On Steubenville

Yesterday, in Steubenville, Ohio, two teenagers were found guilty of rape.  Two sixteen-year-olds were tried in juvenile court for the rape of another sixteen-year-old last summer. It’s a sordid case that’s captivated many because of the way it came to light through social media and YouTube. The case has inspired conversations about many things including issues of consent, acceptable Internet use, potential conspiracies, and the power held by high school football players in Steubenville. The last part is probably hard for some people to understand, particularly those who aren’t familiar with the fervor that surrounds high school football in some parts of the country. I grew up directly across the Ohio River from Steubenville, Ohio, and went to an equally football-crazed high school in Wellsburg, West Virginia. When I went off to college and told people stories about the role football played in my high school and community, I was always rewarded with agape mouths and disbelief.

We had pep rallies every Friday of football season, regardless of opponent or game importance. These pep rallies took forty-five minutes, and happened during the instructional day, the last forty-five minutes before dismissal. However, their impact was greater than that as both the players and the members of the marching band were dismissed from classes even sooner, in order to prepare. Before we were dismissed from our classes to go to the rallies, the band marched through the school’s hallways as a signal that it was almost time, effectively ending class. The routine was always the same, the coach spoke, the cheerleaders cheered, the dance team danced, the band played, the players marched in (hand-in-hand and in matching ties, slacks, and blazers), and the football captains made “speeches,” which were the same every week, a simple “Beat [name of that week’s opponent].” The coach spoke again. The crowd cheered. We were dismissed.

The rallies weren’t mandatory, but virtually everyone went. Sometimes I chose to go to the alternate activity, a study hall, to join a handful of other students, primarily Jehovah’s Witnesses (who considered the rallies blasphemous). I didn’t have any meaningful reason as to why I skipped some of the rallies, other than that on some days I wasn’t in the mood for all the pageantry and noise. I wish I could say it was some sort of principled stand, but it was more apathy than anything, and sometimes simply the nerdy wish to get some homework done before the weekend.

I remember one football Friday in particular when we had a two-hour delay because of snow, yet we still had our pep rally. This meant that classes that day were, if memory serves, about 23 minutes long. I knew that was insane then, but as a teacher now, it feels really, really insane. Yet none of my teachers seemed to notice or mind.

When I was in tenth grade, sometime in the first couple weeks of school, the football coach (who had been my ninth grade health teacher), came into my study hall, and said, “Nora, you’re coming with me.” I grabbed my stuff and followed Coach. He explained that he wanted me to work with him in his office during that study hall period and knew I would do a good job. I was a pretty cynical sophomore, but I felt honored in spite of myself. Coach was as big a celebrity as our county had. For the next three years I spent my study halls at a table adjacent to Coach’s office, doing a mix of my homework and his errands. I don’t think the school’s budget allocated money for him to have an administrative assistant, so he simply lined up students (all girls, in my memory) each period of the day to be there should he need help with anything clerical. I didn’t really mind because I gained a quieter place to study and his errands allowed me to stretch my legs and sometimes chat with friends I saw in the halls. Now, whenever I wish I had someone to help me make photocopies of tests, or put up a bulletin board, I realize that Coach’s influence meant that he could command certain benefits no other teacher could.

Our football team was very good, and often a contender for the West Virginia state championship, just like Steubenville’s is a perennial contender for Ohio's.  The stadium was and is huge, and it was often a ton of fun to go to the games. Everyone from town was there, and it was festive and communal and often exciting. Places shut down on Friday nights, and the biggest radio station in the area played all of the games. I liked hearing my friends in the marching band play. Something about being at the games with my friends, bundled up, cheering, and drinking hot chocolate, felt quintessentially wholesome and American.

Of course, at a macro level, very little of it was actually wholesome. The football program took resources away from other sports and other educational programs. The players were treated as heroes, which often led to disappointment for them when high school was over, not to mention bad behavior during high school spurred on by their lionization. The culture of the school was a social pyramid with the players and cheerleaders on the top, with little room in the social stratosphere for the appreciation of those with non-athletic talents. But when the team was winning, we were all in something together, and people were willing to forget the other stuff for that fleeting feeling.

Well, for Steubenville, that fleeting feeling has been eclipsed by a horrifying story. It’s a dark mark on a grey landscape. In the Weirton-Steubenville metro area, the steel mills have all shut down, and the unemployment rate has gone up in the last two years when it’s gone down elsewhere in the country.  The average household income hovers right around 35k a year. High school football, for many, has long been the bright spot on that grey landscape, but now the whole country knows that football simply can’t be its savior.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

One of the best parts of my job is that each spring trimester, I teach a special topic English course to eleventh and twelfth graders. I have been able to choose my topics and build a course from the ground up. My proudest achievement and favorite course to teach is one called Dystopian Literature. This spring I will be offering it for the fourth time, and in the winter I always revisit my curriculum and the texts I will be using. I am pleased to be able to share these books with you, as they are near and dear to my heart.

First is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It serves as our template for what a dystopian novel is and it exhibits the key characteristics of the genre that my students and I work with all trimester. Huxley’s novel is a sort of dystopian ur-novel; it presents a society that seems to be a utopia to almost everyone except our protagonist. But then Huxley flips the script and introduces a second protagonist midway through the book to advance his themes even further. And, the book has some very funny moments. His vision of the future is remarkably prescient, particularly in the realms of media and entertainment (the “feelies,” movies that you can touch, are starting to feel like something that may exist in my lifetime).

Next, we tackle Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid Tale, which may be my favorite book of all time by one of my favorite, if not my favorite, authors. As we read this book, I have the priceless opportunity of putting the novel in context for the students, including introducing them to personages they do not know at all, like Phyllis Schlafly and, much to their wide-eyed entertainment, Tammy Faye Bakker. Atwood’s novel is so chilling, so unsettling, that it rarely fails to captivate the students.  When Atwood writes “We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories,” we are able to discuss the varied levels of autonomy and agency women have had through the years, and the way many women still exist in negative space in certain contexts. I also take great glee in exposing so many young men to Margaret Atwood. I hope some day these young men will grow into men who might one day list the book as a favorite, as Meg dreams of in this piece elsewhere on this site.

Finally, we read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I will not say much about the plot, as if you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, I want you to approach the novel with as clean a mind as possible. The book is full of the restrained longing Ishiguro is famous for (more often known from The Remains of the Day), and presents a dystopian society that most closely resembles our own (and much of it takes place at a boarding school, not unlike where I teach, adding certain moments of “oh!” for the students). It lacks the overt futurism of Brave New World, and more than makes up for it with gorgeous language and emphasis on character.

Two books I use to supplement our work are Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick and Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin. Both present vivid pictures of modern day totalitarian societies with vivid prose. Some of the passages from Nothing to Envy, in particular, parallel eerily with The Handmaid’s Tale, in spite of one being fact and the other fiction and the thirty years that separate the narratives.

On Compulsory Singing

My son is fifteen months old, and for the last six months has been attending a weekly music class. Initially, I wasn’t able to go with him and my wife because of a work-related conflict, but since the summer, all three of us have gone each week. It’s the sort of music class that is prevalent in the US these days---it’s for students aged five and under, and the music is cheery, non-denominational yet diverse, folky stuff. The teacher of our class is a woman a little bit older than I am who is preternaturally cheery and, frankly, charming. There are several rules at music class, however. One is that once class has started, there should be no talking, only singing. This feels incredibly odd when you need to communicate to your co-parent “where is his sippy cup?” or “do you have the tissues?” When banal sentiments are conveyed in song, it inherently makes the singer simultaneously seem and feel ludicrous. I try to pretend that I’m just a character in a new musical about thirty-something parents (penned by Sondheim, of course), and that talking would only jolt the imaginary audience watching my exploits out of the moment.

The second rule of import is that we aren’t allowed to help our children make any of the gestures or do any of the choreographed movements. That’s impeding on their own rate of learning and stifling their inherent creativity. I totally get this! It makes sense---have you ever seen a grown woman try to make a toddler mimic having hands full of bumblebees? It’s farcical. Nonetheless, the need to conform is strong, and I often remind myself not to “help” my son do the motions of songs. Even when I see other kids doing the motions just right, I try to chill out and be cool. It makes me feel like I am one step away from Toddlers and Tiaras.

I am very much not fond of singing in public. I save my singing for the car or when I am alone in the house (What’s my favorite song to belt alone? Thanks for asking, it’s “Stay” by Lisa Loeb and Nine Stories). I was in the chorus in middle school but quit in sixth grade. I went to church camp for years in the summer and never, ever was enthusiastic about all of the singing (trust me, if you have never been to church camp---I’m pretty sure it is 80% singing). At the school where I teach, there are occasional moments of compulsory group singing, and I just fade into myself.

But then I started going to music class. Parents and loved ones of the children are encouraged to sing. Given that this is a rare setting where I am a student and not the teacher in the room, I found myself to be an incredibly compliant student. You want me to sing? About being sad that there’s no more pie? No problem. I am going to when in Rome the heck out of this opportunity. I want my son to try new things! So, I sing. And I make motions. And I leap and sway and use rhythm instruments and sometimes even twirl a scarf. And, truth be told, I love it.

A Back-to-School Tribute

Before each school year begins, I try to center myself. I organize supplies, I write lesson plans, I memorize my schedule. These sort of tasks, however, aren’t enough and I always find myself reflecting on teaching itself, in the broadest possible sense. I came to teaching late. My first foray into a classroom in a role other than student was when I began my graduate program the summer I turned twenty-five. I felt old, and compared to many of my fellow students, I was old. One of the first things we were asked as we began our studies was to think about the teachers who had impacted us and why that was.

It’s a simple question, nearing cliché. For me, it was easy to answer. My high school Latin teacher, Miss Ede Ashworth, made me crave her praise. I was not the sort of student who yearned for a close relationship with a teacher, or to be pushed to my limits, or to be made to cry by a profound lesson a la Dead Poets Society. I was jaded in high school, arrogant about my self-perceived intelligence, and wary of adults, particularly teachers. Miss Ashworth’s skill and style penetrated my overconfidence and my (probably highly-irritating) cynicism. Her brilliance came from being able to do this without my ever feeling as though she was trying to do exactly that.

I should point out here that Miss Ashworth is a highly-lauded teacher, winning awards that have acknowledged and rewarded her preternatural skill in the classroom.  She managed to bring out the best in so many students, and she did it without seeming to modify her approach or system for any individual learners in the room.  This is nearly unheard of in conversations about good teaching where the norm is to consider the diversity of learners in a classroom and differentiate instruction as needed to reach as many students of possible. This was not necessary for Miss Ashworth---like an elite athlete, she was unfazed by changes in routine, student behavior, or fire drills, and managed to execute well every single class period.

She was teaching Latin, a language so regimented that it can turn off even the most academically-minded student. She required us to make flashcards for every single vocabulary word we learned – a requirement I hated because I didn’t feel as though I needed them.  However, other students made great use of flashcards, and I learned later that while I may not have needed to use the flashcards myself, she had cagily instilled in me the discipline of careful review and preparation. This discipline was key to my perseverance while studying Latin in college.

She told us little about herself, leaving an aura of mystery around her that my classmates and I attempted to shatter through the sort of speculation (“do you think Miss Ashworth ever watches television?) usually reserved for elementary school students. She was always impeccably prepared for class, never seemed to be absent, and could be found before and after school for extra help or to answer questions.

When I did my student teaching, my cooperating teacher told me that he believed there were two core qualities that every teacher must have: she should love the subject matter and appreciate the joys and challenges of working with young people. Miss Ashworth’s love for Latin was palpable---she drove us all over the state to participate in the Junior Classical League, and she ran a yearly Foreign Language Week at school that was driven primarily by her sheer enthusiasm. She had us do art projects about the Romans, she had us travel all over the tri-state area to museums to see relevant exhibits, and she made sure that her students took opportunities to share their knowledge of the language with others. And, even more importantly, while she had very high standards for both academic work on behavior, I remember not one moment when she seemed disdainful when we were rowdy, unfocused, or both.

When I was a senior, I was the only student that year to enroll in Advanced Placement Latin. Before the year began, I wondered what it would be like to be in a one-on-one setting. Would it be odd? I was nervous, because part of what Miss Ashworth did so well was treat all of us remarkably warmly, without ever creating too much familiarity. It ended up (unsurprisingly) being the best learning experience of my high school years. Her gentle guidance as I tried to decide which college attend (never saying what I should or should not do) helped steady me. The intensity of the AP curriculum and how desperately I wanted to please her led me to work incredibly hard and reap the rewards.

Thus, as I begin each new school year, I think back to what it was like to be in Miss Ashworth’s classes. I am not yet a fraction of the teacher that she is, and likely never will be, but her example often inspires me to think more critically about how I am approaching both my students and the subject matter. I ask myself what she might do in a particular situation, and I realize now how much work, dedication, and attention to detail went into all of those seemingly effortless lessons. Each time I sneak in explaining a Latin root into one of my classes, I feel the same old excitement that I used to feel in the windowless classroom that she made crackle with language. Although I had no idea at the time that I would ever be a high school teacher, I am forever grateful that I was able to spend forty-eight minutes every day for four years watching her work.

The Kindness of Strangers

I’m never in a hurry to talk to strangers. For example, if I am going into a store, my preference is to dodge the salespeople who aim to greet me on my way in and avoid talking to anyone unless I purchase something. I know people who want to be greeted, but I am not one of those people. If I am greeted, and asked if I would like help, I always say, “no, I’m just looking.”  I respond this way even when I am actually looking for something and I don’t know where to find it. When I worked in retail, I felt like I could spot the people who feel the same as me---the lack of eye contact, the drifting to the side of the store---and I would forego greeting them in a silent show of solidarity. Now that I am a parent, strangers talk to me. Most of it is pretty much okay. Conversations at the playground with other moms hit the same themes (how old? what’s his name? and so on) and are easily ended when one’s child runs too far afield or asks to go on the swings. My son receives a lot of compliments on his general cuteness from strangers, and I know how to gracefully nod and say thank you, or even more cloyingly, tell him to say thank you. Sometimes folks ask questions about him that would be pretty hilarious to ask another adult stranger, but I do my best to give answers that will be found satisfactory while never actually revealing much about us at all.  A woman asks, “does he eat table food?” I answer, “he loves eating!” An older man asks, “Is he a good boy?” and I answer, “look at him!”

I thought about this recently when a friend on Facebook posted a link to the hilarious article “Hello Stranger on the Street, Could You Please Tell Me How To Take Care Of My Baby” by Wendy Molyneux. I read it, chuckled heartily, and took a moment to be grateful that this hadn’t happened to me terribly often in my son’s first year. There was the time when my wife and I were in Target and attempting to adjust his position in the baby carrier on my chest, and a woman stopped and said, “Do you need help, that doesn’t look like it is on right.” I roared to action, as someone who is sleep-deprived and carrying fifteen sweaty pounds on her chest is likely to do, particularly when she feels as though she really does have it under control.  I snapped back that we were fine and, confident in her moral high ground as baby carrier good Samaritan, my foil didn’t back down. The end result was more than a bit of incivility near the denim short display and my having a very frustrated spouse.

But that was nearly a year ago, and as I read the Molyneux piece, I thought about how it hasn’t happened often. I felt grateful to live in the East, where people are generally not overly perky or interested in one another (simply buying milk at the grocery store when I visit my parents in St. Louis makes me feel as though I have walked into another country what with all of the smiles and cheer).

As these stories always go, though, I had become too comfortable.  Too complacent. The three of us went to an art fair along the Hudson River this week. It was a gorgeous day, sunny, and breezy. We had brought our son in his big jogging stroller to be able to navigate over the grass. We lathered him with sunscreen and put on his baseball cap. To enter the fair, we had to go through a little aisle and down a small hill, and I lifted the front wheel of the stroller off of the ground to give myself more maneuverability on the hill.  As we entered the fair, a woman stopped us and said, “Just so you know . . .”

“Just so you know . . .”  It’s pretty rare when someone says “Just so you know . . . that sweater looks awesome on you” or “Just so you know . . . you make the best cole slaw.”  The phrase gave me the perfect amount of pre-processing time. I knew what was coming was going to be infuriating. I stopped the stroller.  I looked at the woman, a little older than my mother, and she said, “as you came down the hill with the stroller tilted, the sun was right in his eyes.”

I wanted to explain that my goal had been for him to never see the sun, never know that the sun existed, live a vampire-like existence of dusk and twilight and now that was ruined, ruined, and I would always think of how she had been the one to bring me the news.

I wanted to explain that we had been planning to spend all afternoon on that small patch of hill (one where everyone was coming and going in a single file all day, and where we were now holding up traffic), but that she was totally right, the angle of the sun made doing that totally impractical.

I wanted to roll my eyes. I wanted to snap back.  I wanted to say, “Are you serious?”

But I didn’t. I smiled and nodded.  I said nothing. She seemed surprised. She looked at me. I looked at her. A moment passed.  She said, “Now though, with the hat, he’s fine.” I nodded again, still smiling. She looked at my son.  She said, “he’s gorgeous.” I smiled, and nodded, and said “thank you.”

We moved on. My wife immediately praised me for keeping my cool. We realized that the power dynamic shifted the second I didn’t say anything in response, forcing her to backtrack to fill the silence. In fact, by the end of the interaction, she seemed embarrassed. In my previous experience of unsolicited parenting advice, I filled all of the potential silence with anger, and ended up feeling terrible. Furthermore, overly engaging with strangers is not something that I do---in anger or in any other situation. Unsurprisingly, being myself worked best, and we walked on, into the shade.

The End of the Summer

TS Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock’s life was “measured out in coffee spoons.” My life has been measured out in back-to-schools. Every year of my life has featured a significant back-to-school transition. Even before I started kindergarten, my family’s routine shifted when my mother, a professor, went back to school. During the three years of my adult life when I was neither in school nor teaching, my wife was working in college student affairs, where the back-to-school season is strenuous, and feels like a marathon. Some of my most distinct memories are back-to-school related. I remember walking with my mother to my first day of kindergarten, and the very cool bag in which I carried my supplies (it featured an applique pencil).  I remember going to my high school before school started to pick up my schedule and walk through it several times so I could master the cavernous layout of the sixties-era monolith.  I will never forget (and I realize that phrase is overused, but in this case, it’s actually true) watching my parents drive away from my college dorm and feeling the strangest combination of feelings---excitement and fear and an intense sadness.  My first day of student teaching created a confusion of feelings.  Being neither teacher nor student left me in a sort of transitory space, and made the day more difficult to process.

Now, as an adult, one who is entering her eighth year of full-time teaching, I no longer find the back-to-school experience particularly momentous. There’s the change in routine, and a new pack of red pens, and new faces in the classroom, but it feels familiar, almost comforting. What is significant now is the end of the summer. It begins right about now as my teaching friends in southern states go back to work and it continues until I begin again right after Labor Day.

Last summer was a blur of parenting a newborn. I remember little beyond being exhausted and sometimes stopping for ice cream when we put the baby in the car to coax him to sleep through the rhythm of the driving. In a way, it was refreshing to know I could do no more than simply tend to him and my wife. That often meant that a day’s big accomplishment was picking up groceries or cleaning the bathroom.

This summer, however, I had plans. Yet, much like every summer, the season is winding down and I feel as though I have accomplished little of those plans. I’ve read books, but not as many as I’d like. My son and I have gone on many wonderful outings, but there have also been days when weather or timing have prevented us from doing anything memorable. Work, which should have felt far away, has encroached on my leisure through e-mails, the occasional meeting, and the fact that a teacher’s job is never done---there are always lessons to be tweaked or new texts to be considered.

It’s easy to let August turn into a Month of Regret. I ask myself what I could have done differently to feel more accomplished.   I try to carve out moments to satisfy my leisure goals while beginning to prepare things for my classes. I watch women’s Olympic soccer for the sake of both enjoyment and procrastination. Soon, it’s mid-August, and then it’s the end, and the whole month I feel a creeping sense of frustration. In June, the summer feels wide open. It’s freedom!  I know many teachers think of it as a “freedom from.” It’s a break from the early mornings, the capriciousness of young people, the grading, the planning. I try to remember that a teacher’s summer really is a “freedom to.” I want to grab the freedom to do more things than are reasonably possible, and it is that optimism in June that causes regret in August. In a way, it’s no different than how I felt as a child. The summer wanes, and real life presents itself again. It is bittersweet, but it comes with the season, and feels as familiar to me as the changing of the leaves.

On Narrative and Country Music

My son took his first unassisted steps this week. It was pretty amazing, particularly because he took them while giggling hysterically. We had to buy him big boy shoes, and once we got home and he was toddling around in them, there were tears. I try not to be too much of a sentimommy, (that’s sentimental + mommy, I think I just coined it) boring people with maudlin stories; however, seeing him in those shoes walking on his own made me flash back to a year ago this time when he was a writhing, yelping, mess of a baby. When my son was brand new, I spent a decent amount of time alone in the car with him. Often, when he woke at dawn (or just before), I would whisk him out of the house to try and foster an hour of two of uninterrupted quiet for my wife to sleep.  If the weather was nice, we often went somewhere to take a nice walk, but if it was too hot or rainy, we just drove around a bit.

I found myself one morning listening to the “today’s hit country” station on the satellite radio. I have never had a strong feeling about country music one way or another. I’m from West Virginia, so it’s always been around, but it’s not the first genre of music I choose (I do, however, have strong opinions about people who say “I like all music except country” because it’s a coded statement about rural people, the same way I dislike “I like all music except rap” because it is a coded statement about urban people). All of that said, I have a trivia maven’s knowledge of country music. I know who major stars are, I can identify certain key songs, but I am by no means a fan.

Last summer, though, I went all country all the time.  When my wife asked me what the deal was, I had a hard time coming up with an answer. Part of it was having something new and different to listen to. For a period of time, every single song I heard was new to me (which lasted about a week before I could easily identify which songs were in heavy rotation). But, more significantly, so many of the songs had actual narratives. Stories! Country music has always been known for its stories, and while it’s not true for every song, it seemed to be true for many.  I followed each narrative to its end, and in a time when I couldn’t often find a moment to finish a magazine article, much less a book, it was a little bit of comfort at a chaotic time.

I began to discover recurring themes and motifs, much like I am always asking my students to do. Last summer there were several different songs getting a ton of airplay that made passionate arguments in favor of back roads rather than the interstates. Multiple songs name-checked Hank Williams (both senior and junior).  One made fun of men who eat sushi, drive Priuses, and drive on the interstate. In the bleary-eyed days of early motherhood, I threw myself into music that I can’t say represents much of my worldview.

Except for one thing---my worldview does value narrative. A story, even one told in under four minutes that I can’t personally relate to, can be truly transformative. Sleep-deprived and at times overwhelmed, I was soothed by the narrative structure of country music. I hazard that there is no other genre of American music that conveys as many narratives as country music (somehow, Katy Perry’s story of “Last Friday Night” doesn’t have the same push and pull of plot as, say, Martina McBride’s song about breast cancer, “I’m Gonna Love You Through It”).

One day, about five months later, I realized I had stopped listening to the country channel and had gone back to my old stations. My acute need for narrative had passed somehow. Maybe it was because I was more rested, maybe because I was about to go back to my day job of teaching high school English, but it passed. I listen to some of the songs from that time, but more because they remind me of the early days with my son than because I really enjoy the songs. I’m grateful for the solace that country’s narratives brought to me. Oh, and for introducing me to Miranda Lambert’s “Baggage Claim.”  That one is just a great song.

On Inequality

The night before my son was born, my wife and I were in the hospital at the beginning of a very long process. It was June 24, 2011, and the New York state legislature was preparing for a vote on a bill that would legalize same-sex marriage in our adopted home state. The timing was pretty remarkable. My wife and I have been married since 2008, when our immediate families joined us at City Hall in Toronto, Ontario for our wedding. It was a funny limbo to live in, to be married in Canada, but not at home in New York. When we drove into Massachusetts, and said “married!” it often caused us to chuckle darkly. It’s weird enough to be able to buy beer in grocery stores in one state and not another, but to have your own family status legally change based on state boundaries is beyond weird.

The vote in the legislature was going to be close, and both of us had contacted our state senator, Steven Saland, a Republican, to state our hopes that he would vote for equality. In fact, I had called that very day while my wife packed up the last of her things for the hospital. I felt as though he might not even believe me, leaving a voice mail saying, “I’d like my son to be born to two married parents and you could make this happen.”

Of course, the ending of this story is well known.  The bill did in fact pass, and Senator Saland was one of the swing votes. His wife of forty-six years, according to him, “certainly lobbied him,” reported the New York Daily News. How fitting that my marriage was legally recognized partially because of the bond and influence within another marriage?

The moment when the bill passed, as we were up late in the hospital room felt almost ethereal.  Our son was about to enter the world at a remarkable moment in history, and not just History-with-a-capital-H but in our personal history. It felt fated, and I don’t feel that way very often, but even my cynicism couldn’t deny a certain sense of destiny.

Now that a year has passed, however, I no longer feel the blissful surprise of the legislature’s decision. I’m not satisfied with feeling as though I only have a handful of states in this country I can ever live in, with so many others officially off limits (I’m not taking that particular step backward). I realize how quickly this year passed and I know that the years will keep flying by and soon my son will have questions.

There’s no easy way to explain inequality. Why do some people have so much and others so little? Why do women still not make as much money as men for the same jobs? I teach Elie Wiesel’s Night to tenth graders every year and there’s always at least one who asks, “but why?” as the concept of a Jewish ghetto is introduced.  I have honed an answer to that question over time, but it never feels convincing. How will I explain to my son that our state sees us as a family, but our country does not?

I suppose I could show him all of the various tax returns that we had to have prepared: separate federal returns (which mean that my wife, in the eyes of the federal government, is a single mother), a joint “dummy” federal return to inform state returns, and a joint New York return.  I could explain that many people have had to endure a lack of family equality for as long as the United States has existed. We could talk about the Loving v. Virginia decision that will likely inform any decision the Supreme Court makes on the issue.

Fortunately for me, our little boy is not yet concerned with such things, not when there is water to splash and trucks to make go “vroom-vroom.” Someday, though, he will be. I am grateful to Governor Cuomo and New York’s lawmakers for validating our family and setting an example for the rest of the country, but I hope that this inequality, one that is anathema to what I believe to be “American,” is rectified before today’s children are adults who are appalled by the generations before.

The Surprising Joy of Inadequacy

When I began my first semester of college, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what I wanted to study, and I remember when it came time to register for classes I felt pretty lost. I knew I would be taking Latin; Bryn Mawr had a pretty weighty language requirement and I had taken four years of Latin in high school. I had to take a required freshman writing seminar that all new students took, but that left two class slots wide open. My high school education had been very traditional and middle of the road. I went to college not even knowing what anthropology was, for example. I took some great classes in high school, including AP offerings in both Latin and Economics, but overall, I would say that the program offered at my high school, while solid, was not dynamic.

I had gone to a state-run educational camp for two summers while in high school (three weeks at a local college, all expenses paid for everyone, a pretty amazing thing looking back) and one year I had done creative writing. So, that first semester, I enrolled in Introduction to Writing Poetry. I didn’t think I’d make it into the course as Creative Writing offerings were notorious for being popular and oversubscribed, with priority going to juniors and seniors. When I received my schedule, though, there it was.

I figured this would be pretty straightforward. I had written some poetry at camp, and it had been well enough received.  While in high school, I hadn’t really read any poetry at all, saving old standards like William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” which I remember enduring in AP English. Nonetheless, I figured I would be set.

I realized immediately that I was thoroughly mistaken. The other fourteen young women in the class were not there because they couldn’t think of anything else to register for. They were there because they loved poetry. They had written oodles of poems and read even more. Before class even started, they were swapping favorite poets, most of whom I didn’t know at all. It was frightening and intimidating. I am not entirely sure why I stayed in the course, but I think my main reason for staying was that it had been such a surprise to be enrolled, I didn’t want to give up this stroke of “luck.”

I struggled. I did all of the assignments and I did them carefully. I began to pick up the lingo and learn how to function in a workshop environment, and I do think I offered my classmates the occasional trenchant critique. That said, I did not write good poems. I couldn’t think of things to write about, let alone “wordsmith” as we were encouraged to do. The poem of mine that was best received in workshop was built thematically around a life experience that I had never even had, making me feel as though I was thumbing my nose at the confessional poets I had come to love like Sexton and Lowell.  I felt like a minor leaguer, a lost child, a flop. I ended up with a slightly above average grade, but there was no sense that I had done any work that semester to really remember.

In that class, though, I met some absolutely amazing women whose talent was evident and crackled around them like radio static. They ranged in age (Bryn Mawr has a program for students of “non-traditional” age), race, socioeconomic class, geographic background, and sexual orientation. In some ways, that class was a little microcosm of the community as a whole. The professor was kindly and warm, but not at all mincing. She didn’t patronize, but she wasn’t cruel.

I should have left that class demoralized. I didn’t distinguish myself at all, and it was one of many experiences at Bryn Mawr that left me feeling as though I didn’t measure up. So, what did I do? I enrolled in the follow-up course Advanced Poetry Writing the next semester. I was never going to be much of a poet, but I was not going to let the opportunity of spending more time in that challenging, electric environment pass me by. True, I didn’t break any new poetic ground in the next course.  I didn’t earn a fantastic grade. I sometimes felt silly and I sometimes felt stupid. Even in those moments, though, I felt supported and I felt inspired.

That sort of environment is rare and, I believe, a force of nature. It can’t really be created. A good teacher can facilitate the possibility of such camaraderie, but it takes many things coming together in a specific way for what I felt to happen (and, to be fair, I can’t say if everyone in the room felt the same way, although I suspect many did). The power of people (and in this case, women) creating art together (even if some of it is amateurish) should never be underestimated.

Ode to House Hunters

I wouldn’t call myself particularly design-oriented. I appreciate good design and good aesthetics, but I’m not oft-inspired to do anything I would call “design” at my home beyond being sure that I can see my alarm clock from my side of the bed. That said, I love HGTV. That’s Home and Garden Television if you are not familiar. I came to HGTV slowly. As a teen, my mother occasionally watched their shows, but I was resistant to the appeal. I would never make my own headboard---why should I watch someone else do it? Never mind that I will never be a 1960s ad man nor a police detective and I happily watch shows about those enterprises.

At some point in the last decade, it all changed. Was it that I matured, became an adult, and suddenly had an interest in the aesthetics of my abode? Absolutely not. What changed was the introduction of House Hunters to the channel. House Hunters is addictive and infuriating. It has a simple rhythm, not unlike Law and Order, that is soothing and anesthetic.  House Hunters allows me, from the comfort of my couch, to judge the interiors of stranger’s homes.  I find this remarkably relaxing.

Each episode is structured in the exact same way. Viewers accompany potential house buyers on visits to three different potential homes. The prospective buyers walk around the homes, commenting on what they like and don’t like. Sometimes the prospective buyers affect the episode minimally. They want granite countertops and open concepts and are pretty bland. On other occasions the prospective buyers can be absurdly demanding, and it can be fun watching their dreams of finding a four-bedroom house for under two hundred thousand dollars dissolve. Schadenfreude is a key component of watching House Hunters. Aristotle said that good tragedy must have spectacle, and the best episodes include the spectacle of dreams dashed or the buyers being shown a short sale house that was clearly trashed by some combination of frat boys and rabid beavers.

On occasion, the prospective buyers are people I want to root for. They seem friendly and intelligent and just want a place where they can grow some plants or have a baby.  Or, they realize that they will have to pay more for the neighborhood they really want to live in and they accept it and take the plunge. This can be satisfying as well, but not necessarily cathartic for the viewer.

Often there’s a semi-manufactured conflict in the episode. It might be a conflict between spouses, an adult child house hunting with parents who aren’t ready for their child to grow up, or a newly-divorced middle aged woman looking to start over. I accompanied my wife to a professional conference once and we saw a gentleman there whom we recognized. We saw him from afar and couldn’t remember his name and then we realized, “Oh, right, it’s that guy from House Hunters who lived in Knoxville who mocked his wife’s interest in Feng Shui!”

Regardless of the manufactured conflict of the episode, the viewer is led through three homes. Sometimes there are murals. Sometimes there are dolls. Sometimes there are words on the wall (you know what I mean, things like “The food here is seasoned with love” in the kitchen. I loathe words on the wall).  On every third episode, there’s a man demanding space for a “man cave” where he can watch football and not have to interact with his family, and everyone around him treats him like this is appropriate, totally ignoring the fact that “man cave” is just “cave man” backwards. All of these are targets for disdain. I know that when I have stored up disdain from a rough week at work, I can simply spend twenty-two minutes with House Hunters to release it upon unwitting strangers.

There are HGTV purists who decry the fact that the network’s programming consists mainly of real estate-related shows, including many House Hunters copycats. They miss the emphasis on design and home improvement. I’ll admit, the joys of House Hunters are only tangentially related to the concepts of “home and garden.” Not unlike MTV forgoing music videos in favor of teen mothers, and the History Channel forgoing history in favor of pawn shop proprietors, HGTV knows where the ratings lie, and it’s with They Who Love to Judge (while often in pajama pants). I am not necessarily proud of being a part of that demographic, but at least I know I am not alone.

Memories of Freedom

I am the product of small towns. As a fourth grader, in Vincennes, Indiana, I rode my bicycle to school every day. Vincennes is a flat town of under twenty thousand residents and I lived in a neighborhood that was a straightforward grid. I rode three blocks down Twelfth Street and two blocks over on Wabash Avenue. This was fully allowed by the school; it was a K-6 school and bike riding was permitted when students were in fourth grade or above. I loved it. At the time I had a Huffy “Desert Rose” bicycle, which featured a fuchsia color scheme that was all the rage in 1988. There were bike racks at the school and I would ride there in the morning, chain my bike to the rack using my neon orange combination lock, and at the end of the day retrieve it to ride home. I have no idea what, if any, doubts my parents had about allowing this. I do know that I remember the experience with remarkable, visceral fondness.

One day, while riding home, I was knocked off my bike by an older (probably sixth grade) boy on his bike. It was an isolated incident of totally random meanness. I told my parents about it, and, if memory serves, my father went to talk to his parents. While I remember this incident, the sort of thing many parents might fear happening, it is but a blip in the experience of being allowed to ride my bike to school.

I was reminded of this when I read an article in Bicycling Magazine about a controversy in Saratoga Springs, NY.  In spite of rising obesity rates, and environmental concerns, many schools prohibit students from riding bikes because of safety and liability concerns. The article reported that “one British study found that over the course of four generations, the distance that eight-year-old children in one family (the Thomases of Sheffield, England) were allowed to roam from home had shrunk from 6 miles (for great-grandfather George in 1926) to one mile (for grandfather Jack in 1950) to half a mile (for mother Vicky in 1979) to 300 yards (for son Ed in 2007).”

I read the article weeks ago and I keep returning to that statistic. Many of my fondest memories from my childhood involve “exploring” with friends, either on bikes or on foot. When my family moved to Bethany, West Virginia, in 1989, I found myself in a college town with no traffic lights, no gas station, virtually no traffic, and a coterie of fellow professors’ kids with whom to ramble around. Summer often involved four or five of us in the woods, finding crayfish in the creek, or playing an elaborate version of nighttime hide and seek we called “flashlight war.” I remember distinctly the day we decided to “ride our bikes to Pennsylvania,” and while it was only a three-mile ride, the thrill of crossing a state line all by ourselves has never left me.

How do I provide my son with these experiences? Is it possible in 2012, to give kids this sort of freedom? Are such idyllic experiences only feasible in small towns? As a parent, I feel like every decision we make about our son’s welfare is complicated and fraught. “Does the store have organic bananas today? Is he too heavy to use his jumper any more? The weather is cool and humid – does he need a sweatshirt?”  This isn’t even beginning to touch the big issues that cause rifts among even the best of friends like the never-ending debates over breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and so on.

I remember one day when I was probably about twelve years old. I went out into the woods that framed our yard in West Virginia. I was by myself. I probably was never more than a thousand yards or so from my house. I had no cell phone, no GPS. I went wandering, and I stumbled upon two trees that had grown towards each other creating an arch of sorts. I stood, mouth agape, astounded by the way these two trees framed an area of wildflowers just beyond. Romantically, and tapping into my inner Anne Shirley, I dubbed it “the gateway to beauty.” It was a remarkable sight, and I believed (and in a way still do believe) that I was the only person who had ever seen it.  I went back days later and couldn’t find it again, but the memory lingers ethereally and has for twenty years.

Is there space for that sort of moment in a world where kids aren’t left alone “outside” very often? Even though I was really very close to my house, I felt like I was on another planet. Would I still have felt that way with an iPhone in my pocket?

I want my son to have these experiences, but I realize that these memories were not hyper-orchestrated by my parents. They bought me a bike, they let me ride it, they trusted me to come home again, and they trusted the environment enough to let me go. I hope I will be able to do the same for my son, even though the culture has shifted.

Mom Space

I am a mom. But I occupy a funny space in the world of moms. My wife, Lauren, gave birth to our son in June 2011, mere hours after same-sex marriage was approved by our state legislature here in New York, legitimizing our Canadian marriage just in time for the two of us to become three. For all of her pregnancy, I was there. For doctor’s appointments, doula hiring, birthing classes, and of course the birth itself, I never left her side. For some of these things, my compatriots were dads. At the special buffet room in the hospital for new parents, I joined dads filling up plates to bring to the new mothers. At the birthing classes, I tried swaddling the baby doll at the same time as all the dads. In many of these situations, it didn’t feel odd at all. I was the parent-not-giving-birth, along with many others. So what if I was the only woman in that little group?

When we came home from the hospital, though, it felt different. The world of parenting media is clearly demarcated. There are “mommy blogs” and “dad blogs.” Parenting magazines may aim to reach all parents, but their content is clearly aimed toward mothers, ignoring the prospect that a father might want to spend time reading about being a parent. At the beginning of our son’s life, most of the decisions we were making on a regular basis circled around breastfeeding, and I often felt helpless as my wife and son struggled to find their groove, but also strangely empathetic in a distinctly feminine way.

There was some commiserating I could do with other dads, but the general tone of their observations had a certain masculinity with which I couldn’t keep up.  I didn’t have to go back to work immediately like many dads I know. After Lauren’s parental leave was over, I took mine (grateful to my employer for being flexible about when I took my leave, and for treating me like the equal parent I am). I spent close to three months as the primary caregiver during the day, often tooling around the mall or local parks wearing Hank in a carrier, proud as a peacock, but also feeling like I was masquerading as a mom. Being a mom felt simultaneously deeply natural and deeply odd. What was I to do with all I had heard from moms talking about the transcendence of giving birth? What was I to do with all of talk about the bonding that breastfeeding brings? Dads presumably can’t fully understand these things either, but I have never felt like dad, not for one second.

At times it felt like a performance of sorts, as though I were performing motherhood rather than inhabiting it. I do not feel this way at all about parenthood, I have felt like a parent from the second I knew the baby was coming. I prepared for it intellectually and emotionally, and I have embraced the responsibility, joy, and challenges as fully as anyone. Yet, as Mother’s Day approached, I felt a strange sensation. Lauren and I approach parenting as an equal enterprise, from being up together in the middle of the night, to coming up with elaborate schedules to share housework as best we can. Nonetheless, her role as the mom who was pregnant, gave birth, and nurses our son is so preternaturally maternal, on a day like Mother’s Day, it’s hard to know how best to carve out space for who I am as a parent.

After spending a lovely Mother’s Day having brunch, going to a park, and playing in the sunshine, I realized: she is Mommy, and I am Mama. As our son nears his first birthday, I am doing my best to reject the constraints of nomenclature and simply be Mama, and all that means. Mama is usually the first one to hear when Hank wakes up, and Mama feeds Hank dinner, and Mama and Hank watch baseball together. It is in these moments that terminology is wholly irrelevant, and family just is.