Month: July 2014

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American Ninja Warrior Is My Five Year Old’s Favorite Show and Why That’s Okay

ISHKABIBBLE!  ISHKABIBBLE!  ISHKABIBBLE!

My five year old running down the hall outside my bedroom and loudly yelling nonsense words are how I wake up a lot of these summer days.

Our family discovered American Ninja Warrior on a fluke a few month’s ago.  At first, it was honestly comedy for us.  After the baby went to bed, it was something Mom and Dad could do with our five year old for a little while before bed at the end of some long days.  It was occasional, but now, it’s become destination TV.  Have you watched it?

IT.  IS. AWESOME.

First of all, it’s not passive television.  Our boy sets up his own obstacle courses for his stuffed animals around the living room or play room, dashing from floor cushion to sofa to train table.  He makes these awesome sound effects and his eyes get big every time one of the competitors succeed.  An errand at the post office this morning became joyful when waiting in line, the boy realized his imagination was all that he needed to turn the metal bars separating lanes of bored and waiting adults into some new obstacle called the “Line Changing Bars.”

In many ways, ANW is like the Olympics, but without the national bravado and parade of flags.  The TV formula is the same, with human interest stories of the competitors featured as intros before they run the course.  We learn about teachers who train in their off hours, coaches of special needs kids, youth ministers, brothers, cousins, fathers and sons, immigrants, “rednecks,” cops, moms — folks of all stripes who do this crazy thing because they can.

My son seems to enjoy the stories as much as the competition.

As his mom, I love that he sees all kinds competing for the same elusive thing — a victory at Mt. Midoriyama.  There are itsy bitsy teeny weeny little women who fare better than the six foot plus musclemen.  There are scrawny skate punks who get further than the more traditional athlete because they are lithe and flexible and scrappy.

LOLLAPALOOZA!  LOLLAPALOOZA!  LOLLAPALOOZA!

Sadly, our son has not been blessed with parents who are natural athletes or will push the team sport thing.  Dad is 5’8′ and I’m 5’5″.  It’s a fair guess that our oldest son, like his folks, will not tower over his classmates.  At five years old, he has a growing awareness that he is often one of the smallest in his class.  He has a growing self-consciousness about this that breaks my heart, cause there are some things you can protect your kiddos from, and others you can’t.

While our boy has mad confidence where books, facts, figures, and trivia are concerned (man, is he his parents’ child), I see tiny little cracks asserting themselves in his self-esteem.  When he is not self-conscious, he runs and jumps and climbs and plays physically just as he always has, but when he’s in a new situation, or meeting new kiddos, when he has a reason to compare himself to other kids, he will sometimes shut down without trying some new physical challenge.

That kind of sucks.

I want a different kind of childhood for my son than I had myself.  I was a scared little field mouse, hanging back rather than participating.  I didn’t conquer the big slide until I was 8 or 9.  I didn’t learn to ride a bike until I was 11 or 12.  Sheesh.  It wasn’t any fun watching my friends ride off into the sunset on those summer evenings while I sulked at my inadequacies and ineptitude.

Life if so much more fun when you live it, you know?  Slides are better when you have wax paper under your bum and land in a heap of wood chips, thrilled with the ride you just had.  Bikes are way more cool when you are standing tall, pedaling those pedals as fast as your feet will carry you, the wind on your face.

CHICKADEE!  CHICKADEE!  CHICKADEE!

I also love how intently my son will engage with the show.  He is cheering these folks on, caring whether or not they will finish the course.  When they stumble, lose their grip, fall in a pool of water that feels an awful lot like wet humiliation, he sends them encouragement, “That’s okay, Guy! You’ll do it next time!”  He is mesmerized.

And the empathy he shows and sportsmanship he is learning about is something this mother kvells over.  Watching these amazing folks give it their best, falter, but still smile is the stuff of parenting dreams.  Not everybody wins, and failing doesn’t make you a loser.

America's Next Top Ninja Warrior.
America’s Next Top Ninja Warrior.
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Michelle Obama on Work-Life Balance and Family Needs

It’s probably no surprise to the folks who read me regularly that I am a fan of our First Lady.  Michelle Obama, who took flak for calling herself America’s Mom-in-Chief several years ago, is a woman and mother I admire and respect in many ways.  Gal’s got it going on, you know what I mean? She can dance with Jimmy Fallon one night, turn around and represent America abroad as an icon, create a garden on the White House lawn, and be honest about the difficulties of achieving the elusive work-life balance so many working women struggle with.

And, you know, those arms.

^^^ Those are the arms I'm talking about, right there. Those are some guns I could support.
^^^ Those are the arms I’m talking about, right there. Those are some guns I could support.

Noodling through Facebook today, I found a link to an interview Ms. Obama did with Robin Roberts at a White House Summit on Working Families. Given that I no longer work outside the home, I had the 30 minutes to actually watch the interview.  Cue the bon bon comments now. Snark aside, I came away with my respect and admiration for Ms. Obama only grown in scope.

She gets it.

Before I had children I was very career driven.  I was going places and saw my trajectory only going up, up, up.  I presented professionally, wrote an occasional article about my field of expertise, and had, I thought, the world by the career stones.  I put off the decision to have kids because, well, I was pretty happy and fulfilled without them.  Then, in an instant, my life changed.

Sitting in front of one of her beloved slot machines in Biloxi, Mississippi, my Mom experienced a cerebral hemorrhage caused by an undiagnosed brain tumor.  That moment would change everything I valued and believed in about myself and my path.  A few months later, after becoming stable enough to fly to Chicago by air ambulance, a surgery, and weeks of hospitals and rehab, my Mom and Dad moved to a small Chicago apartment to be close to the medical team at Northwestern.

I went from staying at the office every night until 7 to skurrying my little tokus out the door the minute the clock struck 4:30.  My priorities shifted in an instant from career to caregiving.  Suddenly, the things that were most important to me were no longer ambition, conferences, mentoring, and advancement, but watching CNN with my Mom, folding sheets, cooking soft foods, and helping my parents through an inordinately difficult time.

For the first time I understood the impossible push/pull the mothers I worked alongside had struggled with.  I no longer felt like the work mattered to me more than them.  I realized how incredibly naive I had been, and unwittingly, what a jerk.

My Mom died eleven months after that bleed in front of the slot machine. My daughter was born just five months after her death.  I feel so grateful that the last lesson my Mom blessed me with was the knowledge that caring for the people I love is the most important work I will ever do. Because of that caregiving, I was a better mother to my daughter, and now my sons.

I also know how ridiculously privileged I have been in my own work-life balance.

With my Mom, I had a job that I could easily leave every day at 4:30. There were no professional obligations that bled into my caregiving time. When my first child was born, I negotiated moving to a part-time position, allowing me four days at home and three in the office.  When that same child was diagnosed with a brain tumor, I simply walked away from work, as there is no balancing the needs of a a critically ill child, in and out of the hospital with surgeries, chemo, ER visits, and neutropenic fevers, with a job outside the home.  I didn’t return to professional work, part-time again, until our surviving child was two.  And when my husband and I opted to adopt, I quit that job knowing that stay-at-home mothers are more attractive to many women looking to place a child for adoption.

Like I said, I have been ridiculously privileged in my work-life balance.

So has Michelle Obama.

What I love about her, though, is that she, too, seems very aware of the privilege she enjoys, despite her own hardships of parenting while working.  In this 30 minute interview with Robin Roberts, Ms. Obama demonstrates a keen awareness of the difficulty of raising children while working outside the home.  She knocks off facts about the high cost of child care, the difficulty of finding quality child care, the differences women who work hourly versus those women who are salaried face in their dual roles of mother and worker, single parenting, and the need to make work-life balance a family issue, not just a women’s issue — one that both fathers and mothers must consider and plan for.

And like I said, she gets it.

Two summers ago there was a huge Internet reaction to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article in The Atlantic entitled, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Like many with a wee little online platform, I criticized her arguments in a blog post.  What riled me the most about her position was how utterly privileged her concerns were.  There are so many working mothers out there whose struggles are so much more dire than whether or not to create a commuter arrangement for career advancement or if it is detrimental to have the nanny cook dinner rather than yourself.  There are mothers out there who get arrested for having their children sit in a locked car while they interview for the job they so desperately need to pay for food and housing.

While many women of privilege struggle over the idea of work-life balance, many more struggle with the reality of work-life balance.  The consequences of losing a job because they were at the hospital with their sick child.  The need to choose between food or rent.  The peril of leaving children alone, unattended, because that is the lesser of two evils — homelessness being the natural consequence.

Our First Lady encourages all of us, men and women, those of privilege and with access to resources and those choosing between untenable options, to start owning this issue of work-life balance.  She encourages us to make it a family issue instead of a women’s issue.  She encourages us to change the conversation and start speaking up for workers’ rights instead of corporate rights.  She wants workers to bring to the discussion the same pull that politcians feel from monied corporations.

Amen, sister.

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Go To the Joy

For Judith

A few months after our daughter died I spoke with a family friend who gave me some of the most profound advice of my life.  “Go to the joy,” she said, “Go to the joy.”  Four itty bitty little words that hold profound wisdom.

Joy2

This friend, too, had experienced great loss.  I know it is prejudicial, but I always feel a kinship with those, like me, who know deep, life altering loss. There is a wisdom gained, if not always acted upon, that comes with living through and with loss.  There is a shorthand that exists within us that is not, I imagine, unlike combat veterans.  We have seen things and experienced things that others have not and could not possibly understand.  We are, in some ways, another form of the walking wounded.

Years ago, when I was working as a clinical social worker in a retirement community, I ran a bereavement support group for widows and widowers. One man who had lost his wife of over five decades talked a lot about the necessity of wearing a mask when he was around others. Trust me when I say that when you live in a genteel retirement community, you are almost always around others.  Living in community can be exhausting, as the space to just be alone, really alone, is minimal.

Anyway.

This client would talk about putting on his mask every morning.  It would be inconceivable for him to not wear his mask, just as it would be to not wear pants.  His particular mask involved a slight closed mouth smile, brief, but limited, eye contact, and exchanging a few kind pleasantries about the day before moving the hell on and out of there.  He found most exchanges with other people burdensome.  They required great effort and they definitely required his mask.

Listening to this client talk about his mask always made me profoundly sad.  Because he was a minister in his life’s work, he felt a responsibility to show a strong public face — to live the life his flock aspired to.  For him, in his grief, that meant wearing the mask and not showing his vulnerability or his weakness or the true extent of his sadness.

I always felt for him, that he never felt comfortable enough to express how very sad he was to miss the love of his life, every minute of every day, his life’s partner in work and family.  I believe that the mask he wore took a toll on him, too, just as his grief did.

In my own grief, I’ve done almost the exact opposite as my former client.  I write about it, talk about it, share about it.  It’s been five years now, and here I still am, on the eve of my daughter’s 9th birthday, still going on about it.  I’ve been told, albeit by anonymous Internet strangers, to “get over it” and “find a new angle,” but here I still sit, writing about grief on my keyboard.  My sadness and its presence in my day-to-day life is no different than having blue eyes or being 5’5″ — it is something that just is.

The things that guide me most  in my grief are my friend’s words, “Go to the joy,” and my memories of Donna and her own relationship with joy. Kids get joy, you know?  They are joy magnets.  Think about a three or four or five year old and how so many of the things they do, they do with gusto.  A bug!  A sprinkler!  A Happy Meal!  Everything really is awesome! Except, you know, bed time.

I work to find the joy in every day life.  Some days it is easy.  Some days it is hard.  Feeling joy, true, amazing joy, does not negate my grief, but it does give me a reprieve.  Going to the joy — making a conscious choice to seek it out — has restored some balance in my life.  And, full disclosure, I understand how it could be much easier to find the joy when you are raising kiddos in your 40s rather than living in a retirement community in your 80s.  I get it, and I am grateful for it.

Perhaps, like my former client, I, too, have a mask.  My mask just happens to be my boys.  My giggling, growing, amazing, crazy, challenging, joyful boys.  They help me find the joy every day.  Well, almost every day.

And for that I am so very grateful.

Joy1