oh this is hard

Achievement is not a bad thing

I have been thinking a lot about The Race to Nowhere, and what I wrote about it, and about the thoughtful comments that people made.  My sister, the younger-and-wiser Hilary, and I have been going back and forth in email about it too.  She is the only person on the planet who shared with me the overwhelmingly rich and challenging terroir of our childhood and uniquely qualified to discuss those days and to hold up a mirror to me.  She is also a deeply thoughtful person and an educator, so I am particularly interested in her view on this subject.

And she said something that really struck me.  With regard to The Race to Nowhere, she averred that she did not like the way that “achievement has become anathema.”  And I agree.  Fully.  In fact when I read the comments on my post last week, I found myself with an uneasy feeling in my stomach, that creeping sensation of not having adequately or articulately conveyed what I really feel.  I’m worried I left out a big piece of my view.

And so here I will try again.  I think achievement is terrific.  I have written time and time again of how important it is for a child to feel the feel mastery.  Of a skill, a place, of themselves.  I will never forget the glow in Grace’s eyes when she rode a two-wheeler alone, the light in Whit’s face when he swam a lap of the pool solo, the sheer, palpable delight Grace felt when she began reading chapter books.  These accomplishments are immensely self-esteem building, and I would never, ever suggest that they are a bad thing.

In my life this theme reached a crescendo at Phillips Exeter Academy, where I went for 11th and 12th grade.  Frankly, my years there were relatively unhappy, for a constellation of personal reasons.  Despite this, even while I was there I felt a deep respect, almost a reverence, for the place, an awareness that I was somewhere unique.  The further I get from Exeter the more crystalline my appreciation of the place becomes.  As the years have passed, and since I’ve had my own children, I’ve come to understand why.

It feels rare, these days, that an institution that deals with children says as baldly as Exeter does: we have high standards.  And we know you can meet them.  I’m not entirely sure why that’s a threatened stance in education today, but as far as I can see it is.  And Exeter unflinchingly does that.  I’ve never been somewhere that so fiercely believed in the potential of its students: we won’t lower the standards, the voices seem to whisper, because we know you can do it.

And they do.  It’s powerful, being believed in.

Nowhere I’ve been to school before or since has even remotely touched the education I received at Exeter.  Exeter pushed me and defied me and never, once, for a single second, gave up on me.  And you know what?  I could do it.  It is the first place that I began to believe that I might have something to say.

I think the problems begin when one’s identity becomes entirely intertwined with achievement.  This is what happened to me; I entirely lost the voice of my soul, which was a whisper, because the voice of the world telling me what to do, and applauding me when I did it, was so deafening.  Of course the risk of this is high when you begin achieving, because the world’s adulation feels good.  At least if you are a pleaser like myself.

But never let me miscommunicate my lack of commitment to the idea of excellence in general, and of achievement in specific.  I hope to raise children who are tuned in enough to their inner voices to discover what it is that makes their hearts soar, and full of energy and passion enough to go after those goals with everything they have.

I left a piece of myself there

Last week I read Amy at Never True Tales’ words on The Witching Years.  She writes about the years that her children were young, with a combination of regret, loss, gratitude and wonder that I recognize intimately.

It’s clearer here, on the other side. In the light. With kids who brush their own teeth and do their own homework and get their own snacks. I know now that being a mom of young children, staying in the house day after day, parenting solo 80% of the time…well, it is what it is. (Oh, is it ever.) I know that I did my best.

I also know I’ll never get those years back, as much as they often make me shudder: those years that passed so slowly as to nearly grind backward. Those years so long I measured my children’s ages in months instead. And that’s a travesty, because I left a piece of myself there. Something raw, and unmeasured, and instinctively maternal. Something sacrificial.

Those years were also, for me, a time that felt removed from the rest of my life.  It’s absolutely true that it’s clearer here, and also that this feels a bit like the “other side.”  In retrospect those dark years were a kind of slow, dark traverse, like the hours-long slog to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro where all I can remember is step, breathe, pause.  Step, breathe, pause.  In a white-out ice storm.  For eight hours.  All the while wanting it to be over, and then the minute I’m through it I want to go back.

Hurry up, slow down, faster, slower, the interplay of impatience and of regret.  This is the music to which my life is danced.  When my children were little I used to talk wistfully – everyone used to talk – about “getting my life back.”  And yes, I have my life back now.  But it’s not the same life.  And furthermore, I feel nothing short of anguish that I wished over some of the most tender, raw, and special days of my life.  I will never revisit that unique interval of time when your regular life – that life I wanted back so fiercely – recedes.  I will never have that wild magic back.

And I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat.  What I can’t stop thinking about is the notion of I left a piece of myself there. Oh, yes.  My first few months of motherhood were a crucible, so hot that I emerged made up of a totally different alloy.  In those dark weeks it rained and snowed constantly, we waited for Matt’s father to come through surgery, I woke up every morning from deep, soggy sleep and swallowed a white pill, believing desperately that it would help me?  Beyond those initial weeks, the first few years were also their own country.  Set to the drumbeat cadence of the needs of a toddler and an infant, the demarcations between day and night eroded, the very earth beneath my feet tilting perilously.   My sense of self adjusted slowly, creakingly, to this new forever-after reality?

What did I leave there?

I left my body swollen with childbirth, with milk, with life.  I left eyes so tired that they felt like they had sand in them; I’d press my fingers to my eyelids and see stars exploding faintly in the blackness.  I left behind the powdery smell of newborns, a bottle drying rack by the sink, mint green coils of diaper genie wrapped diapers, sterling silver rattles dented from being thrown on hardwood floors, and all sizes of white onesies. I left behind the explosive and extraordinary experience of natural childbirth, though it reverberates to this day through my sense of self.

I left my naive but absolute belief that motherhood was my birthright.  That shattered like a lightbulb exploding and left behind questions and doubts as numerous as those shards of glass.  One of the tasks of the last few years has been to see the beauty in the doubts, the tremendous richness in the questions.

Most of all I left behind my certainty.  My certainty that I knew what I was doing, that my path was assured, that I was safe.  That was lost forever in those weeks where my sense of solid ground shifted; the tremors of those days reverberate still.  Nothing feels safe, but the uncertainty holds a dangerous, fearful promise that I never anticipated.  The impact of those years is carved onto my soul as indelibly as a scar would be on my skin; the difference is it is invisible to others.

I grieve those old, surer, more confident versions of myself, though in retrospect I can see in each of them the buried seam of doubt, rising occasionally to the surface, disturbing the apparently smooth, clear surface like a pebble dropped into a lake.  That’s what I left there, most of all, in the autumn of 2002: who I was sure I was, what I was certain the world was, and the future I saw unfurling in front of me so vividly and assuredly.

Nothing has ever been sure again.  And what an immense, outrageous, terrifying blessing that has been.

Thanks to Denise for the link that sent me to Amy’s beautiful essay.

I was one of those kids

I saw The Race to Nowhere last week.  I was tremendously moved by it.  I’m not sure I know what to do, precisely, with my ever-stronger sense of how I want to parent my kids.  There is a doctor of adolescent medicine in the film who says even he, a specialist who writes books about the toxicity of pressure on our kids, worries about how to walk the line between protecting childrens’ childhoods and holding them back.  He worries about the potential harm that his beliefs – supported in his case by all kinds of medical research and a PhD or two – may wreak on his daughters.  I worry too, and I have only my – albeit strong – intuition behind me.

The movie made me feel concerned about Grace and Whit, but the anxiety I feel about them comes from a profoundly personal place.  I was one of those kids.  I still am.  I was “perfect” in the achievement sense of the word.  I got the 4.0 GPA.  I went to Exeter, and Princeton, and Harvard Business School.  I played by the rules, followed the map, achieved everything I aimed for.  My father often comments that it was easy to raise Hilary and I because we went “straight down the middle of the street.”  Be careful, I always caution him: there’s still time!!

I related intensely to the kids in the movie, and to a culture that praises highly performance and achievement.  At one point in the movie a teacher says, in response to parents being surprised when their kids struggle or fall apart or otherwise cave under the pressure: “They all say, ‘but my kid’s a good kid!’  And I always say back, ‘You know your kid’s a good performer.  How do you know they’re a good kid?'”

That’s what I was.  A good performer.  A great achiever.  And you know what?  It didn’t add up to anything.  I’m writing a memoir, in fact, about what it’s like to realize that that kind of life, built on achievement and success and external validation, doesn’t necessarily lead you to happiness.

As Glenda Burgess so beautifully put it in The Geography of Love, “Eventually, I constructed a layered exoskeleton, a coral reef instead of a life.  The structure was there, but the essence was missing.”  This is certainly my personal experience: I realized, in my early 30s, that my model of approaching life, which was all about goals and achievements, was irreparably broken.  I was missing something fundamental; there was an echoing emptiness around the core of my life that eventually I could not ignore.

I think this is what worries me the most about The Race to Nowhere: we are raising a generation of children who don’t know how to tune in, to figure out what the essence of their lives is.  I know.  I am one of them.

Figuring out how to make my way through life without the external guideposts of achievement has been much harder than I ever imagined.  As I’ve said before, I am now navigating by the stars.  And that is much harder than simply being the perfect performer.  So I worry about myriad things that The Race to Nowhere represents: overscheduled kids who have lost their propensity for wonder, exhausted children who are physically harmed by the pressures on them, students who “do school” as opposed to developing aptitude for – and joy in – learning.

Probably most of all, though, I don’t want my children to grow up as deaf to the voice of their soul as I was for so long.  If they want to achieve and do well I think that’s ok – there’s nothing wrong with that in the abstract.  I just want to be sure they know that’s not the only skill that matters, and not to forget to tend to the essence of their lives as they race into the great wide open.

Race to Nowhere


It’s no secret that I have deep concern about parenting in today’s culture.  I’ve talked about my resistance to over-scheduling my children, my worries about how to preserve wonder in their lives, and my concerns about the overall intensity that seems to be taking over childhood.  I wrote a post on Zen Family Habits about my commitment to and concerns about limiting after-school programming with the kids, I read and loved Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids, and basically this is a drum I’ve beat over and over.  I’m desperate to raise trusting, hopeful children who are able to entertain themselves in a world that seems to squash that out of them no matter what I do.

I experience a constellation of themes and of worries that coalesce into a general unease about the world I’m bringing my children up in.  That said, I’m not entirely sure I understand exactly what the basic issue is, or how to unravel the various things that bother me.  My worries, while very troublesome, remain somewhat inchoate.

It was with great enthusiasm that I read about the new film Race to Nowhere, which strives to understand the root causes of what feels like an epidemic of stress.  Through the lens of particular stories, this film purports to bring to light the undercurrent of stress in parenting school-age children today.  I can’t wait to see it.  From the film’s marketing materials:

Race to Nowhere is a documentary film examining the pressures faced by young people, teachers and parents in our high-stakes, high-pressure public and private education system and culture.  Featuring the heartbreaking stories of young people across the country who have been pushed to the brink, educators who are burned out and worried that students aren’t developing the skills they need, and parents trying to do what’s best for their kids.  Race to Nowhere is a call to mobilize families, educators, experts, and policy makers to examine current assumptions on how best to prepare the youth of America to become healthy, bright, contributing and leading citizens of today and for the future.

If you live in the Boston area, please join me and others at a screening of Race to Nowhere next week.  The film is playing at 5:30 on January 26th at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square, and I’d love, love, love to see you there.  I many not entirely understand the root of the issue, but I’m crystal clear that it will require collaboration, trust, and community to begin to solve it.

Click HERE for more information on the showing on January 26th, and to purchase tickets.  I look forward to seeing you there.

How sheer the veil is between this world and another

Matt has had a lovely assistant, M, for four years. I’ve spoken to her thousands of times (at least) on the phone, and I finally met her a couple of weeks ago at the firm’s summer event in Chatham. She was friendly and warm, her voice familiar even though her face was new.

M died last night. She was 39 and left two children in their early teens. It was entirely unexpected.

I feel sad today, for her, for her family, for the abrupt loss of someone who had so much ahead of her. I feel as though something chilly has brushed past me in the dark, something I can’t see but something I can feel. Yesterday, I spoke to her. Today, she is gone. Where? My mind still struggles with this truth, which is maddeningly abstract and painfully concrete at the same time.

I also feel keenly, shiveringly aware of how close we all tread to the line of our worst nightmares every single day. The yawning terror of what might be, of that we most dread, exists just off to the side of our lives, and though we skirt it and forget it it still threatens. We live on the precipice, walk on a tightrope, exist in a world where the boundary between normal and tragedy is far more gossamer and fragile than we ever let ourselves imagine.

Death has actually been on my mind since my Aunt E’s funeral, actually, and since a dear friend lost his mother unexpectedly in July. As I sat in the pew at my aunt’s memorial service, I thought about how there are many more funerals ahead of me than behind me. And when my friend’s mother died I had an eerie sense of what is to come as the generations fold and my peers and I take our place at the head of the line. Both of these thoughts give me goosebumps, and not in a good way.

I’m sorry for this not-at-all-upbeat post. It seems incongruous, as I sit here on vacation, waiting to pick my boisterous, tired, and sunburned children up from the bus that bears them back from summer camp. But that is the point, I guess: to remember, always, how sheer the veil is between this life and another, between good news and terrible, between just another regular day and the day it all grinds to a halt.

There’s only one way to honor those who have stepped through this veil, one way to turn this tragic reality that flickers at the edges of our experience: to use the awareness of what might be, and of the proximity of the chasm, to heighten our awareness and celebration of the days that we remain safe. To remember, always, those trite sayings that are also so achingly true: today is all we have. Seize it. Take nothing for granted.

I’ll be hugging these two extra hard when they get off the bus today.

Originally written in August 2010