Family Time with All the Stuffing

Here come the holidays.  I hear that for some of us it's really grrrrreat! to get together with extended family.  In my extended family, getting together during the holidays is like traversing a mine field.  There has already been a blow up and we haven't even started cooking our Thanksgiving meal yet.


I've tried to understand my parents without great success.  I love them, but it has taken years of therapy (sounds cliche, but it's true) to be able to feel whole in their presence. Wow -- that's a pretty candid admission! As for my brother, he shares the pain, but hasn't gone down the therapy path. 


One of the reasons I am writing about parenting teens in my blog is that I want to examine my conscious and unconscious choices around parenting and raise my self-awareness. I've learned a lot about healthy family relationships from reading a book called Mindsight by Dan Siegel.  Dr. Siegel is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and his research centers around how family relationships contribute to brain development, including the physical wiring of the brain.


Of course it's too much for a blog post, but if anyone is interested they can watch a presentation on FORA.tv where he provides an overview.  If you only have a few minutes, I would suggest watching Chapter 13, "What Integration in a Family Looks Like" which is immediately followed by "Adolescents and the Brain". 


http://fora.tv/2009/06/30/Dan_Siegel_The_Brain_and_the_Developing_Mind#fullprogram


I would recommend this video for anyone examining their own family dynamics and especially anyone who is raising young children.  He has also written a book called Parenting from the Inside Out that I'm looking forward to reading.


I wish everyone happy holidays and happy families this Thanksgiving.

Penn State Penitence

Everyone is asking how the grownups at Penn State could look the other way while children were molested in the team showers.  Because this horrific lapse of judgement/citizenship/humanity occurred in the context of a high stakes athletic program, many are concluding that it's all about the money.


Football rakes in $70 million per year at Penn State (according to Slate.com). In our hyper-capitalist society we tend to assume that money explains most behavior. Media commentators are saying that those who knew were afraid to rock a boat with that much ballast. Some are even saying that the money and culture of NCAA football are the problem.


That amount of money, together with the celebrity of the alleged molester, make this case notorious, but I think we're missing the point.  What we should be talking about is what this case has in common with every other case of child molestation: the not-so-innocent bystanders.

For every father that molests a daughter, there is a mother who doesn't believe it could happen.  For every uncle or grandfather, there is the family that doesn't believe it could happen.  For every town in which a prominent citizen molests a child there is a whole community that doesn't believe it could happen. As a result, it has to happen over and over until the unthinkable becomes...thinkable.


It should be thinkable because it appears to be all too common.  Maybe if we were talking about this type of thing more openly, victims and the adults around them would understand that they need to go to the police when there is even a suspicion of child molestation.

Julie Sullivan, a middle school teacher in Belfair, didn't think her students were too young to think about child sexual predators.  Her class at Hawkins Middle School, researched how our state justice system deals with sex offenders and then came up with ways to fix the system. This project opened up a community conversation about sex offenders.  Quoting from an article in the Kitsap Sun,


"After the showcase, 13-year-old Mikayla Mehelich said the students didn’t find talking about sex offenders difficult. It’s a reality kids today live with, she said...When she told her parents and grandparents her class was working on a sex offender project they were 'dumbfounded.' But as the weeks have gone by, Mehelich said her family has been asking a lot of questions about the project."


We all need to face the reality that sex offenders can look like, or even be, grandpas or coaches.  It must be hard to report grandpa or a coach to the police, but not reporting a suspected child sexual predator?  That's unthinkable.


Read more about Julie Sullivan's class at: http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/2010/feb/19/not-too-taboo-north-mason-students-examine-sex/?partner=RSS#ixzz1dvebocPP

Earlier today, 18 hours ago to be precise, I was waiting up for my daughter and went to text her about coming home.  shheeeeezzzz.  She had texted two hours earlier that she was spending the night at her friend, Leah's.  I could have been sleeping!!!

I miss you, Sleep.

Image by <a href="http://www.free-stockphotos.com" title="Free Photos">Free-StockPhotos.com</a>

Anne Collier talks about cyberbullying and digital citizenship

The 2010 Tattoo Campaign

One of the best things about my daughter is how relentlessly she herds me beyond the boundaries of my comfort zone. Case in point: the tattoo. Once her older sister came home from her first quarter at college with a swallow on her foot, the campaign was on. 


As she warmed to her theme, it seemed it would be easy to stonewall. I had the law on my side.  It isn't even legal to give a person under the age of 18 a tattoo in Washington State. I said, "Great idea! You've got lots of time to save up and think about what you really, really want to embed in your skin for the rest of your life!"  I even set up a tattoo collection jar where I would contribute money in exchange for her help around the house and yard.

Now she was inspired to read poetry, think metaphorically, and weigh every aspect of her life for tattoo-worthy material. Suddenly, she was a big fan of Walt Whitman. Ancestors were vetted for the number one spot. Everything was profound. There was so much to ponder and I was hopeful that the campaign would bog down indefinitely while options were shuffled and drawn out for mystical consideration like cards in a tarot deck.


Then one day in the high school parking lot, her friend Julie rolled up the edge of her sweatshirt to reveal a souvenir from a recent trip to Arizona.  She was sporting a tat on her hip. Would I consider flying to Arizona to get my daughter a tattoo?  No, I think not. 

This led to a new line of research: state law. What about Idaho? What about Oregon? What about Canada?!


She turned seventeen. Birthday money arrived. She settled on a winsome, cherry blossom illustration. One by one the barriers went down until there was only one thing standing in her way - my will power.

On a sunny spring day, the tattoo campaign came to a conclusion. My petite daughter, who fusses and whines about vaccinations and blood draws, spent almost two hours under a needle guided by an enormous, shaggy, crabby Canadian while I sipped tea and read the Vancouver Sun in a nearby cafe. 

I have no regrets and neither does she. Our tattoo-trip coincided with the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival. The city was coated with wet blossoms and everywhere we drove, blossoms drifted through the neighborhood skies. In art and haiku, cherry blossoms represent impermanence and remind us that one form of life gives way to another. One form of thought gives way to another, too. It was the perfect day to change my mind.  

Anne Lamott: My Favorite Author on Parenting

When in Doubt, Dance.

They say that once you have a child, your heart begins walking around outside of your body. I have found this to be true.  In fact, since my girls became teenagers, I don't always like the places my heart goes. Sometimes I don't even know where my heart goes, especially on weekend nights, and that can really drive me crazy. 


Back in the day, mothers had it worse -- what with infant mortality, arranged marriages, and the absence of amazing pills like antibiotics and birth control.  But still, even with modern conveniences and technology, the weight of parental responsibility, combined with the lack of control, creates a tension that stretches like a frayed rubber band during the teen years.

I recently finished Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott.  She often writes about the sweetness and angst of parenting, both in memoirs and fiction.  Her memoir, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, is so candid, frank and hilarious that I gave it to one of my daughters to read, just in case she might be romanticizing the notion of motherhood.  (I am pretty sure it turned up the dial on her birth control vigilance.) 

The new book is about a teenage daughter who has everything going for her outwardly, but is spiraling down on the inside, and the incremental revelations that slowly awaken her mother to what is really going on. Anyone who has raised a teenage girl, or been one, will recognize the cloak of secrecy the daughter wears so well, and may empathize with the mother's unwillingness to lift the cloak and look at the darker side. It reminded me of what I was capable of during my teen years, when my conscience was still just a scaffolding rather than a structure in my brain.


I can so relate to wanting not to know.  I would so much rather pick up a magazine, say Real Simple, and tuck up my feet, than knock on her bedroom door, waiting and listening for the sullen "What." on the other side, more parlay than question, but still the best opening for a brief dialogue that I might get on any given day. I could wrack my brain and heart for the just the right tone and approach to get past her guard. But mostly I try to live by Anne Lamott's advice, "Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance."

Of course, it isn't all eggshells and worry. It's side-splitting laughter, little victories, long hugs and gratitude, too.  It's different from day to day; sometimes from hour to hour. It's temporary. It's almost done.


“Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.” ― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life