy Fasttrackteaching.com
Click to enlarge

Memories of Home

To someone like me, who was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and lived a good number of years there, there is nothing as lovely to look at as the Golden Gate Bridge in the fog.

It feels like home. Cool weather. Sourdough bread. Ripe produce bought at farmers' markets. Dungeness crab at the wharf. Long walks at my own pace.

Hangin' out in Golden Gate Park and the zoo. Flower sellers on street corners. Being able to choose almost any cuisine and find it in a range of prices. Book stores and golden afternoons.

Serenity

Saturday was a lazy day, with snow on the ground and no real tasks needing to be done. So, I snuggled up in my recliner under a blanket, with both Hooligans using me as a chaise lounge,* and watched Serenity.

I didn't discover Firefly until the word was out that it had been canceled.** Since then, it has been rerun on the science fiction channel and come out on DVD, which I gladly purchased. The incredible fan phenomenon that led to a short lived TV show being made into a movie pleased me no end.

When I was younger, there was no way I would ever have believed that I could actually own movies and TV programs to watch whenever I chose. Maybe one or two, if I loved them enough to put that kind of money into them. But, that the technology would exist that would allow me to have a library of films was not something I had considered. And that they would be smaller than books would have blown me out of the water.

* Pippin curled up on my shoulder, Merry between my feet.
** I still find it hard to believe that with as many people who I know, starting with Richard, who know that I love quality science fiction, no one told me about it. They just assumed that, of course, I knew. No, no. Of course I may know about books. Not necessarily TV.

Yet Another Teen Survey

Shark-fu, over at Angry Black Bitch has posted And I'll bet there is a study that shows studies are full of shit...., where she says

According to the survey conducted by Junior Achievement Worldwide, nearly 40 percent of teens believe that lying, cheating or violence are necessary to succeed. 23 percent who said violence toward another person is acceptable on some level. Overall, the number of teens who said they’d fuck with the rules doubled since 2003.

Okay, but mayhap someone should ask some not so obvious questions about this survey data.

Factoring in this new data, how can we trust that the teens are telling the truth when they say they don’t value telling the truth?

Or could it be that these teens are actually being more honest that the 2003 teens? If so, wouldn’t that indicate a decrease in survey dishonesty and wouldn’t that sort of contradict the new survey results?

And what it reminded me of was my junior and senior year in high school.* I was in a gifted program. Twenty eight of us took our requirements and many of our electives together. In our senior year, we had mornings at the local community college and afternoons at the high school. And part of being involved in what would now be called a pilot project was that we spent a lot of time under the microscope. Our parents were interviewed.** And we took psychological test after psychological test. And one test, during our senior year, when we were missing regular classes in two schools for what we could see little use for,*** a group of us decided to answer at random. We couldn't get out of the test, so we did the next best thing. After all these years I can't remember whether we got in trouble for it, but I imagine that we did.

But, the point is, these days teens are surveyed and tested all over the place. Not just the ones in a particular group, but all of them. And most especially they are asked about risk-taking behavior and moral behavior. Do the testers, I wonder, ever think about whether the kids are giving them true answers as opposed to answers to please and/or answers to shock?

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you really want to know what teens think and believe, you aren't going to get it from a forced-choice survey.**** You need to actually talk to them and really listen. You need to get examples. And you need to observe how they really act.*****

* Remembering that I graduated in 1960.
** My mother well remembers the hours of interviews that covered everything from my toilet training to checking out the books on the family bookshelves.
*** Surely all the other tests had covered everything important, hadn't they?
**** Just this week I went to the HGTV website and took their test for determining my interior decoration style. It was forced-choice, in that I was to choose which of four pictures I liked best in a number of categories. Except there wasn't anything in any of those pictures that I would really want in my home. Nothing awful, but none of it my style. So, if I can't find something that represents my answer about furniture, how will I find it about lying?
***** Maybe it's my unusual training first as an anthropology minor and then in my Montessori masters program, but it seems so obvious to me that if you want to know what anyone really believes, you observe what they do.

Graphic by INdiana Systemic Thinking

Discovering Nature

I was thinking, after yesterday's post, about how we discover the nature of things. Particularly the nature of the young child. I used to wonder how it was possible for my great-grandfather, who was a math professor, to be so unobservant as to misunderstand infant dependence for selfishness. To think that the crying new born even knew that her mother was exhausted in the next room.

And I can now see, with knowing that the idea was not original with him*, but rather a part of the dogma of his ancestors' religion, how that came to pass. Because, when you start out, as anyone before the age of science pretty well did, with a belief that God has already given you the answer to this, you see the events in the world in that frame. The baby whose crying deprives his mother of sleep is seen to prove that babies are selfish and the idea that the baby only knows she is hungry and has no way to feed herself or ask politely will not occur.

But, when you have science, you observe the events without the frame, and you can see more clearly. Maria Montessori, who was the first woman physician in Italy, studied children as part of her internship**. She watched them with as little a priori theory as she could. As she developed materials, if the children did not learn from them as intended, she did not blame the children but changed the materials or the method. She gathered a great deal of new information about the way children learn.

Jean Piaget was a student in a Montessori school when he was young. Later he wrote a paper on marine biology that was so impressive the society to which he had submitted it invited him to present it. He wrote to decline, because the meeting was being held past his bedtime; he was only 8.

It is no wonder that Jean Piaget revolutionized the study of young children. Where Montessori had studied three year olds, Piaget studied his own children from birth. He watched them, he played games with them to see at what age they could perform certain mental tasks.*** Like Montessori, he looked at them with an eye as free from preconception as it was possible for him to have. He became, not only a developmental psychologist, but also a Montessori teacher. Any students who worked with him had to take Montessori training before they began. As a Montessori teacher, one of my major tasks was to sit and observe the classroom when the children were busy. It is that observing with as little prejudice as possible that leads to new knowledge.

* It wasn't just the idea -- when I read Fischer's book, the example he used and the words were exactly what had been quoted to me from Great-grandfather Upton.
**Because of her gender, she was assigned to work with feeble minded children. That work led her to further develop educational tools for them, some the creation of others, some her own. When her impaired students tested out at age level with normal Italian children, the authorities in both medicine and education were impressed with what a great job she had done. Montessori was appalled that normal children were being so poorly taught that her students could do as well as they did and went on to apply the materials and methods she had used with six year olds to normal three year olds. Montessori approached this work in a new way partially because, before she studied medicine, she studied engineering. How lucky for children that her father indulged her intellectual curiosity.
***It was Piaget's work that showed that one reason babies demand to be fed right now is that they have no sense of time. Now is all there is. When a baby is hungry, he is starving to death, he has always been starving to death, and he will always be starving to death. When the baby can wait the few moments his mother needs to pick him up and feed him, he has learned about time.

Portrait of Jean Piaget courtesy of Robert Kovsky; Maria Montessori courtesy of Edith Stein. This is my favorite picture of Montessori; it shows her as the young woman who was sent to speak to the issue of women's suffrage in Italy. She was chosen because feminists were, then as now, dismissed as ugly women who couldn't find husbands. Montessori so obviously was not.

Changing More Than The Name

Wikipedia has this to say about the naming of Eskimo peoples.

In Canada and Greenland the term Eskimo has fallen out of favor, is considered pejorative, and has been generally replaced by the term Inuit. However, while Inuit does correctly describe all of the Eskimo peoples in Canada and Greenland, that is not true in Alaska and Siberia. In Alaska the term Eskimo is commonly used, because it includes both Yupik* (sic) and Inupiat, while Inuit is not accepted as a collective term or even specifically used for Inupiat (which technically is Inuit). To date, no universally acceptable replacement term for Eskimo, inclusive of all Inuit andYupik people, has achieved acceptance across the geographical area inhabited by the Inuit and Yupik peoples.

Tonight I saw a public service announcement in which a young Yup'ik girl states that her Yup'ik heritage includes strength and the courage of her convictions (true) and that this heritage gives her the strength to hold with her traditional values. And then she said, "Sex can wait."

Now, I have no problem with sex can wait. I think it should wait a lot longer than it does for too many young girls. And I have no problem with a campaign to encourage young Yup'ik girls to wait. But I do have a problem with not being honest. And the thing is that waiting is not part of the Yup'ik tradition. I remember that when I was in Fairbanks in the late 60s there was concern about Yup'ik teens being sent out to boarding school** in the southwest, among tribes where the teens did wait. And the problem, I was told. with that was that the living conditions in their tradtitional bush villages were so harsh that a man could not afford to marry a woman who couldn't have children.*** And so, I was told, Yup'ik girls couldn't get married unless they were pregnant. And the Yup'ik girls were not waiting at boarding school, and so the students from other tribes were calling them pejorative names and treating them poorly.

So, if pregnancy is required, how do you get there if you wait? And isn't it a little dishonest to sell young Yup'ik teens on the idea of waiting by claiming it is part of a tradition that it absolutely couldn't be part of?

* Yup'ik is the correct spelling, which I now know thanks to ykalaska.
** Pretty much all Native American kids were sent to boarding school during those days.
*** As with many traditional societies, social security was descendants to take care of you in your old age. If a woman couldn't have children, or if a couple couldn't have children together, they would be less secure.

Russell W. Porter
"Eskimo Girl" Umanak, Greenland, 1896, Watercolor

This Blog's Reading Level

If you want to check your blog's reading level, use the icon in my side bar.

So, here's something to ponder. Does this mean that you are all geniuses to be able to understand me? And, how do I feel about this? I mean, I love that you are all so bright, but do I really want to preclude other people from reading me?

I found it on another blog a few days ago, and went and tested mine, and, being pleased, added it to my sidebar. Then I started finding various reading levels on other blogs and googled "This blog's reading level" to figure out how it is making these judgements.* Various blogs are being scored with various educational levels -- elementary school through college post grad. OK, so that makes sense. You have to have a junior high reading level to read a blog so rated. So, if I wanted to talk to the most people, if I could pitch my score at a basic enough level, that would work. Indeed, some of my favorite blogs have done just that. Clear language, excellent grammar, complex ideas rather than sentence structure. Able to talk to a wide base of readers.

And, I would imagine that a blog with a reading level of college post grad would be perhaps of a more specialized subject matter.** But what does genius mean? That my style is so convoluted and my vocabulary so erudite that only a genius would be interested? That I must be a genius to do this well? Who is it talking about and what is it saying about us? Should I be proud or ashamed? This reminds me of when Linda Ott told me that I would have more dates if I didn't use such big words.*** Would I be a B list blogger if I used smaller words? Shorter sentences?

* Basically, reading level tests look at vocabulary and sentence structure. But, I couldn't find any particulars about this one.
**Maya might not enjoy it, although bright thing that she is, she could probably read it.
*** That's funny in two ways. At that point, I'd never had even one date, so of course any would be more, and she later confessed that she had a huge crush on one of the Elves', Gnomes', Leprechaun's' , and Little Men's Chowder & Marching Society members, Jack Hairston, with whom I hung out on a daily basis. And who came to my graduation party while hers was going on across the street.

The Story of Stuff

Julie and I often talk to each other about how you protect your child from becoming a member of the consumer society, how you help her to learn values that are more human. So, tonight I discovered this short film that I want to share with all of you. Go and visit The Story of Stuff. The video you will watch will take about 20 minutes, so you want to do this when you have some time.

This is a very intelligent and witty discussion of how we go from resource extraction, through manufacturing, to big box stores, to the consumer's home, and finally to the landfill. Annie Leonard tells this very serious story in a light hearted way that anyone can understand.

Without becoming preachy, she gives us this vitally important information. It will make you look at the stuff in your life in a different way. And, right before Christmas, the time of institutionalized consumption of unnecessary stuff, is a good time to review just how the throw-away economy hurts us and the earth. Show it to the young people in your life and e-mail it to everyone you know. There is no need to live a life circumscribed by planned obsolescence, where we can be attacked by terrorists and our president tells us that the way to combat that is to go out shopping.

Would You Ever?

*
Notes from the Grand Jury box. Oh, how I wish I could tell you the details of the cases we heard today. I can't. But I can tell you that it was surreal. That something as serious as crime could be so blinking slapstick! Some of it is that most people who break the law do it in fairly stupid ways. Some of it is that this is such a small, isolated community that people don't normally have to be concerned about harm from their neighbors, and so even when committing crimes, they don't think of having to hide what they are doing. Some of it is that -- I'm not sure. You tell me.

If you had been arrested for a crime in a fairly public place and charged and were now out on bail awaiting trial, if you had done all that, would you then go and commit the same crime in the same place in front of the same people who watched you be arrested last time?

How about stealing an object over 40 feet long that can only fit outdoors from a spot where it is seen daily by the families that live in six houses (and thus will be missed very quickly indeed) and taking it less than ten miles and plunking it down in full view of thousands of people? How about in full view of the State Office Building, where most people in the area work? How about when the police came to arrest you a mere three hours after you took it, would you then claim that you had owned it for several years? Would you do that if it was one of under a hundred that looked like that in the world? If it were the only one of that model in the state? This one was so bizarre -- it was recovered before the owner realized that it hadn't drifted off, but had been stolen, and two of the grand jury members had witnessed the arrest (the plunked down spot was sooo very public) and had to excuse themselves from listening to the case.

What if the police came to your door because several of your neighbors had called about the sounds that were being produced inside and you were totally unbruised although your shirt had been torn and there was a person with a bruised face and what one of the police describes as "standard choking bruises" and scratches on the neck and a four year old was crying and telling the police, "A hurt B." Would you then try to convince the police that B had beaten you?

And if you got through airport security in one city with contraband, would you then deplane for a cigarette during a layover with the contraband on your person and risk being caught when you tried to re-board?

Nope, I didn't think so. Me neither.

* Hermes, the god of theives, who obviously hasn't been very helpful in Juneau. Or Hoonah. Or Anchorage.

In A Blink

Julie has posted This Too Shall Pass on her blog.

I remember one day, my MIL was rocking Maya to sleep, and one of us said, ‘we don’t want her to get used to being rocked to sleep all of the time’ (my MIL watched Maya a few days a week for us, and would rock Maya to sleep at nap time every day)…my MIL replied that we would miss these times, that they grow up so quickly. You know what? She was right.***My mom said, “Don’t worry, I’m sure she’s grow out of it by the time she’s 35.” Her way of telling me that this too shall pass. And you know what? It did.

And, as often happens with Julie's posts, it got me thinking about when Julie was 5 and Richard was 7 and I really wanted time to pass. Richard was having a hard time learning to read, and Julie was still in night diapers. I really, really wanted these two "problems" to be finished. And what I didn't realize was that these were situations, and only problems if I deemed them to be. And that at the same time these two minor annoyances were going on, some pretty wonderful things were also going on. They were both living home, both funny, both smart as whips, both loving, both well behaved, both helpful around the house. They hadn't yet hit adolescence, which is hard for the child even if the parent does remember surviving it. They weren't confronting many of the ways that life doesn't live up to its PR yet.

Two or three times a day, we ate together. We spent the evenings and weekends together. We played board games and cleaned house and went on picnics and to movies and the fair together. They told me so much about their lives. I still read them stories. We loved and laughed and filled our lives with each other and animals and Alaska. We went berry picking and made jam and planted a garden and . . .

And when Julie no longer needed night diapers, and Richard was a good reader, many of the days of that delightful existence had passed. There were fewer days ahead of us as a family that lived together. Fewer berry picking days. Fewer trips to the lake with the canoe. Fewer Monopoly games.

All of it passes. Instead of wishing part of it away, I wish I'd treasured it more. Because, it all passes in a blink.

Shifting The View From Interior to Exterior

Since I've spent so much time examining my own motives and trying to get beyond the fog of self delusion lately, I thought I would rest and allow some mystery to take me back into its arms.

I love this picture, from SFGate.com, of the Golden Gate Bridge in the fog. It somehow makes The City seem like a magical place, wrapped in white, approachable only through true vision.

Granny's Secret Shame

Posting about figuring out how to get Colleen to holiday dinners on time and Mama to stop using racial slurs got me to thinking about when I did and when I didn't solve problems. I've written about Colleen before, and mentioned how she used to break my things until the day I made her pay to repair one of them, which turned out to be the last time she broke something of mine. But there were times when I didn't do anything about the behavior except resent it.

One example is the prawns. Not long after the kids and I moved back to California from Fairbanks, we were visiting my parents and Colleen was there. Daddy ordered and picked up Chinese take-out.* As the food was being passed around, Colleen took all of the prawns. I said something about other people wanting some prawns and Colleen said, "I don't eat anything but prawns." I commented that she could still ask if anyone wanted one before she took them all, since of course with just Mama, Daddy, and her everyone knew ahead of time, but with Richard, Julie, and me added to the mix, one of us might want one. "Colleen doesn't eat anything but prawns," my parents stated, so I shut up. I didn't actually care if I had a prawn or not and my kids weren't acting like they did, so I let it go. However, as soon as Colleen had eaten all of the prawns, she loaded up her plate with everything else in the cartons -- twice. Wait. She got all the prawns because she didn't eat anything else, but she ate more of everything else than any two people. That didn't seem fair. Nor did it seem exactly sane to make that statement. So, I tried to point out that Colleen was now chowing down on everything else, and my parents simply ignored me.**

This scene was repeated an uncounted number of times over the next 20 years. And it was never any different. I never figured out what to do about it. Which is crazy, because now I know exactly what I could have done about it. I had several choices. Since my kids and I didn't really care that much about prawns, I could have let it go. Or, when Daddy went to call in the order, I could have handed him a $5 bill and asked him to get two orders of prawns so that someone else could have some.*** There were probably other things I could have done as well, including taking a picture of the plate full of everything else to whip out as evidence the next time she grabbed all the prawns.

So, why didn't I? Why did I wait until she was dead to think of the solution?

I'll tell you, and it doesn't make me look all that good. The reason that I could figure out how to deal with some things and not others was that I did what gave me the biggest payoff. Quite simply, holiday dinner mattered and racial slurs mattered and having my stuff savaged mattered. But I didn't really care about prawns. And yet, I got angry every time. And that's why I didn't solve it. Getting mad was the payoff. A much better payoff than a few measely prawns.

Because one of the themes that runs through my life with my folks and Colleen is that I am a saint and she was a shit and my parents were unfair. So, when she got all the prawns, and they let her get by with it, they were vindicating me. It was proof that I'm a saint, and she was a shit, and my parents were unfair.

As hard as it is to admit, in those moments, I would rather be right than happy. When I cared I solved it. When I didn't, I let it go on to feed my sense of the unfairness of life and my sainthood.

* Remember, at this point it had been 15 years since I left home and in that time I had only occasionally been in town to see exactly how things worked with Colleen and my parents. Always the same way, always the way they had worked since she was born, but the particulars of any given situation were still missing.
** You may recognize that ignoring when facts clashed with prior policy was a fairly common behavior in that house. It makes one feel crazy, let me tell you. You have no idea how I treasure people who observed this and can confirm for me that it wasn't some nutty imaginary scene I cooked up. I really did say things that they didn't want to hear and they really did simply cease to hear me.
*** Not that he would have taken the money, but he would have ordered more prawns.

Birth Mothers

Bitch, Ph.D has posted Adoption: Birth Mothers Are People, Too concerning the book The Girls Who Went Away, about birth mothers who gave their children up for adoption in the days before Roe v. Wade. It's a perspective that most of us don't think about very deeply. The argument is there for women who are considering an abortion, that they can choose to give birth and adopt the baby out. But what we don't really think about is what it is like to have adopted a baby out.

For two years one of my parenting clients was a young woman who had given her younger child up for adoption because she was afraid of his father. The police were unable to offer her help. She believed that the only thing she could do to get this man completely out of her life and keep her children safe was to hide the existence of the baby from him. To give him up for adoption.

She first came to me after she had given the child up and returned to town. She came to see me once a week for two years, and she never came once that she didn't cry. She ached for her child. It was supposed to be an open adoption, but Alaska doesn't enforce the open adoption agreement if the adoptive parents decide they don't want the birth mother involved.* She gave her child to this couple. She was supposed to get pictures and letters and be able to see him at least once a year. She never got a single picture or letter. All of her letters and the letters of her lawyer were returned unopened.

I have never worked with a parent I was less able to help. I have never known a young woman who I wanted to fight for more. I will never know if she could have trusted her baby's father. But I do know that I have never known a woman to regret an abortion the way that young woman regretted that adoption. It left her wounded to the soul.

Adoption is not a choice normally made by the Tlingits in this area. The tribes do not give up children, and if the mother or parents can't raise the child, extended family members will take it in until circumstances change. I worked with many grandmothers who were raising their grandkids, and even two great-grandmothers.

In those cases where there is no extended family to step in, pregnant teens and their children may end up in the foster care system. There is a woman who fosters young, pregnant, Tlingit girls and their babies. She continues to foster both mother and child while the mother finishes school. The foster mom wants the young mother to have a good start as a mother and as near a normal life as a teen as possible. The young mother goes to the prom and football games as well as learning about child development. She grows as a maturing teen and as a mother. If she "ages out**" of the foster system, the foster mom keeps her without money from the state for her care and works with her until she is ready to take her child and go out on her own. And the foster mom is there to support her in many ways for years. Many of the young mothers she has helped still drop in and visit on a weekly basis. Like any daughter would.

I know that the circumstances between my young client and these young mothers are different, and this superb foster mother would not have been there for my client in any case. But I also know that if there were more women like this foster mom, there would be fewer young women who would have to make either choice about a baby. More intact families. And what a blessing that would be.

* To the best of my knowledge, no state does.
** Becomes 18, when the state stops paying for her care and expects her to go out on her own.

Photo: Ashes to Blessing

They Decided To Share

digby, on Hullabaloo, has posted this quote from Chris Matthews, Tweety of the day

"This gender thing is so tricky. Here's my theory. Men voted in the first part of the last century to give women the vote. They had all the votes and decided to share them. They thought, 'they're smart, we're married to them, if momma's not happy nobody's happy' sort of thing."

Let's try telling that to my great-grandmother, the suffragist, shall we? To all of the women who marched and went to jail and were force-fed to break their hunger strikes. To all of the women who heard that only ugly women who couldn't catch a husband would ever want to vote. To all of the women who died before it ever happened. To Abigail Adams, who asked her husband to "remember the women" in the Constitution.*

Even a child's publication, the Scholastic, says on its suffrage page, Women's Suffrage

Woman suffragists often met hostility and sometimes violence.

Yes, yes. Hostility and violence. That sounds to me like deciding to share. Doesn't it to you?

And how about this (also from Scholastic)?

During the Civil War, suffragists shelved their cause temporarily, hoping that at war's end, women as well as emancipated slaves would be enfranchised. After the war Republican party politicians believed enfranchisement of the ex-slaves would be defeated if harnessed to the even more unpopular cause of woman's suffrage. They succeeded in passing the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which gave the vote to black men but not to women.

It has always amazed me that men were willing to give the vote to men of other races before they were willing to give it to their own mothers and daughters and sisters. I could understand their not wanting to share power with their wives and even their sisters. But their mothers and daughters? What kind of person doesn't see the humanity of his own parent and child? What does that say about those men?

* Let's remember that there have always been men, like John Stuart Mill and my great-grandfather, who believed in the equality of the sexes. I am not talking about them here. I am talking about the majority of men, who had power and did not gladly give it up.

photo, National Archives of Scotland, Photograph of Janet Arthur, suffragist, 1912, taken from the Home and Health Department criminal case files, NAS ref. HH16/43/2

Do We Need To Go Back?

The very first fire fighters that we know of were in ancient Egypt and consisted of slaves running a bucket brigade.

In ancient Rome, Marcus Egnatius Rufus and later Augustus added pumps, poles, hooks, and basllistae (to tear down buildings in advance of the flames) to the basic group of slaves with buckets.

In both of these cases, they fought fires that threatened the property of their owners. Anyone else? Not their problem.

The next advancement in firefighting* came with fire insurance. Subscribers could expect the fire department to arrive and fight the fire at the insured structure. Anyone else? Not their problem.

Modern fire departments, paid for by taxes and expected to protect the property of poor as well as rich, arrived around the time of the Civil War. The idea that the poor had rights and were deserving of protection was historically novel, and required a country founded on liberty and equality to grow. Today we take it for granted that fire protection covers everyone -- rich, poor, citizen, illegal alien. There is no means testing, no mark on the front of the building declaring that it is insured and fire fighters are allowed to save it.

So, I find it shocking to discover that there were private fire fighters at the California wildfires last month. Fire fighters who fought fires and sprayed flame retardant on the homes of their subscribers, and allowed the neighbors' houses to burn.**

In Southern California, it is Firebreak Spray Systems; in Florida during the last hurricane season, it was HelpJet, which arranged evacuations to a five star resort, turning "a hurricane evacuation into a jet-setter vacation."

Soon it will be Blackwater. Private emergency response firms. While public fire departments are horribly impacted by budget cuts, the rich need not worry. The good old days of fire insurance and gangs of slaves protecting the important people while the rest of us can make do on what is left are back.

* The dogs which usually ran with the horses (not, sadly enough, shown in this photo) were rarely Dalmatians, which are too high strung for the stressful duty, and usually mongrels. They ran between the horses feet, fighting off strange dogs who might decide to harry them. Once the engine had been delivered to the fire, the horses were released and the dog would lead them away to a quiet spot a safe distance away and guard them until they were needed again. It was a good day if there was grass for the horses to graze on.

** Two Tiered System, on Alternet.org.

Photos:
Steamer Team, Firegeezer.com
Toronto fire truck, Mike's Journal.com

Mom's Overture

Anita Renfroe is one funny woman.