My kids are special. They are the smartest, funniest, most honest people I've ever met. They are better than your kids. I think that, while rules are important, my kids are so amazing that if they skirt the rules a little bit, that's okay, because they aren't like those other, ordinary people for whom the rules are made.
My students, too. They work hard and they or their parents make sacrifices so they can follow their muse. I should be able to bend the rules for them, especially when the rules don't make sense, or when they'd do better if they got to just ignore them.
And, frankly, while we're on the subject, there are a lot of rules that I'd be better off ignoring as well. Sometimes following rules is just so damned inconvenient; if I'm doing what needs to be done, then why should I have to dot every "i" and cross every "t." Plus I'm super smart, smarter than you in point of fact, so I should get a pass.
Why am I so pissy about this today? Because I follow the rules, sometimes at significant personal inconvenience or expense, and then I find out that somebody else is getting away with blowing them off. And frankly, I don't think I would get away with it, and I don't think I, or anyone, should be given the option to make the choice about which rules to follow.
You don't like the rules? Get them changed. Refuse to follow them and take the consequences. You shouldn't get to pick and choose which rules to follow, but still get the credential, or avoid the ticket, or receive the award.
It just pisses me off.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Transitions.
My daughter stood at the boards of the local ice rink, where we skate together two days a week. We were NOT having a good practice. I can't turn anymore. She can't jump anymore.
"I think this part of my life may be over," she said, tearing up.
I don't know what to say.
"I think this part of my life may be over," she said, tearing up.
I don't know what to say.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Different lives
Your children live such different lives than you.
Generations ago this wasn't true. You lived the life your mother, and your grandmother, and probably your 5 times great grandmother lived. Change came slowly; your family situation was immutable to a large extent.
Enter the 20th Century and the dislocation of tens of millions (hundreds of millions?) from the agrarian past. Without the connection to the land and the community, there was really no reason to try to live the life your father lived, and your grandfather's and great grandfather's life was now out of reach. Those on the land continued, perhaps, to follow their ancient traditions and lifestyles, but those in the cities couldn't, wouldn't, or didn't need to. And the cities increasingly beckoned more and more people from the life on the farm, where the rhythms were becoming increasingly urban, or at least controlled by people whose rhythms were urban.
Suddenly there was this strange modern thing called "choice."
But your children's lives will also differ in more personal ways. My own family had broken down by the time I was my children's ages. My mother was dead, my father immersed in an increasingly remote role that had no room for me. Wei's mother remained (and remains) connected, but his elderly father died before my daughter was born.
My children retain strong bonds with us, and I can't see that changing. It was something deliberate on my part. I feel very keenly how adrift Wei and I were as young adults, without the strong anchor of a stable existing home or parents and wanted my kids to know that we were always there for them. I watch my children struggle with relationships, jobs, and, frankly poverty, and am completely nonplussed about how Wei and I handled this. We just had to make it up; the "adults" in our lives were, for the most part, absent, or useless.
My kids know that they can come home.
Generations ago this wasn't true. You lived the life your mother, and your grandmother, and probably your 5 times great grandmother lived. Change came slowly; your family situation was immutable to a large extent.
Enter the 20th Century and the dislocation of tens of millions (hundreds of millions?) from the agrarian past. Without the connection to the land and the community, there was really no reason to try to live the life your father lived, and your grandfather's and great grandfather's life was now out of reach. Those on the land continued, perhaps, to follow their ancient traditions and lifestyles, but those in the cities couldn't, wouldn't, or didn't need to. And the cities increasingly beckoned more and more people from the life on the farm, where the rhythms were becoming increasingly urban, or at least controlled by people whose rhythms were urban.
Suddenly there was this strange modern thing called "choice."
But your children's lives will also differ in more personal ways. My own family had broken down by the time I was my children's ages. My mother was dead, my father immersed in an increasingly remote role that had no room for me. Wei's mother remained (and remains) connected, but his elderly father died before my daughter was born.
My children retain strong bonds with us, and I can't see that changing. It was something deliberate on my part. I feel very keenly how adrift Wei and I were as young adults, without the strong anchor of a stable existing home or parents and wanted my kids to know that we were always there for them. I watch my children struggle with relationships, jobs, and, frankly poverty, and am completely nonplussed about how Wei and I handled this. We just had to make it up; the "adults" in our lives were, for the most part, absent, or useless.
My kids know that they can come home.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
What's your talent?
We're in a phase right now, as a family, of admiring ourselves.
Every family dinner conversation seems to include a litany of how well we raised our marvelous children, usually in comparison with our newly-fledged ones encounters with their peers, who do not seem to have absorbed the same lessons of self-reliance that ours did.
At my son's birthday dinner last week we somehow got into a description of how talented we all were. DH is Mr. Music. Son Seng Lim is Mr. Music, Jr. I trotted out my old joke that I'm pretty good at everything and superlative at nothing.
And daughter Nga, who has always been a little bit of a cuckoo in this nest, says , "well what am I good at?
And everyone's first reaction was a moment of awkward silence while we all struggled for the answer.
It was awful.
N in fact has an amazing talent; she's a gifted professional figure skater who has traveled the world getting paid to do this. She's been to US Junior Nationals. But for just a moment our minds went blank.
And then we all realized what Nga's talent really is. She's amazing with people, something the rest of us fail at to varying degrees. She makes friends easily, and keeps them happy. She gets along with all sorts of people.
There are all kinds of talent. Our society thinks of talent as skill-- art or music or sports.
But some people are just talented at life.
Every family dinner conversation seems to include a litany of how well we raised our marvelous children, usually in comparison with our newly-fledged ones encounters with their peers, who do not seem to have absorbed the same lessons of self-reliance that ours did.
At my son's birthday dinner last week we somehow got into a description of how talented we all were. DH is Mr. Music. Son Seng Lim is Mr. Music, Jr. I trotted out my old joke that I'm pretty good at everything and superlative at nothing.
And daughter Nga, who has always been a little bit of a cuckoo in this nest, says , "well what am I good at?
And everyone's first reaction was a moment of awkward silence while we all struggled for the answer.
It was awful.
N in fact has an amazing talent; she's a gifted professional figure skater who has traveled the world getting paid to do this. She's been to US Junior Nationals. But for just a moment our minds went blank.
And then we all realized what Nga's talent really is. She's amazing with people, something the rest of us fail at to varying degrees. She makes friends easily, and keeps them happy. She gets along with all sorts of people.
There are all kinds of talent. Our society thinks of talent as skill-- art or music or sports.
But some people are just talented at life.
Friday, March 23, 2012
26 is the new 21
Today is my son Seng Lim's 26th birthday.
It's been making me feel melancholy all day, but not because I feel old, or because he's not completely awesome (he is).
It's because I feel somehow personally responsible for not fixing the world for him.
Because my gift to him today is the loss of his health care coverage. Generations ago kids got cut loose at 16, and then at 18. Back in the day it was 21. Now 26 is the year that we say "That's it. You're really an adult now. Make your own dentist appointments."
Even 26 years ago bringing a child into the world was a terrifying act of faith, because unlike the generations prior to my own, I didn't have to. Starting with my generation, sex in the modern West was decoupled from procreation, and child bearing became a chosen gift to the future. I really did give life to my children, because I had the capability to choose to do that.
But I wanted to bring them into a world that was better than the world I got. A world that honored artists, and tolerated alternate opinions, and took care of its vulnerable, and that didn't study war any more.
When Seng Lim was three, quite literally on his third birthday, the United States went to war. I remember sitting in a cafe with a friend and vowing that there would be no war when my son turned 18 and was vulnerable to a possible draft. But when he was 17 we did it again, starting a war in a place we had no business being. I went home that day and put a sign up in our window that says "NO WAR" and it is still there, almost 10 years later. We have been at war, somewhere, for that young man's entire life. How did that happen.
These thoughts are too sad for a birthday, which just makes me mad. Does it need to be my grandson to whom I can finally say "here is the clean, peaceful, just world that I promised your father when he was born"?
Happy Birthday, Seng Lim. I'm sorry.
It's been making me feel melancholy all day, but not because I feel old, or because he's not completely awesome (he is).
It's because I feel somehow personally responsible for not fixing the world for him.
Because my gift to him today is the loss of his health care coverage. Generations ago kids got cut loose at 16, and then at 18. Back in the day it was 21. Now 26 is the year that we say "That's it. You're really an adult now. Make your own dentist appointments."
Even 26 years ago bringing a child into the world was a terrifying act of faith, because unlike the generations prior to my own, I didn't have to. Starting with my generation, sex in the modern West was decoupled from procreation, and child bearing became a chosen gift to the future. I really did give life to my children, because I had the capability to choose to do that.
But I wanted to bring them into a world that was better than the world I got. A world that honored artists, and tolerated alternate opinions, and took care of its vulnerable, and that didn't study war any more.
When Seng Lim was three, quite literally on his third birthday, the United States went to war. I remember sitting in a cafe with a friend and vowing that there would be no war when my son turned 18 and was vulnerable to a possible draft. But when he was 17 we did it again, starting a war in a place we had no business being. I went home that day and put a sign up in our window that says "NO WAR" and it is still there, almost 10 years later. We have been at war, somewhere, for that young man's entire life. How did that happen.
These thoughts are too sad for a birthday, which just makes me mad. Does it need to be my grandson to whom I can finally say "here is the clean, peaceful, just world that I promised your father when he was born"?
Happy Birthday, Seng Lim. I'm sorry.
Friday, December 16, 2011
25 years
The best gift I ever gave my children was a childhood in a single home; they've lived their entire lives in the same house.
We moved in twenty-five years ago today. My son was 8 months old, my daughter still just an amorphous idea of a second child.
I've always wondered what this does to a psyche.
My children retain their keys. When they come home, they're coming home--they let themselves in; they know where things are. It is understood that they "live" here, even though they don't live here. I can't wrap my head around the sense of belonging and stability that this must give a child. For me this is the house that I chose and bought; for them it's their country. I think this house must feel to them like "theirs" in ways that I cannot fathom.
Americans are used to moving--it's practically a national pasttime. Companies think nothing of uprooting a family and sending them across the country because it's better for the business. Kids get out of college and home in on any community but home.
As a child, I lived at 7 different addresses in four states as my father worked his way up the academic heirarchy. From the age of 17, when I started college, to the age of 30, when we moved here, I lived at 8 addresses in 3 cities, including an entirely different country. I didn't even get to go "home;" between them in that period my parents also lived at 6 different addresses in 2 cities, none of them places that I had ever lived. When I visited them, it was to unfamiliar apartments furnished with unfamiliar objects.
After my son came back from his world travels, seeing dozens of American, European and Mideast cities on tour as a musician, he remarked that he'd never seen a place where he couldn't do anything that he could do at home.
Because he has one. This one.
You're welcome.
We moved in twenty-five years ago today. My son was 8 months old, my daughter still just an amorphous idea of a second child.
I've always wondered what this does to a psyche.
My children retain their keys. When they come home, they're coming home--they let themselves in; they know where things are. It is understood that they "live" here, even though they don't live here. I can't wrap my head around the sense of belonging and stability that this must give a child. For me this is the house that I chose and bought; for them it's their country. I think this house must feel to them like "theirs" in ways that I cannot fathom.
Americans are used to moving--it's practically a national pasttime. Companies think nothing of uprooting a family and sending them across the country because it's better for the business. Kids get out of college and home in on any community but home.
As a child, I lived at 7 different addresses in four states as my father worked his way up the academic heirarchy. From the age of 17, when I started college, to the age of 30, when we moved here, I lived at 8 addresses in 3 cities, including an entirely different country. I didn't even get to go "home;" between them in that period my parents also lived at 6 different addresses in 2 cities, none of them places that I had ever lived. When I visited them, it was to unfamiliar apartments furnished with unfamiliar objects.
After my son came back from his world travels, seeing dozens of American, European and Mideast cities on tour as a musician, he remarked that he'd never seen a place where he couldn't do anything that he could do at home.
Because he has one. This one.
You're welcome.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Double nickle
That's right. 55. I turned 55.
My mother was never this old, in fact I actually noted the day, November 21, that I lived longer than my mother. So from here, I'm making it all up.
I went out to dinner with my old friends Holly and Chris. We always share birthdays, and have been doing this for years. They started this right out of college. I used to make it a bigger deal and invited other friends too, until Chris, bless her heart, asked if she and Holly and I could do it just among ourselves, because my other friends were either boring, arrogant, annoying, or all three.
Sadly, I realized she was right, so we started doing it with just us, and occasionally our friend Maggie.
Well, 55 was one for the record books. I decided I needed to write it down because birthday parties don't really get much worse than this. (Okay, there was the time Bill gave me a surprise party even though I begged him not to, and I spent the entire party locked in the bedroom, crying.)
First, I decided to walk to the restaurant since it wasn't very far (a little more than a mile). Five blocks short I tried to step off the sidewalk to get around this lumbering idiot who was slowly making his way along, and put my foot into a pothole, nicely breaking my ankle. Then I couldn't get a bus to stop for me, and had to walk the rest of the way.
The restaurant gave me ice, but refused to ask someone for ibuprofen, in case I sued them, so my friend had to go to the nearest store, several blocks away, to get me some. We get seated, right next to an unsealed door behind which is a very raucous wedding, playing music so loud that conversation was pretty much impossible. The waiter wouldn't move us, so we simply moved our selves, one 2-top over so there was a little more distance between us and the door.
At which point the hostess comes over and explains to us that the table we've moved to will actually need to be added to a large group scheduled to come in 45 minutes, so we're going to have to be done in 45 minutes so they can be seated. At this point I finally started to cry.
Happy Birthday. You're old, injured, and a pain in the neck.
It all worked out. The restaurant found a way to set up the needed table without ousting us; the other party didn't show up anyway. The wedding finally started dinner and turned the music off, and my friends more or less carried me home and made me tea.
No way Holly (June 4) and Chris (September 14) can top that.
My mother was never this old, in fact I actually noted the day, November 21, that I lived longer than my mother. So from here, I'm making it all up.
I went out to dinner with my old friends Holly and Chris. We always share birthdays, and have been doing this for years. They started this right out of college. I used to make it a bigger deal and invited other friends too, until Chris, bless her heart, asked if she and Holly and I could do it just among ourselves, because my other friends were either boring, arrogant, annoying, or all three.
Sadly, I realized she was right, so we started doing it with just us, and occasionally our friend Maggie.
Well, 55 was one for the record books. I decided I needed to write it down because birthday parties don't really get much worse than this. (Okay, there was the time Bill gave me a surprise party even though I begged him not to, and I spent the entire party locked in the bedroom, crying.)
First, I decided to walk to the restaurant since it wasn't very far (a little more than a mile). Five blocks short I tried to step off the sidewalk to get around this lumbering idiot who was slowly making his way along, and put my foot into a pothole, nicely breaking my ankle. Then I couldn't get a bus to stop for me, and had to walk the rest of the way.
The restaurant gave me ice, but refused to ask someone for ibuprofen, in case I sued them, so my friend had to go to the nearest store, several blocks away, to get me some. We get seated, right next to an unsealed door behind which is a very raucous wedding, playing music so loud that conversation was pretty much impossible. The waiter wouldn't move us, so we simply moved our selves, one 2-top over so there was a little more distance between us and the door.
At which point the hostess comes over and explains to us that the table we've moved to will actually need to be added to a large group scheduled to come in 45 minutes, so we're going to have to be done in 45 minutes so they can be seated. At this point I finally started to cry.
Happy Birthday. You're old, injured, and a pain in the neck.
It all worked out. The restaurant found a way to set up the needed table without ousting us; the other party didn't show up anyway. The wedding finally started dinner and turned the music off, and my friends more or less carried me home and made me tea.
No way Holly (June 4) and Chris (September 14) can top that.
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