Because I Said So.

Dad lift.

Today I decided to give my daughters a great treat and take them skiing.  We had a lazy wake up and a leisurely morning eating pancakes and putting on long underwear.  I was so proud of myself for not pushing an early departure and just being a cool mom, and you know what pride goeth before.  That's right.  A twelve-year old's tantrum.  She went from excited about the braid in her hair to throwing herself on the bed and refusing to go in about five seconds.  "I don't want to go!" she sobbed and screamed.  "Can't you understand that?  Why do I have to go?  Why can't I just stay here?!"

Somehow, I got her out of the house and into the car.  I write a lot about resilience in children, but this piece is about resilience in parents. 

A friend recently shared this depressing article on how terrible my generation is at parenting, which made me think of how much more tedious and time consuming parenting is when corporal punishment isn't acceptable.  I told my mother I hated her once and got slapped across the face. I never did it again. Like her peers, my mom used whatever was within her reach if she didn't feel like using her hand - hair brushes, wooden spoons, the flyswatter - so when I mouthed off it took my mother about 2 seconds to do her parenting thing, then I sulked or cried or got an ice pack while she got back to whatever my misbehavior interrupted.  Now parenting involves all this talk, discussion and consequences and debriefing. And because it takes a long time, I don't think we're doing it.  We get sick of the whole "life coaching" part of modern parenting and abandon it mid-effort, so we lose our authority.  I tell young teachers nothing is more important than following through when they threaten a student with a consequence.  I'm not sure my generation of parents is as consistent with following through as we could be.

This article links how we negotiate with our children over things like broccoli to our loss of authority and a child's increased anxiety and uncertainty.  I thought of it while driving east on I-90 and realized I should have simply said, "Because I said so," when my daughter asked why she had to go skiing.  I didn't have to talk about skiing as a life pleasure or important northwest skill.  I could have just made her go skiing because I'm her mother.  I can do that.  She's twelve, and I still know more about everything than she does.

By the time we got to Alpental both girls were excited and happy, but if you've been to the bunny slopes you've seen and heard angry, scared and wailing children.  Sometimes the parents lose it.  I've seen parents hit, drag, shove or yell at hysterical children, but today the parents were resilient. They set aside their own pleasure to force the joy of skiing on their children, whether the children wanted a piece of that joy or not.

"Noooooooo!"

Rest and a snack.

A little push.

It reminded me of the "forced marches" my parents made us take when we were young, long hikes on Palomar where our cabin was, with cans of Coors and Tab banging against our kidneys through our thin nylon back-sacks.

Not loving it. Yet.

We didn't hate forced marches, but we didn't love them. It didn't matter. We had to do them because my parents said so, and they knew best. Now, hiking is one of my greatest joys.

Few of the kids I saw today really wanted to learn how to ski or snowboard.  Most of them wanted to go sit in the car or just play in the snow, but their parents wouldn't let them.  Being in a beautiful place and patiently, resiliently teaching your child the skills she needs to do something valuable is easier, perhaps, than tenaciously following through on a consequence for her back talk or misbehavior, but it serves as a good example. Here's what I was reminded of today:

1) Know why I want my children to do something, but don't try to explain that in the moment.  It's okay to make them do it because I told them to.  I know more than they do, something that makes their existence more secure.

2) Set aside my own agenda.  If it's important for them to learn something, it's going to take time for me to teach it. 

3) Sometimes I have to push or carry them up the hill if I want them to come down it.

4) Rests are good, and so is food.

5) If I keep my cool and have fun, it's easier for them to keep their cool and have fun.

6) They might not have fun now.  They might hate me now, but they'll have fun later. For parents, later's everything.  It's our job to prepare them for later whether they like it or not. 

More importantly, it's our job to prepare them for later whether we like it or not.

Strength and Surrender

A few days before Christmas and our trip to La Push I battled a case of Norovirus so violent I spent most of the night unconscious on the bathroom floor.  A few days later, when my friend suggested a rigorous hike from Third Beach, out on the Washington coast just south of La Push, to Taylor Point I was a little nervous I hadn't fully recovered.  Turns out, I hadn't.

I think a lot about resilience, both with the students I work with every day and my own daughters.   

I work in a setting that has seen far too much bloodshed - a school.  I tried to get a total for school shootings since 1996 when I became a teacher but scrolling through the long, long list on Wikipedia was too painful.  Try it.  The names, the numbers, the reasons are too much to interpret.  The overwhelming majority of the murderers are boys, boys so incapacitated by emotional pain they find a gun, carry it all the way to school, and murder.  In our culture girls learn and are taught more coping strategies for dealing with emotional pain than boys.  The image of a sobbing teenage girl and her cluster of friends asking for a bathroom pass may be a stereotype of teen angst, but it's also a how-to.  Overwhelmed?  Share the burden with your supporters.  Gather them around you. Put things on hold.  Cry.  Talk.  Unload.  Feel their hands and hear their words and for awhile, let them carry your pain with you.

It wasn't very long into our hike that I started to question whether my body was going to make it.  From Third Beach you climb a series of cliffs using rope and driftwood ladders.  My legs would not lift my weight.  I finally asked my friend Abi to push on my butt.  I'm not kidding.  And, like the champ she is, she did.  She pushed and I pulled, and between the two of us I made it up the seven rope climbs to the top of the bluff.  In this picture I am wondering if I can lift myself one more step.  I'm also embarrassed.  It's embarrassing to be weak. Look at that kid above me just flying up the cliff!

We stopped for a tea-break and snack and I did not feel good - faint and tissue paper weak.  I knew I should sit on the trail and wait for the return of my friends and daughter but thought that would be scary, so I continued on, knowing full well it might be a huge struggle to return. Finally we reached Taylor Point, where I lay on the sun-warmed rocks, drank a Pedialyte my friend Priscilla put in my water bottle, and tried to regain my strength.  I might have slept.  Eventually I opened my eyes to see a Bald Eagle flying about thirty feet above us, gloriously huge and graceful, effortlessly in its element. Abi gave me some chocolate. 

On the return, Abi took my backpack. Here she is, going down the same ladder I struggled to ascend.

I felt guilty, like you do when you pack a heavy camera you don't feel good enough to use and someone else has to carry if for you, but she persisted and I let her because I am smart, and I am female.  At 13, Abi would have insisted on coming to the bathroom with me if I was crying and hurting.  In our forties, she insisted on carrying my backpack.  Women are taught to do this from a young age.  Our daughters, Abi's and mine, witnessed this, saw me sick, flat on my back, saw Abi take my backpack, saw me surrender.  Two minutes into our return trip my nine-year old daughter said, "I'm too tired!" as she stretched her little legs up big steps, so I pushed on her butt to help her up the hill. Here we are, resting on the way home.  I'm resting on my back.  Again.

I know men have this in them too, the ability to ask for help, but they need to be louder about it.  Men need to teach boys how to share the burden.  Mothers are going crazy teaching their sons to be as emotionally healthy as girls, but no amount of didactic conversation from mother to son gets as much done as boys seeing it happen between men.  Google "what to do if your girlfriend dumps you" and then Google "what to do if your boyfriend dumps you," and see how men are encouraged to put up a front, gain revenge, and inflict pain.  See how women are encouraged to remember their strengths and lean on friends for support.  Men need to change the media messaging.  Uncles, teachers, neighbors and the fathers of friends, you all need to start modeling surrender and support.

My daughters are being taught all the right lessons.  If they don't get them from me they get them from movies, magazines, their friends and their culture.  They learn the most important lesson of all - when and how to ask for help - from all the women they know.  It's our boys I worry about.  It's the boys who don't see men relinquish the backpack, the rejection, the insecurities, the pain to a friend.  It's the boys who don't grow up seeing men rely on each other that I worry about.  Boys are trained to offer help, but they're not shown how to ask for it.

We often ask fathers to do more, to give more, but maybe we should be asking them to be really loud about asking for help.  We should be asking them to hand the backpack, or worry, or fear, or pain to someone else.  We should ask men to start teaching boys how to ask for help, and how that surrender creates strength.

Raising Girls and Making Piroshkis

Piroshkis might be straightforward - filling, dough, egg wash - but puberty isn't, and neither is parenting.

When we made our list of favorite meals in preparation for spending Christmas in our beloved cabin #33 at La Push I was surprised when my 12-year old asked for an encore of piroshkis.  Last year's were bland and dry, the pie dough tough and mealy at the same time, but she said she loved them. I added them to our list and tried to think of how to alter the recipe to make them better.

The day after Christmas I diced onion and browned meat for said piroshkis while the girls brought the World Wrestling Federation to life in their bedroom of our small cabin, young bodies flung from the bed off the log walls and to the floor, shrieking voices making the lights swing on their chains. Like parents do I marched into their room and said, "Go outside!"  My nine-year old put her coat on and went outside.  My 12-year old spiraled into a hysterical anger that included every wrong done since 2003, said she was not going outside because it was cold and slammed shut her bedroom door.

My husband took the dog and the nine-year old to the beach.  I was left making piroshkis - ironic piroshkis of love! - with a twelve-year old assigned an hour of bedroom imprisonment for calling her parents "jerks."

Minutes 0-15: hysterical sobbing and various things like, "...doesn't make any sense!!!!"
Minutes 16-20: daughter cleverly escapes bedroom lockdown because she has to "go to the bathroom."
Minutes 21-30: daughter emerges from bathroom and declares she's going to beach, tries to be Marshawn Lynch in getting to door / end zone.
Minutes 31-45: daughter returns to room crying hysterically, calling me a "hypocrite" for not letting her go to beach.
Minutes 46-60: daughter plays quietly in her room with journal, Legos, imagining her mother's gruesome death, pretending she's Adele, etc..

Meanwhile, I made piroshkis. As I rolled the dough and my daughter made her "I'm taking back my life!" escape attempts, I wrestled with the urge to dismiss her hysteria as hormone-driven emotional mindlessness, because that's what we're trained to do with adolescent girls.  We're trained to see them as witless passengers on some hormonal roller coaster. This makes us discount them, their feelings, and whatever objective they're fighting for. Adolescent boys get angry and we think, "My god!  He's exhibiting emotion!  This must be important!"  Adolescent girls get angry and we think, "Hello hormones!"  It's not okay.

I spooned filling - filling more moist than last year's because of a liberal addition of leftover fat from Christmas Day's prime rib - into circles of dough and thought about what it is to be female in our culture, how we minimize female rage by attributing it to hormones, how we think it's funny when young women attempt to exhibit power and autonomy by throwing tantrums - tantrums thrown because they haven't yet learned how to harness anger into persuasion and change.  We see their aggression as an entertaining lack of control, like how we laugh at videos of poor people fighting over discounted T.V.s on Black Friday.  My daughter wasn't flung into hysteria by her hormones, she was angry that her mother interrupted a really good wrestling match with some random order to go outside.

Unlike piroshkis, which can be quickly improved by adding a quarter cup of fat, approaching an adolescent girl's misbehavior from a feminist's perspective is complicated.  I had to hold my daughter accountable for her unacceptable and disrespectful language toward her parents but at the same time I had to recognize her anger and teach her how to express it more effectively.

Inspired by my brilliance in crafting a pastry brush from a torn paper towel for glossing the piroshkis with egg wash, I went into my daughter's room to debrief the situation once her hour was up.

Here's how I imagined it would go:
Me:  blah blah respect blah blah anger blah blah articulate your needs
My daughter:  Oh mother, you're so right.  I'm sorry.  I love you.

Here's how it went:
Me:blah blah respect blah blah anger blah blah articulate your needs
My daughter: Okay. Sorry. So can I go to the beach now?

You can control a piroshki's moistness, but you can't control the reaction of a strong-willed young woman.  So I confirmed she had heard me, which she claimed to have done, and sent her to the beach.

After all this I was exhausted, drained from trying to overcome the sexism of my era and be the best mother the species has ever seen.  How much easier it would have been to have just slapped her, kind of a "You're strong, I'm strong!" mothering strategy that suddenly seemed both feminist and effective. I pulled the piroshkis out of the oven expecting them to be a worn-out mess, beaten by conflict, over-worked and leathery, but they were perfect. Juicy, savory, with a crust both flaky and toothsome.  A hundred times better than last year's.

I ate one, looking out the huge picture window at my loved ones playing on the beach, thinking how next year I might do a better job of getting my kids outside, my daughter might do a better job of arguing her case, and we'd have someone other than Donald Trump in the White House.

Failing those lofty ambitions, at least I could make a really good piroshki.