Category: Culture

Mommy brain

Posted on by Suki

Moms congregating in groups at parks, breastfeeding support groups, and cafes often find themselves trading stories about “Mommy brain.” You know, B.B. (before baby) you were a high-ranking partner at a law firm and now you can’t remember where you stashed your favorite nursing bra. B.B. you aced calculus and now you stare blankly at a restaurant receipt, trying to remember how to calculate a tip. B.B. you never missed an appointment, but now you’ve rescheduled your haircut twice because it’s not like you were actually doing anything important, but somehow you managed to forget the only hour you’ve had to yourself in the last three weeks…twice.

This is me performing when I was studying at Stanford. I have blogged before about my beloved lime green skirt!
This is me performing when I was studying at Stanford. I have blogged before about my beloved lime green skirt!

You know how most of the time changes like these can go unnoticed, but every once in a while a ghost of your former self comes out to haunt you? That happened to me the other day. I was going through all my various 3-ring binders that I keep music in. Rather than having any sort of logical system (an idea I’d love to bring about but never have), my music binders tend to represent me at various stages in my life.

So I pulled out the binder I used the last time I performed live in a singing/guitar duo. I have no trouble remembering that time: I was hugely pregnant the last time we performed. My singing partner at the time and I had discovered that by random chance, we’d been born in the same town, so we named our little band after the town. I truly meant to get back to performing after the birth, but at 7 months pregnant, I was swollen up so much that my hands had gone into full-blown carpal tunnel syndrome (which my physician assured me would go away after birth, ha ha ha). Somehow, that return to performing never happened, and now that baby I was pregnant with is fifteen years old.

How did that happen? Mommy brain…

Anyway, here I was opening this binder, which was a little snapshot of who I was then, more than fifteen years ago. I was charmed by our playlist, which included a couple of my favorite Disney songs (“Everybody wants to be a cat” and “Cruella deVille”).

But here’s where my realization about Mommy brain came in: Each sheet had the words printed out, and some notes about how we were performing, but no chords. I rifled through the binder, amazed. Did I really perform without the chords written out?

Yes, apparently I did.

I’m in the midst of getting my song-singing chops back, fifteen years on with two kids, carpal tunnel surgery, and the painful process of creating new guitar calluses behind me. The lime green skirt is long gone, along with any expectation that I will ever again fit into a miniskirt, or dare to think I look good in one.

But it’s hard to see that despite what research might say, Mommy brain in my case is real: I really did perform without chords when last I performed. And when I was twenty and singing out on that patio, I apparently had memorized the words as well.

The best wisdom I have read about aging is that it’s important to remember that along with what we lose (chord progressions, words, our favorite nursing bra), we gain (insight, perspective, depth of understanding, appreciation for clothing that stretches and hides).

But when these occasional reminders come about, I can’t help but be a little sad for my loss. I used to be able to perform without chord progressions in my book. I used to be able to perform…without a book at all. I was good at calculus. (If Mommy brain hasn’t ruined me completely, I seem to remember I got an A+.) I did manage to hold everything important in my life inside my physical brain, before Evernote, cellphones, and even Google.

Now there seems to be so much—two kids’ schedules, a whole family’s needs—that I can’t stuff it all in there.

Car keysI just hope that when I get back out there with my new singing partner (who, as far as I know, wasn’t born in the same town I was), people will forgive us. Here we are, two post-baby moms, hers out of the house and mine plummeting headlong toward that end, making music and loving it.

If nothing else, give us a little applause for getting up there.

In spite of Mommy brain, we managed to find our car keys.

 

Parenting in a striving culture

Posted on by Suki

The challenge

I have been honored to have my blog featured for some years now in the Santa Cruz Parent newsletter. Parmalee always links to such interesting information and asks such insightful questions. This week, she posed this one:

I listened to an Australian mother recount her adventures in learning how parents in different cultures raise children. Especially interesting was her visit to a Fiji Island where an elderly grandmother was raising 9 assorted child relatives while the parents were off working and sending money home. She sat inside her one room house watching tv while the children played outside, settling their squabbles themselves, never asking or expecting an adult to intervene. At night they shared a couple of mattresses. I figure that’s at least 4 or 5 to a mattress. Now you wouldn’t find that approach in Santa Cruz where we tend to hover, guide and structure a little more. Is there a message in here?

This is one I just can’t let go, as it touches on a subject near and dear to my heart: the effects of modern culture on our health, happiness, and success.

I hear it from all sides: People want to adopt another culture’s food, religion, or child-rearing because their own seems so inadequate.

We’re strivers

Multitasking mom
The modern striver mom—I attempted to find out where this image comes from so I could credit it, but apparently every mommy blog in the universe has used it without crediting it! Thanks to the artist, in any case.

Striving for a better life is one of the fundamental reasons for humans’ success. In always trying to find something better, humans have done wonderful things. We have created lives in places like the U.S. that are devoid of any of the fight for survival that traditionally was part of the human experience, and still is in many places in this world.

But contemporary Americans have this urge to think that amidst our success we’ve missed out on some fundamental key to health and happiness. I think this is a result of our need to strive for more. If our culture tells us to keep going for more, better, deeper, faster, stronger… how do we know when we’ve gotten there?

Where we are

And let’s admit this: We’ve gotten somewhere. If you time-traveled Ponce de Leon and showed him our lives, with our big, strong bodies, ability to thrive without hard physical labor, and knowledge of how to cure disease, isn’t it possible he’d think that we have, in fact, found some version of the fountain of youth?

A fair amount of sociological research is being done lately by examining trends on Google, so I’m going to start there. When I type “famous Fijians,” here’s what I get:

famous Fijians

I truly do value singing, great food, pithy sayings, and art (though I admit I have nothing to say about rugby). However, I will say this: Fijians may be happy, well-fed, and artistic, but they aren’t known for raising kids who go off to advance human society in terms of science, technology, or philosophy.

Which cultures are doing this? Largely the ones that are currently so dissatisfied with how they’re raising our children. Hm… So we’re dissatisfied with our parenting culture, yet our parenting culture is what created the people who invented this keyboard I’m typing on and the Internet we’re communicating through. Those ill-parented children invented the medicine that has kept me alive, when in a traditional society I would certainly have died by now of disease or in childbirth.

This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with Fijian or any other more traditional culture, but it does mean that theirs is fundamentally different from ours. Our children eating their inadequate modern diet, speeding around in their fast-moving vehicles, and living their “meaningless” modern lives are the same ones who are:

  • curing cancer (which we wouldn’t worry so much about if we were dying at 25 in childbirth or at 50 of disease)
  • inventing agricultural technology (to feed the masses of humans we’re keeping alive with modern medicine)
  • inventing entertainment devices (which we now have time for due to other advances)

We live in a culture that promotes striving, and this has paid off. Striving cultures throughout human history have built an amazing body of knowledge and skill, from ancient scholars in Mali and Egypt to scientists, technologists, and academics in the modern developed world.

Why we’re dissatisfied

It’s hard to live in a striving culture. We have time to worry about things that someone trying to scare up her next meal can’t even begin to care about. I, for example, look in the mirror and worry about my wrinkles. I know this is silly—I know that in emotionally wiser societies, wrinkles are cherished as a sign that you are now ready to support the younger generation with your wisdom. But worry I do, because I live in a striving society and one of the things we’re striving for is beauty and continued youth.

But when I read about people wanting to pick and choose the positive things about traditional cultures and impose them on ours, I can’t help but think that they’re going about it all wrong.

What we want from those cultures is something that is sitting right in front of us, waiting for us to recognize it: We want our kids to be happy, grow up healthy with strong friendships and family bonds, and live meaningful lives. But we don’t have to deny the fundamental good aspects of our culture in order to achieve those goals.

From Fiji to California

Here’s what I take away from that Fijian grandmother: I am aware that helicopter parenting can be damaging to kids, and I try not to do it. But when I’m not paying direct attention to my kids, I’m not (usually) sitting in front of the TV with my feet up. My kids see me striving, they see me taking part in our Maker culture, they see me taking part in discussions with friends and family about what it means to be a citizen of our modern world and how to be a good parent within our context.

And when my kids aren’t hanging out outside (which is important!), they are also taking part in our striving culture, hopefully getting the best of it while learning to resist its negative influences.

Healthy parenting, in our culture, requires that we build on our successes, while at the same time try to improve how we’re parenting in order to do better.

It’s a tall order, but that’s life in a striving culture. If you’d rather your children grow up to be happy consumers, best you hope that some of the rest of us are raising our children to be strivers. Those are the people who are going to cure ebola, slow global warming, and yes, create new and better entertainment options for when we’re grandmas and we want to spend (some of) our time with our feet up!

A grown-up Harry Potter for me and you

Posted on by Suki

Some years ago my husband was reading a book he’d bought on the basis of a good review. He was sitting in his chair chuckling, and occasionally he would say, “You have to read this!” and then “I mean it, you’ve really got to read this!”

“OK, dear,” I said, and back to my own book.

Then I did. The book was The Magicians by Lev Grossman. After I finished it I was hanging out with my sister and she said something like, “Oh, my book club read the greatest book!” and I answered, “I just read the greatest book, too!” And it turned out to be one and the same.

Harry Potter for grownups! Put the kids to bed early and enjoy.
Harry Potter for grownups! Put the kids to bed early and enjoy.

The Magicians has now morphed into a trilogy, the final episode published last month, and it’s one that I think every parent who was jealous of their kids for having Harry Potter just has to read. Remember how reading Harry Potter with your kids (or in my case, listening to the wonderful audiobooks) made you wistful for how the Narnia series really didn’t cut it once you put them side-by-side? Harry Potter let kids be real kids. They did real stuff that was not in the least allegorical. They lived in a world that was tactile and dirty and complex.

All we got as kids was weak Christian allegory. (Apologies if you still love Narnia, but reading it as an adult killed all my affection for it!)

The disappointing thing about Harry Potter, from the adult point of view, is that because it’s a series for kids, it does have to stay within the kids’ world experiences. There are no great revelations, no deep learning that happens in that series. The kids have adventures and eventually they overcome the evil.

The end happily ever after et cetera.

The Magicians is Harry Potter for grown-ups. It opens when our “hero” (rather less heroic than Harry, even) stumbles his way into a college for magicians. He doesn’t even know that magic exists. He’s never done anything the least bit magical, yet they’ve been watching him and they want him. Why?

In Harry Potter,  that question gets answered, but Grossman’s books are for grown-ups. Questions don’t get answered; they just balloon and get overwhelming, then subside and let you get on with your life. Quentin, Grossman’s protagonist, stumbles through young adult life in an endearing and somewhat scary way. Quentin’s a thinker, and he lets you know why he makes the decisions he makes, but unlike in a children’s novel, it doesn’t all come together to make sense. It ends, but the ending is just the beginning of the rest of his life.

These are not books for kids, or even your teenagers. In fact, don’t let your teens read these books. They’re yours. I mean it. I think you have to have lived long enough to realize that you don’t really know what the hell you’re doing in life in order to appreciate these books.

I love this piece by Grossman on how he found himself as a writer. I think Grossman does a great job of summing up why his books are so great to read:

“Fantasy is sometimes dismissed as childish, or escapist, but I take what I am doing very, very seriously. For me fantasy isn’t about escaping from reality, it’s about re-encountering the challenges of the real world, but externalized and transformed. It’s an emotionally raw genre — it forces you to lay yourself open on the page. It doesn’t traffic in ironies and caveats. When you cast a spell you can’t be kidding, you have to mean it.”

It’s clear that Lev Grossman means it. Go read these books. Ignore your children for a while. Really. And don’t let them read over your shoulder, as my 11-year-old attempted to do last night. She could see I had a good read, and she was jealous.

Let them be jealous. Let them have Harry.

We have Quentin.

The Feminist Homeschooler

Posted on by Suki

If you are like I was before I started homeschooling, your view of homeschooling moms goes something like this:

  • They are separatist Christians
  • They homeschool because their husbands or churches tell them to
  • They are probably not terribly well-educated themselves
  • They use Bible-based curriculum that doesn’t teach children the whole truth about the world
  • They are raising their children to be subservient girls and dominant boys

feminismThere are certainly some homeschooling moms who fit this description, though I’ve never met one who fits it to a T. However, those of you who know my homeschooling community know what kind of a shock I was in for when I became the world’s most reluctant homeschooler after my daughter didn’t take to kindergarten.

The homeschooling moms I’ve met (yes, they are mostly moms, but more on that in a moment) are as varied in background, theology, and political views as the general population. (Though of course, I will admit that where I live, conservative homeschoolers are just about as populous as conservative voters, which is to say I’ve met very few…)

How would I describe homeschooling moms?

  • From deeply religious to lackadaisically atheist
  • Committed to educating their children as best they can but from within their own definition of what education is (which varies greatly from family to family)
  • Committed to raising children who are comfortable with themselves and have learned how to figure out what they want and how to get it (whether or not society defines what they want as “success”)

So I can say that the public perception of homeschoolers, at least where I live, is pretty far off. When a group of homeschoolers gets together to talk about how they educate their kids, you find out that in the generalities they may seem similar, but when you get down to specifics, each homeschool is as different as each child.

But there are some overwhelming similarities when you look through a gender-based lens:

  • Almost all of the full-time homeschooling parents are women
  • Most homeschoolers are growing up in two-parent, heterosexual households
  • Most of the homeschooling moms left careers to homeschool
  • Many of the moms still work part-time, but even those moms often seem to have changed careers so that their work is more compatible with homeschooling

So of course, seeing this as I started homeschooling, I wondered how to view this from a feminist perspective. Is this a throwback world where women are disregarding everything our mothers and grandmothers fought for? Or is this something new that only looks from the outside like a throwback?

I gave a talk on this topic at the HSC Conference a couple of years ago and recently at the DLC in Santa Cruz. The moms that came were the sorts of women that I have gotten to know during my homeschooling years: smart, committed to raising well-educated children, able to “think outside the box” as far as what education and success are. They are all the sort of homeschoolers that I respect and admire.

Yet many of us feel ambivalent about our choice to step back from a career to raise our children. Those of us who are still working while homeschooling know that clinging to our work (whether from financial or emotional necessity) can sometimes conflict with our success in homeschooling. We can feel uncomfortable being financially dependent on our husbands. We sometimes wonder whether our own education was wasted on us since we haven’t gone out and had fabulous careers to “justify” spending the money and time to educate us.

But all those fears and conflicts are more than canceled out by our real homeschooling experiences. Many women at my talks mentioned their own personal growth that has come from homeschooling, from needing to relearn things that were difficult the first time around to finding out new things about ourselves in the process of homeschooling.

Women also mention how important they feel that their influence is on their children. Their kids might not see a mom modeling the “independent woman” paradigm, but they do see their moms as strong leaders, caring community members, equal (though not “the same”) partners with their spouses, and lifelong learners willing to tackle pretty much anything. (How many of us thought that dissecting roadkill would be part of our adult lives?)

Homeschooling itself is conducive to raising feminist kids. Separated from oppressive school cultures that enforce clear gender roles, our kids develop in whatever direction feels right to them. So when you get together with a group of homeschoolers, you will often wonder at the genders of several of the children in the group – boys with long hair wearing capes, girls with short hair and not a shred of pink to be seen. And because they are homeschooling, their education will reflect their interests rather than some authority’s idea of what they should be interested in. This leads to young adults with a firm sense of identity.

Whether they call themselves feminists or not, many homeschoolers typify what a feminist is: someone who believes that all people should have the opportunity to express who they are without succumbing to society’s ideal for their gender.

And that gets back to the moms. Many of us made a choice to homeschool; some of us were forced due to circumstance. But once we start homeschooling, we realize that we have not taken a step back. We are just entering a period of reinvention in our lives. As one mom said, “When I left my job and started homeschooling, I had to reinvent myself. Once my children are grown, I will just reinvent myself again.”

That’s the spirit—the feminist homeschooler spirit!

The search for the girl scientist in literature

Posted on by Suki

Note: This piece was published by a publishing industry blog a few years ago, but they have apparently reworked their site and I can’t find it anymore. So I am reposting it here. This is one of the pieces that I have written that people find over and over—we need to support our scientist/techy/mathy girls, and part of that is letting them know through literary role models that they aren’t alone. Unfortunately, I got some wonderful suggestions on that blog for other books, but they are now lost! If you have any other girl scientists up your sleeve, please do leave comments!

My eight-year-old daughter is a scientist. This isn’t a career choice. This is just a fact of her being.

When she was 18 months old, she accidentally pulled on her sensitive big brother’s hair.

He cried!

Green glass sea
This is a lovely book for aspiring girl scientists—or any girl who doesn’t fit in.

Another child might have felt guilty or might have been upset. Not my daughter. She had only one possible reaction:

I wonder what will happen when I do that again!

And again and again.

Fast forward seven years, and she’s a regular exhibitor at our county science fair. If I want her to practice her penmanship, we do science. If she learns new words, it’s through science.

In the midst of this we had an accidental book club. We’re homeschoolers, and we do a lot of driving. Those two combined mean that we love audiobooks. I balk at the high price tag, so we get most of our audiobooks from the library. This means that more often than not, we listen to whatever happens to be on the shelves.

Unintentionally, two of the books we listened to were about girls who love science.

The first was The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. This lovely book by Jacqueline Kelly covers nearly a year in the life of a girl living in rural Texas at the turn of the 20th century. She forms an unexpected alliance with her grandfather, an amateur naturalist, and becomes entranced with science the way that some girls now become entranced with teen idols.

This positive portrayal of a girl scientist in a place where she is so completely out of place is riveting. Not only did it inspire more interest in evolution and botany in my already science-loving kids, but it presented the role model of a girl who is a scientist against all odds.

The second book, The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages, is also historical, set in Los Alamos as scientists work desperately to create the “gadget” that will end the war. Dewey is a born scientist also, in this case, an inventor. She loves to create her own gadgets, and largely ignores the taunting of the other kids. When she is unexpectedly required to spend a few weeks living with another family, she forms an alliance with another misfit girl, who is finding her calling as an artist.

Sea and Tate are very different books. In Tate, the negative pressure on the main character comes largely from adults. In Sea, however, adults are largely charmed by Dewey’s inventiveness, but the kids are just short of brutal to her.

In both books, however, today’s girl scientists can see girls sticking to science because it is what calls to them. Interestingly, both books almost ignore the girls’ schooling, which seems tangential to their real lives.

In the midst of this mini girl-scientist book festival, it occurred to me to look for more books. In my wanderings, I got a recommendation to ask Tanya Turek, who runs the blog books4yourkids.com. She mentioned that Sea has a sequel, White Sands, Red Menace, which I had found.  She also reminded me of A Wrinkle in Time, which fits closely enough to the theme I was looking for. But then she came up with a blank.

“I spent quite a bit of time on the internal book search system at the Barnes & Noble where I work as well as the internet and I could not come up with any more books that what I suggested already,” she e-mailed me. “I think that there really, truly are only a handful of books that have scientific themes AND female protagonists.”

I can imagine the reasons for this: Few women are scientists, and scientists in general are unlikely also to be fiction writers, so when you look for the cross-section of those two small groups, you apparently only come up with two current writers amongst our many writers of fiction for children.

To explain the lack of these books, however, does not excuse it! We need more books about girls who love science. Girl scientists, even in the 21st century, meet with a good measure of what met Calpurnia in 1899 and Dewey in 1945: misunderstanding, social pressure, and disappointment. Books are where misfit kids can find themselves, and where they find out they aren’t misfits after all.

When my daughter was three, she was nearly impossible to have in a preschool room. All order would be upset; all expectations would be stymied. Forget learning outcomes, her teachers just wanted her to stop experimenting!

I finally found the right teacher for her. One day when I went to pick her up, Cari said, “I have realized what is going on here. Your daughter is a scientist. She must find out how everything works, and the laws behind everything the classroom.”

As soon as Cari understood my daughter, things went much more smoothly.

Books like Calpurnia Tate and Green Glass Sea will hopefully help my daughter understand herself.

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