It Runs in the Family (11 page)

“A wand, what about a magic wand?” I improvised. I whipped it up quick and handed it to a young boy. “There, now you can do magic.”

“Cool, a sword!” he replied, and he dashed off to engage his little brother. Soon all the kids were crowded around my knees demanding swords in all the colors of the rainbow. “I will make you a magic wand,” I insisted to each, manipulating the top of the long balloons into fanciful wand-like shapes. “Okay, but I am going to turn it into a sword,” they said again and again, undoing my handiwork and swashbuckling their way across the church hall. It went on like this all morning. The only child I could get to request a magic wand was my very own Rosena, and even she used it like a sword the minute it was in her little hands. I think something that helped my siblings and I try to choose less violent options was living among so many different kinds of people at Jonah House over the years. I was exposed to all sorts of ways that good-hearted, radical, and thoughtful people interact with children.

At nightly prayer there were a number of women who insisted on saying “a-woman,” instead of “amen.” I was so influenced by this that I took to calling mayonnaise “womanaise.”

At dinner, we were exposed to typical vegetarians and vegans, but also raw foodists, people who only drank juice, and those who weighed all their food portions. We also sat down with people who used kelp instead of salt and who railed against white sugar as though it were a tool of Satan himself (or herself?).

Everyone took turns cooking, and we’d watch our dad carefully. If he got out the peanut butter at dinner it meant that he did not like what was being served. He would never say anything, but his getting up from the table meant that we could eat peanut butter sandwiches for dinner too. A woman who lived with us taught us to say “directly forward” when we were giving directions, instead of “straight.” Her point was that the dominant male culture prioritized straight over other directions and made us think that straight was the only way to live.

By way of contrast, our own parents—a former nun and priest who were often at least a decade older than other community members—were fairly conventional in their child-rearing techniques. “Please,” “thank you,” eating all one’s dinner in solidarity with the starving children of Africa, “may I please be excused,” long lectures about one’s behavior (differentiated from other kids’ long lectures only by the frequent, learned, biblical references and occasional diatribes against morally corrupt American consumer culture), and periodic spankings.

If you set aside the whole protesting and getting arrested and going to jail and talking about one’s faith all the time stuff, they were basically normal. Our parents ate meat, drank alcohol (though it was seldom on hand), enjoyed classical music, cursed with passion and imagination when provoked, and enjoyed detective novels.

We were not allowed to watch TV (morally corrupt American consumer culture). The worst thing we could do was fight with one another (which my brother and I did constantly), and the second-worst thing we could do was lie, which my brother and I did all the time to cover up for our TV-sneaking and our fighting. I learned a lot from the people with whom I shared the dining room table while growing up—but less about “healthy eating” than about obsession, fixation, and control. I learned to work around my parents’ prohibitions on TV and gorged myself when I could. To this day, if a TV is on in a room, I can’t not watch it. I learned to lie to be able to do what I wanted and still be an appropriate peace activist kid. I’m not proud of learning all of that. I don’t like it…but I did it.

Does it really matter if my stepdaughter plays with magic wands or swords? Why do I want her to call it a wand when she wields it like a sword? If she is having fun and not hurting anyone, does my politically correct overlay do anyone any good? Or is it just a semantic absurdism like “womanaise”?

What do we teach children by our words and actions, and what do we want children to learn? How can I be a parent who is learning alongside my marvelous child rather than imposing my vision of the world on her little shoulders? How can I be a parent who makes the world safe, beautiful, and governed by some logic, while still being honest about its morass of problems and our responsibility for all of it?

Children are little insurrectionists. They turn our lives upside down and they insist we see it through their eyes—and they care more than anything about fairness and friendship. Maybe we have more to learn than to teach.

Rosena is mad for horses. As I was reading to her from
The Black Stallion Returns
one night, I found myself editing heavily. Walter Farley’s sequel to
The Black Stallion
was originally published in 1945 and is, in my humble opinion, horribly written. How many times can young Alec look or act “determinedly,” and is that even a word? What is worse is that the book reflects the casual prejudice and ignorance of the time—the Bedouins of Arabia are portrayed as backward and swarthy. Also, the book is really violent.

So as we approached the denouement, I found myself trying to keep the action going while avoiding the fact that the swarthy Bedouin was about to drive Alec and The Black off a cliff.

It’s true that without that bit of action, the whole chapter makes no sense. But Rosena was half-asleep and perhaps not following what I was saying, and I did not want her last words and images of the day to be of a horse and boy smashed in a rocky tomb.

If protecting her from imaginary violence is tough, shielding her from real violence is even more difficult. And is it even the right thing to do?

Since she entered kindergarten, the violence and unpredictability of the world has been in our face. In December 2012, a young man armed to the teeth massacred twenty kids and six adults at an elementary school less than eighty miles from our town. And then months later, two heavily armed young men detonated bombs at the Boston Marathon’s finish line, killing three and injuring hundreds. Our plan was to be there, cheering on our friend as she finished the 26.2-mile course.

There is killing in Syria, Afghanistan, Gaza and Iraq; saber-rattling and threats of war on the Korean peninsula; death and destruction from West Texas to Bangladesh; the random and not so random brutality displayed in inner cities and suburbs throughout our country; the grind of poverty, racism, and sexism; the looming threats posed by cataclysmic climate change, nuclear weapons proliferation, and environmental destruction. The list goes on and on.

Growing up, my family and community watched the news every night. It was the only TV I got to watch, and so I was there in the front row. When I was about Rosena’s age, I watched, transfixed, as the Iran hostage crisis unfolded, as the Mount St. Helens volcano exploded in Washington State, as the Irish Republican hunger striker Bobby Sands starved to death in British custody, as four U.S. church women—Jean Donovan and Sisters Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, and Dorothy Kazel—were raped and murdered in El Salvador, and as President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II were both shot and injured. The whole time, the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
’ Doomsday Clock stood at seven minutes to nuclear midnight (it is at five minutes today, by the way).

This is what we talked about around the dinner table. And it was terrifying. I had nightmares. I worried. I recently found a “poem” I wrote when I was nine:

What will happen when the bomb comes shoting [sic] down? I am not in a hurry to know. I don’t want to see it come tumbling down. The president will say: I declare war on Russia, or India, or Norway, or any other country. But it’s not their fault. We could have prevented it from happening. I hope we can someday
.

It is written in my best handwriting and illustrated with little bombs.

When I was Rosena’s age, I knew a lot about nuclear weapons. We watched grainy black-and-white documentaries about Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the wall of our living room. I could fold paper cranes and tell you the story of Sadako, the little girl in Hiroshima who died of leukemia even though she was not even born when the United States dropped the two nuclear bombs on her country in August 1945. She tried to fold a thousand paper cranes so that the gods would make her better. She did not finish her task, but her friends and family kept folding origami cranes after she died, erecting a statue of her in Hiroshima.

My sister Kate also remembers growing up with an active fear of nuclear weapons. When she heard planes flying low overhead, she expected that the bombing would start any moment. Despite this fear she doesn’t think that we should have been more sheltered as children. “The gift from that exposure,” she says, “is a more or less constant awareness of my level of comfort in daily life and of those who aren’t so lucky. The challenge of that is to then strike a balance between guilt and action. Do you get self-serving about it or do you find tools and resources to address the problems that you see?”

It made sense that we knew all this. It helped us understand our immediate reality—going to lots of protests, watching the people we loved getting arrested and hauled off to jail, collecting food from dumpsters and sharing it with hundreds of our neighbors on a weekly basis.

Rosena is not writing poetry yet, but she is churning out art at a prodigious rate. I marvel at her cheerful drawings—blocks of color, grand sweeps of magic marker and crayon, intricate illustrations of her big loving family. Each drawing comes with a long and elaborate backstory that she relishes telling. There are no nuclear bombs or heavily armed men lurking in the background. Nuclear aggression and mutually assured destruction are not part of her pictures. There is not even a hint of deprivation or longing—except for deceased and beloved cats, and the dog and horse she hopes to someday have.

Within an hour of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, we got an email from her school with suggestions for how to talk about the tragedy. They said that we should stick to simple and brief reassurances that she is safe and that school is safe. Over the weekend, we got another email updating parents and caregivers on new school security procedures, telling us how they planned to handle discussions with the kids on Monday. “In K/1 we will not make any reference in the classrooms to the incident. As we normally do, children will write about their weekend. If any students mention the incident, the teacher will do a check-in with them individually.”

As far as I know, Rosena still does not know about the Sandy Hook massacre or the Boston bombing. She is blissfully unaware. I think this is a good thing. Lots of kids don’t have the luxury of being shielded from tragedy and deprivation. Almost seventeen million kids in this country are hungry, for instance. Every hour in this country, eighty-four kids end up in the emergency room as the result of violence perpetrated against them. The picture is much worse outside of our borders—every five seconds, a child dies of hunger somewhere in the world. I want Rosena to know all of this someday. I want her to grow up compassionate and empathetic. I want her to work for justice and peace. I want her to be curious about people and empowered to help them. But, right now, I just want her to be a kid—innocent, lucky, happy, and mad about horses.

KIDS WILL BE KIDS: GENDER, SEX, AND RAISING GOOD CHILDREN

S
eamus went to a University of Connecticut basketball game a while ago. UConn beat Yale, big time. He sat in the stands with his dad, uncle, and papa and was completely absorbed by the action below. “My son is a boy,” I thought. He is a handsome, strong, demanding, loving little boy whose favorite things are blocks and balls and Cheerios.

We did not know before he was born if we were going to have a boy or a girl. It was the first question everyone asked. “Congrats. What are you having?” When I said that we didn’t know, older people always offered additional congratulations. “Good for you! We never knew back when I was having my kids.” I thought it was strange that even people who thought not knowing ahead of time was good couldn’t help but ask. I also got a lot of speculation about the bump’s sex. “What do you feel like you are carrying?” I was asked. “A watermelon, a small sedan, or perhaps a large sofa,” I responded.

“You are having a boy!” was the informal consensus from women at the grocery store, on the street, and in my extended family. Almost no one thought I was going to have a girl, except Rosena who wanted a little sister.

While I was pregnant with Seamus, I learned about a new trend: gender reveal parties. Expectant parents throw a party where they learn if they are having a boy or a girl. They get balloons filled with pink or blue confetti, they get cakes with either pink or blue frosting inside, and the guests divide into Team Girl and Team Boy to suggest names and guess the baby’s stats like weight and due date.

“How do you know what color to paint the nursery?” asked the woman bagging groceries at Stop & Shop, when I told her I didn’t know if my bump was male or female. “White,” I said. “We have painted it white.” She looked disappointed. In truth, I painted all the walls white. I was not going to waste any time meditating over paint chips and variations of green with names like “Summer Moss” or “Old Toad.” I could not see how knowing the sex of our baby ahead of time would help us prepare for being parents. We had everything one actually needs for a baby—car seat, co-sleeper, high chair, and stroller. Friends with two boys moved back to New Zealand and gave us all their baby clothes, shoes, hats, diapers, baby seats, and swaddles. The clothes were mostly European and Kiwi, which meant lots of stripes and lots of red and white patterns with very few overly assertive boy markers, such as the ones you see emblazoned on everything at Target and Babies “R” Us: T-shirts with gorillas, trucks, or super heroes. Girl clothes have pink polka dots, dogs or cats with long eyelashes, and princesses. Sex education starts immediately.