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The ‘Mama Instinct’ answer: They’ll do fine.

Posted on by Suki

The things we do as parents.

We want our children to do well. We want them to succeed. We want them to say the right thing. To be respected by adults in their lives.

And sometimes that leads us to act in rather silly ways.

Last week that lesson hit home for me. I was teaching an online course at Athena’s Advanced Academy, a provider of online classes for gifted kids. We don’t test for the “gifted” part of it—our approach is that if kids can’t keep up, they figure out that they’re not in the right place.

For the most part, this approach works great. Research shows the the most reliable predictor of whether a child is gifted is the parent. Parents are keen observers of their children, and they notice when their kids are different.

“Trust your mama instinct” is something I heard often when my kids were young.

But sometimes we go a little past that. Sometimes, after trusting our instincts, we feel compelled to go beyond and, perhaps, do a little extra work to insure that our instincts were correct.

In a class last week, one of my new students turned on her microphone three times to answer questions. I always love hearing my students’ voices, and love waiting to find out the surprising and insightful things they will say.

But in this case, once, then twice, then three times, I heard the mother’s voice in the background prompting the child on what to say.

“Really?” I thought. “Who signed up for this class, the kid or the mom?”

I had a mix of feelings.

I was affronted as a teacher that a parent would invade our space this way.

As a parent, I was horrified that a fellow parent wouldn’t know how damaging this was.

As this child’s teacher, I felt that I was sharing in her mortification.

Just to be clear: All the other students could hear the mother. As far as I know, none of the other students was being fed answers by a parent. They were taking part in the class in good faith, being who they were: complex bundles of gifts, deficits, inconsistencies, and contradictions.

But this is a story with a happy ending, or at least, a funny one.

The last time my student turned on her mic to answer a question, you could clearly hear the mother’s answer in the background first, and then the daughter’s.

But the answers didn’t match. The girl ignored her helicoptering parent and used her own mind.

I almost cheered.

Parents, please understand:

  You have your life; your children have theirs

      Your children will make mistakes, and this is how they learn

          Your children will sometimes be brilliant

and yes…

    Your children will say things that are not brilliant

         Your children will sometimes be wrong!

Here we are, complex bundles of gifts, deficits, inconsistencies, and contradictions. Get used to it. Let your kids go, and let them make mistakes. If you can’t trust your own “mama instinct,” trust mine:

They’ll do fine.

Home for the holidays

Posted on by Suki

21 years ago I moved a couple hours south from San Francisco to live with my then boyfriend, now husband. I also coincidentally ended up living a 15-minute drive from my parents’ farm, which they had just purchased after looking at properties many miles apart from Central to Northern California.

A typical scene at a family gathering: A glass of wine, conversation, kids, and at least a couple of dogs!

This was the start of a family life that I never envisioned when I left my parents’ home in Michigan at the age of 17, moved out to California, and expected to be the adult child furthest from my family seat. I ended up raising my two children within a short drive of a farm that became the center of an extended family of cousins, aunts and uncles, and my two healthy, active parents.

My mother never gave me much parenting advice, feeling that she and my father had pretty much been dumped into the middle of the hardest job they ever had with no preparation. However, she did tell me one thing that she and my father had made a decision about before they had children. They made a conscious decision that their family was going to get along.

Maybe this sounds like a little thing. But it wasn’t to them, coming from families who bickered, fought, and kept their distance as adults.

I’m not saying that my siblings and I, our children who are cousins, and spouses and other extensions of our family don’t ever have disagreements. But my parents did see success in their approach.

I wish I could offer a formula for other families, whom I often see suffering during the holidays because of the pain that they carry as a group. But there is no formula that we follow except that simple decision that our parents made: No matter what it takes, we get along.

Sometimes it’s not easy. I know that everyone in our family has things that they don’t say, that it might actually feel good to say in the moment. But there are many things in a family that simply don’t need to be said. We are not each other’s therapists, friends, or supervisors. All of the other categories of relationships amongst humans are severable.

No matter whether you see your family or not, they are family. They are by definition, not by choice.

I know people, adults now, who have chosen to take this tactic within their complex extended families though it means that they bite their tongues when other family members don’t.  I can’t tell you that this is the right thing to do, though they assure me that they get some benefit from it.

Others I know have chosen to sever their relationships, even to the point of denying their children a relationship with grandparents. And they have just as good reasons.

I am looking forward to our last holiday celebration on the family farm, which my parents are now leaving after maintaining it on their own for 21 years. When I was 17, I had no appreciation for what my parents had given us. But now with teenagers of my own, I completely understand.

To have an extended family that can come together as a family and get along is a gift that my parents created consciously and without precedent in their own families. I hope that it is a gift that my own children and their cousins will also inherit and cherish.

Thanksgiving at the farm

Further reading: 

When the beautiful becomes ugly

Posted on by Suki

This should be a beautiful photo: the bounty of my parents’ farm near Corralitos. Holy basil, limes, lemons, and peppers—the bounty of late summer.

That’s the problem. This is December. The only natural bounty in this photo is the lemons and limes (which are more productive in winter). Otherwise, the holy basil should have gone to seed; the peppers should just be a memory, forlorn, brown stalks shivering in the wind.

This picture makes me sad, anxious, perplexed.

Sad because the fires raging in Southern California are directly related to the reason I am picking fresh peppers in December.

Anxious because I fear that the doomsday predictions of climate scientists are, perhaps. too optimistic.

And perplexed because I just don’t get human nature.

What does it take to get us to change our ways? How can we know if the little things we’re doing individually are having any effect at all? How can we not be angry at our friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens who are not only ignoring the signs, but blithely taking part in the actions that are causing these problems?

We are a parasite killing its host.

My personal belief is that we won’t take care of this problem until we agree to spend political capital on it, and unfortunately, the people in charge are in denial. They just passed a tax bill that will stifle investment in renewable energy. They have told our automakers that they should cede our leading role in alternative fuel vehicles to China. They say that human-caused global warming is a fiction made up by scientists.

Well, this isn’t fiction. A beautiful bouquet of holy basil on my counter in December. No rain in the forecast for 10 days out. Southern California burns today; so far Northern California is safe. But for how long? And what happens when the water greening the Central Valley runs out? What will be on wintertime supermarket shelves in Washington D.C., Texas, and Iowa?

I don’t see beauty. I see a parasite killing its host.

How to raise boys who respect women

Posted on by Suki

I hope you didn’t come here looking for answers, because this will be a column full of questions.

How is it that we’ve come so far, but we haven’t come far at all?

Before feminism, men gave women a bad deal: You stay home, forego most opportunities for self-fulfillment, have no financial or physical independence, and put up with whatever life deals you, and we’ll take care of you. It was imperfectly enforced: poor women still had to work though with little pay and no status; all women had to risk that there were men who weren’t interested in holding up the we’ll take care of you part of the bargain.

Then we got feminism, we got some basic civil rights (though they’re still not guaranteed in the US Constitution), and we got the sexual revolution. That pact between men and women was thrown out: women were then expected to work, expected to do both the jobs they used to be confined to and also their new jobs, and expected to be sexually free. Men no longer had the responsibility of taking care of women; we were supposed to be strong and take care of ourselves.

Then we got third wave feminism or post-feminism (depending on who’s defining it), and we realized that we still hadn’t quite got it right. Men were still preying on women but women weren’t being protected. Women could get jobs, but with no guarantee that they’d be treated equally once they were there. Women were supposed to be sexually available but were also supposed to take care of themselves when they didn’t want to be sexually available. No one had clearly defined the line between “flirting” and “harassing.”

How do we raise sons in this world?

I don’t know. Men are now being called out publicly for behavior they committed which was excused under the first pact (any woman not in the care of a man is fair game), and which was encouraged by the second pact (women who go out in the world are sexually available to all men).

I haven’t asked them, but I’m guessing that the moms of these men didn’t raise their sons to behave this way. Heck, maybe even their dads didn’t. (Being a dad was different 50+ years ago.)

But I’m speaking here from the perspective of being a mom. I’ve always hoped that if you are a woman who expects and receives respect from the men in her own life, and if you model that behavior in front of your sons, it will eventually take root.

Here’s the problem: It’s not like you can enforce respectful private behavior the way you do, say, manners. When your child doesn’t say please, you prompt him, right? And eventually he turns out to be a polite person (when he’s not at home, that is).

What do you do when your child starts laying the roots of private disrespect for girls in his life? Will you even see it happening? How much more influence does what your son sees in media and out amongst his friends have on his behavior? We can do our best at home, but these things don’t happen at home.

If men’s private behavior is so different from their public behavior, how can we prevent it?

Is this actually a question about raising girls?

I am in no way a believer in the men-are-victims-of-their-own-biology line of reasoning. Men can, and do, control themselves.

All humans control ourselves: We learn not to defecate in the backyard. We learn to eat in a socially acceptable manner. We learn how not to throw fits at the DMV.

None of these behaviors follows our biological programming.

So the argument that men will be men and thus women have all the responsibility for protecting themselves is b.s., pure and simple.

How can we parents make sure that our kids’ experiences are different?

Boys that sees girls as friends and people first are less likely to treat women as targets later…or so we hope!

Humans will always be complicated, and no human system is perfect. But there’s just got to be a better way.

Men should know when they are harassing a woman.

Women should feel empowered to deal with it publicly.

As a society, we’ve been in a place where any woman not directly under the care of a man was fair game. We’ve been in a place where women were assumed to have full agency and were expected to stop victimization at the hands of men. But we’ve got to get to a place where men take a responsibility for their own and other men’s actions, and where women are able to get the support they need when they can’t handle something on their own.

But what is the path from here to there?

Sorry, just questions today.

The Rake, otherwise known as that which keeps me up at night

Posted on by Suki

A few weeks ago we got a visitor. We knew it wasn’t human, but past that, we weren’t taking bets. It sounded like someone was raking concrete….. in the forest behind our house. We wondered if it was bats. We wondered if it was a band of exotic birds that moved in because of global warming. We wondered if we’d ever sleep again.

It starts up every evening at sundown. It goes like this:

Yes, there was a cat’s meow in there, too. That’s just part of nature at our house.

But I’m writing about the raking sound. Keep focused on the raking sound, OK? Please understand that we can’t focus on much else.

I posted on Nextdoor, the source of all local wisdom. You used to have to find a wise guy with a long white beard sitting over a campfire.

Things have changed.

Anyway, my neighbors, whom I could have talked to on the driveway but instead with whom I exchanged electronic messages sent over miles to servers which then translated them and bounced them back, told me they were barn owls.

A lovely little family of barn owls living in our redwood tree.

Really? I wanted an exotic explanation, and I got barn owls.

Sure enough, my son and I went down and saw this mess under one of our redwoods:

Zoom in, enjoy the guano!

So, OK, we love nature. But does anyone know an owl sharpshooter? Because we could really use some sleep! We’ve got the white noise generator (affectionately termed the “windge” when nothing else would get our preschooler to sleep), up as far as we can stand it.

I dream of raking concrete. Really.

When I was young, I would put up with many things. I would put up with my cats sleeping on my face.

But now, having raised two children, I have my priorities. And my priorities are sleep, sleep, and sleep.

Before the barn owls, we had golden eagles. I’ll tell you, I know which kind of neighbors I prefer.

Anyone know how to serve an eviction notice on owls? Anyone want a nice home, set back from the street, super quiet?

We might have one to sell you.

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