Word of the Day

Abnegation.

A word I’ve never had the slightest opportunity to use. Denial, the dictionary has to say about it, particularly self-denial.

I have so little self-denial! a person might say coyly when presented with — particularly this time of year — a plate of goodies, just before they reconsider — oh, well, on second thought! — and reach a hand toward a particularly tempting bite.

Other than that usage — so blithe, so redolent of pop psychology — I can’t imagine a single way self-denial might be inserted into conversation: it’s a concept that’s been stripped of meaning, an act long ago fallen out of fashion.

I’m certainly not bemoaning that fact. To practice self-denial — what would be the point? What would it be for, other than …. I dunno. To prove a point? For one’s own good? You give up smoking, you turn down a rich piece of cake, you practice self-denial. Maybe you exchange all the old-style lightbulbs in your house and turn down the heat.

Our culture keeps the concept of self-denial firmly on a transactional level. You give something up — you get something in return. You cut the sugar from your diet, you are gifted with… (I suppose)… better health.   You simplify your life, you're blessed with... tranquility and peace.

So abnegation means self-denial, and there’s little point (who cares?) discussing it.

But then there’s the verb form of the word …

Four days ago, after I gave up on driving so aimlessly and at the same time so purposefully through the neighborhood with my freight of sleepless child and all my complicated baggage — of what I needed, of what she needed, of what should happen, of what was most important — the word self-abnegation all of a sudden seemed scrawled across my afternoon in bold, black, foot-high, maybe even flaming, letters.

To abnegate: To deny, renounce; to surrender, to relinquish.

So Latinate, so medieval! And the interesting thing about the definition is the way it changes our focus from the transactional nature of self-denial (at least as we see it these days, hair shirts having gone, also, out of fashion) to something much more difficult, and powerful: the struggle. If denying, renouncing, surrendering or relinquishing isn't the hardest frigging work you’ve ever engaged in then I sure don’t want your job, whatever it might be.

In parenthood, one’s will continuously butts up against something so much larger and stronger than it is — a life force? A universe? —  and there is something downright… religious about the — I don’t know what else to call it — self-abnegation that almost always is the lesson learned.  There is nothing concretely transactional about the self-abnegation of parenthood:  I mean, I can sacrifice my desires for my child's well-being until I'm blue in the face, but it's not ever ever ever going to get me back into a size 6 pair of jeans. 

This sort of sacrifice is dangerous stuff. This is poking at the dark heart of motherhood — here there be dragons! — with a particularly strong stick. This is mixing the theological (or the spiritual) with the everyday, and to do so is anathema (interestingly enough, another religious word) to the people and the culture we are these days.

Is the self-abnegation that is part and parcel of parenthood good or bad? I’m not saying ( I don’t know; I made a C in Existential Philosophy at UGA in 1983). It just is, as loathe as we are to acknowledge it.

A couple of other religiously-connotated words:

Fanaticism.
Fervor.

Oh, they’re not words connected to us, (even should we have a religious affiliation, these things being also these days somewhat out of vogue) but belong to other people’s lives, across oceans and far away.

But throw those sorts of words into the parenthood mix and what do you get?

A culture where parent participation is sometimes elevated to a byzantine art?  Where guilt can be paramount?  One where places exist where parents must undergo interviews to get their kids in preschool?  

Wow, that world's not oceans away from us ... it's right down the street, at least from the house I most often find myself living in! 

Any state of being that requires extremes from an individual ... may also pull forth extremes of behavior from within them as well. In short, if you expect a person to put hours and hours and hours of time every week into their childs' ... school... sport... whatever... maybe you're going to have to not just tolerate but embrace some fervor and fanaticism as well.       

Food For Thought...

First grade.  Those first few weeks as the family transitions back into the school year schedule can be a killer.  Elder Girleen has bags under her eyes like she's been cramming for a final, but honest, Ms. M the First Grade Teacher, she's in bed by eight!  

Last night, though, I know she was up a little later:  I could hear her in her bedroom reading On the Banks of Plum Creek to herself for at least half an hour.  Reading a chapter book.  The second week of first grade.  I myself don't remember much about first grade besides the tedium of Sally, Dick and Jane and the morning nit-check (it being 1970 in small town Georgia after all).  

First grade is just not what it was back then in those primitive days; in fact, a couple of times it has already seemed to me like Elder Girleen's first grade is my first grade experience, completely inverted.  She can read like nobody's business already; I was grinding through books with little more two words on each page at that age.  But on the other hand, I was walking by myself to school.  Elder Girleen can't.  

Her school isn't within walking distance from our house, which makes things easier for me:  I don't have to face any hard choices about whether or not she should.  But every morning when I drive her there or carpool with the neighbor, I think about the way things used to be — the quarter bestowed upon me so I could stop for ice cream at the soda fountain at the pharmacy on the way home, the fact that once I walked all the way home from school backwards, and down one of Athens, Georgia's main artery streets, no less — and the way they are now, when letting a first grader play in the front yard of your house may be a fraught proposition.  

All this is a rich vein to mine.  And Leonore Skenazy, a New York City mom and New York Sun columnist does just that, here. In case you missed the uproar (as I had), Skenazy let her nine-year-old take the subway home from Bloomingdale's without a parental escort and then wrote about the experience for her column.  Two days later she was on the Today Show (this is much worse than ending up on the cover of "Bad Mommy Monthly").  

Not saying I agree with everything she says ... but it is food for thought.   

Cooperation/Corporation, Continued

Spring has sprung here in the 'hood. Painting crews are blasting conjunto music while they scrape and prep houses in a repainting ritual that seems to take place every spring. The lenten roses, green belles of the early spring ball, are laden with demure blossoms. The Bradford pear trees are a confectionary of exploded cotton batting.

And just as there has been every single spring for the past five years, controversy is reaching a boiling point at the cooperative preschool where we've thrown in our lot.

Cooperative preschools — or for that matter, Montessori preschools, Waldorf preschools, Reggio Emilia-method based preschools, and state-funded preschools— were not something I was aware of, pre-children (I actually don’t have enough fingers or toes to count up all the things I knew nothing of, pre-children). To tell you the truth, I didn't put a whole lot of thought into exactly what you did with kids once you had them. I knew they went to kindergarten at five, but other than that.... who knew?

Now that I've got six years of parenthood under my belt, I've come to appreciate the cooperative approach to preschool education (and maybe that will be blog fodder on a slow day), but in the beginning I made the decision to enroll Elder Girleen there when she was 1 1/2 based solely on this: the cooperative preschool was close to our house, I was attracted to its flexible schedul, she and I both needed some breathing space from each other, and I'd seen the children enrolled there as they marched (or rather strolled and rode on shoulders) in the annual free-spirited neighborhood parade.

They looked happy. In fact, they were happy — they are. Under the nurturing guidance of a cadre of teachers, a hardworking preschool director and all those fellow parents who “own” a cooperative preschool and pitch in when the building floods or someone has a baby or a child’s nose needs wiped, my daughters have blossomed into a sharp, inquisitive, polite (mostly), poised little people.

Sounds lovely, doesn't it? But at the same time, that annual free-spirited neighborhood festival, now one of Atlanta's biggest events, is sponsored by Red Hook Beer, and the preschool (now just Younger Girleen's school) might just as easily be described as a loose consortium of small fractious countries, each with its own nuclear warhead and fingers itchy to start hostilities. In short, things change in five years. Or maybe it's just that the Pristine Surface is always, no matter where you find it, in good part about spin.

Last year I was on the board of directors at the preschool. Quasi-political, following — roughly, chaotically — the same Roberts Rules of Order that theoretically instill parliamentary procedure into everything from neighborhood meetings to … well, uhh … preschool board meetings; equal parts tedium, political brinkmanship and occasionally, heartwarming cooperation, the board of the preschool and the time I spent serving on it dragged me, kicking and screaming, to a level of social and political engagement that, before I had children, I mostly chose to observe from the sidelines.

Maybe because of that fact, this year my role can be best described as that of a mostly disinterested bystander. Not for me, board meetings that last for three hours where life-affecting details such as whether or not the child-drawn figure that serves as the school's logo "looks lonely" at the top of the school letterhead are discussed. Not for me, those sidelong looks and huddles of two or three board members on the playground as the latest board powerplay or malfeasance is dissected. You might even say that I find myself watching this year's controversy build the way you might watch a car crash — o, that spectacular fishtail! o, the crumpled bumper! somebody call 911!

Past springs, preschool controversies have involved everything from teacher hirings and firings to the possible dissolution of classes for certain ages of children. The specifics of this year's controversy don't really matter. The globals, though, as I read them, involve where you stand on the following statement:

Our organization is a non-profit educational institution, not a for-profit corporation with shareholders, etc.

This year, my motto as far as my preschool duties has been to tell myself yo! you can't expect a sorority to behave like a commune, and even though this is about as inane as saying it is what it is, I've drawn a lot of comfort from it. People at the preschool generally mean well. I'm not so sure I would've wanted a commune anyway -- we all know what happened to most of those idealistic sixties utopias.

Apparently, though, while I'm busy mouthing platitudes and keeping my head in the sand, the firestorm has been raging. I bumped into the poor soul who took my place on the board at the playground and she had a wild look in her eye. "The emails!" she cried. "One came down that said 'we're trying to run this place like a corporation.' She took a deep breath. "A corporation! The first time I read that one, I read cooperation. That's what it really is, right?"

Cooperation/Corporation. Ah, you wondered how I was going to pull this one off!

The answer is: I'm afraid I can't pull it off at all. The serial nature of the medium has made me realize I'm on thin ice, narrative-wise: this one is just too hard for me to tackle. In blog form. Without a Ph.D. in Political Science. Or Philosophy. Or a bigger, less-mommified brain.

But I guess the point I might be trying for is this: As I stood there at Elder Girleen's school while the Pledge was being recited, it dawned on my that we might all have some idealized vision of democracy, and the United States, lodged in our DNA. One vote, one voice! Our ancestors did mostly wash up on these shores believing this to be the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, after all.

So there we are, standing on that bedrock. But we live our day-to-day lives swimming (and sometimes drowning) in a sea of capitalist impulses. That's why, when the parents charged with making decisions about a cooperative preschool get going, they start borrowing ideas from the corporate world. It's not like they've been working on kibbutzim their whole lives! Where else are they going to get ideas from?

This is a big question. Maybe the BIGGEST question. But I think lots of folks are starting to ask it; that maybe the desire to find the answer to that is in the ether these days.

Apologies for the sociopolitical content of the last few days (we're done now, I promise).

Howdy to all the folks in Texas who are in the political spotlight today.

Cooperation/Corporation

Part One

Mornings when I take Elder Girleen to school, I usually hang around for fifteen minutes for Morning Meeting, a daily occurrence that involves 360 drowsy kids with sleep still in their eyes sitting criss-cross applesauce on the floor of the auditorium for a couple of announcements, a song or two and a factual snippet (such as: what exactly is leap day, what is a primary election, did you know that George Washington Carver invented over 400 things to do with sweet potatoes?).  



They also scramble up off the floor for the Pledge of Allegiance, as do all the teachers and any parent-types who've stuck around.  

I certainly don't think of myself as the patriotic type.  I don't go to baseball games.  In fact, before Elder Girleen started kindergarten I probably hadn't said the Pledge of Allegiance since I was in elementary school.    



But, just as you never forget how to ride a bike, you never forget how the Pledge goes.  The hand folded earnestly across the heart!  Those words:  and liberty and justice for all. 



On one hand, it seems so anachronistic, so quaint.  But on the other, because of who everyone standing there in that circa 1929 auditorium is (an American) and probably because we all stood in similar settings saying the same words when we were the same impressionable age that Elder Girleen is now (6), I find that I have an emotional reaction to their meaning.  



And liberty and justice for all.  For the few short moments it takes to say them, I believe.

Are they true or false?  Wiser heads than mine are debating that as we speak, and have been doing so ever since they were written.  Because of my status as mom,* I'm not going to weigh in on the actual veracity of those words, though I certainly have my own opinion about it.

Some of my first political memories:  my mother weeping during the six o'clock news as wives of soldiers missing in Vietnam were interviewed; my confusion between the IRA (who were particularly active right then) and the IRS (who upset my father); adult discussions about assassinations; the way the airing of the Watergate  hearings meant there were no cartoons to be watched on TV.  Given all that, it would be easy to say I turned out cynical about our country's political underpinnings. 

But peel back the callused skin of every adult American and you might find a child who once stood hand-over-heart and said and liberty and justice for all and believed it.  

We tend to forget that as we age.  These are skeptical times; they might even be the end times, for all we know.  But I would submit that under our cynicism the desire at least to believe in the idea of democracy is practically encoded in our DNA.

   

*Though motherhood can be a deeply political act, I find that in the day to day of motherhood, talking politics is generally frowned upon:  I mean, how can you force yourself to go to a particular play group every week if you know the moms you're having coffee with LOVE Mike Huckabee?  I was with a group of moms I knew socially every morning during the week the Iraq War started — did it come up?  Not just no, but hell, no.  

Part Two

Currently, the husband and I are obsessed with the TV show The Wire.  We won't even get into the fact that the pop-culture cognoscenti were first watching, and raving about, The Wire all of five years ago.  We don't have cable around here and besides, five years ago we were too sleep-deprived to follow complex story lines along the  lines of The Wire's. Anyway, now the show's on DVD so we can watch it every single night.  This is lovely from a narrative point of view, sort of like having a long novel that never ends to look forward to every night, but it also colors one's world view.

The Wire takes a sprawling Dickensian look at life in urban America, and it confirms many of my most-cherished observations about the way the world works: more than half the time the time the good guys are on the take; doing the "right thing" tends to get people screwed; self-interest, power, politics and greed might be the forces that really shape American society.* The framework in The Wire is politics and public safety, but you could just as easily apply its tropes to any institution in American society: white-collar corporations, community organizations, even -- dare I say it with a straight face? -- cooperative preschools.

But how can those two ideologies — that of the starry-eyed child saying the Pledge of Allegiance who believes democracy is something to be championed and that of the grizzled cynic, who believes that the Will to Power greases the wheels of industry and politics — exist in my body simultaneously?

Bingo. Cooperation and Corporation. The two conflicting impulses that define American behavior.

*For an interesting take on The Wire, click here.

Three Little Words, Revisited

An astute reader reports that she's run across the new sanitized Wheels on the Bus (with "the mommies on the bus say 'I love you'" replacing "the mommies on the bus say 'ssh, ssh, ssh'") elsewhere, as well as a sanitized version of "Rock-a-bye Baby"--instead of "down will come baby, cradle and all" they sing the last line as "mommy/daddy will catch it, baby and all."

Oh, the years of therapy the Girleens will need — not only were they sung the wrong versions of these two songs, but also "Hush Little Baby" complete with lines about horses and carts falling down.

OK, I have now parsed out The Wheels on the Bus as much, as not more, as the author of last Sunday's Modern Love column.

It's all either Grist for the Mill --- or I need to get a life.

Three Little Words

I tend to read the "Modern Love" column in every Sunday's New York Times the way one slows going past a car crash: with equal parts disgust with myself and prurient interest. It's never one's better self who taps the brakes driving past someone else's tragedy; it's certainly not my better self that immediately after scanning the Book Review (I admit, there are vestiges enough of my writer self left that I still read the Book Review first) immediately flips to the Modern Love column in the Style section.

No offense to any of the writers published there (I'd certainly be one if I could), but I had no idea that navel-gazing could be elevated to such an extraordinarily high art within the pages of a daily newspaper. In a blog, yes. But in the New York Times?Does the world (or New York, or those small portions of the country that actually read the New York Times) _really_ need to know what it's like to... be a egg donor... an abused woman... at the losing end of a bad breakup... or, as was the case this past Sunday, what it's like to be a mother who doesn't particularly like to say "I love you" to her two-and-a-half-year-old?

(Don't get her wrong... it's not that she doesn't actually _love_ her child; she just doesn't care to say it much, a realization that dawns on her after she hears a woman sing the following verse of The Wheels on the Bus — "The mommies on the bus say 'I love you,' 'I love you,' 'I love you...' — to her stroller-strapped offspring.

First things first. I've NEVER heard this verse of the Wheels on the Bus. And I've been singing the Wheels on the Bus, a song I was lucky enough to never even have heard of until I had children, until I'm blue in the face for the past five years, particularly at Mommy and Me Swimming classes, a scam foisted upon well-meaning middle-class parents who, being led to believe that you can actually teach a toddler something that resembles swimming, pay good money to stand waist-high in a swimming pool singing the Wheels on the Bus and This is the Way We Splash Our Hands while their child, and every other in a two-mile radius, screams its head off. I mean, how stupid do we think children actually are? The Wheels on the Bus is no way interesting enough to distract anyone from the fact that they're being dunked in water, which, in case you didn't realize it, Mom, you can drown in.

All that aside, there are a couple of ways one could react to this essay:

1. When the song The Wheels of the Bus leads you to start parsing out your relationship with your kids, it's time to reevaluate your life

2. Maybe this was published in the Times so that all of the rest of us parents — whether bad, run-of-the-mill or stellar — can feel good about something. We may forget to pick up our kids at school, may exchange store-bought cookies for homemade ones when it's our turn to bring snack to preschool (provided one's preschool allows cookies), may buy our kids Barbie outfits at Target so that we will have five minutes to stand in the dressing room to try on t-shirts that make us look pregnant (having, as we move through our child-bearing years, travelled the ignominious road from wearing Exhilaration! to Mossimo to Cherokee Woman) without having to contend with a child who is either screaming or trying to squirm under the dressing room stall door into the adjoining stall where a 65 year old woman who does not like children is trying on brassieres. We may do all that, but at least we are ok about telling our children that we love them.

Of course, like every other parent, this woman makes herself feel better about her disinterest in saying those three little words by making the whole act of doing so seem vaguely suspect, as if it were akin to

1. Letting your child watch too much t.v.
2. taking them to MacDonald's
3. Bribing them with sugar

What a pretty pass things have come to. The other day I was in the check-out line in the grocery store and against my better judgement picked up Real Simple's Family issue. Did you know that letting your child eat something that's dropped on the floor gives you two stars in a one to five scale of bad parenting? Likewise, sending your child off to school without a scarf or mittens? Don't even ask how many stars neglecting to make them brush their teeth one single night can give you.

Forgive me, for I have sinned. My youngest daughter trolls around on the dining room floor after dinner occasionally popping that morning's dropped cereal into her mouth. My children are congenitally incapable of wearing mittens, and more power to you if you can get them crammed on their recalcitrant hands. Sometimes when the Husband has been away on business for four nights running, we ... forget... to brush our teeth.

I guess the title of this post should really be: I Just ...Don't... Want... to ...Know.