Jedi

I seem to do better when surrounded by certain outside forces. Unsurprisingly, I seem to do worse when surrounded by certain outside forces. Not good as in carry around a light saber resisting the revolution or bad like hurting defenseless kittens kind of bad but as versions of myself. And I suppose it could all be in the eye of the beholder, this good or bad dilemma. There are some people that probably prefer the quiet and indifferent version that I consider bad. After all, I know she's easier to be around than the questioning and assured version.
But I find that there are certain things, people, places that electrify me. And contrarily there are others that just drain me. Because right now I can't seek more electrifying sources, I need to ponder the draining qualities and figure out a way to change it. A magnet can change it's poles, right? Please don't mock if I'm wrong. I didn't pay much attention in 7th grade science and I don't have to time to go checking Wiki.
So the big question is how? Must I be the one to change what electrifies me? Or is there a way to turn those energy-suckers into challenges that will spur me into action and put the spark back?

My fears made funny (and real!)

My Second-Favorite Son: A Dad's Tale of Parental Favoritism

Thursday, May 14, 2009 1:14 PM

By Newsweek

By Eric Weinberg

My son Benjamin is three and a half. He’s an unbelievably sweet, smart, Spider-Man-obsessed kid who wakes up smiling, and goes to bed asking me to lie next to him in the dark and tell him the story I made up about a monster who uses lemons and oranges and cherries and grapes and blueberries to make giant rainbows in the sky. (And sure, it occurs to me now that I’ve been sending my son to bed every night dreaming of an artistically-inclined gay super-icon, but there’s really no way to put that genie back in the bottle.) We’re not religious people, but I think I can speak for my wife, Hilary, and I when I say we feel really blessed to have Ben. So, that said, I want to talk about my second favorite son, Julian.

Just so you understand, I say “second favorite” only because I don’t love Julian as much as I love Ben. And I say “son” because he’s not a daughter, which is what I really, really wanted. Badly. And I say “my” because I stubbornly choose to believe I helped produce him, despite the fact that he’s almost a year and a half old and resembles me about as much as a slice of cheesecake resembles Jeff Goldblum.

When I say I don’t love Julian as much as Benjamin, I’m really saying I don’t know him as well: He’s younger, his personality isn’t as well formed, we haven’t spent nearly as much time together. Plus, his head looks like a lightbulb. To be fair, it’s not like the day Ben was born I loved him as much as I do now; I mean, I’m not crazy, or his mom. Point being, if I’m throwing a party, Ben gets an invite before Julian.

But back to how Julian’s the wrong sex and probably not mine: See, whenever I thought about having children, I imagined a boy and a girl; it just seemed normal to me. For instance, I’m a boy and my sister’s a girl. And, sure enough, Hilary’s second pregnancy felt different than her first one. Hil and I had this great idea—well, copied this great idea—of having our doctor reveal the sex of our baby to us on a card, which we’d open over a romantic dinner. (Our romantic dinner was eaten at home, half-standing at the kitchen island while we went through junk mail, but I’m not saying that’s mandatory.) Anyway, we opened the card to make it official, and it said, “Congratulations—it’s a boy!” And, just like that, all the air left my body. Not in a farty way; I mean I was devastated. We had a boy, we had a great boy, what did we need another boy for?

Now, I’m no psychiatrist, but I am Jewish. So I’ve obsessed over this long enough to know that my desire for a baby girl probably goes back to me feeling a tad screwed-over by my older sister while I was growing up. (For the record, we’re friends now, which I hope is encouraging to eight-year-olds everywhere.) As a kid it made me wish I had a younger sister, who I’d be far nicer to, and as an adult it made me wish I could have a little girl of my own to cuddle, to counsel, to connect with in the way that other fathers – my best friends, in fact – do with their daughters, just as mothers do with their sons. See, people always talk about that special relationship between a father and daughter; what they hardly ever talk about is that special relationship between a father and someone else’s daughter. And, sure, I get that it’s no one’s idea of a classic May-December romance, but there’s a certain bond you have with someone whom you’ve known since she pronounced that word “Dethember.”

Of course, when Hil was actually giving birth to Julian, all I was thinking was, Just be healthy. And maybe have a vagina. Not in addition to a penis, because… anyway, just be healthy. And he was healthy. He looked nothing like me, but I blew right past that until I had to tell the doctor my blood type, and he said, “Well, either you’re wrong, or he’s not your child.” I blew past that, too, and as the weeks and months went by, I kept waiting for something, anything, familiar to show up in my second son. Instead, he just kept looking like some odd combination of my wife and… someone too ugly for her to have slept with. “Maybe you should get a blood test,” Hilary would joke with me. And we laugh, awkwardly. Friends trotted out something like, “He really has your, um… expressions,” because it’s a nice thing to say, like, “I love your house,” or “I didn’t realize you were that old.” Yet, oddly, over time, I’ve grown accustomed to Julian’s face. Sometime last year I said, “Hey, handsome,” and then he and I both did a double take when we realized I wasn’t being sarcastic.

So, the upshot is, I have two boys. The Weinberg boys. As in, “Mom, can the Weinberg boys come over?” Or, “No arrests have been made, but local police are questioning the Weinberg boys about their parents’ disappearance.” And the thing is, Julian is such a boy: He grabs fistfuls of hair out of your scalp, he gashes himself over his eye and doesn’t blink. And whereas when you pull Ben’s hair back he almost has a pretty girl’s face, when you pull Julian’s hair back he just kind of looks like… well, suppose Andy Richter had chemo.

The truth is, love comes in all sorts of ways. With Julian, well… I don’t want to brag, but he pursued me. Big time. He made me fall completely in love with him. And it’s not just a crush, it’s the real thing, I can feel it.

Excerpted from "The Other One," by Eric Weinberg. Weinberg is just one of several very funny - and honest - writers sharing true stores and parental confessions in "Afterbirth: Stories You Won’t Read in Parenting Magazines," edited by Dani Klein Modisett (St. Martin’s Press, 2009).

Puzzling Pieces

What am I missing?
I have had this sense of nostalgia lately that I just can't pinpoint. This morning I saw a picture of a ski hill and I was suddenly swept into the pine trees with soft flakes swirling around as I watched a snow-covered valley become blanketed in thick clouds below me. And then I lamented the loss of the ski hill when I looked around at my living room.
I am missing my last house and the foothill that was behind it. If I watched very closely I could often see deer on that hill. It was such a peaceful place this time of year. I would watch the trees waking up every day, adding more and more greenery to their tan limbs. The bird's songs would get louder as the sun came up and I would bury my head in my pillow, praying for 15 more minutes of sleep... There were few things that I liked about that house, but having coffee on the deck in the Spring was probably top of my list.
If I do find the missing piece, will it fit into my current reality?

Previously Unposted Circa 8/2009

A barefoot climber? While rock climbing this weekend I was taking a shade break and chasing my Meanie around when 2 guys dropped a rope and were chatting at the bottom of a small climb. They'd dropped the rope from above and it seemed they hadn't known what level climb they were about to attempt. It was a difficult one they'd chosen with some small feet and a long reach or two but it isn't an impossible climb. The first one to climb was rather loudly proclaiming the difficulty and exclaiming how it was much steeper than he'd thought. The climber was so convincing in regards to the impossible feat that he was about to attempt that his belayer asked if they should set up something else. Barefoot Dude then started expostulating to Belay Monkey that he could try it because he'd been training a lot. And apparently with his Ipod turned up too loudly because he couldn't seem to hear himself if he spoke in a normal volume.
Climber Dude starts stretching out and again resumes his full-volume monologue about the odyssey of awesomeness that he was about to complete. At this point I hadn't paid much attention as I was chasing my bored and determined toddler around but they were providing a semblance of distraction as I was waiting for my next turn on the wall. So Climber Dude ropes up and starts to climb the route. After a moment or two I peek over and notice that homeboy has started the climb with no shoes!
Wow, I am impressed. The bottom of the climb isn't a particularly easy start and he seems to have cleared it with ease. Again he starts talking about how hard this is and how he can't believe that he can do it. Well if I wasn't impressed before I am now. To climb a hard climb barefoot is one thing but to provide a running commentary on your accomplishment while doing so is quite another.

Guest Post

http://www.newsweek.com/id/196023?from=rss

Happy Mother's Day!

Oh, I know the burnt toast and dandelion bouquet won't come till May 10. But lately, every day is Mother's Day, thanks to our relentless focus on moms (and to a lesser extent dads) and the way they parent.

Parenting has become a spectator sport. We set the bar extremely high for what is "good" parenting and start judging the moment we hear someone did something that could be considered one drop dangerous.

I should know. I'm the mom who let her 9-year-old ride the New York City subway by himself. Just about a year ago I made national news when my husband andI decided to take our son someplace he hadn't been before and let him try to find his way home by himself on public transportation. (By day, not very far from home, with money and a map and quarters for a phone call.) The very thing he'd been begging us to let him do for months. He made it home fine, btw, but millions of folks weighed in, often critically, on my parenting.

Now I feel a little like Miss America, passing my "Bad Mom" crown and scepter to Madlyn Primoff, the Scarsdale, N.Y., lawyer who was arrested for endangering the welfare of a child a few weeks back after she left her two daughters, ages 10 and 12, in a shopping area of a New York City suburb because they were bickering in the car. (Both the girls got home safely, though one did wind up waiting for her parents at the local police station.)
Primoff can have the crown, but I'm keeping the scepter for self-defense. All moms could use one. It was only when complete strangers started saying I was lazy/crazy/cable-TV-fodder-in-the-making that I began to understand that a lot of us Americans are raising our kids in an utter state of panic. We are convinced that every day, in every way, our children are in terrible peril. We are obsessed with other parents' child-rearing decisions—and our own—because we're being told each one is of life and death importance.

And it's not just about stranger danger. It begins even before birth, with the pregnancy diet books (a whole new genre!) telling us "each bite" is going to determine if our kids are golden—or duds. Same goes for every other parenting decision we make: are you having natural childbirth? If not, you're traumatizing the baby! Are you breastfeeding? If not, your kid's going to be a dummy! With allergies! And extra-chunky thighs! Are you feeding your kid nonorganic baby food? Did you wait too long to sign her up for music lessons? Shouldn't you get that toy that teaches multiplication? But the biggest decision of all, of course, is: can I ever leave my kids to their own devices? To climb a tree or walk to school? And lately the answer is: no. Not until their hair goes gray and they start liking bran flakes.The prevailing belief is that even one unscheduled, unsupervised childhood episode (like the car-ejection) is dangerous to the point of criminal. That kids could never possibly buck up and ask someone for help, or figure out how to use a public phone, or ask directions to the police station.

But that Scarsdale lawyer's kids were not preschoolers. At age 10 or 12 in other eras, those kids would have been apprenticed already. Or working as servants in someone else's house, or picking coffee beans. Actually, in other countries, some children that age are still picking coffee beans. Why do we assume that today's American kids are the dumbest, most vulnerable, least competent generation ever—and that we are doing them a favor by treating them almost as if they are disabled? ("Let me open the car door for you, honey!") Because that's what our culture tells us to do. It tells us that kids need extra classes, extra padding and extra supervision just to make it through another day. It tells us we should always plan for the worst-case scenario. And it warns us that they are in physical danger from a crime-crazed world, even though, nationally, our crime rate is back to what it was in 1970. Yes, if you grew up in the '70s or '80s, times are safer now than when you were a kid. That's according to U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics. We Americans have a very hard time believing that good news because good news is not what we are soaking in. Mostly we are soaking in 24-hour cable, bringing us the worst stories—especially child abductions—from all corners of the globe. (Aruba, anyone? Portugal?) When we flip to TV police dramas like "CSI," we see maggots and autopsies and the freakiest, saddest scenarios Hollywood can dream up, usually involving duct tape. These stories, so graphically told, sear themselves on our brains. Pick up a parenting magazine instead, and we find article after article, "Is your child's crib safe?" "Is your child's food safe?" "Is your child's [fill in the blank with something that seems extremely safe, like a pillow] safe?" If that magazine can't convince us that it has some lifesaving info that we really must read to keep our kids alive, we won't buy it. So it's in the same biz as TV News: It simply has to scare us.

In short: we are being brainwashed with fear and it makes us worry that everything we do as parents may be putting our kids in danger. That's why we judge other parents so harshly, and why we keep our kids cloistered like Rapunzel. Don't get me wrong. As founder of the Free-Range Kids movement—a group of people who believe in giving kids more freedom and responsibility—my philosophy is not to throw kids out of the car (sorely tempting though that may be at times). But Free-Range parents do believe that kids are more capable and competent than we give them credit for. And that, after teaching them basic safety, they need some freedom to develop as smart, happy, responsible humans. Not crazy freedom. Just the kind of freedom we had, back when parenting decisions were not the stuff of national news.

Skenazy is founder of the blog-turned-parenting-movement FreeRangeKids.com and author of, "Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry." (Wiley, April 2009)

© 2009

Counting Down

My pregnancy is fairly all-consuming at this point. I would like to have thoughts on the public reaction to the Swine Flu and the following come down of safety. The fact that our VP has already been caught in a Clinton-sized lie and the media basically glossed over it. I would even like to start reading a new book or finish an already started one, but I can't seem to focus on anything other than my growing belly and the wrath that is shortly to be released on my somewhat peaceful life.
This obsession takes many forms. While reading, either online or a book, my little Grover starts to squirm and I try to imagine what he's doing in there, what he looks like, meeting him for the first time, etc. While sitting down to zone out for a few minutes and give my poor feet a break I start to stress out about all the things I really want to finish before he comes. Then I start to imagine what it'll be like once he's actually here. I have fuzzy memories of a very dark time in my life called "Love in the time of Colic" where I felt a love like nothing I've ever known and yet I thought my life had ended in the wake of screaming infant.
In some ways I just want him to be here. I want to see him and start to get to know him. I know it's weird for some people but I am so excited to get to nurse again. I miss that particular bond with Killian and I am excited that I get to experience that one more time. But I am terrified beyond description. I have more fears this time. Last time I loved my tummy-baby so much from the second I considered the notion that he might be in there. This one is taking more time in the bonding department for me. I have a few theories as to why this is, but none of them ease my fear that this half-love may not bloom into the passionate obsession that I had for Killian for the first while.
In some ways I can accept that you will never love again like you did the first time. I have experienced this in my non-mothering life and I assume that it can tend to be similar with one's children. After all, I kind of know what's coming. By the very act of expecting to hear the stars sing and the see the world in the eyes of my son, I am setting myself up for disappointment.
But then there is the odd feeling that I am already divided between my two boys. I vacillate between resenting Grover for taking a part of me from Killian, for making me a mother of two, for just being here. But then I get so so excited that I will have two little people! Two boys seems like such a rowdy, fun way to live life. I want to teach them to hike and climb and swim and ski. I know they'll shoot targets with their dad and come home to bake cookies with their mom. And I know that all these experiences will be richer for them because they'll always have each other. I know the bond of two siblings is unlike any other. When they are grown and their dad and I are unreachable on some mountaintop, river, or desert they will always be able to call each other for a piece of home.
I guess I am just scared of another baby, not another child. While I did love Killian every single day, I did not love the stage of my newborn. I take so much more pleasure in my toddler than I ever did in my baby. And knowing this is coming it's a little hard to imagine a pleasant 2009 and that just doesn't seem fair to any of us.