family

Apnea Babies


Read a really interesting piece today about how writing – and writing for the internet in particular – should be about telling authentic stories from our lives. About the importance of returning to the crux of narrative, whatever the topic.

And it made me think of little stories from my life that I can tell.

For some reason, I feel like I spent a lot of time as a child in the backseat of the car with Hilary. I realize that this can’t really be true, because I think when we lived in Paris we barely drove anywhere. Certainly I have vivid Paris memories that have to do with other forms of transportation, the sing-song way I used to say Sol-fer-ino every time we passed that metro stop being one of them.

But, the car. I have a lot of memories of time in the backseat of the boxy navy blue Volvo station wagon. This was before the Volvo designers got all aerodynamic and fancy. It was a navy blue rectangle. And I used to chant, as Mum tried to get it to start in the morning in the freezing cold North Cambridge morning, “Go car go! Go, car, GO!”

I have no recollection of carseats. Am pretty sure there weren’t any, because one of Hilary’s and my favorite games was to each sit with our back against one of the backseat doors (obviously impossible had we been in carseats of any kind). We then bent our legs and put our (always bare, always dusty and dirty) feet against each other. The game was to see who could straighten her legs first. Apparently we had a lot of faith in the Volvo designers’ mechanisms for closing those doors – some of these battles were heated enough that I’m kind of surprised neither of us got ejected onto the highway.

Another game that we invented was called Apnea Babies. Hilary, who was a preemie, had apnea as a baby. I understand this now to be a serious and scary disorder, but for some reason she and I both saw great comedy in it back then. The game was simple. One of us had to stop breathing and hold our breath until the other one noticed. Then the other sister had to rush to stuff a McDonald’s straw up the non-breathing sister’s nose. Thus, by putting our sister on a “respirator,” we had saved a life. There was no winner in this game, but we played it incessantly.

The final thing I remember is the ankle grab. We used to sing a fair amount in the backseat, or talk, or ask questions, or, likely, argue. When my parents had tired of our noise my father would reach back with his big hand and grab the nearest ankle. Whoever had her foot closest to the hump on the ground in the backseat was shit out of luck. Wow did he have hand strength. I remember those ankle grabs and the subsequent, agonizing squeeze that followed. Unfortunately for Dad, I think that move resulted in more and not less noise, but it definitely made an impression.

Redheads

Well, I have seen this referred to anecdotally, but now there is data and the official imprimatur of a New York Times story.

Redheads require about 20% more general anesthesia to knock them out. I have always viewed this as all the evidence we need that my kind (which includes my sister, my mother, and some of my dearest friends – two minority groups wildly overrepresented in my close friends are redheads and lefties) are just a little more feisty than the rest of the world.

Currently 4% of the world’s people carry the gene for red hair, which was only discovered in the 1990s (what??? not a priority, people of science? how can this be?). I’ve heard about this frankly terrifying claim that redheads will be extinct by 2100, but I cannot reconcile the tenacious, hard-to-knock-out (is it any surprise that I sometimes need elephant tranquilizer style drugs to help me sleep?) reality of redheads I know with genetic extinction. No sirree.

And MMG, about to turn one, I have great hopes that you will carry the flag into the next generation … no pressure, babe, but the Sun In is coming out for Grace if your hair doesn’t bloom into redness!

middle places

The Middle Place made me think about the various contradictions we hold in our hands at any given time. Our lives can be defined, I think, by the tensions between these contradictions, and by the ways that we address their competing needs and implications.

Tonight, I am holding a difficult set in my palm.

Young – Old
Lost – Trapped
Daughter – Mother
Wired – Tired

Free Range

Just finished Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy. It is a quick read and a compelling manifesto. Skenazy has ample data (for example, that the rate of crimes against children has actually plummeted since we were kids) and colorful anecdotes to illustrate her basic premise that children of this era would benefit greatly from more independence and less oversight.

I took two messages away from the book. The first is that we ought not be so arrogant as to think that we as parents have that much impact on our children. Of course good parenting is important, but, fundamentally, our children are who they are when they are born. We should both let ourselves off of the hook and take ourselves down from the pedestal. We can wreak on our children less damage and less improvement – less formation, over all – than most of us think we can. How we parent is not going to shape them into the unabomber or into Abraham Lincoln. This is reminiscent of my father’s quote that he always believed parenting is at least 95% nature and 5% nurture. I share that belief.

The second message is that to really trust our children, to let go of them a little bit, we have to trust our parenting. Ceasing constant supervision and helicoptering is a gesture of trust. Only those who are confident in their childrens’ attitudes and instincts will be comfortable letting out the raveling string. To trust your children is, at the most basic level, to trust yourself and to let go of them. And, of course, we all struggle mightily with both.

The book reminded me of an experience in sixth grade. We had to have a note from our parents saying we were allowed to skate without helmets at school (can you imagine this today? helmets for all!). I asked my mother to write a note but for some reason the task was handed over to Dad. He penned a handwritten note that began, verbatim (I will never forget this):

Recognizing that risk is an inherent part of life …

I was mortified. Appalled. I cried and begged to get a regular note that just said OK Lindsey can skate without a damned helmet. He would not let me. I survived it. And I laugh about it to this day. And I think he was making, in his own way, the same point that Skenazy makes.

A few passages:

The whole Free-Range idea is that the twin notions of constant supervision and perfect parenting are not necessary. Obsessing about every emotional, intellectual, and psychological boost we could give our kids is not necessary. Even being 100 percent Free Range is not necessary. Our kids are not solely formed by our input, nor will they be irreparably harmed by our bumbling oh-so-humanly along.

The people who show us they believe in us are the wind beneath our wings. The black holes are the people who don’t. If you think back on the big turning points in your life, good and bad, you will find all those people standing there, directing traffic. At some point, the ones who believe in us trust us to cross the street. And to drive with just a learner’s permit.

We have to learn to remind the other parents who think we’re being careless when we loosen our grip that we are actually trying to teach our children how to get along in the world, and that we believe this is our job. A child who can fend for himself is a lot safer than one forever coddled, because the coddled child will not have Mom and Dad around all the time, even though they act as if he will…And on top of all this, we have to teach our kids the tools they need to go Free Range. Teach them about bike safety and bad guys and traffic signals and how to ask for help and how to handle disappointment and what to do if they ever get lost and all the things parents have always had to teach their kids. Or at least they did until recently, when they decided they could just do everything for them instead.