Category: Culture

What can you say?

Posted on by Suki

There are times when you realize that nothing you can say is exactly right. In the last couple of days I’ve read a number of pieces about “how to respond to tragedy,” but I find them all lacking. Really, it seems to me, there is nothing right to say to parents who have lost a child to random murder. Just simply nothing that can encompass all you might want to say yet avoid everything that might cause more pain, might seem to trivialize it, or might imply that can know what they’re feeling.

We live in an unusual time in human history when we are ill-acquainted with childhood death. I know two parents who lost young children to disease, but even that is rare in comparison with the past. Before the age of cancer treatment, I would probably have known a few more. Before the age of antibiotics, I would have known many. And before the age of plentiful nutrition, relatively clean and comfortable housing, and freedom from daily violence, every single adult I knew would have had childhood death in their immediate experience.

Our modern culture has no equipment to deal with this phenomenon that is largely unique to modern culture: random acts of violence aimed at groups of children. We digest the more common news of gang killings, innocent deaths during wartime, and parents lashing out at their own kids because there’s a sense of both normality and otherness: gang violence, innocent victims of war, and personal abuse have been part of Western human societies long enough that we collectively understand them even though we don’t accept them. At the same time, though, victims of all three of these types of violence are easily dismissed as “not our kids”—we may feel sympathy, but most of us don’t know anyone it’s happened to personally, so it’s OK.

But these random, “in the wrong place at the wrong time” acts of violence are not padded by cultural understanding. Why that day? Why that school? Why those children? — It could have been any place, any day, any kids who happened to be in the perpetrator’s path.

I am glad that events like this spark collective soul-searching, because I think that our culture is very happy to trip blithely along as if we are doing just fine, when we’re not. We have way too many deaths from violence in this country. We have way too many untreated mentally ill people in this country.

But for me personally, I still end up wondering, what can I say? What would be the right way to respond? And I come up blank. Nothing I think of contains the enormity of this, the sadness, and the answers to the questions we naturally want to ask.

Birthing a book

Posted on by Suki

People compare writing a book to having a baby, and in many ways its the same. You pour a huge amount of yourself into a book, whether it’s an autobiography or an academic treatise on a rare insect from Guatemala.

But for me, the process of publishing my book, From School to Homeschool, has been in some ways uncomfortably unlike birth.

Suki and book
Me with my little newborn baby!

When you have a baby – those of you who are parents will remember – your body is flooded with happy hormones and despite the fact that your body may hurt and you’re getting very little sleep, you feel elated. You know that your baby is the most beautiful, wonderful baby ever birthed. And people stop you on the street to tell  you how beautiful and wonderful your baby is.

Between the heady days of writing a book and sending it out into the world, however, you lose any hormonal help you may have gotten. The editing process drags on and then you have to start marketing something you can’t even hold in your hands yet. You start to think:

“Is my baby really that beautiful, or did I somehow mislead my publisher?”

“Oh, I really should have given my baby brown eyes instead of blue!”

“Did I forget to give my baby a pleasant smile?”

“Why would anybody like a baby of mine, anyway?”

“How could I have thought that I’d be a good mommy to this baby?” (OK, I think I did think that one once or twice over the last 13 years of parenting, as well!)

The first thing that happened as the paper copies rolled off the press was contacting reviewers. My publisher’s publicity person rightly pointed out to me that they get a better response rate when the writer approaches reviewers she knows or has some sort of relationship with, so I started sending out e-mails. I suspect they were more professionally worded than this, but I remember these e-mails going something like this, “Please like my baby, please don’t treat her badly, please notice her friendly smile and not the big wart on her nose!”

Last week, I awoke with a start in the middle of the night. I realized with great certainty that I had forgotten to mention the website of one of the wonderful movers and shakers of the homeschooling world who agreed to review my book!

What is going to happen when she reads the book and sees that her wonderful website and her wonderful books aren’t mentioned? I thought, my heart pounding. I mentally composed an apologetic e-mail — “I can’t believe we got through the entire editing process without my realizing that I’d forgotten your website!” — and somehow got myself back to sleep.

Days later I remembered that midnight terror, and went to check my electronic copy of the book. There the website was, with appropriately encouraging words about the author’s contributions to the craft of homeschooling.

OK, so my baby is slightly less imperfect than I thought.

Of course, there will be people who don’t like my book, and I’m prepared for that. And there are people who for whatever reason don’t like me, and thus won’t like my book. I suppose I’m a little less prepared for that because I know that I’m way too concerned with whether people like me than I should be. And of course I’m completely prepared for the fact that my book isn’t for everyone: When people whose children are grown or gone, or people who never had any in the first place and are not into gifted education, say that they’re going to buy my book, I’m happy to say, “Only if you want to.” (I personally have a “thing” for owning books by people I know, but what started as one shelf of people that I know has overflown to books stashed all over the house, so perhaps that’s a “thing” I need to give up!)

So yes, publishing a book is like birthing a baby. I am terribly fond of my little orange-and-blue progeny and it was such a thrill to see her (why is she a she? I can’t answer that) after all those months of imagining what she’d look like.

But it’s also a period of growth for me, and growth, as any rapidly stretching teen can tell you, is not always comfortable.

Here’s to books, babies, and personal growth. None of the three is always a welcome force at any given time of a given day, but all are necessary for the continuation of intelligent life in our little corner of the universe.

I never met a recipe I didn’t want to change

Posted on by Suki

I have a favorite recipe from The Frugal Gourmet which I have been making for years. The first time I made it, I didn’t have any green peppers as called for in the recipe, so I made it without. It was delicious, so for the next twenty years I have made it my way and been quite happy with it. In fact, when I contemplate it with green peppers in it, it just doesn’t seem right.

It occurs to me that this is somewhat how I approach life in general. But I know that it goes against rules that we seem to think are important to teach in childhood, such as:

  • Fruit
    Giant fruit

    follow the recipe

  • don’t start something you’re not going to finish
  • don’t do things unless you have a reason to do them

The fact is, life is full of changed recipes, abandoned projects, and aimless yet completely fulfilling activities. When it comes to raising kids, I can see that I habitually break all those rules. First of all, I am always amazed that there are parents out there who profess to follow a single parenting “theory.” You’ve got your Positive Discipline disciples, your 1 2 3 Magic practitioners, and your Attachment Parenting adherents. They will attempt to follow a theory precisely, and on message boards and in real life they’ll ask each other advice for handling a situation within the worldview of their chosen parenting guide.

In our house, however, we mix it up the way we serve raita with South Indian curry. Sometimes I’m trying to be all Positive with a kid and it’s clear that she needs a countdown: “Get off that computer 3! right now 2! or I will lower your feet into our aquarium and let the sucker fish clean your toes 1!” Or Discipline seems to be agitating rather than calming so we go for the big hug instead.

Another one of my parenting beliefs is don’t be afraid to jump ship at any time if your designated coordinates don’t fit your current needs. So say you’ve decided that your family must be trained always to put away their shoes the second they come in the house, then you realize that means that your own shoes won’t be accessible when you’ve got an armload of used kitty litter that needs to get to the garbage can. Did I really say you had to put all your shoes away? Well, change of plans.

Life is full of abandoned plans, and let’s face it, some of them deserved to be abandoned. Did I really think I liked my kids being in private school more than being able to do something fun with all that money? Did I really say that if we kept all the scrap wood from the old fence I’d help the kids build a playhouse? Did I really buy ricotta thinking I’d spend the time to make homemade manicotti? How about baked ziti instead?

And finally, some of our most fulfilling family activities are done for no particular purpose. I noticed the other day that I had two adult passes to the deYoung Museum that were about to expire, so we decided to hop over to San Francisco for the afternoon. Usually we plan ahead, find out what’s showing at the museum, call up some friends we don’t often see to set up dinner, make a shopping list of things we need at our favorite Asian groceries on the Peninsula. But this time we just up and went. We wandered through the museum split (spontaneously) into two groups. My daughter and I spent a haphazard couple of hours wandering around with her taking photos of things she liked, like the giant, glass fruit. She also decided to look for horses in every room, which necessitated that she at least look at each of the paintings. A few of the ones she appreciated didn’t actually have horses in them.

I think it’s very easy to lose a sense of spontaneity with so many things to do in our hectic world. We schedule ourselves into a corner, making sure that every activity is done the correct way, done fully, and done with purpose. Sometimes it’s really great just to wing it. Who knows? You might find a painting you liked in an exhibit you would have skipped, or you might just prefer that recipe without green peppers, after all.

The wonderful world of Diana Wynne Jones

Posted on by Suki

In the past, my kids and I had read a couple of random selections by the recently deceased British author Diana Wynne Jones, but we had never gone in depth into her large body of work until this summer. We were inspired by our book club, when another mom took a guest turn and announced we were going to be discussing Diana Wynne Jones’s work… all of it! We weren’t required to read all of it, but once we got started, we couldn’t stop.

Enchanted Glass
Enchanted Glass was a late novel for Diana Wynne Jones, offering a new world in which magic is woven into everyday life.

We started with The Enchanted Glass, a wonderful little novel that reads like the great beginning to a long series. Unfortunately, Jones died soon after this novel was released, so no more installments are forthcoming. The characters, however, live on in my mind, and while reading the rest of her books, I am getting a sense of where she might have gone with them.

Right now we’re working through all the books in the Chronicles of Chrestomanci, a group of inter-related novels about storylines that take place in a series of related worlds. Most of the books feature the wonderful and slightly ironic figure of our “contemporary” Chrestomanci, Christopher Chant. (Chrestomanci is the title of a British government position in a world much like ours, so the series features different inhabitants of this job.) We love this Chrestomanci not only because he never fails to deliver as a dapper gentleman who is most focused and dangerous to his foes when he starts to look “vague.” We also love him because we get to know him as a boy, and we sense over and over how his experiences stick with him as he deals with all the magic-wielding children who come his way.

Jones’s most well-known series are probably the books related to Howl’s Moving Castle, which was made into a well received animé film that has, if I remember correctly, very little similarity to the book itself! The books are enjoyable and fanciful, if not Jones’ deepest work.

The interesting thing about Jones’ career is that it never took off in the way that her rabid fans think it should have. She was a steady, respected presence throughout her life, but her books have never inspired lines at midnight outside the book store, or high budget films that become the must-see film for every kid.

Part of the reason for this, I think, is how internal Jones’s books are. Things do happen in the books, but the plot is seldom the focus of the book. Instead, what happens inside the characters—both major and minor characters—is the main focus and the beauty of these books. The kids in these books are desperately trying to hang on amidst events that they have little control over. The adults are flawed and real, only sometimes doing what the kids need them to do.

Another reason the books may not generate the fever of a series like Harry Potter (which owes a lot to Jones’ work) is that she made some major marketing mistakes: She doesn’t have a clear line between good and evil in her books; she doesn’t feature one character as the focus; she doesn’t have a single plot line that keeps readers waiting for the next installment. Instead, her books dip into the lives of groups of characters. She has great respect for her characters, even when they do bad things. She creates characters and worlds so vivid that they live in on the reader’s mind, even when she has gone on to a new world and a new set of characters.

Having now read over half of her books, I can’t recommend them more highly for your kids of any age. They draw in little ones who love the beautiful descriptions. They entertain the kids who like humor and offer enough action and pyrotechnics for kids who crave such things. They help kids understand motives—their own and others. They respect children and adults and all the complex situations we find ourselves in.

For me, Diana Wynne Jones’s books are simply some of the best that you could read with your kids. She has been a fascinating companion to have in our car, inspiring a number of great conversations and ideas.

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Book Review: A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Children

Posted on by Suki

A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Children
James T. Webb, Janet L. Gore, Edward R. Amend, Arlene R. DeVries
Great Potential Press, 2007

Parents often wish their children came with an owner’s manual. If there is anything that comes close to being an owner’s manual for parents of gifted children, this book is it.

The authors comprise a who’s who of experts on gifted children. James T. Webb, the lead author, is perhaps the best-known writer and speaker on gifted issues in the United States. His more recent book, Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults (also written with a team of experts), outlines the specific psychological pitfalls gifted children face. The other three authors, Janet L. Gore, Edward R. Amend, and Arlene R. DeVries, add both depth and breadth to Webb’s solid credentials. Together, the authors have worked with gifted children in almost all capacities.

The book serves first as a very good primer for a parent who is facing questions about raising a gifted child. The first two chapters define giftedness and explore common characteristics of gifted children. In doing so, they answer two questions that often accompany a parent’s first forays into the gifted literature: First, is my child gifted?, and second, how is my child different from other children?

The authors point out that the diagnosis itself can cause problems for gifted kids and their parents. From dismissive comments by other parents such as “all children are gifted,” to misunderstandings from educators like “bright children don’t need any special help,” gifted children and their parents face a lot of opposition as soon as their children are identified.

The second goal of the book is to teach parenting and educational approaches that work as an approach to all children, but are even more important when working with the needs and intensities of gifted children. Chapters on communication, motivation, and discipline outline an approach that takes into account both the child’s age-appropriate emotional needs as well as respecting the child’s unusual ability to process and understand information.

The parenting sections of the book expand into gifted-specific problems: How do the parents of gifted children help them in relationships with their peers? How does having a gifted child affect the relationships of siblings? How can a family’s values support a gifted child? And most importantly, how can a marriage survive the complexities of parenting a gifted child?

A Parent’s Guide only touches upon aspects of aspects of raising a gifted child with twice-exceptionalities such as learning disabilities, mood disorders, and ADD/ADHD. Parents who suspect that their gifted child may suffer from concurrent problems will do well to read Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults after getting an introduction to the issues in this book.

Finally, the book devotes chapters to the educational needs of gifted children, as well as working with other professionals. The educational section gives a blueprint for looking at schools — what to expect in traditional schools, private schools, gifted programs, and gifted schools. There is a short section on homeschooling, a popular choice for parents of gifted children. More useful is the information offered about teacher training for gifted issues (most teachers receive no training), gifted programs in schools (which may or may not serve a gifted child’s needs), how to work with the school administration, and how to advocate for your gifted child.

A Parent’s Guide is a great starting point for educating yourself about the needs of your gifted child and the possible pitfalls you may face as you raise and educate him or her. However, more important than the actual information in the book are the pointers to how to learn more about giftedness, schools, and your child’s emotional health and educational success. If you’re just starting down the road to helping your gifted child, especially a younger child, this book offers a straightforward “owner’s manual” that will guide you through the challenges you and your child will face.

Now available