A Walk in the Park

in which I get into my own dog fight

Our first day in the city upon return from New Hampshire is often tense. The senses quickly forget how to filter the onslaught. Confined spaces drive little boys into frenetic states, like a gas under compression. The best cure is always a walk in the park.

Yesterday was Monday, Day 1 back in Brooklyn, back to school for D-man and work for Daddy. Distractions from necessary tasks (eat, get dressed, make lunches) included: The Tooth Fairy's first delivery ($5) and Chess (a theoretical match between Duncan and Reeve in which Duncan makes the moves for both parties, magnanimously allowing Reeve to win every now and then to keep him interested). At last, Jordy and Duncan got out the door to the subway for school/work. Time to walk the dog.

Suiting up for a dog walk is not a simple process. First, one must configure the no-pull contraption on the dog, whose poor old hips are likely to splay out in the process. Then one must dress Reeve in parka and helmet for riding scooter. Then one must affix baby to back, which requires months of yoga training to perform back-bend on couch to secure straps before springing upright with confidence that baby will not fly off. Getting out the door is a Three Stooges routine, the stooges being Me (with Papoose), Reeve, and Wiley T. Dog, in which our efforts to circumambulate strollers in the front hall leads to entanglement by dog leash. We unwind ourselves, make it as far as the front porch and down to the sidewalk when I realize I've forgotten plastic bags. I coax the 3-year old back up to the porch while I race inside, get bags, then down and off we go.

The trash trucks have just passed, so the sidewalk is a slalom course of garbage can tops. Reeve weaves deftly among them on his scooter; I step on one and nearly go over, but regain my balance. We reach the end of the street, whereupon Reeve requests mittens. A Reeve request is not negotiable, and what kind of lousy mother makes her child go bare-knuckled when she herself has gloves, so back we go, in and around garbage tops, hook dog to the fence, back up the stairs, get the mittens, and back out for take 3.

Let it be said: Wiley T. loves trash. Its absence (as in rural New Hampshire) makes his heart grow only fonder. Despite a hearty breakfast at the house, this morning he lunges lustily at every possible scrap. If it's a napkin or paper towel, I let him have it. If it's foil, he will sometimes reject it. (The dog has standards.) This morning he rejects nothing. In broad view of Billy the Whippit-Sniffer and the merchants opening shops, I must wrestle a cigarette box out of his mouth, but his locked jaws require me to straddle his body. Tucker must find this amusing as he finds himself upside down on my back. Meanwhile, Reeve on his scooter whizzes up to Farrell's Bar where he will wait for me, though concerned passers-by don't share my confidence and yell both at him and me.

Somehow we survive the traffic circle, street cleaners and garbage trucks and all -- pteradactyls in Wiley's dog brain, requiring vicious defense. At last we enter the park and I take a deep breath. The sun streams through the bare limbs. The last of autumn's splendor has fallen during our absence, and we are returned to the capacious views all the way up the Great Meadow to the museum. Wiley hunkers down and drops a poop beside the magnolia tree, an odd poop no doubt from all the odd scraps we gave him over Thanksgiving. Nonetheless, our mission is now accomplished and the rest of this walk will be, simply, a walk in the park.

Baby, Wiley and I walk twenty paces when Reeve goes down. "Carry me." I look back at the boy sitting on his scooter. I tell him I can't possibly carry him, a logic that holds no interest for him. "I want a gwown-up to carry me!!" he demands. I offer to carry his scooter and let him walk. No go. I confess I resort to the, "Bye Bye!" trick of walking off. It works. He catches up with us on his scooter like a shot, and I'm relieved. We pause for one fatal moment to let Wiley roll around in the fallen ginko leaves (which I will pay for later in sour stench), and Reeve goes down again. "Carry me!" It turns out that analysis of regressive behaviors is of very little use for convincing a three-year old to walk or scoot home. I was stuck. Had to resort to the "Bye-bye" technique again, which feels exploitative at best, but it worked. We made it back out to the street where Reeve wanted to stop and "warm up" on a bench in the sun. Having no appointments to keep, I agreed.

Reeve produced a lizard from his pocket, green and rubbery. As the lizard crawled and flew among the slats of the bench, Wiley took an interest in something buried under the fallen leaves. I spaced out for a critical millisecond in which Wiley got the coveted item in his jaws. At first I could see only yellow cardboard. Let him have it, I thought. But then as he worked on it I heard a familiar jangle -- the sound screws make in a little plastic package from the hardware store. I have experience authorizing (and paying for) surgery to remove a lethal doorpost from an animal's intestine. My mind raced forward to the X-Ray of Wiley's gut, screw shrapnel every where. I could hear my dear husband, who tolerates all these animals I take in off the street, reasonably weighing the cost of Wiley's surgery, no doubt with slim chances of survival, against tuition and taxes. There was no time to waste.

Like John Wayne leaping on his steed to catch escaping Indians, I throw myself onto Wiley again. My urgency must have told him this was a treasure worth fighting for; he no doubt thought I wanted to eat it myself. He dug his heals in, writhing left and right to avoid my grasping arms. Baby must have felt like he was riding two bucking broncos. Reeve and his lizard ceased from their adventures to watch the epic battle. But I would not be defeated. Yank his mouth open, I did, and toss box of screws beyond the fence of the park. "Time to go home," I panted.

Weaving between parked cars to cross Prospect Park Southwest without a crosswalk, four mortals and a scooter made the passage without getting hit by a bus. Reeve declared he was miserably cold, though he resisted my logical encouragement to "walk faster" in order to get home "sooner." (Lizard was busy checking out each wrought-iron fence post along the way.) Ahead my Doggie-Radar honed in on a large one on approach with an owner on a cellphone. My cortisol spiked a bit -- inattentive owners may not notice how I hold my own dog on a short leash to the side as they pass. She might think nothing of letting her dog run out for a quick butt sniff greeting with Wiley, but Wiley T. can be unpredictable on a leash. As I huddled with Wiley to the side, gauging the in-coming canine's trustworthiness in relation to Reeve, now alone at a significant distance behind us, lo and behold, Wiley starts to take a second dump. I wait a beat to clean it up to let the dog pass to a safe distance. I begin untying a plastic bag from my retractable leash when-

"Don't let your dog poop on my yard!!!" At first I cannot identify the source of the shrill voice. I am totally confused. I look down at the non-descript 3 foot-by-3 foot patch of dirt permitted in this New York City sidewalk for a tree, where I have just removed all traces of canine feces. Is she speaking to someone else? Then I see her, an older lady on a ladder behind a thicket. She was cleaning her windows, or else on high -altitude border patrol. "You are disrespecting my property! You have to stop that dog, and I mean it! These dogs ruin my yard!"

My heart rate leaps to about 300 bpm. This lady picked a fight with the wrong little Mamma. I lunge right back at her. "I am cleaning up after my dog. That is the law. This is a public sidewalk, not a yard!"

"This is my yard, and you are disrespecting! You have to take that animal to the park!"

"We just returned from the park where he went poop!" (Am I really shouting these words to a perfect stranger?) "And while we're on the topic, you shouldn't let your dog sit at this chain link fence barking and intimidating my children and other dogs!"

Which is true. We have been ambushed a number of times when passing this house without noticing the sleeping dog behind the chain link fence. Like dog like owner.

"I cleaned up after my dog, that's the law!" And we walk away. Wiley's and my heads down. Receding behind us -- "It's my private property and I'll do what I want! You can't just let your dog poop wherever he wants! ... No respect! ... Ruining my yard! ... My dog has a right to bark at whoever he wants! ... No respect! ... Woof woof woof! Woof woof! ... Woof woof!"

"Professional" Parenthood - Take 2

Dear readers, I thank you for wading into the riptide-laden waters of topic:parenthood on the last entry. If you will bear with me once more, I'd like to try again. This time I will drop the ruse and get more directly to my point.

I bet historians would verify that parenting small children has never been the most relaxing stage of life. (I think of Abigail Adams administering small pox puss on the blade of a knife to her own children, praying they will develop immunity rather than perish.) However, I want to make the case that our generation finds itself in a particular squeeze because, among other forces, we inherited a culture that does not value the work of parenting highly.

Because it's as hard to "see" our own culture as to see the air we breathe, it's helpful to encounter parents of other cultures who approach the role otherwise. I get this chance on a small scale when I drop my kids at preschool. There I've had the chance to befriend several orthodox Jewish women. They view their work as mothers as nothing less than fulfilling God's commandment; the children they bring into the world, raised well, will help deliver the Messiah, the final era of peace. I imagine this confidence in their mission must help when babies don't sleep or children quarrel: The task to guide new little people toward good and purposeful lives is the foundation of the culture and the bedrock of its survival. The secular world can make easy mockery of this sense of divine purpose, or criticize the strict gender roles that come with it. I would rather choose to take inspiration and figure out how to infuse it into the secular world.

So how does the secular world value parenting? With anxious consumerism, apparently. A number of cultural commentators such as Judith Warner and Erica Jong offer similar theories -- generally, that our generation of "organic-food obsessed" parents (especially mothers) are trying to achieve "perfection" in our roles as a "defense" against the forces of the world that feel "out of control," and that as a result we are riddled with "anxiety". I understand the book PARENTING, INC. (which I haven't yet read) makes the case that our generation is prey to corporate profiteers who make billions on our insecurity from such quack goods as Baby Einstein DVDs. Another band of commentators call us the generation "that doesn't want to grow up."

Hm. I'm interested in the words "control" and "defense" and "anxiety". I am not convinced that the world is a more dangerous place than it ever has been. Perhaps what is more dangerous now, however, is simply the fact of sticking your neck out to become a parent. Our parents' generation broke the mold of traditional parenting, but we haven't yet agreed what a better one looks like. So we are trying to reinvent the airplane while flying it - and taking a few surface-to-air missles in the process, often from each other.

From what I see, most of us are striving to be conscientious - not perfect - parents in a confusing time and place. Where there are two parents, most couples seem to be trying to balance parenting roles between the spouses more evenly than in the past, even when one (more often the mother, but not always) takes time off to parent full-time. We are trying to build on the best of what our mother's generation bled for -- more career options, equal pay, removal of judgment on women who work -- and take it to the next level, to share parenting roles more equally. But we are far from finding a peaceful equilibrium, with discontent more often turning inward toward self, spouse, kids than outward to our culture, where "family values" are claimed by a fundamentalist right and the rest of us are left, in the other great American tradition, to go it alone.

A working hypothesis: this belittlement of the value of parenting is the price we pay for advances made for women toward the outside working world a generation ago. Most employers do little to help new families; weakened extended family networks don't, or can't, do much either. Add the pundits making careers of critiquing the way we parent, then subtract the church or other religious belief systems that uphold the centrality of the job, and parenting can indeed feel like a sentimental exercise in folly. Also, the beautiful price many women pay for higher education is heightened expectations for career advancement, which most of my friends have discovered is unachievable -- even with great, supportive partners -- without paying the price of feeling like one hasn't been the parent one wants to be. Or for those who postpone the career, there is a gnawing feeling of professional inadequacy without the counter-balancing sense of achievement on the family front -- because, we learned, we mustn't "count" our work there or derive identity on the homefront lest we get stuck in that ghetto. Who wouldn't feel anxious?

The result, I fear, is that we are too often overwhelmed, distracted, discontented to respond as calmly and creatively as we might to what children, being children, bring up; moreover, we miss out on too many of the pearls our wee ones are offering us. Why? This state of mind is not dictated, in my observation, by whether one works outside the home or not; it's a pervasive stress on young families. Parenting tiny ones productively takes enormous emotional and physical energy, which is in too short supply because of the many other demands on our attention. (See NYTimes: "When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays" 11/15/10) It also requires a learning curve that we often miss. Instead of giving little ones the protected space to live in their Time, we push them to hurry up into ours because we feel like we have to -- a loss for everyone who bypasses a fascinating bug or doesn't stop to hear how the snow crunches under boots.

Our pre-verbal children absorb not only the words we use, but the tone and intention with which we use them, as we've learned to our horror in our house when they come back at us later! (Once again, see NYTimes "Ability Seen in Toddlers to Judge Others' Intent" 11/16/10). The earliest years are a precious and scarce time when not only is a child discovering who he/she is, but families are discovering who they are. We can accept that this is just "the way it is" in the early years, but couldn't it be better? When I float on my lotus blossom and consult the Dalai Lama, he smiles patiently and reminds me, "You and I and all beings were each other's mothers in previous incarnations." The whole karmic evolution of compassion in the universe depends on the experience of being a mother! It must be a job worth doing well.

My playful proposal to MPa/PaD degrees for parents of small children has attracted outstanding critiques that reveal the point more plainly: Do we want academic institutions judging our parenting performances? No. Do we need added academic requirements atop our stretched schedules and psyches? Definitely not. To the extent I have a serious intent, it is to give "credit" for the parenting as it happens and recognize role models in the field in order to do for the secular world what a religious culture does reflexively: To sanctify the work of making families and help us find ways to do it better.

Herein lies the poorly played joke: Graduate and Professional schools are modern secular temples where the upwardly mobile seek instruction and accept evaluation; invest money, time and effort in exchange for "credit"; and reach a place of standing in the economy and society. It is the final preparation for a productive, fulfilling professional life. The word "professional," afterall, comes from "profess," meaning to declare one's religious devotion." Parenthood lacks an equivalent preparation and elevated standing -- and yet what work requires more patience, knowledge, wisdom, giving, and commitment to the world beyond oneself?

My immodest proposal is that we declare the value of being as "good" (not perfect, not moralistic, but patient, loving, present) parents as we can be without making any apologies; we demand that our economy re-shape itself to pace careers more humanely, both for parents and young kids alike; and that we challenge our critics to come up with something encouraging to say about our efforts or creative to do on our behalf - or else stuff it!

While I've been writing, I could hear my neighbor through the wall rocking out on his guitar to the screaming delight of his two-year old. It must be Tuesday, his day "off" from "work" to take care of his son. Seems like a pretty holy way to spend a day to me.

MPa/PaD - or the Case for Professionalizing Parenthood

Any other parents out there with young children feel any stress? Ever feel like you're doing the hardest job you've ever had with no pay check, no promotions? If you've taken time off to parent, do you stress about your options upon re-entering the "work force"? (loss of position, loss of pay, loss of options?) Ever feel like you should be enjoying life more than you are?

A team of world-class mathematicians came up with the following equation:

Contentment with Life = 1/(Financial responsibilities x [# of Children/Ages] x Principal owed on mortgage) + (Career Ambition/Frustration) + (Spousal Delight/Frustration x Expectations/Reality of Parenting Roles) + (Joy in Time with Kids/Ambivalence+Confusion about Value of Parenting)

In my playground poll of our generation, our scores are pretty low right about now. This is not good for us or our kids and begs the question, why is it so? Some people call this period "the tunnel" - very young children, financial stress, marriages strained. We are the first generation of parents whose own parents divorced at a rate of 50%, most of them in the first 9 years of their marriages -- i.e. when they were "in the tunnel." We were going to study and avoid their mistakes. Wait longer to marry. Pick better partners. Share the loads of work/family more evenly. Etc. But as my older sister reports from the front lines of Parenting Adolescents, a lot of our marriages are cracking up too.

Not that the fate of a marriage is driven solely by the stress of parenting, but there is mounting evidence that it's a -- if not the -- major force. And not that the success of a marriage is the sole factor in determining a happy life, though there is mounting evidence that it does -- on average -- make people happier. My purpose is not to save marriages, or even assume partnership (married or not) as necessary for raising a family. I am just pointing to the strain on marriage as further evidence of how hard it is to parent young children.

An obvious solution: Stop procreating. There are many intelligent people who have chosen this path with great results. I couldn't have made that choice for myself, and I think even those happy child-free couples agree that we need some suckers to keep falling for the baby trap if we want Future Workers to support the Social Security System and perpetuate the race. So we've got to figure this thing out.

First, a quick survey of some of what's wrong with Parenthood in America according to Me:

* Right now, we treat parenthood as if it were an extra-curricular activity, something to take up after a full day of work like you might Squash or Photography lessons. Our maternity leave policies are barbaric, paternity leave worse to non-existent. We internalize this economic paradigm, as if somehow we should fit all the effort of building a family into the M-F 6-7:30pm and Sat/Sunday slots. This is absurd. Building a family well requires more time and energy than many of our day jobs.
* "Sharing the work/family" load equally between partners made a lot of sense in an undergraduate feminist studies seminar. In reality I think our generation inherited a half-finished revolution. Our parents' generation opened doors for women to work outside the home but didn't fight for the value of work that happens inside the home. Work traditionally done by women is routinely de-valued... Teaching, nursing, child care, stay-at-home parenting. Rather than fight for the value of this work, we've shifted the low wages down to nannies who are generally inadequately compensated and must lean on their (unpaid) family members to care for their own children.
* We jump into parenthood with no training, little support, and no manual other than what a Google search offers. Many find that parenthood isolates, which propels some people back to work for fear of "disappearing" into parenthood. More on that later.
* We penalize people who "take time off" (revealing language) of jobs to parent, even when they do so without compensation, by making it hard to re-enter the work force and by stifling career advancements when they return.
* We stigmatize people who take time off to parent and indulge in false dichotomies to handle the neurosis of it all. For e.g. a friend who works full-time recently let slip a comment about how she would be bored to death with "those stay-at-home moms with their tennis dates." Is that what women who are at home with kids do? Not in my experience. Dig deeper and most women who are at home are actually doing outside work while most women who work "full-time" are doing a lot of care-giving. I wager that the caricaturing of people "on the other side" is a defense mechanism. I want us all to get beyond it. I also know a number of stay-at-home Dads who fend off even greater caricatures.
* Ageism and the Time Crunch. Related to all of the above: Most career paths expect maximum performance in the exact same age range (30s-40s) as when we are trying to give birth and raise little people. This is insane. Most of us are going to live into our 80s. Why should we not consider our 50s-60s to be Peak Performance years, when kids are in their teens or beyond? We'll still have 2 more decades to ease out and hit the putting green. (See Laura Carstensen's A LONG BRIGHT FUTURE for a much more thorough argument on this point.)

Rewind to that newborn baby who captivated your whole attention, who re-defined the axis around which the world rotates. Imagine yourself in Baby's shoes (or booties). Your parents gaze at you with ultimate adoration. Every poop is perfect. Every coo is an aria. Every smile transforms the world. Then you begin to grow, to discover your powers just as you are supposed to, to climb stairs, to pull every book off the shelf, to pitch a fit at the post office. Gradually, your frazzled parent holds you at a greater and greater distance until s/he pleads, "You take him."

This progression makes me as sad for parent as it does for baby and reveals how outside forces crush the tender regeneration that family life can offer. Baby doesn't understand that you've had a long hard day. She can't understand our fear. Our kids' clumsy first steps toward the outside world are exactly the moments when we can both teach and learn from them -- but for most kids, we will already be gone during most of their waking hours. These will not be their first clumsy strikes outward, and how much better they -- and we as parents -- would fare come adolescence if we had taken the chances to learn now? To know each other better? To conquer that fear most of us first felt the moment we took Baby home from the hospital? ("You're just gonna let me drive out of here with him?") Why do we flee our children so soon?

My sister-in-law got to the point (or one of them anyway). We were discussing that panic shared by parents of small children when the weekend arrives -- 48 continuous hours with offspring. She said, "I felt incompetent. The babysitter knew how to get them down for naps, their rhythms, better than I did. By weekend's end I was exhausted. I felt relieved to go back to the office where I felt competent, successful."

Which leads me to the point: Parenting takes practice. It is learned, not innate. Many parents never get on top of it -- rather they endeavor to get through it. The more "accomplished" the parent, perhaps the deeper the humiliation! Moreover, the critters change at a blinding speed, so the requirements of parenting are constantly shifting. No wonder we feel awful much of the time. For many, jobs necessitate hired caregivers, but it goes beyond that. Who wouldn't want a "professional" to present a bathed smiling child at day's end, allowing us to return to jobs where we feel (and are treated) like professionals?

Except that many of us find ourselves plagued by a sense of loss, torn by seemingly irreconcilable impulses to be with the kids we worked hard to make and the jobs we can't afford/don't want to lose. Guilt and feelings of failure linger, which we (especially women?) add to our private list of self-criticisms, bringing our Contentment Scores even lower despite the sizable budgetary line dedicated to Child Care. How can we boost our scores?

Which brings me to my immodest proposal: Let's professionalize parenthood.

There is a Buddhist idea that a sapling needs a little fence until it grows strong enough to withstand blows from the outside world. I used this image to explain why I went to graduate school. I could battle it out on my own with no skills and various economic (and gender) forces arrayed against me. Or I could seek a few years of shelter to grow in strength and expertise among peers and mentors, earning a credential to show for it. Kids and parents need a little fence around their early years together.

Imagine graduate level credit given for time spent primarily parenting, available to mothers or fathers. (Let's offer an added certificate for the breastfeeding mother.)

For parents who choose to work home for 2 years, we'll offer a Master of Parenthood (MPa). For parents who choose to stay home for 4+ years, let's offer a Doctorate (PaD). We can imagine all kinds of flexible variations for part-time dedicated parenthood/work. No one has to do this, but for those who do, there is a vessel that they (and the outside world) recognize as having validity.

Graduate school offers an appropriate model because it assumes maturity and relevant background without assuming expertise. It is organized to move from greater structure (courses) to independence (original scholarship). It depends on mentorship under faculty solicited by the student, allowing for student choice and philosophical differences. It culminates in thoughtful original work evaluated by peers. It motivates funding streams. It takes seriously its subject matter. It creates a professional community. It gives students a label for what they do all day, and why it is important. It leaves students with a degree to show for it.

Help me flesh this out. What could coursework look like? We could make use of online options for seminars on topics like "Sleep," "Language Development," "Nutrition," or "Marriage and Family Dynamics." It would be student-driven and derive from day-to-day life with Tots. Parents could keep journals or blogs. PaD candidates could do longer-term projects, perhaps supporting the work of scholars in fields related to issues arising in their families, such as allergies, tantrums, illnesses, marriage roles, or autism. Advanced work could reach into academia in fields such as Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroanatomy. WIKI could come up with a WIKI-PARENT site to organize the ideas and insights of thoughtful parents, much like the CDC and SETI organize the inputs of ordinary people to search for meaningful patterns. Parents might work on it as a team, dedicating different stretches of time to parenting.

Who could the mentors be? Help me think about this. This could be a chance to recognize people specifically for their good parenting, a category that garners no formal recognition or particular respect, even if they were not literally parents themselves. A grandparent, a nanny, a neighbor, one's own parents, a sister or brother, a pastor, one's former high school teacher or coach. It would give people of other generations and stations a stake in supporting the new family.

The timetable of graduate study also lines up with dedicated parenthood. It is my unsubstantiated view that many new parents feel like Early Childhood Will Never End. My doctor friends describe the sleeplessness of residency in similar terms, but they knew exactly when it would end. But when you are in the tunnel of early parenthood, it can feel like you've lost your life and will never get it back. (We don't get the same "it" back, but we often can't yet see how the alternative can be better.) Lacking outside validation, compensation, or recognition, it's reasonable to question the worth of the effort. The graduate degree model both affirms the time-limited nature of the work and the importance. Knowing that this intensive early stage passes can also relieve pressure on couples, who often feel like weary roommates more than the amorous hopefuls who once made these little beings.

Imagine if volunteering at a child's pre-school, serving on a board of directors for athletics or the arts, or writing letters to elected officials on behalf of legislation affecting kids and families were part of an internship? The point is not "credit" but rather to value these activities.

There is abundant research underway about the intellectual, emotional and social development in children ages 0-4, and yet there is evidence that children are entering school with far less developed verbal skills than previous generations. Could it be because we are simply not talking with them enough? Explaining? Asking questions? Entering their worlds? It amazes me how often I see little kids alone in strollers with nannies or parents on cellphones. I want to be clear: I am very much in favor of both professional caregivers and cellphones! (In fact, I think nannies should be better paid and better recognized.) And sometimes a phone call must be made. But more often, the behavior is part of the same problem: A mindset that caring for small children is something to be gotten through rather than engaged. The most valuable thing we can offer our children is exactly what we place the lowest value on when we spend it with them: Time.

After 6 years with little ones, I'm finding one similarity between parenting and squash or photography after all: the better one gets at it, the more enjoyable it is. As the competence gap closes, parents can find new delight in their children - and each other - that makes weekends less arduous and more restful. A virtuous cycle kicks in. We no longer crawl toward Monday morning. I can't help but believe that kids can feel the difference.

Am I serious about graduate degrees for parenting? I am serious about changing the way we value the work all parents do. Help me think of even better ways to do that.