“There’s rats in the street, and rats in the jail
In the feds, rats wear wires in they cell
S**t Steven Seagal, I used to love his karate
But even he snitched, he told on Peter Gotti…”

-Tony Yayo, “Tattle Teller”

“Ruthless” is not my middle name. Although I cop to episodes of selfishness and inchoate rage, I am also a person who swerves to avoid hitting squirrels in the road, gives money to the person in the checkout line who is short $3.50, and believes that everyone should, on most occasions, be given a second chance (and sometimes a fifth). I have always been utterly baffled by the “players” of the world, from Machiavelli to modern-day politicians and ex-boyfriends who lied, cheated and manipulated to get what they wanted. I can’t imagine spending five minutes of my life plotting anything, or deciding consciously to say one thing while meaning something entirely different in order to achieve a desired outcome; this may explain my complete and utter failure as a player of chess and poker.

My belief in myself as a fundamentally kind creature is, and has long been, complicated by the spectre of “tattling.” In general, it is an unnatractive characteristic in children; everyone remembers the perpetual carrier of tales who reported every playground infraction and instance of excess crayon consumption to The Authorities. Mostly, we all hated that kid. From that early fear and loathing, most of us come to accept a standard and unspoken “No Ratting” rule which we carry into adulthood. One does not, as a rule, “tell” on friends who leave the high school grounds to smoke, on colleagues who punch in late, or on family members who call in sick to attend the opening day of baseball season. It’s not that there’s nothing to report; it’s just that everybody hates a rat, and our response to behavior that is, strictly speaking, “wrong,” but which appears to do no serious harm, is to look the other way. If tattling were a positive behavior, we would call it “fluffy bunnying,” or “kittening,” rather than “ratting.”

One can argue endlessly with oneself about how much harm is caused by various kinds of bad behavior, and get all Kant-y about “if everybody did it…,” but most of the time we just don’t “tell” unless there is a serious infraction like the abuse of a child or a bloody hammer behind the basement furnace following the mysterious disappearance of a heavily-insured spouse. If one is basically “nice,” and generally adheres to the “no-tattling” rules, how is it clear when one has come upon a situation in which one has an obligation to tattle, and to become the far nobler “Whistleblower” rather than just a rotten snitch? Where, between stealing paperclips and embezzling cash, does the behavior of another person rise to the level where it is right and possibly necessary to blow the whistle? In a case where the infraction is some shade of gray, how do you know whether you are really a pure-hearted whistle blower, or throwing someone under the bus to make yourself look good? To be sure, there is an element of common sense for a sane person making such decisions, but how do we even begin to assess “common” in this context? Just because taking 20 sugar packets from a restaurant sets off my Spidey Sense does not mean that it’s even on the radar for the person at the next table.

I have tattled on a co-worker three times in my life, the most recent occasion being…recent. In the first two cases the infraction involved theft, and although I did not personally like either of the tattlees, it was clear to me that their behavior rose to the level where I was a) morally bankrupt and b) legally at risk if I didn’t disclose what I knew. I felt bad about reporting on them because I knew that they would lose their jobs, not to mention that they would figure out who snitched, and hate me forever. On the other hand, I knew that I would have reported even a close friend for stealing (after a concerted effort to persuade them to come clean on their own), and that I gained absolutely nothing from my actions. I could sleep at night, still “nice.”

About my more recent snitchery, I haven’t yet cleared my conscience. The other person was not doing anything dangerous or illegal; the transgressions were merely disorganization and fairly shocking unkindness directed towards people about whom I care a great deal.  I do not particularly enjoy the person, and admit that I would not have reported on the behavior if the guilty party was a  friend (although I would certainly have tried to mitigate the damage in a private conversation). I also admit that it was cowardly of me to turn the situation over to a third-party rather than trying to resolve it on my own. It would have been painful, messy and miserable to have handled things on my own, but I could have made the effort. In my favor, I can state with some certainty that the behavior in question was harmful to the business of the workplace, and that I had nothing to gain, personally, by bringing it into the light of day. Based on this calculus, I can clear myself of throwing my coworker under the bus, which, by definition requires some element of personal enhancement, but I was definitely tattling, based on my own moral conviction that the Wrong should be Punished.

I still don’t think I’m ruthless. I think I am guilty of judging, and of a certain smug self-satisfaction about the fact that I am a lily white pillar of virtue, above reproach in comparison to the other person involved. That is neither ruthlessness nor Machiavellian behavior; it is merely self-centered, flawed and possibly regrettable.  There will be no job loss or demotion, but there will likely be a “schooling” which may serve merely to make another person conform more neatly to my personal standards of conduct. Until I can decide whether I was “blowing the whistle” to make the world a better place, or simply tattling to get a quick fix for a personal annoyance, I don’t feel  all that “nice,”  and my sleep will continue to be troubled. Somewhere, on the scale between spotless virtue and childish pettiness, is…human. It’s a tough gig.

]]> http://imagineannie.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/tattling/feed/ 2 imagineannie rat[1] tatler-jan-2009[1] http://imagineannie.wordpress.com/2009/11/15/running-with-the-shadows-of-the-night/ http://imagineannie.wordpress.com/2009/11/15/running-with-the-shadows-of-the-night/#comments Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:50:59 +0000 imagineannie http://imagineannie.wordpress.com/?p=1761 ]]>

In the suburban neighborhood of my youth, a hush fell with the darkness. Aside from summer nights when we were all allowed to stay out playing Statues or Kick the Can, children were safely home by the time the streetlights went on, and most houses gradually went dark by 11:30 or 12:00. As a teenager, I remember feeling that it was a great act of rebellion to slam a car door or even cough loudly when returning home late on a Saturday night. It was a respectable neighborhood; people were sleeping.

I now live in a college town, and not the kind of college where students are studying on Friday nights, or huddling in their dorm room with a few close friends to pass a wizened joint and talk about “Brideshead Revisited.” This school is a big, brawling, land-grant university with 40,000 students, a downtown full of bars, and a steady revenue for purveyors of kegs. The drinking begins after class on Thursday (there are very few Friday classes), and ends some time Sunday evening, unless it is Finals Week. Drinking is not a private and local matter; bands of students roam the streets en route to bars and parties, and on the day of a 12:00 home football game the revelry begins before 7:00 AM with stereos on “stun” and Beer Pong tournaments played in front yards. There are other sports in the Alcohol X Games as well, including one involving dunking one’s head in a wading pool full of ice-cold water, drinking an entire can of beer, being turned around to the point of vertigo, and, finally, being handed a bat, tennis racket or golf club with which one must try to hit the beer can after it is pitched. I have not yet seen this on ESPN, even ESPN15 where paintball is considered a sport, but I’m telling you, it’s cutting edge.

In the middle of all this, lives my family. We are one of only two owner-occupied houses on a street of student rentals, a street of beautiful houses built by the original Pillars of the Community at the turn of the last century, and presided over by towering trees on both sides of the narrow street. During the 1970s, due to a combination of urban flight and improvident licensing laws, all of the houses around us were snapped up by landlords, turned into duplexes, and gutted, or otherwise violated on the inside, while the exteriors remain largely as they were. The average age of our neighbors is 20, there are no other families on the street, and, for the most part, there is complete turnover once a year. There is an annual period of rapprochement, during which I bake cookies or brownies, we deliver them to our new neighbors as they carry in furniture and high-end electronics, and we are then treated with great respect when we have to deliver the news that the bass on their stereos is causing our house to shift on its foundation.

Last night, as I went out to call the last cat in at 11:30, Forest Street was roaring to life. It was a Saturday night, our teams had won a rare football-basketball-hockey trifecta, and it was unseasonably warm. Lights were on, people were in their yards, and it looked like a (literally) “noir” version of Sunday afternoon in the suburbs, with neighbors greeting neighbors, beers in hand. Although there was a time, shortly after moving into our house, when I was horrified by the nightlife of the local creatures, I have come to view my situation as the best of all possible worlds. I was very happy during the years I spent living in a “real” city, and I have, here, the bustle, noise and vitality of that crowded, busy existence. I love it that if I choose to be immersed, I can sit on my porch and speak to a parade of people on their way to and from campus, work or recreation. There are other times, when there is a heavy blanket of snow, and the students have all gone home for winter break, that I can look out from my porch at a car-less row of houses freshened by the snow, and imagine that I am seeing what I would have seen from the same vantage point in 1912. I have not, for a moment of the past 9 years, wished that we had bought a house in a suburb, in the country, or really, anywhere but here. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that we have lived here for 11 years).

As I waited for the cat last night, I had a front-row, center seat for Life’s Rich Pageant. Next door, a birthday was being celebrated. This involved a trip to the bar, and a young woman who was wearing a typical outfit for such an outing: a tight, strapless black dress which began just below the cleft of her cleavage, and ended just south of her posterior, and stiletto heels at least 3 inches high. Dresses and skirts short enough to make it potentially illegal to do anything other than stand still or walk (slowly) are legion in these parts, as are the stilettos; we have witnessed more than one artificially heightened beauty wiping out on the climb up our hill, engaging in a frantic and hopeless scramble to prevent the ace bandage micro mini from revealing too much. (I should also note that we frequently see these outfits in their Walk of Shame incarnation the morning after, covered by a mans’ sweatshirt but still glaringly inappropriate in the harsh light of day.  Assuming that one is sufficiently charitable to believe they were ever “appropriate”). The men in the group were far more casually dressed, in expensively shredded jeans and collared shirts, making it look rather as if Miss Michigan were being escorted out for the evening by the models from an Abercombie ad.

Wine and Song being inadequate for the Abercrombie boys, I came in at the point where they were discussing the procuring of Women for those not attached to Miss Michigan. “Dude,” one of them said, “they live across the street. This girl named Sheila made me dinner and I think we hooked up.”

“No way,” said the one with his cap on backwards, “there’s nobody over there named Sheila.”

“Yeah, well, I know I slept on this street. Or Evergreen or Park.” Miss Michigan, understandably chilly in her miniature costume, stamped her exaggerated heel and hugged herself.

“Can we just go?” she asked plaintively. Looks passed among the boys; mutinous on the part of the dateless, and imploring on the part of the boyfriend.

“Whatever” one of them mumbled. They started down the street, past our house where Rob and I now stood together on the porch. They greeted us kindly, genuinely and with appreciable warmth. Miss Michigan noted as they walked away that she “saw [our] kitty on the porch every morning.” We allowed ourselves a warm glow, as we do when the boy across the street rakes our entire yard unprompted and uncompensated, when a nervous interviewee asks Rob to help him with his necktie, or when a houseful of boys (!) brings over a plate of cookies that they sliced and baked themselves. It’s not conventional, it’s not suburban, and it’s not always easy, but it’s truly neighborly, and never dull. I wouldn’t trade it for all the driveway-sweeping, lawn-manicuring neighbors in the world.

From their earliest incarnations, I was sucked in by the “reality” series genre in which two families trade mothers for a couple of weeks. In order to heighten the drama, the selected families must be not mere diametric opposites, but so different as to defy the laws of probability.We have seen rock and roll families v. fundamentalist Christian families, orthodox Jewish family v. redneck hillbilly families, vegetarian v. carnivorous families, and (most frequently) disciplined/ultra-neat/rigid families v. laissez-faire/messy/bohemian parents. In the end, regardless of the bitter arguments, the weeping and the threats of abandoning the experiment, both families are somehow better for having Seen A Different Perspective, and we are all reassured that however we live, even if we are circus clowns or orthodox jews, it’s all good.

An early episode featured a wealthy suburban family in which the father was a Japanese-American plastic surgeon and the wife a pretty blonde socialite type who appeared to have benefited from her husband’s professional expertise. This family “swapped” with an African-American family in which both parents worked long hours at hard jobs, and the kids”talked back,” ate junk food and listened to rap music. Rich family lived in a sprawling dream house with a pool, owned a second home by a lake, and ate out frequently and expensively. Poor family occupied a modest, single story home, and had clearly become adept at stretching a dollar. As the hour drew to a close, it became apparent that the producers had indulged themselves in a heavy editorial slant focused on the self-centered and vacuous nature of “rich mom” and the earthy, humble goodness of “poor mom.”

Even with my husband groaning “could it be any more obvious?” every few minutes, I was absorbed. I smiled when “poor mom” walked into “rich mom’s” room-sized closet and contemplated at least forty pairs of shoes neatly lined up on shelves, and I winced when “rich mom” attempted to bully her daughter-for-the-week into eating fewer carbs because she was overweight. Although I did not find “rich mom” particularly sympathetic, I confess that I felt for her when she discovered, on her first morning in her alternative universe, that there was no coffee in the house. I myself am capable of committing serious crimes when my first cup is denied or even seriously delayed. I could see it all coming, but it was still fascinating. I was also interested to note that no matter what surface differences there were, both families had essentially the same goals of health, happiness and success for their children, and both families were working, in their own way, towards reaching those goals.

I am now considering the discoveries that would be made during a less dramatic swap. If there were no cameras, no dramatic music to make sure we headed in the correct emotional direction, and no need to hook the interest of the average channel surfer, what would it look like if women traded families and households? Another woman coming into my house would probably find my husband charming and helpful, and my son basically well-mannered and appealing.  On the plus side, my house is big and comfortable, there is a theoretical routine of cleaning, cooking and laundry, and I have built a schedule that allows periods of “mommy downtime” that I can use to write, read or work.  On the minus side of the balance sheet, we have three cats and two dogs. It’s necessary to “cover” the door when coming in or going out of the house, because the dogs and one of the cats will almost always be waiting to escape, and the dogs don’t come when called. They have, unfortunately, been known to roam the city for twelve hours at a time before deciding to return home filthy and limping. Some of the animals are also accustomed to sleeping in beds with people, and insist on doing so; one dog sleeps under the covers in our bed.

Furthermore, my house always smells vaguely of animal, and there is always a thin layer of hair covering the carpet and furniture no matter how often I vacuum. There is no real floor on our bedroom because three summers ago in a fit of Bob the Builder enthusiasm I ripped up all the yucky carpet, planning to reveal the beautiful old floor underneath. There was nothing but particle board underneath, and until we can afford new flooring, we have particle board with rugs over it. We live in the midst of student renters who “party like its 1999″ almost every night except during finals and when they are passed out or home for the weekend. On the whole, I would classify our lifestyle as a complex blend bohemian, laissez-faire, and carnivorous, with notes of rigidity, neurosis, and spirituality, and faint hints of oak, leather and star anise.

While I am able to tolerate the chaotic elements of my own home life, there are many things that might make it difficult for me to survive two weeks in someone else’s house. I am not particularly fond of noise, and would become quickly psychotic in a household full of loud children, particularly if they were given to verbal or physical fighting. I would also fail to thrive in a home with more than one electronic noise source at a time. It is a well established rule in my house that if a stereo goes on upstairs, the television goes off downstairs. I am only good for about an hour of cartoon noise wafting from any part of the house, and become increasingly hostile in the presence of a child sitting dumbly in front of the television set for any length of time. I hate chewing gum, most processed foods, humorlessness, and apathy. I require morning coffee, periods of total silence, and gracious acknowledgement of my home cooked dinners regardless of quality. In fact, the more experimental and unappealing the meal, the more likely I am to sulk until someone thanks me for my efforts.

It now occurs to me that, in the unlikely event of a mommy swap, my family might be happier and better off with their new, probably more tolerant and relaxed mommy. They would be free to watch TV around the clock, snap their gum, eat canned hash, and generally disport themselves in ways that would lead to my swift and complete breakdown. They could have an orgy of noise any time they wanted to: the TV on in the living room, a CD playing upstairs, one computer roaring with synthesized race car engines and maybe that horrible tweedly Gameboy music to top it all off. No one would be bustling around picking up dirty socks, turning down the volume, or insisting that everyone come to the table for a meal with two servings from the fruit and vegetable food group. If the “new mommy” could stand the noise and the animals, she’d be on Easy Street, and no one would miss me for a while.

I could be persuaded to enjoy two weeks in the home of a family in which the parents were artists. Deep in the woods, with walls of glass, a pot-bellied stove and constant classical music, the house would be equipt with a vegetarian family, a well-stocked library, and no television set. I might miss watching “House” for a while, but I could get over it while lying on a well-worn leather sofa reading “Paris Match” in French and drinking espresso fresh from the machine on the counter. Besides a little Schubert, he only sound in the house would be the crackling of the fire, and the whisper of pages turning as I read, the (handsome and generous) father painted in his studio, and the (quiet, intelligent) children drew clever pictures at the kitchen table and fixed their own healthy snacks.

I’d miss my life, though. After a week or so, I’d be itching to jump up and fix a bowl of ramen noodles for Sam. I’d miss the comforting lump of beagle next to my leg under the covers,  the rap music and engine noise of “Need for Speed” on the computer and especially the sound of my husband and son laughing as they played. I’d like to think that after a little anarchy (or martial law)  my family would miss me too. We all want good things for our spouses and our children, but the little differences in how we make life “good” can add up to an infinite number of different lifestyles, tastes and choices. Like snowflakes, no two households are really alike, and I think there really is “no place like home….”

I may possibly be the only living college-track student ever to graduate from my high school without taking either chemistry or physics classes. I did complete the required Freshman year of something called “CP Science,” a physics and chemistry mashup from which I remember only that there are protons, neutrons and electrons, and that…there are protons, neutrons and electrons. I think that’s chemistry; physics was about arrows.

I did not always avoid science. I loved biology in 7th grade, mostly because I had a teacher named Walt Van Dien, a small, spry, and gentle chain smoker with tobacco-stained fingers and a quick wit who loved teaching, loved us all, and really couldn’t rest until we were as excited about chlorophyll as he was. He kept Mourning Doves and other creatures in the classroom, and when I found a Ribbon Snake in our yard and carried it to school on the bus to show him (don’t ask), he was thrilled, suggesting that we keep “Delphi,” as I called him, to study for the year, before releasing him into the fields behind the school.

That year, I could have become a Science Student, a Biology Major, or even a Scientist, but that potential was dealt crushing blows first by the incredible tedium of CP Science, and then by an unimaginative martinet of a high school biology teacher whose main skill in the teacherly arts seemed to be the use of the “ditto” machine to make endless worksheets, pale blue on white, and redeemable only because I liked the way they smelled when they were fresh from the machine. The excitement of learning about how the Mourning Doves digested, reproduced and flew was replaced by “mitochondria is the ____________ of the cell.” (The answer, by the way, is “powerhouse”).

Science having become dead to me (math expired some time in elementary school), I was delighted when it became apparent that, since I was planning to attend a conservatory of music rather than “regular” college, I really didn’t need to take chemistry in my junior year, or physics in my senior year. (Actually, I just didn’t take chemistry in my junior year, so both classes were on the table by the time I was a senior). I knew, in the same vague, second-hand way that people know that you can’t swim after eating or trust a man with a limp handshake, that both physics and chemistry involved math, lots of math, strange symbols and hard tests, and in a feat unrepeatable in this day and age, I convinced my parents and my principal that instead of taking more science, I really needed the two hours a day to practice my cello, to study music theory, and to help my orchestra teacher work with the students at the middle school. Many days, I actually did one or all of those things.

I would love to say that I am often troubled by the resulting hole in my scientific education, and that I really, really wish I knew more about how things work in the universe. The truth is, that I admire the Periodic Table as an example of Cubism, and that I am grateful for the existence of gravity, but beyond that…I rarely give it a thought. This is (or should be) embarrassing because I am married to a man who sells math and science curricula. While I am impressed with the “Inquiry” method of science instruction on which his company bases their texts, I have not, thus far, felt an unquenchable need to pick up any one of the 70,000 books currently filling an upstairs room and spend some time learning about what I missed. It’s not that I don’t think it’s important, it’s just that there are so many books I want to read, and so many things I want to learn, (and, honestly, “House” and “The Office), and I just don’t feel willing to spare the time necessary to become intimate with physics. It’s probably also important to note that law school was (for me anyway) a period of three years during which I read nothing of any personal interest to me, and I do not feel that I have another brain cell or breath to sacrifice to anything that is neither necessary for my survival nor scintillating to my psyche.

Yesterday, sitting in a restaurant with my husband and my parents, I happened to mention that I didn’t know anything about physics, except that there was something called a “vector.” My father, a teacher by nature and profession, took the twin straws from his iced tea and told me that he was going to teach me what a vector actually was. Placing them in a “v” on the table top, he asked me to imagine that they were chains, one attached to an ox, and one to a truck. My questions about the age, gender and size of the ox, and the make, color and model year of the truck were ignored. I was, he instructed, to imagine that the two sources of power were being used to move a large rock, located at the joint of the “v.” I was distracted by the fact that the putative “chains,” were very clearly cocktail straws, and tremendously bothered by the absence of ox, truck or rock, but I focused very hard on following the next part of the story. In order to pull the rock in the desired direction, my father explained, it would be necessary to adjust the “v” in some way, due to the relative force of the ox and the truck. The line in which the rock traveled was The Vector.

While I was still constructing a visual in my head (the velvet-nosed ox with his wooden yoke worn smooth by the years, or could the ox be a “she,” or if it was a she, would she not be an “ox” at all, but something different, like “bulls” and “cows?” Was s/he well-treated? Was the truck one of those really cool vintage models with the cute front-mounted headlights that looked like bug-eyes, maybe in a faded pale blue?) my father and husband had gone on to other examples, one involving my brother flying his small airplane and forming a “v” with the wind, followed by an entirely incomprehensible example related to sailing into which I interjected  my sailing vocabulary (“tack”) and was, again, ignored.

So I kind of get it. I even see a real reason to understand what a vector is. If, for example, one was moving a large rock, flying an airplane or sailing, one would need to have a firm grasp on the use of vectors, on “vectoring,” as it were. I have no plans to move large rocks or to fly an airplane, and I have long ago proven myself an incompetent sailor (in an incident in which my father had to row a boat into the middle of a lake to retrieve me and the boat I was attempting to sail, because I could not…tack). The laws of physics and chemistry are important things to understand, things that are fundamental to comprehending the workings of the world in which we live, but for the most part, I plan to continue being glad that other people understand them and feel willing to dole out tidbits of information to me on an infrequent basis. A very infrequent basis, if you please.

[Dear Reader: it has been suggested to me by those nearest and dearest that I have been writing a number of gloomy, self-deprecating and Altogether Serious posts which might lead the casual observer to believe that I am living in a darkened room with 50 cats and a bottle of Trazodone. These pieces are, for me, compelling to the point of urgency, and I cannot apologize for the thinking or the writing of them. I can, however, tell you that there are lighter things on the horizon. Don't give up on me, baby].

The most utterly miserable times of my life were in high school.  I was always a fat girl, and later, a fat girl with acne. I never had a date, was never kissed, was picked last for every team in gym, and was called “pizza face,” among other things. To be sure, there were girls fatter than I was who were not teased, and were, in fact popular. There were also many among the Leadership of the Pack who had acne (a common occurrence in the pre-Accutane era).These facts always baffled me, and mostly shored up my notion that there was, for some reason, a target in the middle of my forehead. I recall bands of lithe, silken-haired Popular People roaming the halls of our very upper middle class high school and possessing the power to slay me for an entire day with nothing more than a dismissive look or a word whispered to a friend in my proximity.

I had been teased enough, beginning in elementary school, that I had a rational basis for believing that I was a target. This belief was bolstered by occurrences like The Sweater Incident, in which one gazelle-like beauty in her OHS cheerleader drag figured out that the sweater I was wearing came from the boy’s department of Knapp’s Department Store, because her brother had the same one. (I feel compelled to point out that I was not wearing a boys’ sweater because I was elephantine, which I was not. I picked it out because I liked the pattern). “Hey Ann,” she called from across the classroom, “where’d you get your sweater?” Unsure about whether I was being set up for a compliment or a fall, I answered her. “What department?” she asked, looking at her friends to make sure they wouldn’t miss the punchline.  I was doomed, and sat, face burning, as she announced the Origin of the Sweater;  much hilarity ensued.  I never wore it again, and made up a story for my mother about how it made me itch.

I had good friends, and did well academically, but my school days were spent navigating a minefield. I never relaxed, and I was perpetually scanning vigilantly for the next sneer, judgmental assessment or (worst of all) look of utter contempt from some handsome, athletic boy walking next to a petite, faintly tan girl with the right hair, size 3 hiney-binders, and an expensive ski jacket with lift tickets hanging from the zipper pull. Had I been any number of things other than what I was, I might have fared better. If I had been thick-skinned, oblivious, or even ambitious and optimistic about trying to meet the standards of the Ruling Class, I might have done my own thing, unscathed, or at least had a project to keep me from rehashing every slight. Instead, I was me. I was hyper-sensitive, anxious, and certain on a molecular level that the people at school who echoed what I saw in “Seventeen” magazine were what teenagers should be, and that I was not.

Nearly thirty years since high school, I am far more comfortable with myself, and sometimes even fancy myself  a “cool kid,” at least in my own circles. It would, however, be inaccurate to pass myself off as a “changed person;” nothing has made that clearer than the reappearance of high school in my present-day life courtesy of  facebook. I panicked (no exaggeration) when a cheerleader classmate found and “friended” me, seriously believing that, at the age of 46, she might be planning to tease or embarrass me in some way. She suggested other potential “friends” to me, and into my life came people who I had feared, secretly worshipped, and generally viewed as an entirely different species from Booksmartus Thunderthighica.

As time passed, and I corresponded with and generally kept up with the “popular kids,” the plates began to shift. Many, if not all of them proved to have interests in common with me, to have struggled in various ways, and to be genuinely kind, tolerant adults. Most recently, the original “friend” began organizing a class reunion, and designated me as “chief party planner.” After my initial surprise (and, I’ll admit, vestigial suspicion), I recognized that the gesture was genuine, and based on a belief that I was a person who not only deserved to be included in a party, but who knew enough to make it a good one. Two paths converged in my cliche-ridden mind, and I selected the one that led me to question my identity as a scarred victim of high school cruelty. It now seems plausible, even likely that what I saw as meanness in the high rollers of adolescence was simply the expression of a different kind of insecurity from my own. I am pretty sure that I was as visibly dismissive and contemptuous of people who I believed to be unintelligent, conventional and sheep-like (by which I mean the “popular people”) as they were of the socially disadvantaged (by which I mean “me”), and none of us was particular skillful about challenging our assumptions or prejudices.

Letting go of personal mythology is a difficult thing, particularly when the stories are thirty-five years old, and have been cherished, embellished, and embroidered to the point where the Bayeux Tapestries appear to be mere hand towels in comparison. I’m pretty sure that I responded to cruelty, real and imagined, by developing layers of cynical, suspicious protection that gave out signals of rejection and moral superiority. I can’t, otherwise, explain the fact that girls heavier than I was were popular, had boyfriends, and generally  believed that they were entitled to sit at the table for life’s rich banquet. They didn’t care, they laughed it off, or they were so confident about their intrinsic value that they could take a little teasing in stride, possibly giving back as good as they got. I lacked that confidence, and developed a set of defenses that could have repelled even the most determined teenager. Particularly towards attractive or popular boys, I am now certain that I directed Death Rays of pure, unmitigated contempt. It wasn’t conscious, and I don’t imagine they would have been beating down my door with invitations to Homecoming in any event, but it was a social “Stop” sign. I admit that to this day, when dealing with a particularly handsome man at a car dealership or parent meeting, I still find myself fighting the urge to cut and run because I am certain that I am being assessed and found wanting.

It seems that I probably got back from the “popular” people what I gave out, missing entirely the part where I was equally nasty in my own way. There was teasing, there was cruelty, and in Tort Law, I would be considered “The Eggshell Victim,” a term used to describe the victim of negligence whose injuries and/or damages far exceed what might normally be expected due to some inherent characteristic like hemophilia or brittle bones. Outside of Tort Law, in the natural rough and tumble of growing up, there is no Eggshell Victim rule. My sensitive, anxious and self-critical self took every blow hard, even those easily deflected by a tougher nature, but the fact that I responded by subconsciously claiming Victim status and lining up my defenses was not the fault of my beautiful and socially adept peers. It was, as a friend of mine says, “a thing;” a no-fault, no-liability mistake that caused years and years of damage.

I am not good at forgetting things, but I am brilliant at “spin.” With my adolescent years re-classified as “mutual misunderstanding” rather than “endless persecution,” I feel a freedom, a lightness that may just allow me to move around the cabin of my life a little more easily. I can choose to see myself now as perfectly adequate, maybe even a little young-looking for someone of my vintage, and capable of navigating in any social waters in which I find myself. I can also see the people who cast long shadows in high school as flawed, human equals who may have suffered in ways I never imagined while I saw them perpetually perfect and in control. I guess I’ll learn more about them when we all see each other at that reunion party I’m planning….

I always hated sports. As a child, I played outside, swam all summer, rode my bike, and sledded and skated in winter, but I was not interested in playing or watching organized sporting events. I grew up in a Big Ten town, and was constantly bombarded by games on TV, games on the radio, and the difficulty of driving anywhere on the day of a home football game. I also hated the interpersonal heat and mayhem when my Michigan State University family traveled to Ohio for Thanksgiving with my mother’s Ohio State University uncles and cousins. I was completely horrified that grown men could get that upset because some big idiot dropped a ball or got knocked down. As far as I could see, football involved a bunch of thugs running at each other and falling in a pile. Basketball made more sense, but was still just a bunch of taller thugs with fewer clothes. I attended precisely one football game in four years of high school, and cleverly found a college at which football existed, but was really kind of  a joke in the greater world of college sports; it was the “Anti-Big Ten.”

I had a two brief flirtations with sports that were really about impressing the objects of my affection and not about passion for a game. When I fell in love with hockey-playing Stuart, who lived near my grandmother in Rhode Island the summer after fifth grade, I had a brief obsession that included learning all about Phil Esposito and Bobby Orr, and requesting a puck and stick for Christmas so that I could play street hockey (which was interesting since no one else I knew had a puck or a stick, or played street hockey). I never saw Stuart again, and although I could (and can) follow a game of ice hockey with some interest, I can also walk away without a second thought.  I became a basketball fan when I was in love with John, watching the Detroit Pistons play game after game, and learning to identify a pick & roll, a pivot and a technical foul. My separation from John being more dramatic and disturbing that Stuart’s slow fade from my conscious mind, I rejected basketball along with everything else associated with the relationship.

By the time I was an adult, it was well-known that I had no interest in sports, and wasn’t interested in being led to the Church of ESPN for a conversion experience. When the rest of my family gathered to watch bowl games on New Year’s day, I sat in another room and read, or entertained whatever babies we had at the moment. When my husband, and later my husband and son watched sports on TV, I suffered it by sitting in the same room with them and reading, despite the annoying cheers, whistles, and buzzers. I was kind of proud of my sports-resistant nature; watching people who cared about the outcome of a game was kind of like watching people who are drunk when you are sober. They yelled, they jumped out of their seats, and they said things like “all riiiiiight!” and “come on, come on, come on…YES!” Sometimes, to my great surprise, they cried after the beloved team won a game. I cried about all kinds of things, to be sure, but I could not even remotely imagine caring so much about which group of testosterone-y thugs beat another team of testosterone-y thugs that anyone would weep with joy.

We live, now, in a neighborhood near the Michigan State University campus, and all of the neighboring houses are student rentals. Four years ago, as I engaged in the annual meet and greet with our new undergraduate neighbors, I met a group of male housemates which included what appeared to be a giant. I soon learned that the giant (whose name was Jake) had come all the way from a small town in Wyoming on a full academic scholarship, but that he was also a walk-on for the M.S.U. basketball team. He was a smart kid, and a funny kid, and during that fall we  often saw him leave the house at the crack of dawn in his green and white sweats for a workout before classes began. He came home long after dark, after practice and hours of homework.  As I got to know the boys in his house, I learned that Jake almost never actually got to play, but that he was expected to participate in all workouts, coaching sessions and games on top of a rigorous academic load. He was no thug, he was willing to give up most of the social life associated with his senior year in college just for a chance to walk on with the team. I was intrigued.

When Jake offered us tickets to the first game of the season, I surprised myself by saying we’d love to go. I enjoyed the brisk walk towards the Breslin Center in the midst of a huge throng of fans, I liked going to the window and asking for the tickets that were held for us, and watching the team warm up from our floor bleacher seats, reserved for players’ families and friends. We were so close that I could see sweat fly, and hear the squeak of giant green and white basketball shoes. We saw Jake, not even close to being the tallest giant in comparison to his teammates, and I began to study the program to find out about the other men on the team, studying up on their home towns and majors; all of the kind of personal, “girly” details that made me feel like I was still me, even on the edge of a basketball court with “Havana Gila” blasting through the speakers, and announcements about something called a “fifty-fifty raffle.”

When the game started, I had my conversion experience. That’s really all there was to it; by some alchemical process of being in that place, learning about those boys and watching them run, and weave and shoot, I became a Fan. It felt strange, at first, to yell out loud, or to cheer (I don’t think I had ever cheered in my entire life) but it was impossible to stay poised or quiet after a hoop-grabbing slam dunk, or a beautifully executed steal. A new, true believer, I went on to read about the history of the team, devour newspaper stories about the players and the coach, and watch every televised game that season. When the games weren’t on TV, I sat glued to my computer, watching something called “Game Tracker” which was to basketball what “Pong” was to tennis; a small graphic of a ball moving back and forth across a rectangle, with text updates after a foul or a score. I began to see, in college basketball, not a group of nameless thugs, but My Boys, who trained their bodies to run hard and fast for minutes at a time, understood complicated strategies, and took the beratings and blessings of their coach as one might accept the ministrations of a beloved father. I knew that Coach held the team to high standards academically, and that he expected them to display good character on and off the court.  I came to love him, too. I loved his animated face and barely contained emotions after bad calls and botched plays, and the faint smile he permitted after a three-pointer sailed into the opponent’s basket with a satisfying “swoosh.”

Although I wasn’t sure that I could love another team, especially after Jake graduated, it turned out that I could. I loved Goran, and Raymar, and Marquise, and Travis,  gangly Tommy and each year’s new crop of freshmen. This year, I was bereft when I discovered that I had somehow missed the first game, and rushed to find the schedule and put it on my calendar to assure that nothing comes between me and Spartan basketball. I will snap up proffered game tickets, cheer with the Breslin crowd when I can, cheer from my couch when I can’t, and have conversations with perfect strangers about how we pulled out of a slump the previous night  because the offensive players were “on fire.”

In case you suspect a flash-in-the-pan kind of love, susceptible to evaporation in the cool breeze of time, I will tell you something I have never told a soul. The first year of my basketball fan-hood, Rob participated in a conference in Grand Rapids Michigan, and Sam and I tagged along to stay in the magnificent Amway Grand Hotel with him. After dinner, we dropped Rob at his booth for the evening, and as we started to walk back to our room,  I remembered that we were missing the start of an NCAA playoff game. As Sam and I sped down long, carpeted halls, he noticed that the TV over one of the lobby bars was showing our game; I rationalized that it was okay to sit on a bar stool with my 8-year-old next to me as long as we weren’t sharing a Jagermeister. It was for the sake of our team. As we watched, eating tiny crackers and drinking soda through tiny black straws, the most giant of our giants, a seven-foot Nigerian, fell and injured his elbow with an audible crunch. It was terrible to watch, and his agony was compounded by the fact that it was an important game, and more than one of the high scorers had been benched due to foul trouble. The announcer said that, replacing the injured player was our Jake “Number forty-three, a walk-on from Cody, Wyoming.”

“Jake’s in!” said Sam.

“We know that guy!” I told the bartender. As the three of us watched (the bartender unable to resist our contagious enthusiasm), Jake played real minutes, assisted, shot, and scored. After a year of working out, learning plays, watching tapes,  and spending most of his  minutes on the bench in his sweats, he played in a nationally televised playoff game, and he played well.

Reader, I cried.

I have always been a judge-y kind of person. Although I was raised by people who were fundamentally kind and charitable, I picked up early on, the difference between “us” and “them.” We were readers, went to college, listened to classical music, voted for Democratic candidates, appreciated art (and never said things like “my five-year old could have made that”), listened to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast on Saturdays, read the New York Times on Sunday mornings, and eschewed Hamburger Helper and Velveeta. My professor  father went to Harvard, my teacher  mother to Wellesley, and among their circle of friends, old and new, there were few who exposed to us to anything that would shake the divisions and categories forming in my mind. The familial hard-wiring included fierce support for minorities, “those less fortunate,” and the disabled; the only inherent human characteristic that was openly criticized was being “dumb” when one possessed the necessary intellect not to be.

Going to school in a very upper class middle and high school added an entirely new set of things to judge, including myself. Like a victim of Stockholm Syndrome, although I was personally neither attractive nor popular, I took on the prejudices of my more popular peers. It was important to be clear-skinned, slender, athletic, and, if one was a girl, to have hair that could easily be curled back in the Farrah Fawcett wings of the 70s. I met none of those requirements, and so I began not only to judge others who did not meet the standard, but to judge myself in ways guaranteed to lead me straight to a giant can of Neurosis Whoop Ass.

The Beautiful People  lived in subdivisions with Indian names; I lived in a neighborhood on the wrong side of the District’s tracks, which was just…a neighborhood. They went to Fort Lauderdale on Spring Break and drank, made out a lot, had sex, smoked pot, went to parties and drank, and generally seemed to me to be living the lives of sophisticated and stunning adult film stars while I was stuck practicing the cello and conjugating French verbs. To this day, unless I exert a great deal of mental effort, and even though I know that some of them have aged, gained weight, and lost their youthful looks, those people live on in my mind as the standard bearers of beauty and cool, and I am still “less” everything in comparison. Don’t imagine for a moment that the irony of judging the world based on the casual cruelty of my social social “superiors” has escaped me.

As soon as I graduated and left that particular hotbed of exclusion, I went to college where I  wore black from ancient tweed overcoat to pointy boots from Trash & Vaudeville, took up smoking, hung out with speed-addled studio art majors,  and generated a whole new set of ways to slice and dice the world into “good” and “bad.” A full-time cynic, I rejected anything that was  cute (“a four letter word”), tacky, conventional, or trying too hard. I recall making fun of “Flyover” with friends from New York, despite the fact that a) I had grown up in Flyover, and b) we were all attending a college in Flyover. I did not watch TV, I listened to Butthole Surfers (sneaking in a little Madonna or Culture Club when I was alone), and I sat through endless Bergman films, feeling that my personal worth was cheapened by the fact that I hated all of them except “Fanny & Alexander,” which was the “easy one.” I was happier and more comfortable at college than I had ever been in high school, surrounded, as I was, by peers for whom quirkiness and neurosis were not only acceptable but the secret handshake. I was, however, adding to all of that baggage about what was “good” and what was “bad,” accepting once again the standards of the “cool kids,” and viewing the world and everything in it through the solipsistic lense of a pretentious, immature and ridiculously jaded college student.

I don’t imagine that anything that happened to me during my formative years was unique; I know literally hundreds of people who were raised in families like mine, or attended the same high school, or went through a period of black-wearing, Faux Urban Cool during college in the 80s. It was probably not the experiences themselves, but something about the way I think that made it so critical for me to assess what was “good” and “bad,” and to view the world through judge-y colored glasses. It could take years of therapy to Figure It Out, but I am far more interested in the process of Cutting It Out. Judging necessarily makes divisions and expresses preferences for “this” over “that,” a process which leads to separation from people, ideas and things that don’t make the cut. It is this kind of process, even when it is intended to be positive and supportive, which leads to division, alienation and conflict.  When I  write about the wonderfulness of something, like gay male friends, I am (as my husband kindly pointed out) inadvertently criticizing  straight men because they are not gay, and probably won’t be. I meant only to be kind and helpful, but it’s still true that deciding what is “good” invariably results in the categorization of other things as “not good.”

This may all seem excessively dramatic and philosophical, but I know for certain that it has never given me a moment’s peace or happiness to reject, accept or classify anything based on my own personal world view. As an adult, I still make an astronomical number of judgments every day, and I am trying to learn to recognize and correct them. I reflexively judge on appearances, quickly assessing everything from hair color (Natural? Roots?) to clothing (Tacky stretch pants? Sweater with reindeer faces?) and find myself, unless I stop the process, deciding on whether I prefer, or do not prefer that stranger. I judge negatively people who don’t read, people who are bigots, people who drive giant gas guzzlers, people who use incorrect grammar,  people who raise boys with long, braided “tails” of hair, and people who talk on cell phones in the library. I judge positively people who drive Priuses (bonus for liberal bumper stickers), shop at the Farmers Market, dress beautifully, order their drinks dry, and have children with lovely manners.

I have perhaps failed to mention that despite being extremely and unrepentantly liberal, I have, for twelve years, been married to man who is…not. There has been no greater impetus for me to stop the constant calculus of “good” and “bad” than the dailiness of living with someone with whom I cannot watch the news, but who I love dearly and respect, and with whom I agree with on most things other than politics.  He is, to use my traditional labeling, a “good” person with “bad” political beliefs, but from years of living with him, I have learned that while our ideas about means may differ, we share common goals of justice, peace and prosperity. I have also, in my adult life, found much in common with people I would previously have rejected as “tacky,” “dumb” or “wrong,” and observed that humans are, in general, more alike than different. It makes me wonder what might be accomplished on a global scale if more people could see all that they rejected morally, intellectually, stylistically or politically, embodied in a person that they loved, or at least liked a lot.

It is hard, and sometimes painful for me to stop and see that I am judging someone or something that is not in any way “bad,” only different from an entirely artificial standard in my brain. It is also increasingly difficult for me not to notice how often those near and dear to me articulate militant, one-sided opinions with which I can no longer agree. I am neither amoral nor opinionless; I still make choices about what is right or wrong to do in a given situation, but my choices are neither static nor applied as a universal standard. I am hoping that there will come a time when I see everything and everyone (myself included) as nothing more than…what is, without judgment. In the meantime, if you see me in the grocery store standing next to the Greek Yogurt and staring into space, you may safely assume that I have just seen a reindeer sweater, and that I am in the process of convincing myself that it’s all good, even if it has jingling bells and little tufts of Santa beard….

I grew up in a family in which manners extended well beyond “please” and “thank you,” and the placement of one’s napkin on one’s lap. I answered the phone “Graham residence, Ann speaking” and said “excuse me” before I interrupted adult conversation. I was also expected to recognize adult conversation, and to refrain from interjecting my own opinions or anecdotes unless they were requested. I was never encouraged to believe that I had the same rights as adults in the household, and consistently taught to consider “the other person” in matters which ranged from sitting through dull stories told by old people to expressing great joy upon receiving a(nother) knitted hat for Christmas.

My brother and I were not allowed to chew gum, yell or play loud music in the house, or to thump up and down the stairs. We wrote thank-you notes, ate what we were served as guests and held doors for people. My mother disapproved of containers (milk, catsup, salsa, soda bottles) on the table, and required that condiments be decanted, and that we knew which forks and spoons were used for what purpose. We could sit through a concert or lecture without getting up or rattling wrappers, and we could eat at a nice restaurant without disturbing other diners. If we had to, we could sit still while the adults drank (endless) cups of coffee after dinner  and discussed people we didn’t know. We were not allowed to use the words “fart” or “butt” or to comment in any way about the passing of gas.

We were well-loved, thoroughly supported and doted upon; we were simply expected to behave well in most circumstances. The basic premise of our upbringing was that the opinions and activities of children are interesting mainly to those children and their immediate families, and that adults outside of that circle should not be discomfited in any way by their presence. Charmed and entertained, absolutely, but not disturbed or annoyed.  Under the guise of “manners” we were being taught to be civil, compassionate members of society – to listen patiently, think of others and be grateful, gracious  and helpful.

In my present family, the rules of my childhood are largely dismissed as archaic, artificial and repressive. My husband was raised on a rural farm with five other children, and while his parents both have lovely manners, they were lucky to keep napkins on laps and elbows off the table without concerning themselves with the vulgarity of gum chewing or inquiries about who had “cut the cheese.” I believe we have taught my son to behave well in public and to consider the feelings of others, but his manners at home are sometimes appalling. He has the questionable gift of being able to adhere to all of my parents’ rules at their house, and then to slip back into ill-mannered sloth at home.

While some of the rules have fallen away at my house for reasons of expedience (my life is too short to decant catsup)  others are rejected on the basis that the rules were just plain weird to begin with. Gum was made to be chewed! Who wants bored kids sitting around fidgeting while adults try to talk? In addition, there is the ever-popular refrain “no one does that!” Apparently I am living in a door-slamming, gum-chewing universe where children are encouraged to recite the complete play-by-play of favorite Disney movies in the middle of adult conversations and announce every ingested bean and every resulting emission with great relish.

I have also been advised by both professional and lay analysts that the rules of my upbringing were a way of squelching my natural impulses and denying my true self, and that children must be free to express themselves, and simply “be.” If that means throwing a football in the house, or interrupting grandma’s monologue about her walking tour in Denmark, so be it.

In the context of my house, I am suffering from battle fatigue. I am told so often that my inclinations are snobbish and outdated, that I tend to save myself for egregious behavior. My son chews gum, plays loud music, and thumps on the stairs with impunity. For now, I am trying to be satisfied with the fact that his manners in the Great World are decent (aside from a baffling inability to move a napkin from table to lap), and he is an essentially a kind human being. That should mean that the important lessons are being learned, and that we can work on refinements.

Secretly, though, I delight in accounts of well-mannered children carrying the torch of etiquette. I devour stories in the New York Times about children who are sent to special schools to learn how to behave at the dinner table, how to meet and speak with adults, and how to behave at the theater. I nearly wept tears of joy when I called an old friend and her daughter answered with the familiar “Smith residence, Alice speaking.” Call me repressive, old-fashioned, or simply “weird,” but I believe that manners are an embodiment of civilized society. I would hate to think that there is no longer any place for them in the world in which I live.



“Cigarettes And Chocolate Milk

Cigarettes and chocolate milk
these are just a couple of my cravings
everything it seems I like’s a little bit stronger
a little bit thicker
a little bit harmful for me…”

-Rufus Wainright

I am thoroughly familiar with The Golden Mean, “all things in moderation,” and blah, blah, blah. As a student of Buddhism, I am repeatedly confronted with the basic tenet that cravings are the root of all suffering, and that being in the present moment, not longing for something different, is the path to enlightenment.

The problem is that moderation takes huge discipline, and that when I am tired, or hungry, or celebratory, or breathing, I tend to want something, and it is very rarely “just enough.” Back in the days when I was not eating a low-carb diet, I would be drawn into the kitchen by the inexorable pull of the remains of the triple layer carrot cake, or the virgin carton of “Moose Tracks” in the freezer. I wasn’t after a “bite,” or a “taste;” I wanted enough to create the culinary equivalent of Blotto. I could eat four slices of pizza, seven cookies, or half a bowl of leftover Halloween candy without thinking, after which I would be placid and satisfied (until the next time). I don’t do that anymore, not because I have become more disciplined, but because I don’t want to die before the next season of “The Rachel Zoe Project” begins.

Even about diet and excercise I have been immoderate; two years ago when I “went on a diet” and began working out at the local YMCA, I was obsessed with calories ingested, calories burned, and the logging and tracking thereof. Since I couldn’t actually eat what I wanted to eat, and made myself burn calories in ways that I truly hated, my cravings were displaced into data-gathering, rule-following, and petty triumphs over shin splints and metabolism. Of course it didn’t work, and I gained it all back (with extra). This time around, there has to be a balance of pleasure and pain so that there is no room for the feeling that I want, I need, I have to have something dramatic to make me feel better. If I am craving the solace of an inappropriate snack, I have two hands full of peanuts instead of one. Extra calories, certainly, but no carbs and no damage. If I don’t want to go for a walk, I go anyway, but I walk slower, or for a shorter distance; my Id is pleased that we have gotten away with something, and I still burn some calories and get my heart rate up.

Food being off the table, so to speak, there are other things that pull me towards the tipping point. During a recent bout of sciatica, I was given giant, economy-sized bottles of Vicodin, Flexeril and Valium. I was in a tremendous amount of pain, and there was no “high” involved, merely a cessation of the feeling that I would amputate my left leg if I could get up off the couch and find my chef’s knife. I do recall, though, that a “sciatica cocktail” left me feeling mellow and made me forget everything unpleasant that might previously have been lurking in my addled mind. I was also a more benevolent creature, unruffled by things that would ordinarily cause me to snap at loved ones or begin to stew about ways to express my unhappiness at the loudness of the television or the shoes in the middle of the living room floor.

I wondered, more than once, how it would feel to take those pills, even just one Vicodin, when I was not in pain. Would I be a kinder, happier, generally smoother person? Would I be more relaxed and charming in social situations? The fact that I even think these things is a flashing red indicator that I am lacking in some fundamental kind of equanimity. Do other people think things like that? Is that how addicts get started? I have not, of course, tested the Better Living Through Chemistry idea, but what does it say about me that I even let the thoughts form in my head without stabbing them with my piercing understanding of all things rational and moderate?

I am also every marketer’s dream. When I see ads for lipstick that plumps, moistens, glosses and refines, I am galvanized to act. I want the perfume that no man can resist, the jeans that will make me look like Twiggy, and the rings that cost as much as our house. There is nothing wrong with identifying a product that one can afford, and that is useful, but this is not that. This is belief in the transformative power of merchandise, belief that, despite objective evidence to the contrary, the presence of that object in this life will make it better. It is materialistic, un-spiritual, banal and generally unattractive, but it happens. As with food, and my stash of potential mood-elevators, I am able to control my actions;  it is very rare that I actually buy anything that I covet unless it is a particularly zippy new kind of Kashi bar that also happens to be on sale. The issue is not the doing, but the wanting to, which takes up precious energy and cheapens the life around me by comparison.

Wainright  goes on, in “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk,” to say that, in addition to cigarettes, chocolate milk and jelly beans “there’s those other things /Which for several reasons we won’t mention.” I have craved other things, far darker than anything I’m willing to discuss in a blog post that my mother will read. There was a time in my life when it seemed very romantic, artistic and edgy to switch off the controls and let myself pursue whatever I craved. Maturity, marriage and motherhood have all contributed to the end of that kind of thing, but it still worries me that there was a time when I would drive to a man’s house in the dead of night to leave a note on his windshield, begging him to come back. Fortunately, as long as my husband is alive and well, it seems unlikely that I will revert to stalking unkind and inappropriate men because of my deep belief that we are soul mates, and that the “having” of him would make me whole.

The harsh truth is that I am very bad at “being here now.” No matter how hard I try (which may, in itself, be the problem) I seem, much of the time, to be craving something that part of me believes will make be prettier, happier, calmer and generally better. If I stop cold and send myself a memo concerning the failure of all previous food, perfume, CDs and handbags  to make my life better, I can come back to a place where I need nothing more than to be who I am and where I am. Maybe I just solved my own problem. I can make a Post-It note with a reminder. A really beautiful Post-It note from of those cool, exclusive and expensive online stationery stores with unusual and interesting designs that would inspire me every time I looked at my desk….

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I recently encountered an article about something called “Gender Disappointment,” a label for women who are so traumatized by failing to produce a child of the desired gender that they become deeply depressed, and go to great lengths to produce the “right” flavor on future attempts. One of these Prize Narcissists was so unhappy about the fact that she had not yet given birth to a daughter that she posted the following in an internet forum: “‘I hate my life. My family is complete in reality but not in my heart.’” According to the article, “[s]he is considering giving all three of her boys up for adoption,” because she “‘wants to give them to someone who can actually love them.’”

As the mother of a healthy 12-year-old child, the piece shocked and sickened me. I thought about the women I know who struggle or struggled with infertility, and about the psychological impact on a child whose mother wishes that he or she were something completely different. As I thought, I tried to lower my blood pressure by finding a way to feel compassion towards those women; there had to be an “in,” some way that I could identify with their sorrow based on common bonds of motherhood, womanhood, or even humanity. In the end, I couldn’t do it. I have argued passionately in favor of showing compassion towards everybody from Andrea Yates to Sarah Palin, because in my universe there is no more important concept than the notion that we are all human, and are neither superior nor alien to other humans with failings. These legions of “gender disappointed” women, weeping while fondling pink dresses at Macy’s while their male children look on,  are also human, and deserving of compassion. Clearly, I am not sufficiently evolved.

There are other kinds of “disappointment” in one’s children, though, which are entirely sanctioned by society and viewed not only as benign but as commendable. Although I haven’t participated as a parent, it seems to go like this: a child is a fungible commodity, albeit a beloved one, and regardless of the actual nature, inclinations or abilities of that child, it is the role of the parents to shape whatever they got into whatever they really wanted.

The desirable outcome varies, but I grew up a child musician with peers who were being pushed hard to be professional musicians from the time they were three or four years old. In my community, future prodigies were started early in “Suzuki Strings,” based on a program devised by Shin’ichi Suzuki to develop not only technical facility, but “beautiful character” in children. Although the goals of the program are not only admirable but quite lovely, the parents of my compatriots used it as the first step towards World Music Domination in a school district with a first class string program. The competition was so fierce that by the time I was in high school, one mother became so unhinged over her sons’ inability to get and hold “first chair” positions in the orchestra, that she began a campaign of using various poisons placed in cars, lockers, and homes to exact revenge from those who stood in the way of her dream. Since I was often competing for first chair with one of her sons, I can tell you that we had chemicals in the air vents of the family car, and mercury in the air vents in my bedroom, the effects of the latter eventually killing our beloved Airedale.

This perversion of an opportunity for enrichment into a desperate pursuit of success produced only one chemical poisoner (to the best of my knowledge) but it produced many, many parents who glossed over or completely denied the fact that music was not the passion of their respective children, but their own interest.Among my fellow musicians in middle and high school were those who were clearly “born to it,” those who played with heart, and willingly immersed themselves in all things musical because it was a welcome gift. There were also student musicians who played with great technical facility, practiced their daily hours, and generally hit all the right marks, but who were not in love with it. We could all make ourselves do anything; we were tremendously disciplined and competitive, but it was an entirely different process when the pressure came from without rather than within. I often wonder what happened to some of the “unwilling prodigies,” what they might have chosen to do had they been permitted, and whether they were ever able to find their own gifts and facilities after fifteen-plus years of striving to meet an artificial external standard.

In the less rarified parts of the world, this parental pushing is most often seen in the arenas of sports and academic excellence. What starts as kindergarten rec league soccer becomes, by sixth grade, an obsession with making the try-out team, and getting enough time on the field during games. When the child’s interest flags, or changes, there is insidious but heavy pressure not to “give up.” Instead of serving as a beloved form of play, and a way to get regular exercise, sports become a “job” for the budding Pele, with all of the pressure, deadlines and examination of performance that adult work generally entails. There is also a pattern of pushing children to excel in academics, particularly math, with a rush to enroll young students in after school programs, summer programs, and tutoring sessions. What happens to these children who are denied the chance to see play as play, or to be praised for doing good schoolwork at an age-appropriate level of skill? How would we feel, as adults, if we were required to focus vast amounts of time and psychic energy on hobbies in which we had lost interest, or abilities which gave us no real satisfaction?

My own child has facilities and interests completely alien to my own. I honestly expected, to some degree, a child version of myself, or at least some of myself; a young person with a great love of reading, and art, with some musical aptitude. Instead, I have a son who is a technology wizard focused passionately on wires, mother boards and “glitching” XBox games. He hates all things related to English class, from reading to writing, and after a year of playing the cello, decided that he would rather be in choir because “they don’t get yelled at if they don’t practice.” I have caught myself pushing, reading him “The Phantom Tollbooth” in the hopes that it would ignite a torch for literature, or insisting that we listen to classical music in the car despite the siren song of 50 Cent on 96.5. None of it worked; he will read the books required by his English teacher, he will grudgingly tolerate the intoxicating strains of Tchaikovsky long enough to get to Target, but he is just not that kid. He is a person who loves what he loves, just as I am. He might be a better cocktail party companion for me if he developed an interest in Beat poetry or the sonata form, and we could probably force him to learn about those things, but we would then be creating a different person altogether, and not a natural one.

There are things that we probably should “push” our children to do no matter who they are or where their interests lie. They should be taught to be decent, compassionate human beings, to clean up their messes, and to take responsibility for their actions. In my opinion (and my house) they should also be expected to respect their teachers, have nice table manners, say “please” and “thank you,” and try new things from tofu stir-fry to playing soccer or the violin. Beyond that, our children are neither possessions nor craft projects; they come into this world as human beings in their own right, and with whatever gender, talents or aptitudes occur in nature. Although he is not, strictly speaking, what I expected, I could not be more pleased with what I got, and I look forward to finding out who he grows up to be. If we’ve done our job right, he’ll be himself.