Did You Really "Come Out Okay?"

My generation, "Gen X," really annoys me to no end when they start the nostalgic stupid-talk:

"I did [insert stupid/illegal/dangerous/cruel activity here] and I came out just fine...

"My parents [insert ridiculous borderline abusive parent tactics here] and I came out just fine..."

Did you? Did you really? Isn't it kind of arrogant to say, "I came out just fine?" How do you know? Could it be that you came out scarred and beaten-down? And, I mean, if one is total oaf, one won't know it, right?

See, because, maybe the reason we Gen X-ers have raised a generation of frightened, anxious and over-protected kids is because we grew up steeped in bad decisions and walked around frightened and intimidated by our elders and we were so heavily encouraged to "respect" them that even under circumstances of borderline (or actual) abuse, we suffered silently. [This did not happen to me, but it has sadly been the case for some.]

Maybe you didn't come out ok. Ever think about that?

I think about it, literally, every day. I keep a picture of myself as a toddler on my desk so I can ask myself: "Have I let that little guy down? Have I done my best to be the man he deserved me to be?"

We should all do that, I think. We need to stop justifying our own stupidity and that of our parents. We can love our parents forever and still acknowledge outdated parenting ideas. We can admit our own stupidity as kids and still maintain our cool factor.

To the Gen X-er who says, "My dad used to smack me with the fireplace tools when I slouched. That's what kids today need!" ...I say, "How about, no?"

Let's stop blaming some mysterious force for our mistakes with our kids and let's stop soothing our souls by pretending we are perfect.

Face the horror. Prove your parents really raised you with a backbone. Face your own imperfection. Prove all those cracks across the knuckles with the wooden spoon and those bike jumps over rusty scrap metal paid off.

Did you really "come out okay"?

The New Glass Menagerie

My sons are good young men. I am immensely proud of what they have become. And, I am especially proud of how they weathered the COVID storm. My younger son had to do half-online high school and my older son had to start college online. They performed admirably and with grace. 

But, a few weeks ago, my younger son sort of reflexively said that his circumstances (being really busy -- new job, school play, etc) was "affecting his mental health." I quickly pointed out that being miserable and overwhelmed is not a decline of mental health; it is a natural reaction to a difficult situation. He was quick to acknowledge it and it was obvious that he understood that the lingo of the day had simply crept into his statement. 

I mentioned, to him, a bit by our favorite comedian, Sebastian Maniscalco. Maniscalco talks about people going to therapy for depression and about his father's reaction: "I've been depressed for thirty years." This gets big laughs, but it is a comic implication that the older generation didn't run to therapist when things got tough -- they "dealt with it."

Of course, we don't want to take this philosophy too far, right? We want to outgrow the foolish bravado of not seeking help when we need it. But, as in all things, we need to seek balance. 

I think we are turning the world into a kind of glass menagerie. We are creating people who feel as if they could shatter at any time; who think that being sad is a sign of trouble; that being taken surprise by emotion is always a dangerous situation. 

The other day, I was listening to a radio program and they were doing a piece on young men who had fallen into prostitution. They introduced the piece by warning the audience that some of the details in the story might be "disturbing." My first thought is: how could it not be disturbing? Isn't that idea implicit in the anounced subject. My second though is...so what if it is disturbing? Is the listener going to shatter to pieces?

Well...maybe. 

I often find myself, here and elsewhere, lamenting the complete inability of humanity to seem to be able to ever do anything but the extreme. If one listens to the chatter about mental health, one might assume, if you will forgive another literary reference, that we live in a world full of Roderick Ushers. 

Can't we teach our kids and others to be strong when they can and to seek help when they need it? I believe this is the intention of mental health professionals and the media, but I can't help think that it is recieved as: "Seek help, because you can't handle pressure alone." Somehow, in the minds of the many, I thihnk it just becomes a constant stream of rominders that one simply is not strong enough to make it without reliance on others. 

I don't want my sons to swallow their misery. I don't want them to be stoic and incommunicative. But I do want them to be strong enough to deal with stress and high levels of difficulty. What I don't want is for them to feel like any breeze of sadness is going to blow them off of the shelf to shatter on the floor. 

We're not good at balance, though -- this society of ours -- and I think it always comes down to one thing: too much work. Why tread water in the center of the pool when one can just cling to an edge?

The Kind of Man I Want To Be

I know. It's a cheesy title. But it is necessary. We're not allowed to have opinions about others anymore. That's labeled as "judgmental." So, I'm not allowed to say what I believe is "proper manly behavior," because that implies things that we are no longer allowed to believe, like, for instance, that there is a difference between men and women or that, in fact, there is a such thing as "man" and "woman" at all. 

But I have a sense of what it means, for me, to be "a man." I'm not saying you need to be like this or that anyone else needs to care what I think. If you define being a man as standing in a field with a with a propeller beanie on your head and hitting 600 baked potatoes a day off of a tee, have at it. For me, though, there is a combo of stuff that I have seen and respected in men who have influenced me over the years and those things have guided me to where I am today, whether the Interweb groupthinkers like it or not. 

Crying

"Big boys don't cry," some used to say. "Sure they do," people of good sense responded. "Well, they don't cry in front of others," some said. "Well, it all depends," people of good sense responded. 

While my dad was a fan of the John Wayne brand of machismo, he was also a composer. I watched him unashamedly break into tears while listening to Ravel. I saw him wipe tears away during powerful emotional scenes in movies. When my grandfather (his dad) died, I can still see the image of him standing in the twilight-dark kitchen, looking out the window, drinking a glass of milk. His face looked wet. He didn't hide it, but he didn't bawl in front of his son. He didn't sensitivity-signal. 

That's the kind of man I want to be. 

Courage

Back to The Duke: He's been credited as having said that courage is not about not being afraid; it's about getting "into the saddle" even when you are scared out of your mind. Sometimes it's about putting youself last. 

My wife and I have been watching a pretty good show called Longmire. Walt Longmire is a real "throwback" kind of sheriff in Wyoming; cowboy hat, the works. In a recent episode, he decided to go on foot, up a mountain, alone, after a snowcat vehicle full of armed convicts who were holding an FBI agent hostage. When he was told he was crazy for doing this, he said, "If I was a hostage, I'd want to know someone was coming after me." 

That's the kind of man I want to be. 

Chivalry

I treat women with deference; I treat them differently than I treat men, in some ways. I respect them, even though I go out of my way to hold doors for them. (I know that seems impossible, since all of the suspicions point to the fact that this is just cog in the wheel of an insidious plan to keep women feeling as if they need men, but bear with me.) Sure, I hold doors for dudes, but, I might throw the door open wide behind me so they can easily catch it and then say "thanks man" on the way through, but I'd never do that to a lady. I'd stand there and let her go through. 

Why? Not because I don't think she can hold the door, but because I don't think she should have to. What did she do to deserve this? Women, for me, have always represented an ideal that we power-hungry, chest-beating men would do better to imitate. Women have a strength of spirit we only wish we had and that we historically have pretended to have by shooting others by and making labyrinthine rule-systems. Women are the source of life, literally, and they are no less than the bedrock of civilization. 

Least I can do is let them go first through the door. That's the kind of man I want to be. 

"Head of the Household"

I don't want to boss my family around, but I want them to feel like they want to turn to me when things get hard. I want my boys and my wife to see me as a source of courage and strength; of rationality and reliability; of safety. I want to be the captain to whose ship all of the sailors want to be assigned, not the one who is just known for running a tight ship. 

Bringer of Balance

I want to be confident enough in my manliness to be able, occasionally, seek comfort from my wife when things overwhelm me. I have learned to ignore stupid machismo markers like "the man should always drive" and to, instead, focus on doing the things behind the scenes that keep my family happy and healthy --  to expect or desire exactly no credit for being a dad and a husband. As I once heard a mother say on a call in show, I want my children to "take me for granted." My thanks is their respect and healthy develpment, not attention for broadcast-actions of empty toughness. I don't want to spike the ball in the endzone, as if what I did was a big deal; I want to casually toss it to the ref as if I never broke a sweat. 

That's the kind of man I want to be. 

On Leaving Children to Die in Hot Cars

A long time ago a friend called me, excited. He'd finally found a reason why he couldn't learn to play guitar. He had schmigglie proclastic stiglination. I made that up. I have no memory of the term he used, but he claimed he had found a "condition" that made him unable to learn the guitar or to sing in tune.

I responded: "Yeah. It used to be called: 'no talent'." He got angry for a moment, but worse insults pass between on a regular basis, so life went on.

I have kind of a love/hate relationship with psychology. First off, I don't like its inherent paradoxes. For instance, things like this hypothetical: if you hyper-discipline your kids, they will be rule-following, well-adjusted adults or they could become violent criminals. (That helps me, how?)

The second thing I dislike, which is the focus of today's ramblings, is a mixture of psychologists and the general public: the confusion of behavior explanation and condoning said behavior.

We had a humdinger of a kerfuffle over on my personal Facebook page last week. Another case occurred, very near my home, of a parent locking his or her child in a hot car all day. The poor baby died and I had the audacity to post this:

A baby died in a hot car — it seems; no autopsy yet — at Lindenwold station. Here come the people to explain how we shouldn’t judge parents who “make a mistake” and how “it could happen to anyone.” Not to me. Ever. And I can be plenty absent-minded. If you do that, it means one thing: there are things in this world that are more important to you than your own child. That is all it means. This makes you the exact opposite of a good parent. If we are going to bring back standards, this is a good place to start.

(I found out today, she was two. Not a baby. That's even harder to do. Updated info on this case says it was not the father -- he is a convicted criminal without parental custody -- who did this. But, many a parent has done this, so the principle remains the same.)

The overwhelming majority of people reacted as I did, with anger, "likes," and agreement. Some people who wrote on my thread were pretty...energetic (more than I was comfortable with) in their condemnation of such a heinous mistake. Some made fun of recommendations about leaving one's cellphone in the backseat so as not to forget one's child; others of cars with warnings about checking the back seat...

This prompted an exceedingly intelligent and deeply valued friend of mine to more or less come in with guns blazing against the idea that some (including myself) were saying it "could never happen" to us. He shared a video in which a newscaster said, "If you think it couldn't happen to you, you're wrong" and in which a neuroscientist talked about the conditions under which it "could happen to anyone." My friend said that making fun of tactics and warnings is foolish and saying that "it could never happen to me" is "hubristic". His arguments were not without merit.

That said, I maintained there and will state here: It could never happen to me. (People all over the globe just cringed... "But...the saying...") I could never, under any circumstances, have left on of my babies or toddlers in a car. Never.

Those who love platitudes will roll their eyes. (I always think of Frost's "He will not go behind his father's saying/And he likes having thought of it so well/He says again, "Good fences make goodneighbors.") But people do love platitudes, even if they become irrelevant or questionable.

While "never say never" applies perfectly to saying "I can smoke...lung cancer will never happen to me," it does not apply as neatly to "I will never eat liver." Or, indeed, to: "I would never forget my kid in a hot car."

My friend argues that a certain set of circumstances could lead anyone to lock his or her child in a hot car all day and forget. (So, too, it seems, does the neuroscientist.) But my question for psychology is this: Why is it that behavior modification therapy exists? Don't some overcome their natural psychological tendencies through therapy? So, doesn't that mean that these mental "glitches" are surmountable? If so, why do we talk as if they are not? Maybe because it is safer that way. I get that.

For me, though, strength of will and priorities are powerful things. I stand by my post.

But just as we have to avoid seeing diagnoses and psychological theories as excuses for failures (and what else but a failure is leaving one's child in a car to die?) we have to avoid condemning people as people because of these failures.

Yes, I think someone who locks his kid a car is the very definition of a bad parent. That does not, however, mean the person is a bad human being. Skewed priorities don't make one evil; stupidity does not make one evil; being easily distracted doesn't make one evil; not having a strong parental connection to one's child doesn't make one evil. But all of these, sure as anything, can make one a bad parent. (Hat tip: Jesus. He said it way before this. This is what He meant by not judging others. He didn't mean we shouldn't have standards.)

The fact my emotions make me want to beat the stuffing out of a parent who does this cannot affect my reasoning.

If I cared enough -- if it were enough of a real priority -- I would keep my weight down to 195 pounds (my fightin' weight). I do okay, but I don't work hard enough for 195. I have a psychological and conditional (I get busy) tendency to eat lots of food. Sure, it adds to the challenge and explains my issue. But guess what: Fate will take me earlier if I stay where I am. He's not going to give me a pass on, say, diabetes because I had a "condition" or because my life was so busy I simply kept forgetting to watch what I ate and to exercise.

My kids? Nothing has ever come before them, not in my head and not in my actions. (Between you and me, it's why I am 51 and just launching a viable career in music composition. Next to my family, music is the most important thing in my life. Next to my family.) So don't tell me never to say never, please.

(And in case you are wondering, my track record -- in terms of my "watch" -- with my kids in terms of serious injury or allowing them into potentially life-threatening situations is exactly zero. They are teenagers now. Now it is becoming their responsibility; but I still remain focused.)

Should we have warning bells and strategies for not forgetting kids? Yes, we should. Most of us parents don't need them -- and I do believe it's an overwhelming majority of us -- but some do, and saving kids needs to come first. It's sad but true.

Our Uncomfortable Young Women

The First Feminist(?)

I have noticed a very meaningful paradox in the young women of America. Many of them (if not most) seem to feel compelled to embrace "sexiness" but they also seem completely uncomfortable doing so. This, I think, is one of the many negative results of the media-driven world.

Young women are taught (by example, in music and the media) that overt sexuality equals power; a kind of Wife of Bath-ish feministic statement. They are almost, I would argue, sent the message that it is their duty to be sexy; to wear certain revealing styles. I'm told by my young female students, in class discussion, that every young girl has, at some point, received at text from a boy that says "send nudes." The shocking thing here is not that boys want to see naked girls but that those boys seem to think they have a right to see these pictures; or, maybe worse, that getting pictures like that is a matter of course in their relationships with girls. The other thing I am told is that may girls comply because "they feel like they have to."

What I see in daily life is a lot of young women wearing clothes that "show" more than I ever, as a young man growing up in the 80s, saw. What I also see is how uncomfortable most of these girls seem to be in those revealing clothes. They seem constantly to be adjusting and trying to cover up.

It kind of breaks my heart to see that; to be witness to the profound and moving struggle between innocence and experience playing itself out in mannerisms.

To be clear -- and I don't mean this to be funny or ironic in any way -- I have respect for a confident woman who is comfortable both in a with her own skin; who is not ashamed to be sexy. She has every right to "strut her stuff" as they say; I (and the rest of us fellows), of course, still have an obligation to be gentlemanly toward her. But there is a great strength in a woman who is comfortable with her body and who is not ashamed.

That's all great, but, what if one is not ready for that? -- or what if one simply is not that person? This is what makes me sad, because it comes down to the usual thing: people being crushed by the weight of a media-connected, group thinking world.

I wasn't blessed with a daughter, but, if I had been, I would have done my best to encourage her to find her own "look" -- to be herself, without shame whether sh had chooses to dress minimally or conservatively. But I also would have tried to teach her that "sexy" isn't just about showing skin. It all has to be her choice to make, how she dresses; but every girl needs the independent spirit and confidence to really make it her own choice.

One thing I do know is that it really shreds a little bit more off of my already thinning soul every time I see a young girl who is obviously uncomfortable with the way society has dressed her. I don't blame her. I feel bad for her. Sadly, her only option is to take up arms against the ocean waves. Hopefully she has family and friends willing to support her in the fight.

Smogging-up the Abortion Argument

I'm "pro-life." I would like to think every human is. How could anyone be anything other than for life? I also think (in fact hope) that every human is anti-abortion. (More on this in a bit.)

I know, I know: I'm being cute. We know that "pro-choice" means what it says and that "pro-life" means anti-abortion, in context of the debates. Personally, I am truly "pro-life." By this, I mean that I believe that we humans do not have a right to take life. For this reason, I do not believe in the death penalty and I would not willingly participate in killing, even in war. To me, if life is sacred (or, in non-religious terms, it is an inalienable right of the one who exists) and there is no carte blanche for the taking of life. (I do believe that taking a life can be necessary, but that it is never moral. For example, I am sure I'd kill to protect my family, but I would still consider it [there simply is no better word] a sin that I would suffer from for the rest of my life.)

Of course, when it comes to abortion, the big debate is whether or when the biological stuff in the womb is a life. But I am not sure that is relevant to my own reasoning about the subject. (Maybe I'll address this in another piece.) But my purpose here is not to argue the particulars of abortion, but more to criticize how we currently argue about abortion.

But, first off, I categorically dismiss those who label men as invalid commentators on the subject of abortion. Abortion is a human question and not just a women's question. It is primarily a women's question, for sure.

Having said this, I watched my wife carry and give birth to two children; I also watched her miscarry three times (the first time, heartbreakingly late in the pregnancy). And while I "watched" this happen, I also, on a very deep level, experienced these things. As deeply as her? Of course not; but, I think these experiences more than justify my having opinions on reproductive rights.

I actually think my being a member of the human race is justification enough, and I am surprised everyone does not feel that way. For instance:

I am ready for you, too, you, O quoters of tribal arguments. I see you checking the script for the right line, you who are ready to question (or lambaste) men who see women's issues "in terms of how they affect the men, themselves." I always see men who comment on abortion being chopped down for saying "if my daughter..." or "if my wife..." But let's put a check on our cynical natures, shall we? Many (though, admittedly, not all) of us men love our wives and daughters deeply and mean this sort of thing in an empathetic way.

When my wife suffers, I suffer. When we need to make decisions, either about her body or mine, we make them together. We're married; we are, in terms of our belief, one. So, I simply won't entertain that argument. I will not see real empathy perverted, through "canned" argument, into selfishness. (Can it be selfishness? Sure, depending on the sincerity or insincerity of the source. but it is not a man thing, it's a good vs. bad man thing.) Argumentation contains pathos, ethos and logos. Always has. How can we argue something as profound as life itself without emotion? -- without discussing how it affects us all?

That said, my real purpose here is this:

I think we do a lot of arguing around the issue of abortion these days. Current trends are to use things like barbaric legislation ("death penalty for women who have abortions" and "99 years in prison for doctors who perform abortions") as either implied or explicit arguments that being anti-abortion is barbaric. If, for instance, a school principal puts a rule on the books that children who cheat on quizzes will be punished by the removal of a finger, that just means the principal is an animal; not that cheating is any more wrong or right than it was before the rule.

It's like some weird version of ad hominum. It's as if people who use this technique would argue that cheating is okay because chopping off fingers is the act of barbarians.

Further, I have seen the pro-life stance, itself, referred to as cruel. Can laws against women who have abortions be cruel? Can a pro-lifer's very perspective on women be cruel? Of course. Can thinking one should not -- on a fundamentally ethical level -- have an abortion be cruel? I certainly don't think so. It's a concept; it's a moral belief. Cruel or not cruel is determined what one does with one's beliefs.

I would argue, further, that no one thinks abortion is a desired outcome. No one is "pro-abortion," because anyone, given the chance, would choose not to be in a position to have to consider having one. "Pro-choice" and "pro-abortion" are not the same.

But if we are arguing whether abortion is moral or not, we should really stick to the act, itself, independent of the urge to make teams out of the sexes. There is just too much fog around the issue now and people are not trying to burn it away; they are trying to take advantage of the poor visibility -- even willingly producing smog -- to make their arguments.

Once again, we see tribalism raising its head. Us against them; liberals vs. conservatives. Foolish. And, in terms of argumentation, distracting at best and crippling at worst. We attack each other and not the issue at hand. We have forgotten that argumentation's highest purpose is to find the truth and adopted the sports (team) mentality: it's all about winning.

Joseph, 2018; Guiseppe, 1618

So many little things are so profound but we spend so much time fixated on the wrong aspects of those things.

My sixteen-year-old son got into the car yesterday, having been sent into the school office to take care of a little piece of business. He got it wrong.

I found myself lecturing him: "You need to stay focused on the thing you're doing and not on the thing you are looking forward to doing. I know you want to get done and leave, but..."

Within seconds, I saw myself sitting in the passenger seat, in 1984, being told the same thing by my own agitated father. Immediately, I smiled to myself and told my son that I had been in his seat, both quite literally and quite metaphorically, many times. My dad had told me the same, exact thing (over and over).

In that moment, I felt deeply connected to my dad again. I also felt overwhelmed by the profundity of the truth -- what I really think Keats meant by "Beauty" (not aesthetics but the profound) in his famous "Beauty is truth, truth, beauty" line.

This particular truth is that life is a continual rewrite of our past and of the past before our past. We look at the work our parents did and we separate the good from the bad and try to improve on the bad and to capture the good in what they did for us. We try to evolve into better parents -- and people -- than they were, no matter how good they were. (I know I want my boys to be ten-times the man I am.) We go one and on, generation after generation, era after era, doing this.

It is also true that what we so often comically write off as "I sound like my mother/father" is really the echo of an epic story that goes back to the beginning of every family line, back to the first sea-fleeing slime the was to evolve into our ancestors. (In my case, probably slime with glasses and too much affinity for bread.)

So, yeah, I sound like my dad sometimes because my sons often sound, act, succeed and fail,  just like I did. And that is powerful.

It is so powerful, that it makes me realize how unimportant it is to dwell on sentiments like "Oy, kids today..." when their sometimes annoying traits are really profoundly beautiful and really proof to me that the spirit of the Matarazzo roots going back to the very beginning of it all. Somewhere perhaps, in Renaissance Italy, a Matarazzo and his son were in the cart, the boy -- with dark eyes, mysteriously like my own son's -- looking sheepish and the father looked at him and said, "Devi rimanere concentrato sulla cosa che stai facendo..."

Powerful.

But here's the rub: The kid still needs to learn to take care of business. Not dwelling on the mundane in the face of the profound is wise, but letting your kids become irresponsible is profoundly wrong. It just ain't the end of the world, though, when your kid leaves his socks on the floor. So many things in life are like this. Problem is, the more one realizes this, the more people look at him (we'll call him "Chris") like he's crazy.

The Emotional Sneak-Attack

One of the elements in life that can be jarring is the emotional sneak-attack. We can think, as much as we want, that we have filed our experiences into their appropriate cabinets and closed the doors; that everything is shuffled into its respective folder for permanent storage. But experiences are less like files put into a cabinet than they are like animals stuffed into cages; and a caged animal will try to get out.

I was in the car, a few days ago, when I remembered an incident with my dad, a little while before he died. He was in the early grips of dementia. My mother had needed surgery, so I went to their apartment, while she was in the hospital, to stay with him, because his mind just was not right.

That night we had numerous "conversations." One of them had been about how my father "knew what was going on" between "[my mom] and [so-and-so]." Clearly, my dad pointed out, they were having an affair. For the record, he was about as wrong as one can get: [so-and-so] is my mom's brother and, he's gay. 

But I would sit and listen and do my best not to patronize him -- to make the conversation as real as possible; to endure the sadness it brought upon me to hear him struggle with a partial understanding that he was making no sense and his efforts at defending himself as sane: "I know -- you think I am crazy..."

Finally, it was bed time. As I was getting him settled in, he began to tell me about the noises he was hearing at night; that he thought there might be ghosts in the place. My dad had always, even when lucid, had a belief in the possibility of supernatural phenomena, so I was not surprised that he now believed there might be some retirement community haunting going on.

I did my best to dismiss the sounds he was "hearing" -- a loud heater; the refrigerator motor -- and he was pretty well tucked in. As I left the room, he said, good naturedly, "Do you want to sleep in here? Like, in the bed, here?"

"Dad..."

"I mean," he said (and pardon the direct quotation from a man of another generation who would, in life, never have discriminated against even those for whom he used politically incorrect terms), "It's not like we're faggots..."

"I know, Dad," I said. "It's not that. It's just that it is seven o'clock and I am not really tired yet."

"Oh," he said, clearly disappointed. "Well...maybe when you are tired..."

"Yeah...maybe. Good night."

Well, I didn't go in there when I was tired. I slept on my mom and dad's awful couch. In fact, it threw my back out of whack for about three months. Maybe that was payback for my insensitivity...

....because, all I could think, last week, when this event of about four years ago popped into my head, was: couldn't you have just gotten into bed with your dad? After all the irrational fears he talked you through as a kid; after all the comfort he brought you in the late hours, after a long day's work, when he would rather have been asleep? 

I can still see his face in a flashback to my childhood; I can see him in silhouette, sitting on the edge of my bed, on a night of sickness or of irrational childhood fear, looking down at me. I can feel him gently squeeze my arm and say, "If I could, I'd take this from you and onto myself, I would. I'd be sick or scared for you, if I could..."

But I couldn't inconvenience myself when he saw a monster in his closet...

Maybe a better metaphor for this is that memories are sharks down below us, cruising around, waiting to clamp onto our legs. This one got me good.

Why Biting Your Children and Offering them Cigarettes Can Be a Good Idea

Dan: I can't kill him! [Lord Lambourne] brought me up! Just like a father.
Yellowbeard: Oh, you mean he's beat ya and kicked ya and smashed ya in the teeth?
Lord Lambourn: Yes...
Dan: No!
Lord Lambourn: No.
Dan: He's been kind and gentle.
Yellowbeard: What kind of a father is that? Kill him!

 -- Yellowbeard, 1983

Being an effective parent is a matter of perspective, really. I am reminded of the absurdly comical scene above by memories of my mother, who both bit me and offered me a cigarette before I was ten. It was, in both cases, "good parenting."

The first scenario was simple. I bit her. She bit me back. I never bit her again. Years later, my son slapped me. I slapped him back. He never did it again. Was it wrong for us to do these things to our kids? Isn't hitting wrong? (For the record, I never, not once, hit my kids as discipline, outside of that scenario.)

As did many people of her generation, my mom smoked. She knew it was not good for her, but at the time she started, as a teenager in the fifties, word was not that strong, regarding smoking. She started and she was addicted... When I was little, I asked her what it was like to smoke. She said, "Wanna find out?" and offered me her cigarette, instructing me to "breathe  in deeply."

I nearly coughed myself into a seizure. I never touched a cigarette again. (She quit, a few years later -- "cold turkey" [what the hell does that really mean, anyway?] -- when I came home from school after a lesson on the dangers of smoking and begged her to stop.)

In the age of judgmentalism and public shaming, we set inflexible rules. We watch each other. What if a neighbor walked past my house today and looked in the window and saw me offering a cigarette to my eight year old son? -- or if I were walking home after picking my eight-year-old son at school and I employed my mom's perfect technique? Someone would call the division of family services and I would be in danger of losing my kids.

Dangerous times... Big Brother is not watching... We all are watching each other, fingers hovering over various buttons...

The World a Stage; Our Kids the Clowns?

Boy, do we put pressure on our kids. We do it in a million ways, in terms of serious stuff, but we also do it "for fun." I just saw a video of numerous people announcing to thier kids that the mother was pregnant again. The results were kids getting upset -- crying, slamming things down, etc. Ha. Ha.

Why do we feel the need to come up with clever ways to do everything? Why do we "announce" things to our kids and record them on video? Why, most importantly, do we put our kids in the position of feeling pressured to act a certain way, under the scrutiny of a camera and/or of a huge group of family? Why are we surprised when this "overloads" them? More frighteningly, why are we amused by it?

And I don't see it as cute or funny. I never have seen embarrassing kids or putting them in an unfair position as entertaining. Not once did I ever laugh at my sons when a crowd of loving relatives thought it was appropriate to break in to hysterics when one of them said something "cute" in complete seriousness.

Everything is a show. Everything from asking a girl to the prom to "graduating" fifth grade has become an event of grandiose proportions. It's stupid.

I don't even remember how we told our older son that he was going to have a brother or sister. That's cool with me.

The Uses of Humor

It's good to be funny. Funny can help in a lot of ways.

I suppose it can be considered conceited for one to simply say that he is funny, but, after all, I was voted most humorous in my eighth grade class. So, there is some documentation that I am, in fact, a knee-slapping, laugh-riot.

That said (you be the judge) I have found humor to be a wonderful tool in various like situations.

As a kid, for example, I used to dread going out with the family to get the Christmas tree. It always turned into a verbal brawl as to which tree to get. This went on for years, until, around the age of fifteen, I started saying, "Well...time to go fight overt the Christmas tree..." Everyone laughed and, strangely, everyone stopped arguing. We satirized ourselves into harmony and tree-picking became a pleasure again...

When once asked to speak to the students at the school (in which I am the vice principal of academics) about uniform dress codes, I surprised a former principal by doing what amounted to a stand-up routine that satirized kids for thinking they are being rebellious by not tucking in their shirts. The students laughed through the whole presentation; then a documented decrease in uniform infractions occurred.

I have used satire and humor with my sons to make lasting points about life. For instance, a previously mentioned episode in which, after my son -- ready to go into seventh grade -- heard an adult say that "after seventh grade, the real problems start..." I broke into mock sobbing and lamented that fact that he would stop being my friend as soon as the school year started. We both laughed about it then; we still laugh about it; we are still close.

As recently as yesterday, when, in class, one of my high school juniors threw a container of Mott's applesauce across the room, I used humor as a tool. Did I yell? Did I "write him up"? Did I express outrage? No. Using the dramatic silence presented by the thrown fruit treat, I quietly and circuitously lamented the fact that my life -- a life driven only by the desire to teach literature and to help the youth of our country -- had come to this. A monologue followed, concluding with a speculation about how I would tell my wife how my day went: "Well, there was one incident in which a sixteen-year-old threw applesauce, but other than that..."

The class laughed; the missile commander was sufficiently satirized (and affected) and the class went on...with no further problems...

Perhaps we all jumped to the serious too fast. I know a lot of parents and teachers do so. sometimes a good joke is your best lesson, your best illustration; or, even, your best punishment...

Two Boys, "Tom Sawyer" and a Hobbit: Dad Dreams Realized

Rush, in all their clownishness. 

When my youngest son was born, I was joking about anticipating the day he would become the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra and simultaneously hold a position in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. My wife laughted, but then she said, leveling a serious glance, "So, what if he doesn't want to teach Shakespeare? What if he becomes a construction worker?"

My response: "As long as he becomes a construction worker who reads Shakespeare."

As I age and accrue (I hope) wisdom, it becomes increasingly apparent to me how rare real happiness is and that one's greatest wish for one's kids should simply be that: true happiness. That's a tall enough order without imposing our dreams on our children. If we do what we love, we should let our kids do what they love; if we don't do what we love, we shouldn't see our kids as that last effort to get a piece of what we never "went for"ourselves.

Still, I am often tormented by the desire to see my kids pursue those things that brought me so much joy, like music and literature. I need to be careful, of course, not to cross the line above. But when they do find their way into the  things I loved as a kid, there is -- I admit -- much inner rejoicing...

The Professor

My younger son loves Tolkien. He and I recently finished reading The Lord of the Rings together and we are (backward, I know) reading The Hobbit, now. Tolkien set me on the path to a life of letters. The other night, my other son, who goes up to my little music studio every night to sing along with his favorite music, was singing along to "Tom Sawyer," by Rush. Rush, and especially the drummer/lyricist, Neil Peart, had a musical and literary impact on my life that is second only to the influence of my dad. (Though, if you know Rush's music, you might share my apprehension about my son trying to sing along with Geddy Lee...)

I'll admit that I always thought they would find their way to a similar path as mine. And, sure, they may branch out into their own paths -- in fact I am sure they will. The fact remains, though, that, in a world in which people are singing along to Nikki Minaj/Beyonce...

(Feelin' myself, I'm feelin' myself
I'm feelin' my, feelin' myself
I'm feelin' myself, I'm feelin' my, feelin' my, feelin' myself
I'm feelin' myself, I'm feelin' my, feelin' myself)

...it's good to hear my son upstairs singing Rush's "Tom Sawyer":

"Though his mind is not for rent
Don't put him down as arrogant
His reserve, a quiet defense
Riding out the day's events
The river..."

And in a world in which kids tend to sit in front of screens watching over-sexualized shows and stereotype-reinforcing things, it's good to read about a homebody of a hobbit with just enough "Tookishness" in him to drive him out to an adventure...

I admit it. It feels good to see my boys treading on the fertile ground that helped me realize that life is more than meals and paychecks. I just have to be careful not to force things...

A Clump of Kids

My wife was visiting a friend for the weekend. Friday, I had a clump of kids at our house. (That's the new term, at least for me. You know: a flock of birds; a school of fish; a murder of crows; a clump of kids.) There was going to be a sleepover. The girls were not invited to stay for the sleepover with the boys, in case you were wondering, but I did invite them to stay for dinner.

Pizza, you know... You just have order another one. I like simplicity. (I also drink "Afternoon Tea" in the morning. I'm crazy that way. Carpe Teaum.) Also, I like that the guy at our local pizza shop actually calls me "Goombah."

As the kids gorged themselves on besauced and becheesed carbs, I retreated to the adjacent room with a few purloined slices to watch a TV show. They were loud. Very loud. The presence of girls who are my sons' friends -- and who are delightfully rough-and-tumble with the lads, woods-tromping and ball-throwing and all that -- can really crank up the ambient decibels, let me tell you. I put on the "closed captioning" so I could follow the peril of Captain Archer's Enterprise without yelling at the kids to, as they say in Bugs Bunny gangster cartoons, "shet ep."

Yeah, it was a tad frustrating. They were really loud and I felt like a bit of a prisoner in my own home, but they were having a great time being ridiculously silly. And loud. Not sure if I mentioned how loud they were being.

As they finished demolishing the pizza and they were moving the party out to the back yard, one of the girls said to one of my sons, "Your family is really nice."

After dark, out in the yard for a marshmallow roast (read: waving around of flaming sticks in the dark), it hit me again, as it often has: being a parent, in the eyes of those who are committed to never being parents, seems like too much sacrifice of personal space, time and silence. It is a sacrifice of all of those things. But I am not the first philosophical type to point out that sacrifice can pay a fee to one's heart: The next day, after their friends left, my sons said, in unison, "Thanks for the sleepover, Dad." Hugs followed.

And it's not too shabby to hear one of your sons' friends say, "Your family is really nice." I want my sons friends to want to hang out at our house, now and into the future. If you have to ask why, you don't keep up with the news...

Ten Characteristics of Flawed Parents

Parental perfection. Bull pucky.

1) They read lists to try to figure out how to be a good parent.

Okay. That was mean. Sorry. 

2) They go on "dates" with their kids. That's just creepy.

Seriously -- just spend time with your kids. Do we have to get all Oedipal about it? That's got to do some damage somewhere along the line... 

3) They read articles instead of "reading" their kids.

Articles can be good, but nobody but you can really see what you kids needs from you. But you gotta think. Nobody can hand you insight. 

4) They think that because they survived doing asinine or ignorant things that kids today should do the same. 

Just because you went out without sunscreen and sat on the roof of a moving pickup truck and survived, by chance, it doesn't mean we should throw away years of accrued scientific study so that our wimpy kids tougher. So quit it. Toughen them up without pushing stupidity, if you must. 

5) They believe it when one psychologist says every established bit of wisdom about being a parent is now -- all of a sudden -- wrong. 

Just because this guy comes along and say punishing your kids for bad behavior is the worst thing you can do, you are going to buy it lock, stock and barrel? Stir it into the stew of consideration, but don't just gobble it up.

6) They think that everything lower than a B is "unacceptable."

I get it. Motivation. But how wrong is it to teach your kid he or she can be perfect, in anything? I have taught kids who have gotten nothing but As during their entire school careers. Can that be a true assessment? Is that a fair standard to carry into life? Many of the most successful people in life have been C students...or worse. Maybe it is because they felt they had some country yet to discover... Back off, Patton. 

7) They treat their kids like they are the center of their world.

Your kids should be the center of your world. But they shouldn't constantly be aware of it. That's too much pressure for anyone to take and you are going to lay it on a ten-year-old? 

8) They exemplify what they will later complain about.

Put the cell phone down. Read books. Stop complaining. Don't yell and roll your eyes. Eat well. Spend time with your family. Don't talk about your friends behind their backs. Or, just shut up later. 

9)  They're afraid to apologize.

Just say it, once in awhile: "I overreacted" or "Sorry I yelled" or "That was unfair -- I drew the wrong conclusion." You're flawed, okay? What were you?  -- a straight-A-student?

10)  They're flawed.

We all are. Even windbags like me who might appear to think they know it all. I don't know .00004% of what I should, but that might be .00001% more than parents who spend their lives on auto-pilot. This gig's work. The one thing I do know is that you don't punch out at night for at least, like, twenty years.

Now, go forth and screw up as little as you can and forgive yourself for the rest.

Swingers on the Parenhood Pendulum

God forbid that we, as a human race, should maintain anything close to a rational and un-affected perspective on anything, or that everyone's perspective not be dangling on the end of a pendulum...

It all started with people gently reminding married couples not to "lose the romance" when they have kids; to remember one's self during the selfless years and through the selfless instincts of parenthood. Very good advice. But I have seen this to the extreme when, in a conversation about education with a friend, he said that the idea that "family comes first" is one of the worst things that has happened to our society.

Not everyone is as extreme as this, but I have noticed a lot of articles that now lean away from "leave some time for yourself" and toward "you are more important than your kids." This is bad.

When one has kids, one needs to put them first. The job one signs up for is to prepare kids for the world in which they live. Doing this requires attention to that child that supersedes one's attention to one's self. (This, of course, does not imply that parents should sacrifice the essentials -- we're no good to our kids if we are dead.)

People like my friend would argue that, in the old days, parents were less focused on their kids and it was better for society as a whole. I would argue, however, that parents focused on different aspect of parenthood, but they still focused on their kids. The ancient hunter trained his kids to hunt; the farmer taught them how to bring in the crops; that warrior taught his sons to fight... All of these parents were preparing their kids for the world they would need to enter. In this way, we are the same as they were: we are to prepare our kids to. someday, function in the outside world without our help.

Parents, in modern times, are preparing their kids to venture out into a raging tempest of varied moralities and ideas and beliefs all driven by a raging, constant flow of information, both good and bad. We are preparing their kids to find their way through a world that offers them innumerable choices of ways in which to live their lives. It's no longer a question of eking out daily survival or of passing down the village blacksmith shop. Preparing modern kids for a modern world requires us to be constant teachers, in terms of helping our kids learn how to deal with myriad uncertainties. This means we need to watch our children; to interpret how they deal with a playground confrontation; to instruct them on manners and mores; to help shape them into sane, rational creatures who make good decisions and follow societally beneficial paths.

My paternal counterpart in the Celtic tribe focused on preparing his sons to defend against the neighboring tribe's attempt at a cattle raid, but he still focused on his son. He needed his son to be fierce, strong and relentless. This was focus on family -- just a different kind of family. It was an internal focus that resulted in a benefit to the tribal society. In strengthening the family, many have said, we strengthen the society -- in this case, things become quite literal.

In not-so-extreme terms, the father who owned a shoe repair shop in 1915 focused on fixing shoes, bringing in money and, perhaps, training his kids to repair shoes in order to keep the business going... This was still focus on family.

Our parental jobs, today, are more complex but no less vital. If we turn out kids who are lost and ineffectual in the world, we have failed. We need to focus on them until they are ready to leave and stand on their own.

What people need to do, though, is to stop giving themselves up completely for their kids. I have known and still know parents who give up every free moment by going to kids' games and various other activities. This is the opposite side of the pendulum swing from my friend's perspective. Cheering at a game, however, is no substitute for talking and spending real time together... I

In the end, our kids can be our focus without completely erasing their parents' lives. By sometimes not focusing on my kids, I give them an opportunity to understand that everyone deserves his own space. I also give them an opportunity to watch me in action and to learn from that.

When I leave a comfy house on a winter's night to go play with the band, my boys see that their father is continuing with his passion and that he is willing to work hard to pursue it -- something I want them do do for themselves. When I say "not now" to one of my sons because I am reading a good book, it shows them how important books are...etc. How can they learn by my example if I'm always following them around? How can they watch me do stuff if I never do stuff? -- if all I do is watch them do stuff and criticise them for how they did stuff?

But, when my sons truly need me, I forget myself -- I drop all consideration of what I might rather be doing...

My kids might displace my personal time, but they certainly won't erase it, because, when they grow up and move on, where will I be? If, on life's personal journey from point A to point Z, I had stopped at, like, J when my first son was born, how am I going to, after my boys move out, make it through K-Z? Given the choice, though, I'd rather croak at W than live through Z knowing I turned out a couple of ill-adjusted, self-centered, entitled boy/men.

A Wish For My Sons

Wisdom is not automatic, no matter what the old-timers might imply (or outwardly state) about themselves. Learnable moments appear and, sure, some lessons are hard to avoid learning. If one steps on button and a rock falls and hits one on the head, as a result, one learns not to step on that button again. Laboratory rats have learned similar lessons, though, so no glory there.

But real wisdom takes work and commitment to the quest. Inevitability, the "youth is wasted on the young" aphorism comes to mind, because once we acquire certain nuggets of wisdom, we want to share them with those who have not found them yet. Parents try earnestly to do this for their children.

Of course, the most important job of a parent is to teach his or her kids to think clearly and logically, not what to think. Still, the most important lessons we have learned carry with them certain truths. Although we know our kids must walk certain paths in order to truly understand, we hand them what might well be irrelevant trail maps, expecting them to truly know without ever putting their toes in the dirt.

William Blake's "mind forg'd manacles"

It's hard to resign to the ineffectual nature of this desire to teach. Can it really be that all of the wisdom the hard-working thinker acquires is useful only to himself? On one level, I like the idea; it affirms the importance of individuality. On the other hand, as a member of a social species, it makes it all seem like a bit of a waste -- not a total loss, but contrary to the sharing instinct I, and most of us, have.

For me, the things I have learned to see clearly are revelations that I want to share with my sons. If I could just get them to see how unimportant some things really are -- things that the world would convince them are essentials; if I could just take unnecessary burdens off of their shoulders that are doing nothing but adding difficulty to the already ridiculously challenging task of growing up; if I could just steer them away from the negative pulls of the social tides and away from the common practices that drive wedges between friends and that, although they might feel powerful, are actually impotent struggles for temporary and useless power that result in discord...

A Parental Temptation: Forcing Joy

"No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is suppose that they are like himself." -- Steinbeck, from The Winter of our Discontent. 

A parental mistake?

When I was in fifth grade, I read Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea for the first (of many) times. I loved every word of it; hung on each of the old man's thoughts. Something in me immediately attached itself to the beauty of the work and to the quest of the old man to simply keep being who he was, despite his age; to his wise and humble inner pride; a pride that required (and would get) no external validation. I wouldn't have put it quite that way as a boy, but I understood on an instinctual level.

My sons have to read a book per month in school and do a quiz and a few projects on each book. I recommended it to my seventh-grader, who is both a reader and a thinker. I thought it would be right up his alley.

He didn't really like it. In fact, over the course of a month, he didn't manage to finish the ninety pages.

Part of my reasoning in recommending the book was that, even if he didn't like it as much as I had, he could easily polish off ninety pages. He has read 300 page books in that time allotment.

Apparently, he disliked it so much that he couldn't keep reading. He made an attempt to finish it the night before it was due, but, alas, fell short.

Am I disappointed? Yes. Not "in him" so much, but that a book that meant so much to me simply didn't mean much to my son. Which is okay. He's allowed not to like what I liked. And here is the parental crossroads between wanting my son to be happy and wanting him to be what I want him to be.

A Rebellion in Socks

My boys are both in middle school. They are both in a few activities. Both of them are in the chess club. Both of them are in the band. One of them is in choir. They have also done things like "Lego Club" and they both earned quite a few belt-levels in karate. They come home from these activities and they "knock out" their homework. Then, we all eat dinner together.

Yes, you heard right. All four of us at the table, talking and eating.

After dinner, the boys will play their allotted video game time. My wife and I might read or watch something on Netflix. I might go up to my studio and work on some music or practice my guitar. On some nights, we will all watch a movie together in the living room.

Near the boys' bedtime, my younger son and I almost always go upstairs to read a chapter of The Lord of the Rings together. By then, it is time for them to go to bed.

Once the boys are in bed, I usually go up to bed and read until it's sleepy time for me. Karen, who may have been finishing up studying for a class comes up soon after.

Gentlepeople

If I, as a man, write about how I believe a woman should behave, whether in terms of morality or comportment, I will invariably be labeled as a chauvinist by some. (I will have been guilty, in their eyes, of chauvinistic views and actions of which I am totally unaware, having grown up as a male in a male dominated society.)  It has already been made quite clear to me by numerous responses to any writing that touches upon women and their state in our world, that I have no business writing about such things and that, as a man, no matter how intelligent I may (or may not) be, I simply cannot speak with any validity on any matter relating to women. In short, empathy just ain't enough. I just don't get it, the critics say.

Yet...I speak. I don't have a daughter, but I like to think in terms of fatherhood: What would I want for her? How would I want her to act? What I find is that I would want her to act the same way I want my sons to act: like a gentleperson. I'd want her to be dignified, self-assured, polite/assertive, strong (both physically and mentally), confident and kind. In fact, there is not one thing I would approach, conceptually, differently in raising a daughter than in raising my sons, in essence. (I say "in essence" because, let's face it, each child of whatever sex requires a slightly different parental approach.)

That said, there is this video going around... As with most of these, I will not repost is because I don't believe in contributing to the easy viral success of anything I disagree with. The video consists of little girls speaking about feminism and cursing, letting the F-word fly in Scorsese-like barrages.

On Letting Go of the Little Ones

I'm not much for nostalgia, but, today, I happened to look at a printed-out photo montage that my wife, Karen, made. It is a collection of pictures from the beach, of my two boys. They were much smaller and much more innocent than their present ten and twelve-year-old counterparts. The cheeks were fuller, the bare feet were chubbier and the eyes were ever so slightly wider.

In one picture, the two of them are standing in bright bathing trunks and oversized T-shirts, looking down and waiting for the cold water to hit their toes. They are fascinated by the bubbles and the illusions in the tide. They are looking at the ocean as a curiosity; as a rare and new thing.

In another picture, my older son -- though much younger, then -- is crouching and intently looking for treasures in the sand; in still another, the two of them are smiling with unbridled joy, sitting side-by-side on an amusement park race car ride. These are smiles that are empty of self-consciousness; empty of the need to appear any certain way other than simply happy. Their smiles are boys' smiles, unashamed and unaffected. Pure happiness -- the kind of pure happiness a grown up can never remember except through his children.