oh this is hard

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

An endless alleluia and a constant goodbye

I know I write all the time about the powerful and perilous ways that Grace reminds me of myself, about how she seems to have a core of sensitivity, emotion, insecurity, and sentimentality running through her that I intimately recognize. Similarly, I’ve written before of Whit’s predilection towards lightness, his surprising humor, his lack of instinctive subservience to authority. I wouldn’t blame any of you for feeling I’m a one-note violin on this score.

Never let it be said, however, that these children rest in their neat categories. Tonight, after reading several pages of Star Wars Heroes (another post: the Jedi emphasis on controlling your emotions – I’m fascinated that this may be taking real hold of the minds of our young boys, given the wild passion for Star Wars), I tucked Whit into bed. He was unusually clingy, consenting to snuggle in my lap while I rocked him, listening to a lullabye, a tradition that is all but gone now. I kissed him good night and went downstairs to read Harry Potter to Grace.

A page or two into the terrifying scene at the Quidditch World Cup where the Dark Mark hovers over the eerie forest (Grace: “Mummy! I’m scared! Can I hold on?” = her gripping my upper arm with two hands, so hard she left white finger marks) I heard Whit’s door open and his snuffling, tearful voice. “Mummy?” he called plaintively. “Yes, Whit?” “I’m sad.” I asked Grace if it was OK for me to go check on her brother and (surprisingly) she agreed easily.

Whit was in the bathroom. Looking at the floor, he kicked at the tile by the tub idly. He said, without looking at me, “I don’t want to talk about it.” “Oh, Whit, please?” He looked at me and dissolved into more tears. I picked him up and carried him back to the rocker. He was limp in my arms, his tearful face nestled wetly against my neck.

“Whitty, what’s wrong?” He was crying hard, speaking in short bursts between his hiccupy sobs. “I don’t want to be a kid, Mummy. It’s hard to be a kid.” “I know, sweetheart, I know.” “Mummy, I want to be a baby still.” We launched into a fairly detailed conversation about how he didn’t want to grow up and it was all going too fast and he wanted to still be a baby and be carried around. I was somewhere between shocked and blown away. Has he been reading my blog? Reading my mind?

Grace tiptoed into Whit’s room and he let her come over and stroke his hair back from his forehead. He looked right at her and told her why he was sad. “Oh, Whit, I know that feeling. I get sad about that too,” she said sincerely. What? Do my children feel the same contraction and expansion in their chests that I do, that same echoing sadness that seems to pulse with the closing of each moment?

I thought about how their bodies seem to be longer and leaner every single day; a similar growth must be happening in their hearts and spirits. That growth, sudden, overwhelming, must be scary and disorienting. I thought fiercely: I always want them to be able to talk to me about this.

Blinking back my own tears, I took the children on a quick tour through their babyhoods. I showed them the tiny hats they had each worn in the hospital, the doll-sized newborn diapers (I saved a couple of clean ones), the plastic bracelet I wore during each labor & delivery stay. Whit dug deep into his sock drawer to unearth a pair of 3-6 month socks with robots all over them. “These were mine, right, Mummy?” he asked urgently. He wore them to bed tonight.

We then went to the family room and leafed through the two photo albums that covered the first nine months of Whit’s life. He alternated between giggling and crying as we pored over the pictures. One in particular, of him lying on the floor, curled up, asleep, still a newborn, he exclaimed, “I think that’s on this very rug, Mummy!” He was right. He looked at the rug with an expression in his eyes that I recognized deeply: this place, here, was there, then, and it’s here now, and it’s the same and yet not… where did that moment go? Is it here? How could it not be here?

We talked some about how it is normal to feel sad sometimes about things that are over. About how it is hard to be a kid. Also, about the things that they can do now that they couldn’t when they were babies (Storyland, playdates, pizza, scootering, TV). Whit wisely said, “But I didn’t know about those things then, so I didn’t care that I couldn’t do them.” Hard to argue with that.

I finally got both my children settled and on their way to sleep, but now I sit here, lost in memories of those years of new babies and new horizons. I was a different person then, something I was reminded of when I saw the pictures with Whit as a newborn. I’m aware, as I am often, of the ways that minutes and hours and days add up to years, but with very irregular contents. The days stretch like taffy, sagging in the middle, the moments crystallize like glittering gems, the years pile up haphazardly, and what is built is a life.

Parenting – life itself! – is an endless alleluia* and a constant goodbye.

And, I am 100% biased, but I admit that tonight’s little exercise reminded me of how utterly adorable I thought Whit was as a baby.



*attribution to Newman and Hank for the best Christmas card message ever.

Originally written in June 2010

Moment of truth by the tub

On our last day in Sanibel, Grace and Whit were horsing around in the pool. She dunked him aggressively and he was very upset. My mother immediately reprimanded her, asking her to get out of the pool for a few minutes. Grace, in classic form, dissolved into tears. She sat on a chair by the pool, wrapped in a towel, hot pink goggles pushed up onto her forehead, forlorn and in full-blown pout mode.

Finally I asked her to come back to the condo with me and we walked, hand-in-hand but in silence, through the parking lot. She was sniffling and, I could tell, making a real effort to calm herself down. Often she asks for “deep breaths,” where she sits on my lap or we hug and take deep breaths together – this has been effective but I am now thinking she needs to figure out how to calm herself down without me. Anyway, she was trying hard and I could tell.

We got to the condo and I turned on the tub for her, because she was freezing and her purple lips were chattering. As she stood in the bathroom, naked and shivering, I looked at her suddenly all-grown-up body. She is so tall now she comes up to almost my chest. She seems startlingly unfamiliar, lean and lanky, with endless limbs, though I can still see that faint birthmark, more texture than color, on her left hip. I remember noticing that birthmark for the first time when she was mere days old.

She turned to me and I could see she was still crying. Overcome with identification and empathy, I crouched down in front of Grace, realizing that she is at that awkward height where standing I’m too tall but crouching I’m too small. I looked up at her tremulous face. “Gracie?” she looked at me, a tear spilling over her right eyelid onto her cheek. “It’s hard to be the older one, I know. Isn’t it?” she nodded at me. “I was that, Grace. I know. Everybody expects you to be grown up all the time. It’s hard, isn’t it?”

Her face just crumpled. She leaned into me, hugging me awkwardly as she was now taller than I was. “It’s so hard, Mummy. Sometimes I just get carried away and I lose control,” she choked on her words, crying hard now. I pushed her away only so that I could look her in the eye. “I know, Gracie. I know,” I said, firmly, “sometimes what you feel is really strong, isn’t it?” She nodded mutely, tears flooding down her face. “I know, love, I know.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I folded her body, all angles and long, skinny bones into my arms. We stayed like that for a long moment until she broke the embrace, wiping her eyes. She looked at me and I could tell she felt embarassed. “Grace.” I looked at her, almost sternly. “I know. And I know what a good, good girl you are, and how hard you try. I know. I promise. And I can tell you that your feelings, for the rest of your life, will be really strong. I still feel like I lose control sometimes. And it’s scary.”

She stared at me, a combination of fear and thanks in her eyes, and I could see how much she wanted to believe that I was being sincere. I think we both felt we’d revealed a lot, so she stepped into the tub and we moved on to other matters, but something essential happened in that bathroom. I saw a young version of myself and she saw that the strength of her emotions was going to be a lifelong battle. Yes, Gracie, I know what it is to feel out of control. I know what it is to feel pressure to be the “good one” and to do as others want you to do. I know all of those things. I wish I could teach you how to stop those feelings, but i can’t. I honestly have no idea. I wish I did.

Retrospective repost from March 2010