"Restore Default Settings?"

Most of us, I think, like to believe that we will default to doing what's morally and ethically correct, when the situation requires it. Why don't we all default to it? Moral and ethical failures are painfully baffling.

It's painful, today, to read about what's happening to Penn State, to learn how the moral and ethical failures of a few resulted in the continued abuse and assault of children by a monster.

It's painful, today, to read about Michigan lawmakers who are actually trying to argue that it's okay to bully, if you're doing so out of "deep moral conviction" or "religious belief." Yes, that's right. Morally and ethically wrong behavior is okay if it's based on morals or religion. It's hard even to type that sentence, it's so incongruous.

To make this pain subside (a bit), I'd like to share our children's default behaviors, given a variety of relatively difficult situations.

Embracing Their Ignorance or Inability, Because They Know It's Temporary
Our six-year-old is reading, but sometimes has difficulty with longer words and certain letter combinations. She says, when she stumbles, "I get confused by those. Those are tricky. How do they work?" Our four-year-old is learning to write. He loves "O" because "that's easy." The letter "B" "is hard for me. I can't do that by myself... can you make it dotted?" (so that he can trace it and practice).

Being Very Proud of Their Secrets, So Proud They Share Them
After they're tucked in at night, my husband and I watch a little television or chat. Sometimes we hear their bedroom door open, but we ignore it. One morning, our daughter informed us that "sometimes we go into the bathroom and get a drink from the faucet!" And that she knows that we "talk about things and work and watch shows that have bad guys," because she can "creep very quietly in the dark and you don't even know I'm there!"

Knowing the Best Rules, and Being Happy to Follow Them
When I pick him up from pre-school, our son, without fail, tells me, "I had a great day, Mommy! I listened! I got a sticker, because I did a good job. One boy, he didn't listen. He was sad." We go to get our daughter from first-grade, and quite regularly, she shares a story that goes something like this. "A boy wasn't being nice to my friend, and she was crying, and so I stood up and asked him, 'How would you feel if she did that to you? You wouldn't like it. You should stop.' Our teacher says you should always think about how YOU would feel."

Forgiving a Person Who Hasn't Been Nice, if He Shows He Can Be Nice
There's one child in our daughter's class who has not always been nice to her, or to many in her class. She tells us, "he makes mean faces at me sometimes," or "pushes me to the ground." We tell her to stand up for herself, to ask her teacher for help, and she has. Last week she asked me to give her an extra baggie full of goldfish crackers so that she could give them to her friend. I did, but her friend ended up not being hungry for them. She ended up giving them to the boy who is not always nice to her. I asked her why. She said, "he was smiling at me and said 'please.'"

I don't ever want their defaults to change. I want them always to know what they don't know, and then learn it. I want them always to share what they find out with people they trust. I want them always to stand up for what's right by tapping their empathy. I want them always to forgive people, but hold them accountable.

If anybody has any ideas on how to make these defaults permanent, I'd love to hear them. If we could restore these default settings in some adults... it's hard to imagine how much the world would improve.

An Ode to Simple

I don’t consider myself to be overly attached to tokens of the past. Meaning, if my house were on fire, I’d try to grab only my children and husband and head out the door. Or window.

But I am strangely attached to a very simple meal that I learned to make a while ago. It has been a part of my life for 17 years. It makes me insanely content to eat it. Not overjoyed, not ecstatic, just utterly satisfied and pleased.

It’s hard to find that in a meal. Especially one that costs about $5.00 to make and can feed eight adults.

In 1994, when I was very low-paid research assistant in Washington, DC, fresh out of grad school, loaded with student debt, my then-roommate taught me how she made black beans and rice. It involved sautéing onions, adding a can of black beans, salt, pepper, chopped green peppers and tomatoes… all while a pot of white rice was cooking on another burner. When everything was done, she put some rice in a bowl, topped it with the bean mixture, and then topped that with a very healthy portion of shredded cheddar cheese.

It was divine. It was cheap. It was easy. It was my favorite.

My roommate went off to law school in 1995 (and got married in 1996, and she served black beans and rice at her wedding). I stayed in that apartment, and a new roommate moved in.

I made black beans and rice, only I sautéed the tomatoes with the onions. I added Cajun seasoning, ground cumin, cayenne, sometimes cinnamon. Drained the beans before adding them into the mix.

In 1998 I moved into my own apartment, and I kept making those black beans and rice, at least once a month. A friend, as a housewarming gift, gave me my first-ever piece of serious kitchen equipment: an All-Clad stainless steel 12” frying pan, specifically for my black beans and rice. I still use that pan.

I met my future husband and made him some black beans and rice. He liked it. He went off to Philadelphia to get an MBA, and made his own version, adding mushrooms and corn.

My parents came to visit me in DC in 1999. I made black beans and rice for them, adding in a bit more spice and spinach to the now standard beans, mushrooms, corn, tomatoes, and cheese set-up, and garnished with fresh cilantro on top. My dad said it was so nicely presented it should have been served at a restaurant.

Well, he is my dad. My mom suggested that I add tomato paste… I have to admit, I never know what to do with the leftover paste once you open that little can and use only a little bit. I didn't add it.

I got married in 2002 and moved to Pittsburgh, and made black beans and rice pretty regularly. (Now I use brown rice.)

We had children in 2005 and 2007. When they began to eat solid food, they loved black beans and rice. (Now they tend to be picky and only eat a little bit of it. They’ll come around again.) 

My mom is undergoing treatment for multiple myeloma. I saw her in September. I made black beans and rice. I forgot the tomato paste. She didn’t mind.

I've learned to make a variety of things since 1994. Some far more complicated, far tastier... but nothing beats this meal. It reminds me of friendship, and love, and growth. 

I'm so weird. Or maybe not. Make yourself a pot. You'll see.

"You've Got Spunk."

I have always wanted to have "spunk," just like Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

I think I internalized too well, however, Mr. Grant's reaction to it. I tend to second-guess myself, largely internally, but often I apologize to people, worried I've given offense in a joke or a conversation. I'm told, repeatedly, that my apologies are unnecessary.

I want our daughter to have spunk. I never want her to think anybody hates it. I never want her to apologize for it.

Consider this. Last night our neighbors celebrated the Fourth of July with a little jazz concert performed by a very talented seventh-grade boy. The boy's father, every once in a while, enjoys a cigar--and last night, with everybody hanging out and in a celebratory mood, he lit one. Our daughter saw it and promptly called out a helpful reminder: "NO SMOKING!" and the poor guy retreated to a point nearly out of his own yard with his cigar. He came back up shortly though, to play drums with his son, and our girl called out, "Put that smoking thing away!" (He took it all in good stride... I think.)

Then, as the little concert began, our girl took it upon herself (and was encouraged by the seventh-grade performer) to dance along to the music, front and center. She had not an ounce of self-consciousness. I watched her with tremendous pride. I got the video recorder like any good and proud mom would.

But my inner "Mr. Grant" was nagging at me: "Had she been disrespectful to the cigar-lover? Is her dancing cute or is she appearing to be a show-off?"

Later I read a great profile of Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. She's a brilliant, accomplished person--she grew up in a nice family, got herself a stellar education, and her early career was nurtured by one of the best minds in the country. Her mentor, Lawrence Summers, said of her, “If I was making a mistake, she told me. She was totally loyal, but totally in my face.” Another colleague of hers said, “A key part of what Sheryl does in her life is helping people advance, to be seen and to be heard.”

I've got to do better at modeling what I hope for Melina. In the profile I read, Sandberg suggests that "women, unlike men, encountered tradeoffs between success and likability. The women had internalized self-doubt as a form of self-defense: people don’t like women who boast about their achievements. The solution, she began to think, lay with the women. She blamed them more for their insecurities than she blamed men for their insensitivity or their sexism."

Now, I don't find her reasoning to be absolutely sound (sexism remains a problem institutionally, at bare minimum!) but I do think she's hit on my big challenge with raising our daughter: I've got to stop listening to my inner Mr. Grant, and embrace and extoll the virtues of Mary's "spunk."

Sandberg offers some great advice that I plan to adapt to my own stage of life. As Ken Auletta, author of Sandberg's profile, summarizes:

1. Women need to “sit at the table.” She said that fifty-seven per cent of men entering the workforce negotiate their salaries, but that only seven per cent of women do likewise. (I promise to do this when I'm re-entering the full-time outside-the-home workforce.) 
2. At home, “make sure your partner is a real partner.” On average, she said, women do two-thirds of the housework and three-fourths of the child care. (As an at-home mom, our family's ratio is a bit of an outlier, but I'm pleased to admit I have a real and excellent partner.) 
3. “Don’t leave before you leave.” When a woman starts thinking of having children, “she doesn’t raise her hand anymore. . . . She starts leaning back.” In other words, if women don’t get the job they want before they take a break to have children, they often don’t come back. (Now, I took a break after I had my first child, and then we relocated, making a "come back" a little more challenging. But not impossible. One day in the near future, I'm going to make it after all.)

Stepping Slowly

My daughter wants a new house one day, specifically a house with stairs. That girl loves to climb steps. As for me, I've never been happier to live on a lovely, single-level slab of concrete.

Five days ago, while performing a heart-felt and enthusiastic karaoke version of "Raise Your Glass!" by P!nk for a dear friend on her birthday, I dislocated my patella. There's something about dancing, jumping, pivoting and landing, in flip flops, that does not mix with my particular set of quadriceps and ligaments.

If something like that had to happen, it could not have happened in a better place: my friend's home, with all my neighborhood friends present, including a paramedic. I'm an extraordinarily lucky person.

We were in and out of the ER inside of two hours--most of the time was spent after an unacceptably handsome French attending physician "reduced the patella" (google that, it's quite horrible). They fitted me with an immobilizing splint and crutches, we went through registration, we went home. It was a symphony of efficiency. I'm extraordinarily lucky.

We got home to find my neighbors waiting in an adjacent driveway, in lawn chairs, cheering our return home. Again, I'm extraordinarily lucky.

I'm reminding myself of this fact--my luck--because this ridiculous event and utterly disruptive injury are also teaching me some things about myself that I don't think I've ever been quite ready to learn.

One neighbor who learned of the accident the next day told me, "Sometimes these things happen to us because we haven't been taking care of ourselves and we need to slow down." My first reaction to this statement was defensiveness. It was as if somebody were telling me the injury was my fault. I replied, "Maybe."

But as the days on crutches have progressed, I'm rethinking my answer. It should have been "Definitely."

My first lesson: my exercise regimen has been sorely deficient. I should have learned and acted on this long ago, and even when my back went out last month, I haven't since been diligent enough with my core strengthening. I haven't been careful enough with regard to lifting anything over 15 pounds. I don't stretch regularly. I don't work with weights. I just want my 45 minutes of cardio everyday. No reason or excuse. I've just been stubborn and lazy, at the same time. Very unattractive.

My second lesson: I'm more impatient than I ever could have imagined. Who tells the paramedical team caring for her that she doesn't have time for all this, she can't go to the hospital, she has two small children and things to do? Who says that? Me. Ridiculous.

But my impatience manifests in other ridiculous ways. I can't stand how long it takes me to get dressed, take a shower, or get in bed. It infuriates me that I can't carry a cup of coffee to my desk--that I'm actually stuffing a sealed travel mug in my waistband and getting where I need to go. I actually move as fast as I can on crutches. For no reason. There are no deadlines or places to be, I just can't stand moving slowly. That's just foolish.

Yesterday, in a fit of simultaneous self-pity, frustration, and disgust, I figured out how to do three loads of laundry and clean two bathrooms while on crutches. Thinking about it today--I realize that I simply couldn't wait for my husband to help me. I just couldn't wait.

Why couldn't I wait? What am I trying to prove? And who am I trying to prove "it" to? It's not like I'm going to get a medal or a gold star or an A+ because I'm acting like nothing has happened and I can still be speedy and tidy and efficient.

Tomorrow I'll learn from an orthopedic surgeon exactly what I can and can't do during rehabilitation. I'm hoping, hard, that I'll be able to drive with a strong but flexible brace on my knee. Hoping I'm strong enough to walk, maybe with a cane, instead of crutches, very, very soon. My husband thinks I'm going to find I'm not as bad off as I think, and he tends to be right about things... Or I need to believe he's right about these things.

In the meantime, I have a dear neighbor and friend who takes my daughter to kindergarten with her son. My daughter now has a new best friend and wants to play with him all the time. My son has been out of preschool and home with me, and the one-on-one time has been especially nice. I'm seeing how helpful and patient my children are. They can and want to help me. All those moments where I imagine that they see me as merely the one who cleans up and feeds them have been erased from my memory.

I find myself laughing more, getting pleased with myself for my little accomplishments (because while it annoyed me that I stuff a travel mug of coffee down my pants, it made my kids laugh, and as a result, I laughed too.)

I'm extraordinarily lucky.

A forced slow-down is a good thing sometimes. I'm able to look at myself more closely, and take steps to improve myself and my approach to things. Slowly. And definitely.

On birthdays and music videos.

My daughter turned six recently, and to mark the occasion we had her first party. Now, we've celebrated each and every prior birthday, with family, a cake, presents, decorations and lots of picture-taking. But this year, our girl wanted to invite people over (dear neighbors and their children) to share cake and play duck-duck-goose.

So we did, a few days after her actual birthday. Her birthday falls shortly after Chanukah and Santa's visit, so she was overloaded (in this mom's humble opinion) with presents--10 total days worth over three weeks seems excessive, right? I asked our guests (three neighbors) to withhold from bringing her gifts--much to their shock and disappointment. But they respected my approach (which I greatly appreciate).

We ate a lot of cake, and played duck-duck-goose for a good half hour in the front yard. Then, folks headed home. I asked our daughter later if she enjoyed her party. She said she did, but she was sad. I asked why, fearing that she was sad because she didn't get presents. She said, "I hated when they had to leave. Why can't they just stay and play all the time?" To be six and only want to play all the time...

The other day, the kids and I were in the car singing "Firework" by Katy Perry. Came home and played the video. It features a less than perfectly figured teenager, fearful of jumping into a swimming pool in her underwear with her friends. It features a cancer-stricken child in a hospital, feeling lonely and scared. It features a gay teen boy, nervously watching another boy at a party. With Katy Perry reminding them that they're each a firework, that they can show everybody what they're worth, that they've each got a light inside, they each overcome their fears--jumping into a pool, leaving that hospital, kissing that boy.

My daughter asked what it all meant and I said, "it all means you don't have to worry what others think or say, you just have to believe in yourself and remember that you're strong and bright." She accepted that as truth. To be six and just accept that as truth...