I Hope You Dance

The first day of school, 2012.  Our house is quiet, a few remnants of breakfast remain, cinnamon-kissed.  I don't mind picking up these dishes, because it reminds me you were here, and that you are on your way. For reasons I can't identify, a singer I barely know is in my head. Lee Ann Womack (I think it is her song) repeats a few times, "I hope you dance."  And it seems the perfect message, actually, for the start of this year.  Dancing (the informal, let yourself go, respond to the music with no choreography kind) is not about where it gets you. You don't have to do what anyone else is doing, necessarily, though it can at moments connect you with someone else, and there's always the chance you join with someone, or lift them up if they need a partner or just a moment of eye contact, or if you do.  You can "work" on your dance moves, if you want, if they matter to you, if they capture your spirit.  It is not  about success or failure. Dancing can be really... real. Sometimes, you can tune into yourself, and get your bearings.  Sometimes you look around and feel the exchange of energy that happens with others expressing themselves.  Sometimes you can stop thinking so much.  This analogy has its flaws.  It doesn't acknowledge some important and necessary expectations and realities.  But in this moment, and because it's too easy to get lost in logistics and requirements, I hope you dance.

Balancing Act:  This school year, dance.  Whatever that means to you. At least a little.

Before We Go Any Further

One of my friends said recently, about balance: "It's what we all strive for in our own way.  It's a very elusive thing and sometimes so unfamiliar a feeling that we don't even recognize it when we have it for that one fleeting moment." So true.  (For the record, my friend has her own blog, with beautiful, delicious, healthful, inspiring food (and her smart, savvy ways of preparing it: The Pig and The Fig.) In choosing to muse about balance, I feel the need to clarify that by no means do I write"In The Balance"  because I think have a handle on it.  Au contraire.  Every morning, I give it a go, sometimes spilling my coffee along the way, sometimes evoking the wrath of a grumpy passenger in my car, and sometimes forgetting the folder I needed. Those are the small ways of teetering.  There are larger ones, to be sure, and I plead my share of guilty. Keeping a hold on your center is really hard, especially with the level and intensity and constancy of destabilizing messages we receive multi-media-ly all day and night.  It's just that lately I've been very aware of and self-conscious about my interest in balance, and my observations about where it's off -- in myself, in my family, and in the world around me.  I do not for one second consider myself a master of the task of balance. Instead, I believe in the process of paying attention to where we are, and putting some questions out there so that we all (myself included) might pause, even fleetingly, and check our balance.

Balancing Act: Pause for a moment. Do not look at your phone. Take a deep breath.

We Must Chill

There are so many things out of whack with "the risky rise of the good grade pill" picture that it is hard to know where to start.  What would be the conditions that would lead to the following?  1. Parents are requesting that doctors prescribe stimulants for their kids to "make them smarter." 2. Teens believe that they need to medicate themselves in order to combat the need to sleep (Note to society:  sleep is a basic necessity, throughout life, but of particular importance during years of growth.) such that they can perform well enough to make their parents and coaches happy and "get into the quote-unquote right school."  3. There is an imagined link between class rank and the abuse of prescription medication.

The prevalence of stimulant abuse amongst teens is not new news.  But it is a frightening symptom of the misguided priorities that too many children have absorbed from the pressure cooker in which they've been raised.  When did sleep become optional? When did it become unquestioned for a high school junior to "not come out of their room except to use the bathroom" as a middle-school child I know described her older brother's behavior? ("If you have APs that's what you have to do, she told me, matter-of-factly.)  Smart parents know this is wrong, yet have unwittingly accepted it.

Having worked with students who (however barely) have survived the "race to nowhere" and ended up one of the ridiculously "lucky" (by the numbers) few who "get in" to the most elite name-brand universities, I have had an inside look at what can happen after years of sleepless nights in pursuit of this dream. It is often not very pretty.  If students arrive at the school of their (?) dreams too exhausted, too burnt out, and too unaccustomed to time that is unstructured, the results are often depression, substance abuse, or less dramatically but still unfortunate, the inability to fully embrace, contribute to, and benefit from the vast richness of experience they have "earned."  It is not a good return on investment, especially when what has been invested (childhood) can never be regained. Never. No  degree from anywhere offers a do-over for what was sacrificed.

If we are looking at the big picture, the status quo makes no sense.  To be blunt, most kids, including thousands who are textbook "perfect candidates"  will not get into the small group of schools which are considered "the right ones."  So, why are their lives being organized for them (we could end that sentence right there)... as if they will, and as if that is the point of their early lives?  There are literally hundreds of schools where they can have a rewarding and productive and excellent college experience. Can that be ok? Can where your kid ends up not be the marker of your success as a parent? Instead, if we have to judge ourselves, I think we ought to withhold that judgment until much later.  Could we aspire, instead of molding the perfect college applicant, to offering our children the opportunity as children to try things, do things because they care about them, and have some sense of what actually matters to them.  There is no pill for this.

Balancing Act:  If you have very young kids, can you think about whether your child is enrolled in an activity because he or she shows an interest and seems to enjoy it now, or whether you signed them up because you thought you "should"? Or because you think it will lead to something else (scholastic or athletic or otherwise)?  Remind me why you need your child to read before kindergarten? If your kids are older, do you make time to talk about things other than school or the future? Even a few minutes? Do you give them the message that you value their health (sleep, nutrition, well-being) even more than the grade or the accolade?

The Price of Special

David McCollough, English teacher at Wellesley High School, you had me at hello.  I hope your commencement speech is a shot heard 'round the world.

Far too many children who would traditionally be considered "advantaged" are being raised under a "perfect storm" -- they are spoon-fed an empty notion of their specialness from birth, and simultaneously piled-on to believe that success is measured by standardized test scores and "the right" college acceptances.  At the end of the ivy-trimmed rainbow that has been drawn for them (inside the lines, on paper that doesn't allow for mess-ups or spills), there might be little more than a gold-plated mess. (More on what's waiting at the end of the rainbow in my next post...)

To start, we could play the "special" theme out in any arena-- school, music, sports.  It starts in utero and the opportunities for affirmation are endless and relentless--  think about all of the organized baby "classes" and even the strange pull of a video tape called "Baby Einstein.  Geez, couldn't we just let them be cute and idle and see what happens?  I realize that compared to where we are, I am asking to revert to the Stone Age.  But, I stand by it, because I think real dinosaurs may have had something on purple ones. I'm just saying.

Let's start with sports.  Though it is now almost a decade ago, I recall thinking it was ridiculous when my son's kindergarten soccer team all received plastic medals at the end of their "season."  (I'm pretty sure I thought having a team at all was silly, but we had to join that little band of brothers in order for my wheels to start spinning about what was wrong with the picture...)  It proceeded to become clearer that something had really run amok as my kids gathered the "hardware of participation" throughout elementary school.  They would never understand how much the ONE tennis trophy I'd won by the age of ten really meant to me.   I wished my kids could have that feeling.  But they'd been given so much plastic finery, so soon.  That ship had sailed.

I wonder, when I think back on the kindergarten "end of season" party, should I have declined? What were we celebrating? That we, a group of twenty responsible, well-educated adults had just spent eight weekends in a  row doing nothing but driving up and down parkways and sitting on sidelines while our kids played against ten kids who lived in communities just like ours, but an hour and a half away? That we would have a respite from complaining to each other about how this was our lot in life? (Oh, wait, no, because the "indoor season" was just about to start!) No.  If I had it to do over again, I would have started raising my voice louder and sooner.  

Travel sports relies on the fantasy that your child is "special."  That she is somehow so beyond the "rec" league (at age six or so) that you need to bring her to another town in order for her to "develop" or "be seen."  Travel sports exists because an "adult" could anoint a group of children the "A" team and then make demands upon that child's entire family that the parents would willingly submit to involving, for example,  the total abandonment of time spent together at home on a weekend; or, dinners together seated at a kitchen table.  I even hear parents talk about when "we" have a  game.  Really? Are WE all playing? My playing days are so over.  And, "nationals?" When I was a kid, that was a word that hardly applied to anyone I'd ever met-- but now your whole team can go if "we" (the "parents on the team") will pay for entry to the tournament in Disney!...What is the message here?

I should say, here, that travel sport parents do not have a monopoly on the insanity and disconnection that is contemporary parenting, or even contemporary culture at large.  They happen to illustrate one version of it.  Travel sports as a "family activity" are of course not the worst of the potential sources of disconnection, but they are an artificial construct, a neat and easy structure imposed where it would be much messier, much more emotionally complicated, and maybe much too dangerous to build one for ourselves. What if we just had to sit around and talk with one another?

I realize, in raising my questions and criticizing an institution around which so many current weekends are built, that there are some practical problems inherent in my position.  First of all, of COURSE I love to watch my children doing things they love, being part of something bigger than themselves, and improving themselves by hard work.  OF COURSE I want to support them in everything they do.  But I'm not sure that being there on the sideline for every game, every shot, every miss, every everything is the best I can do for them.   I want my kids to be able to have to whole gamut of athletic experiences --whether they make the shot at the buzzer, or strike out to end the game, and Kipling-like, "treat those impostors just the same,"  I think in the long run it is actually reassuring to a kid to realize that the fate of the universe is not, in fact, resting on their performance in or the outcome of their game against Rival Nation.

 In fact, it might also help them to realize that they are actually "not so special" if you were doing something really meaningful during their game.   To clarify--  I am by no means promoting reckless disregard for or negligence as related to your child's activities.  I'm advocating  for the opportunity to teach our kids humility and also perspective.  I'm also not making any proclamation of what might constitute "doing something really meaningful" during the game.  Maybe it's going home and preparing a really good dinner, which your whole family could sit down to after the game.  Strong research tells us that having dinner together might be the most important thing we can do for our family's health and well-being, but we've been willing to look the other way in order to watch them play a game???

If our kids spent a little more time on the playground, without us (or the uniforms, snacks, or juice boxes we provide)  they might actually be fine with the idea that they aren't that special. They could enjoy the game without it feeling like it is a means to an end. Instead, just a game. Realistically by the numbers, that's all it is going to be for the vast majority, whether or not their parents want to admit it. Seriously, the kids would be totally fine.  The question is, would their parents????

Today's Balancing Act:  Can you consider missing one of your child's games this week? What would that be like for you? For him/her? What would be hard? What would you do with the time? How might your son/daughter benefit? What is it like for you to even ask these questions?

Starting Somewhere

So many journals I did not write.

In the second grade, I kept careful track of the ping pong games I played against my opponents-- the scores, the sequences, my deep desire to be better at ping pong than my siblings, who were generally better natural athletes than I was.  My tiny pink embossed journal was the only witness. It was almost enough.  Since then, I guess I've been busy. I am thousands of days behind.... so where would I even begin? But, that is the question that led me away, and I decided today, for whatever reason, that I would go toward, not away.

 A long talk with a new friend reminded me that there would never be the precisely correct time or place. If I kept waiting for that moment, it would pass me by, as it has over and over again.  Images I noticed and  gradually forgot.  Words my own children spoke that eventually evaporated. The shadows are left, but they are not enough.  If I am ever going to write, it just has to be now, as random and imperfect as it is.  So today I placed myself in the middle of the public library and told myself to begin. Now.

I will write in order to think about the way things connect -- past and present, known and unknown, sad and funny, true and false -- and maybe the way they diverge.  I like grey much more than black and white. I think the world has gone a little crazy in ways that are both obvious and ignored. I'm not sure what the point is -- I'm really not sure at all.  But, I am hoping there is something worthwhile to be found in the balance.


These posts are really thinking quietly, not quite out loud, but out there, in the event they can connect more than just for me.

If there is a theme, it will be loosely tied to the notion of balance -- seeking it, finding it, losing it, recognizing it, throwing it off, and sometimes just wondering what it is.   At the end of each (or most) posts, I will attempt to offer a "balancing act" -- a way of being or doing that follows from the text. Believe me, these will likely be as much suggestions to myself as to anyone else. Something to consider, not an instruction. Honestly, it's just an idea. Balance is a process...