I have long seen, and continue to see, articles about self-esteem.

Here's one: Self-esteem not a good teaching tool

Turns out children are feeling pretty good about themselves lately. Maybe a little too good.

A recent study by researchers at San Diego State University found that high school seniors are bursting with more self-esteem than a generation or two ago. For example, in 1975, 49 percent of them believed they would be successful at their jobs.

Today 65 percent do.

Instilling that "world, here I come!" attitude is a great thing. Instilling baseless self-congratulation? Less so. Yet I have to admit that I have a hard time figuring out when to say, "What a wonderful letter you wrote for grandma!" and when to go, "Do you think you could possibly put one ounce of effort into your thank-you note?"

There have been various proponents of self-esteem over the years, ranging from Nathaniel Branden, onetime close friend and "intellectual heir" of Ayn Rand, to James Dobson, who wrote Hide or Seek in the early 1970's. Somewhere along the way, the idea of self-esteem became subsumed into the kinds of you're-so-wonderful-just-because-you're-you statements we associate with Mr. Rogers, and then, in that simplistic form, worked into education theory for kids through high school age - that is, if you believe articles like the above mentioned.

Count me as one of those people who think that self-esteem is very important. I think you can figure out what a person's self-image is by inviting them to complete this statement: "I am the kind of person who...." And I think it's important that the person's self-image, while moderately realistic, is generally positive. "I'm the kind of person who gets the job done." "I'm the kind of person who is compulsive about getting all my schoolwork finished and turned in on time." "I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I'm the kind of person who worries at my math homework until I understand it, no matter how long it takes." Why only moderately realistic? I don't think it hurts for people to stretch themselves. If a person of average intelligence thinks "I'm pretty smart", she will probably challenge herself by taking the more difficult courses in school. She may not make grades better than C, but she'll definitely get to the limit of her natural ability; she'll learn a lot of stuff, possibly surprise her teachers, and if nothing else, be an interesting and engaged person.

I have read and absorbed some of the caveats about the kind of general praising you're not supposed to do. So I've tried to be both accurate and specific about the positive feedback I've given my daughter. "I'm proud of your hard work and the way you stuck with that tedious project until you got it finished," for instance. (There are those who say I shouldn't have said "I'm proud" because I wasn't letting her have ownership; shoot me.) This is the answer to Ms. Skenazy's dilemma about the letter to Grandma, by the way, and one might incorporate one of the things I learned in management training: say "and" instead of "but". "I see that you've written a thank-you note to Grandma. She'll be happy to get that. It looks very nice. And maybe you could add a sentence about how you love the color and you can't wait to wear it to school." Now you haven't griped or carped and you've expressed to the kid exactly what you'd like to see (which you can't depend upon the kid reading your mind to figure out; "put more effort" is basically meaningless).

I'll add that there is a time and a place for unconditional love. Your kid does something immature or even dishonest, he comes to you about it dreading the consequences, and the first words out of your mouth are, "We'll get through this." Dr. Dobson said somewhere, possibly in Hide or Seek, that in his practice he saw parents who put a lot of pressure on their kids to excel academically and sometimes the kids just simply didn't have the raw brain power to do it. He imagined parents at the sidelines of a footrace, screaming "You can do it! You're just not trying hard enough! I think you want to embarrass us!" to their kid struggling behind all of his peers with leg braces from having polio. Dobson said that if he had a little boy or girl who couldn't excel in school, he'd help them find a field where they could excel. The movie "Dead Poets Society" has a protagonist who commits suicide because his father can't accept him unless he is fulfilling his father's own self-image of having a son who is like this and like that. Unconditional love means that you want the kid to be who he or she is, to be the best he can be, and you love him for who he is, not what he does for you. If the parents of my hypothetical C-student in the previous paragraph love her unconditionally, they'll appreciate and enjoy her can-do spirit and encourage her to continue to value learning over her grade-point average.

So self-esteem is important. I think people are sometimes prevented from doing stupid, dishonest, or immoral things because their self-respect is more important than whatever they would have gained. And I don't see how it could be wrong to bolster that kind of thing in a person, by pointing out positive character traits when possible.

I also think that one of the unwanted outcomes of the War on Poverty is that some people got the self-image that they couldn't make it on their own like other people; they had to be supported by the government. Then you had multiple generations born on welfare and that same pernicious self-image passed down. This is one of the reasons why welfare reform, undoubtedly frightening and painful as it has been for some people, was sorely needed. What would the pioneers have said? "I am the kind of person who finds a way to provide for myself and my family, no matter what. I can stand on my own two feet in any situation. We may not be rich but we'll get along." Except for people who are disabled to the point that they can't survive without help, it's un-American for adults to be allowed or even encouraged to think that in the field of making a living, putting a roof over their heads and food on the table and paying their bills, they just can't cut it. They've lost an important part of their heritage, IMO.

I also have to wonder about that 51% of kids in 1975 who didn't think they'd be successful on their jobs. What in the world is that about?

Here is a better article:

The most awful, stupid parenting advice

Maybe a good parenting question is: When to help and when to leave them alone? A better formulation would be: How do you know when the child/person should know what to do so you should leave him/her alone and how do you know when that person is in over his or her head?

It's a good, thoughtful, useful article that doesn't rehash the same stuff we've seen over and over. It's true that kids aren't born knowing everything about getting along in the world and acting like a civilized person. Some pick up things like social cues very easily and others need explicit explanations about how to act. Individual kids need different levels of parental guidance at different ages, too. Parenting books and articles are useful for getting ideas about how to handle things, and what might be going on in your kid's head, but you have to know your own child and run all that stuff past your common sense. (I am the kind of person who pays attention to my kid and thinks about the long-term consequences of the way I help her grow as a person.) Some people, like John Rosemond, think parents over-think. It's my view that parenting done right requires some thought.

And that really is the answer to the self-esteem thing. Think about your kid. Think about what's going on with him and what direction you'd like him to develop in, and how you can help him go there. Getting more patience, or being more persistent, or slowing down and being more thoughtful, or being more forceful with his peers, whatever it is. Nurture a positive, healthy, moderately realistic self-image by verbally holding up a mirror to reflect back to the kid those traits you want to encourage.

Disclaimer regarding parenting advice from me: Once again, the definition of "expert" is "parent of one child". It's possible that if I'd had two I wouldn't have dared open my mouth on the subject.

The princess is home for winter break. I picked her up at the airport in Orlando this PM and she is now ensconced on the couch, reading and eating popcorn, with the cats studying her.

I am proud of my girl. F has a well-developed sense of self-preservation, and while this has saved R and me many anxious moments that other parents have to go through, it is inconvenient for her at times when it manifests as a little extra apprehension before a new experience. When she and I flew to Florida last year to find a place to live, she became white-faced and had to sit down in the airport in Memphis. Maybe a bit of a panic attack? She didn't say anything about it but just gritted her teeth and rode it out. Today she flew by herself from her college town in Mississippi, changed planes in Atlanta (a very large, busy airport) and arrived at Orlando cool, calm and collected.

Many of F's friends in Memphis stayed there to go to school, some moving to dorms and some continuing to live at home. I told her starting in middle school that she would have to go away to college. She is such a homebody and her dad and I are happy to have her around, and it would have been very easy to shelter her too much, solve problems for her that she should be able to solve, and so forth. Her first semester at school, a 3-hour drive away from Memphis, wasn't the easiest thing in the world but she got through it. Last year and this year she volunteered for the welcome week team, to help incoming freshmen get situated and figure out how to live apart from mommy and daddy.

At 21 you're supposed to be all grown up. It's not that at 21 you know everything and won't make mistakes. It's that you have the tools and also the self-confidence to take responsibility for yourself. Of course we're not going to shove her out in the cold the minute she graduates next May. But I think she has what it takes to make her way in the world.

This is funny as heck.

Laws Concerning Food and Drink;
Household Principles;
Lamentations of the Father"

An excerpt:

On Screaming

Do not scream; for it is as if you scream all the time. If you are given a plate on which two foods you do not wish to touch each other are touching each other, your voice rises up even to the ceiling, while you point to the offense with the finger of your right hand; but I say to you, scream not, only remonstrate gently with the server, that the server may correct the fault. Likewise if you receive a portion of fish from which every piece of herbal seasoning has not been scraped off, and the herbal seasoning is loathsome to you, and steeped in vileness, again I say, refrain from screaming. Though the vileness overwhelm you, and cause you a faint unto death, make not that sound from within your throat, neither cover your face, nor press your fingers to your nose. For even now I have made the fish as it should be; behold, I eat of it myself, yet do not die.

This writer knows about little children.

“Children with Down’s syndrome require an awful lot of attention. The role of vice president, it seems to me, would take up an awful lot of her time, and it raises the issue of how much time will she have to dedicate to her newborn child?” CNN anchor John Roberts asked during a live segment on Aug. 29, the day McCain announced Palin’s candidacy.

...

Dr. Brian Skotko, a physician at Children’s Hospital Boston who serves on the board of directors at the National Down Syndrome Society, told FOXNews.com that, in many instances, it is no more challenging to raise a child with Down syndrome than any other.

“We know that about 50 percent of babies who are born with Down syndrome have a heart condition within the first few months after they are born,” he said.

“But thanks to the advances in technology, we have been able to correct many of these conditions, and after the initial medical issues have been addressed, raising a child with Down syndrome does not involve much more time than it would take for any child.”

Palin’s Candidacy Reignites Feminist Debate

I believe that John Roberts was acting as what the left-wing bloggers call a "concern troll".

In other news - I am so amused at the little girl kitties trying to make sense of my nightly shoulder exercises. The tomcat could NOT care less.

I start out using the pulley over the bedroom door to stretch my arm as high as it can go, hold for a count of fifteen, repeat several times. They have to watch this, or sit close to me with their backs turned, or get in my lap as I do it, or as Bonnie did tonight, anticipate where I am going and get on the chair first (what a funny joke). The next thing I do is to go to one particular wall that's convenient to do external rotation stretches and then wall pushups. So while I'm using the pulley, one or the other kitty might run over to that wall and reach up to scrabble on it with her paws. "See, I got there first."

Molly's done after that but Bonnie precedes me into the bedroom where she sits on the dresser and supervises my working with weights.

Don't know what I'd do without them - I'd probably get everything in the wrong order.

I want to talk about raising a literate child. I can do that because, since the definition of "expert" is "parent of one child", I am an expert. Disclaimer: You can't make your kid be literate any more than you can make him or her anything else. People are who they are from the get-go. But you can influence a kid to go the way you want. You might as well try, since you'll pretty definitely influence him or her to go the way you don't want. I've read that "the footsteps your kids follow in are the ones you thought you'd covered up".

Anyway, back to the literate child. Before I became pregnant with F, I was listening to the radio one day - and I can tell you exactly where in Memphis I was driving at the time - and I heard someone authoritative talk about the importance of reading Mother Goose rhymes to babies. The cadences and the rhymes point out the way the language is put together. That made a lot of sense to me. When F came along, we acquired a big green Mother Goose book. Maybe my mom gave it to us? It has lots of big colorful pictures and lots and lots of nursery rhymes. I held F on my lap and read them to her. When she was big enough to turn the pages, I'd read all of the poems on one page and she'd study the picture for a while, then she'd turn the page and I'd read the poems on that page.

By the way, on that studying the picture thing: I and my sibs were read to quite a bit, and I can run across the Little Golden Books, which are still in print, and know what the pictures inside will look like even though I haven't cracked those things in decades.

F had short books when she was a toddler. We belonged to a book club, maybe associated with "Parents" magazine, and we got lots of little short books from them. R or I read one or two of them to her every night before bed.

At age 4 I thought it was time to start reading chapter books to her, a chapter a night. I took inspiration from Dick Estelle, the Radio Reader - anyone remember him? I thought if he could do it I could. We started with The Hobbit. I paraphrased just a bit as needed for clarity and when the story might bog down from a 4-yr-old's perspective (in Mirkwood, and after they found the dragon) but other than that we read that sucker straight through. After that it was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. That one really motivated F to learn to read. She wouldn't let me stop after one chapter. I had to keep reading every evening as long as I could. I remember once croaking, "I have to stop now," and she said, "Oh, no, Mommy, I have to find out what's happening to Edmund and the White Witch!" and she took the book from me and tried to force meaning from it.

After that we skipped over to The Magician's Nephew, and then we left Narnia and read some other things. We did Ramona the Pest right before she started kindergarten, and The Door in the Wall (terrific story) and then we started the Little House books. We read ALL of those, and there are quite a few. If you start with the first one, Little House in the Big Woods, and proceed chronologically, the reading difficulty progresses as Laura gets older. Sometimes when I was reading F her chapter, R would come in and sit and listen to the story. He enjoyed taking a turn doing the reading too, if I was busy or tired or just if he wanted to.

And let me interject - when you're doing this you don't just read every word on the page, one after the other, like a robot. You stop and ask questions: What do you think is going to happen next? Do you think it was a good idea for her to do that? What should she have done? Or if a scene has an incomplete description, ask the kid to fill in from her imagination. This encourages the child to pause and reflect while reading, and it's an excellent opportunity to get those little character-shaping lectures in that parents need to do. "See, all of this happened because she didn't tell her mommy the truth" - that kind of thing.

We read to F every night until she could read faster to herself. When she reached first grade, they sent her back to read to the kindergartners because they wanted those children to see that a small child like themselves really could read. She chose The Monster at the End of This Book and she read with great expression, because that's another thing: when you read to a kid, you have to do different voices for different people, and slow down dramatically, or sigh as you read, or whatever it takes to make the story real.

(Never stopped reading to her altogether, by the way - I remember reading a Katherine Anne Porter short story to her, for instance, probably close to the end of high school. And I took my inspiration there from The Princess Bride, the book, in which it's the father reading to the kid, and he tells the kid's mom that his father continued reading to his children into their teens.)

After that my boosting of F's literacy mostly consisted of suggesting books for her to read and talking with her about her reading material. I read virtually all of the books she had to read, from elementary school through high school. Some of the selections made me wonder: I was not the only parent horrified at The Giver for kids going into 5th grade; the boy watching his father kill the low-birth-weight twin even as he talked baby-talk to it was a bit much, we thought. And then in high school, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I had not read it before, and loved it. F hated it. But I read it identifying with the adult narrator, looking back at all of the sad, funny, scary, horrifying, infuriating events of her girlhood that made her into the person she became. F read it identifying with the little girl in the story, and if you read it that way it's pretty much unbearable.

I wrote here about forcing her to read Rider at the Gate, a book she didn't initially want to read and subsequently loved, and here about using Jane Eyre and The Good Earth to make a point about what makes a person a moral person. We talked about poetry, too.

This summer I inflicted A Yellow Raft in Blue Water on her. She read it all pretty much in one sitting, complained bitterly about how depressing it was (although she liked the parts about Rayona), and I'll bet anything she'll be taking it off the shelf again at some point even as she is asking herself why.

I think sometimes people make a distinction between "legal" and "moral" that simply isn't there. They tell you that you can't legislate morality. Well, of course you can. Murder is immoral, isn't it? Isn't it also illegal? It's wrong to steal. It's even wrong to cheat on your taxes, because you're making other people pay your share as well as their own.

I don't think law-abiding people refrain from acts like murder and theft solely because they happen to be illegal. I think they refrain because they're wrong.

What you can't legislate, sadly, is intelligence. But you can go a little way toward that, for example, by making it unlawful to transport a baby in a car unless it is in a carseat.

Erin says she thinks that Heather MacDonald, who suggests that the supposed pandemic of rape on college campuses could be drastically reduced if it were explained to girls that they should refrain from stupid behavior, is a pragmatist rather than a moralist. I think morals originate from pragmatism, actually.

Monnie asked her readers if God is a vengeful God.

I had a conversation with a Muslim coworker once. He was contemplating an interest-only loan for a house. This was before the housing crisis and I'd never heard of such a thing. It took me a moment to realize he was asking my opinion about the moral rightness rather than the financial advisability. I had never thought a Muslim would ask a non-Muslim's opinion about things like that - prejudice on my part, I admit. Anyway, he had almost enough money saved up to buy the house outright and what he wanted to do was to lock in the price of the house, pay this interest-only thing but regard it as rent, and then when he was ready, just pay cash and buy the house. Because Muslims aren't supposed to take loans that pay interest. He wanted to know what I thought about that

My first thought was that you can't fool God. He knows your heart.

"I know that," Mustapha said. "I'm not trying to fool God."

Then, I said, you should ask yourself what the point is here. Is God trying to keep you from getting in over your head? A loan that piles up interest too fast can be impossible to pay off and it can be a real bondage. Is this the issue? If so, and if you have every reason to believe that you can handle this thing and it will work out the way you think, then you should probably go ahead, I told him.

Because I don't think the rules are about God setting us up so he can smite us when we deviate from the path. I think the rules are there to keep us from getting hurt. It's the same with morals. People who refrain from casual sex with multiple partners can cross all kinds of unpleasant experiences off their list. People who refrain from gossip don't have workplace and family drama blow up in their faces - or at least, not from things they've said behind people's backs that got out. There's a reason for all those "thou shalt nots". One can heed them, or one can learn the hard way. Why re-invent the wheel over and over and over?

I remember that when F was very small she had a horrifying habit of running headlong through the house with her arms thrown behind her. Of course she fell and hurt herself all the time. I asked her repeatedly not to run in the house. Go outside and run. Still she did it, and she came to me howling with her bumps and bruises. One day I kind of lost my temper.

"Do you see me falling down all the time and hurting myself?"

"No," she bawled.

"What about Daddy? Do you see him falling down and hurting himself all the time?"

"No."

"Why do you suppose that is? Do you think it's because WE DON'T RUN IN THE HOUSE?"

Sniff.

"One of these days you are going to figure out for yourself why it is that I keep asking you not to run in the house. And that will be a happy day, because I won't have to listen to you crying because you fell down and hurt yourself."

Epiphany. The running in the house stopped forthwith.

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction. Hear, my son, your father's instruction, and do not forsake your mother's teaching; indeed, they are a graceful wreath to your head, and ornaments about your neck." Proverbs 1:7-9

I think sometimes about how people change, individually, and how society changes. Human nature doesn't change, does it? But things that are socially acceptable become less so, or more so, over time. Are we getting better? Is it better that we don't (usually) openly make fun of mentally retarded people, or hide them away in shame? Oh yes. On the other hand, parents of children with Down syndrome report being asked by complete strangers why they didn't abort them, as though they had a duty to do so. That's not better.

And one has to ask what society is, anyway. I tend to think we each have our own society: people we hang with, in real life or on the net, people whose opinions we read in the newspaper or whose shows we watch on TV. So whether violent video games, for instance, affect society probably depends on whose society we're talking about. Unless I am the victim of a violent criminal who took his inspiration from those games, they don't affect my society at all. Except insofar as I care about people I don't have dealings with, as I am supposed to do, and fret about their societies.

Anyway, one of the things I think about is the changing acceptability of words. The n-word comes to mind, of course. There is a book I really like: Twilight Sleep, by Edith Wharton, one of my favorite writers. One of the reasons I like her work is that she draws her characters so finely, and includes such detail in her stories, that you can pick up all kind of social nuances that have disappeared since her day. (An example is in "The Lady's Maid's Bell", which is one of the stories I linked to in my previous post. The exchange between Hartley, the lady's maid who narrates the story, and Mrs. Railton, neatly illustrates how each of these women know their "place", yet they appear to like each other. They are totally comfortable with social distinctions we don't have now.)

So in Twilight Sleep there is a fairly tragic character in Nona, Pauline's daughter. Nona at 19 is the conscience of the book. She's never had any real spiritual guidance from her mother, although her mother would argue that. She's left Nona to develop her own spiritual/ethical compass as best she can, and Nona has done pretty well; better perhaps than her mother would like. For instance, Nona doesn't see the social distinctions the way Pauline does. Pauline's secretary, Maisie, has a mother who develops cancer. Pauline sees this as an inconvenience for herself, although she tries to push this down, and generously offers to pay for all of Maisie's mother's care. But it's Nona who goes to the hospital and actually sits with Maisie, and holds her hand, while her mother has surgery. Pauline worries that Nona is just a little too good, really. Here:

Pauline turned a tender smile on her daughter. "It's so like you, Nona, to want to be with Maisie for the operation - so fine, dear."

Voice and smile were full of praise; yet behind the praise (Nona also knew) lurked the unformulated apprehension: "All this running after sick people and unhappy people - is it going to turn into a vocation?" Nothing could have been more distasteful to Mrs. Manford than the idea that her only daughter should be not only good, but merely good: like poor Agnes Heuston, say ... Nona could hear her mother murmuring, "I can't imagine where on earth she got it from," as if alluding to some physical defect unaccountable in the offspring of two superbly sound progenitors.

You see here that besides being empathetic with Maisie, Nona has more insight into Pauline's "unformulated apprehension" than even Pauline does.

Yet here is Nona out on a date: "Isn't there a rather good little Italian restaurant somewhere near here? And afterward there's that n--- dancing at the Housetop."

How jarring that is. One thinks that when this book was brought back into print they could have changed that line: "afterward there's jazz at the Housetop" for instance. Because if Nona were a girl of today she would bite her tongue off before she'd say that word. On the other hand, it's interesting to see how the corporate view of what is or is not acceptable changes.

Let me pause and say that of course one realizes this is fiction. At the same time, Nona is a very important character in the book, and her depiction has internal consistency throughout. If it had ever been brought to her attention that the n-word is rude and hurtful she would not have said it. Either it would not have been brought to her attention (very possible) or it simply was not the derogatory term then that it is now.

So the minor issue here is that one reads these books and is jarred by this kind of thing - Twilight Sleep also includes a much more problematic outburst of anti-Semitism by a less sympathetic character - and wonders whether the text should really be left as it is, which causes one to hesitate before recommending it to people it might upset.

The other issue, and the reason why these books should probably be left as they are, is that in many cases you kind of have to judge people and events by the standards of the day. Not every case, of course. Major things like murder and rape have always been wrong. And individuals or (hopefully) small groups always have and always will find ways to rationalize doing what they want to do, even when they know they're wrong. Use of words, though, don't you have to take that in context? There was a school somewhere that I read about a few weeks ago, that wasn't allowed to put on a play based on Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians" because originally in England (never here) it was published as "Ten Little N---s". That was in 1932, as I recall. The story has nothing about black people in it. Isn't that a bit much?

Anyway, so acceptable use of words changes. Acceptable attitudes change - in "The Lady's Maid's Bell", Mrs. Railton notes that because Hartley can read aloud, she is educated above her station. I don't believe anyone would let that pass their lips today, but Hartley thinks nothing of it.

And we are reminded that well-meaning people have done things in the past that we reject now. The fact that they are now rejected doesn't necessarily mean that they were bad. The rejection itself may be a passing fad. Going back to mentally retarded people - look at the controversy over mainstreaming. Those children used to be excluded from regular classrooms. Then there was a push to mainstream absolutely all of them, because segregating them is BAD. But every now and then you run across the parent of a child with a severe mental handicap, or a teacher who has mainstreamed kids in her classroom, who question the wisdom of mainstreaming every single kid, or assert outright that some of them should not be mainstreamed. Segregating schools by race used to be wrong and bad, but we find Afro-centric schools springing up in places where the grownups are desperate to find some way of reaching the next generation of black kids. So I think it's useful to look at these things and separate out the things we have let go of, or need to let go of, because they're wrong; and things that we let go of that we need to bring back, like the idea that folks should get married before they start having kids, like they used to do.

When F was a little girl I gave her Little House books and Louisa May Alcott books to read along with her contemporary fiction. I wasn't trying to prepare her for life in the 19th century. I simply wanted her to have some perspective, to see that pop culture of today isn't all there is or has ever been, and to see that ideas like temperance and sexual morality didn't just spring up overnight among the people on the fringes of society. One of the ways I tried to be a bit proactive about helping her develop her own spiritual/ethical compass. Mine's still developing.

I saw F this weekend. Spent the night on the floor in her dorm room. (She offered her bed, but she has the top bunk and I didn't want to risk having to climb over her roommate if I had to go to the bathroom in the night.) We had a good visit. She's really looking forward to the semester being over and coming home the first week of May.

We talked about the Virginia Tech thing, of course. F said there was a lot of discussion about it on campus. I had sent this article (via Lady-Light) and she had passed it around to her friends, and they to theirs.

And I reminded F of a study that was done some time ago, don't remember where. Some people volunteered for this thing. They were walked down a hallway past a maintenance worker on a ladder, into a classroom, and put in front of a computer to take a test. The computer test wasn't the study, though. While they were taking the test, they heard a sound as of someone falling from a ladder, and then a single cry for help. The subject of the study was to see how they reacted to this.

The people who were alone in the room when they heard the sound looked up - the camera caught a blank look on their faces as they internally processed the sounds they had heard and the probable cause - and then they abandoned their computer tests and went out into the hall to check on the maintenance man. But the people who were put into the room with others, who were in on the real subject of the study and had been instructed to go on with the test as if nothing had happened, looked at those other people and saw that they did not react, so they went on with their tests too.

I could see how all that would happen, and I made up my mind right then that I would not be a sheep.

I emailed F today: "20 years ago I was in and out of labor, and wondering when I would see your little face."

20 years ago I had a baby due on April 23. I didn't have very many maternity outfits, and some of them were starting to get just a bit too tight. So on March 21, a Saturday, R and I went to the mall and I bought some pants, and maybe a shirt or two. We walked the entire length of the mall and back. Ha ha. I tell everyone who gets close to term and wishes their labor would start, "Go to the mall!"

Because I woke up in the wee hours with a funny little back pain that grabbed and held, and then crept around both sides to the front, squeezed, and let go. This continued the rest of the night. By morning the pains weren't any harder, or closer together, but they were undeniable. I was hungry and wanted my breakfast, but you aren't supposed to eat if you are in labor, so R and I decided to go to the hospital and let them tell me it was false labor so I could get some breakfast and get on with it. I remember having to pause a time or two on the way in from the parking lot because it was kind of hard to walk through those things.

Of course I had to put the gown on and get on the bed. The nurse hooked up the contraction-measuring belt and went about her business, then came back and looked at the printout and said to someone, "OK, call her doctor," and to my husband, "Go and get her admitted." I remember that being a bit of a shockeroo. That wasn't supposed to happen. They were supposed to send me home. I wasn't ready. Not yet. I had another month, didn't I?

But the doctor came in and took one look at my belly, and became very concerned. Even though as it turned out I was not dilating at all, she put me on terbutalin to stop the contractions. The OBGYN who did all of my prenatal care had sent me for a couple of ultrasounds because I didn't get big enough to suit her - only gained 23 pounds (from 108) and my stomach just didn't stick out very much. She ultimately decided that F and I were OK, but she was not on call when I went into labor.

One also has to remember that there have been tremendous strides in caring for preterm babies in the last 20 years. It's possible for babies born 4 weeks early to have lung problems that they can treat now, but couldn't then.

So the doctor on call told me that she just didn't think F was ready, she was afraid the due date was a mistake; left the room to make a phone call and came back and said, OK, maybe I was 8 months along, but she still didn't want to take the risk.

They kept me overnight and sent me home with that wretched medicine. I stopped it on Thursday, when yet another doctor in the group checked me out and told me I had a 6.5-pound baby and it would be OK to go on and have her. But we went to the hospital three more times, to be sent home with the cruel diagnosis of "false labor". For the uninitiated, labor is "false" if the cervix is not dilating. The term has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the intensity, pain, or frequency of contractions. That third time I knew I probably wasn't any closer to giving birth but I was absolutely frantic from lack of sleep. The contractions woke me up every 4 to 10 minutes. I thought I would die, I wanted to sleep so bad.

May I interject here that I love, LOVE, Dr. Lamaze. I do not know how I would have gotten through that week without him.

What finally happened was that on March 31, after we'd spent a good part of the night at the hospital not having F, and R was sleeping because he'd been up all night with me, I threw up. R helped me get settled back on the couch where I'd been reading the newspaper, and prepared to go back to bed. But he is the most solicitous person in the world so he didn't go back to bed right away, but stood in front of me saying, "Is there anything I can do for you? Can I get you anything? Can I do anything else for you?" and I ignored him, reading the comics and wishing he'd go back to bed.

While R was asking those questions he saw me take a cleansing breath and start the slow deep-chest breathing and said, "Are you having a contraction?" Nod. "Didn't you just have one?" Shrug. So he stood there timing my contractions by my breathing, while I ignored him and read the paper. At last he said, "These are coming every three minutes."

A wave of irritation swept over me and I threw the paper down. "Let's go back to the hospital. I'm tired of this crap. I'm through with this. Let's go back and tell them I can't do this anymore."

He helped me to my feet - WHOA. Everything shifted. I felt a tremendous weight, so that it was hard to even stand. Because I'd taken a bath earlier, I was wearing a really ratty old comfortable nightgown that I certainly didn't plan to be seen in public in. I looked pitifully at R and said, "I don't have to get dressed, do I?"

"Let me just get my shoes," he said.

So we went flying down Walnut Grove Road to the hospital ... got there around 3:00. I couldn't walk in from the parking lot this time. I could barely sit upright in the wheelchair. When they checked me, I was dilated 5 cm.

They had told us in childbirth classes that if we got to that point when we went in we could not have an epidural but I did get one. R says I was quite insistent. I was just so exhausted from lack of sleep and the unrelenting, UNRELENTING contractions that I couldn't control with Lamaze anymore.

With the epidural slowing things down, F was born at 4:52, not quite two hours after we got to the hospital. I suppose that if R hadn't stood there when I wished he would leave me alone, asking what else I needed, and therefore noticing that my contractions were close together, I would have had her at home.

So I got to wear those new maternity pants maybe a couple of times before I didn't need them anymore.

I do remember this: I wanted to make the crib bumper because I'd read that babies need strongly contrasting patterns to look at. All the bumpers I saw were pastel colors, and they were out of my price range anyway. I consulted my mom, who researched how to make crib bumpers, and bought a white sheet and some red, yellow, green, and blue taffeta. I set about appliqueing a row of primary-color tulips onto the sheet. I thought I'd have lots of time to get this done before my daughter was born, but during that last week it was pretty clear that things were going to go faster than we'd anticipated. My mom came up to see me on Wednesday of that week, and while we were visiting I finished those tulips. She took the sheet home with her and constructed the bumper, and brought it back the next week in time to put it in F's crib when we put F in it. I remember F staring at those tulips when she was a little newborn. Probably the first of many parenting issues I have given thought to over the last 20 years (and don't seem to be slowing down, though one doesn't usually think of parenting a grownup) and one of the ones that actually worked out.

Still pretty tired.

I worked from 9:45 to about 5:00 Friday, and from 12:00 to 5:00 today. I'll go in tomorrow afternoon after church, too. It's not, like, backbreaking labor or anything. I'm physically tired but I'm mentally kind of drained. Lots of thinking, which we actually all enjoy.

They're taking one of my peeps into the plant. As I told him, it's good for him and good for the company but it sucks for me. But he's very smart and curious and organized and CALM and REFLECTIVE although he is also a man of action and initiative, all of which they definitely can use. My boss told me yesterday that my lab runs like a well-oiled machine. It's true, and that's mostly because of my group. We have to be careful when we replace that person, that we don't upset the group dynamic. Nothing worse than having a person who doesn't pull his weight, or who is always anxious to see that he isn't doing more than his fair share. Or who complains and tries to get his coworkers in trouble.

F is in town for MidSouthCon.

I have to tell the story of how F began attending this con.

Years ago, when F was 14, she tried to distance herself a bit from her parents, as all teenagers must do so they can finish becoming their own persons. She was nice about it, but one thing she did was to decide that she did not like science fiction. This was about the first thing R and I found that we had in common when we met, and we still love it.

I had read a book called Rider at the Gate, (which I see is out of print,) and I kept telling F she would love it. Not interested, no. Thank you, no.

So we were on our way out of town one day, and I saw that she did not take a book with her. I scooped up Rider at the Gate on my way out the door. When from the back seat she sighed, "I didn't bring a book," I tossed Rider to her. More sighing and looking out the window. Finally she cracked the book and began reading.

After a few minutes I glanced into the back seat. F had fallen into the book with almost an audible click. And that was that. The next day she came to me and asked if there was another. So I gave her the sequel, Cloud's Rider, and she took it away immediately to read it.

The next day she came to me and asked if there was another. No, I told her. F then fell headlong on the floor, all 14 years of her, b/c without a sequel to Cloud's Rider she could not support life. With age I have learned to be philosophical about such things, and perhaps she will too. But we both were actually kind of bummed out that there was no third book. I told her we'd try to email C.J. Cherryh and ask her to write another book, and I meant to but I never did.

Not too long after that F went to a kind of hippie coffee-house with some friends, and when she came home she came to me with a grim look on her face. She had seen a flyer.

"There's going to be a science fiction convention in Memphis."

"MidSouthCon," I said. "They have it every year. I've never been, but I know about it."

"C.J. Cherryh is going to be there."

"Really! She's going to be the guest of honor?"

Nod.

"Cool!"

Silence.

"Do you want to go?"

Grim, reluctant nod.

So we went. And there, amid all the funny people in Spock ears and Darth Vader costumes and barbarian princess outfits, F found that she could not escape her destiny. She quit fighting SF and succumbed.

Cherryh was there, by the way. She gave a nice talk, and then had a question-and-answer session. I put my hand up and asked if there could be a sequel to Cloud's Rider. She said that there could. "Because we're all wondering what's happening to Brionne," I said. She said that she knew exactly what was happening to Brionne. When and whether she wrote that book depended on her agent and publisher and all ... I don't really remember. But she talked about those books a bit, and that was cool.

The next year F wanted to go in a costume. I had to make a dress for her so she could go as "some random elf" from Lord of the Rings. It was a very nice dress, if I say so, pale blue with silver embroidery around the neck (my sewing machine did it) and leaf-shaped sleeves I had to figure out how to make. She made the leafy brooch for her organdy cloak out of Sculpy. Her blond hair was waist-length at the time and we pulled out a few small sections for braids. She really was recognizable as an elf if you accept that they look like they do in the movies.

We went to the hotel and parked the car, and as we walked through the parking lot together F said, "I feel like a dork."

"Well, you're going to a dork convention, so that's probably all right," I said.

Just then a dirty, low-slung little yellow car came through the lot, with a couple of fat guys with buzz haircuts and t-shirts with wild fantasy pictures. The driver slowed as he approached us and rolled down the window.

"I take it this is where the convention is?" he said.

"Yes," we said, and they drove on to find a parking spot. After they passed us we both just died laughing.

"I guess it takes one to know one," I told F.

She called me today to say that her costume this year won some kind of award and she gets in free next year. I'm proud of my little nerd.

Tsiporah is making a concerted effort to eat right. Today her routine was off, so she had to eat her fallback breakfast: vanilla yogurt with blueberries and sprinkled granola. Doesn't that sound delicious? I am partial to blueberries and cottage cheese, myself, and could eat that till it comes out my ears.

Her rushed morning, and the age of her son (8), remind me of a time when F was about that age and our morning routine was off. F didn't have time to eat breakfast, so I made her a peanut butter foldover and shoved it at her as we walked out the door - "Get on the outside of that!" (I used to say that when I needed her to go on and eat, but one day she looked at her food in bewilderment and said, "I'm already on the outside of it!") Halfway to school, with a mouthful of sandwich, F sneezed explosively. I had to pull over to the side of the road, retrieve a roll of paper towels from the trunk, and wipe chewed peanut butter sandwich and snot off her jumper, her seatbelt, the dashboard, car door, and book bag. Both of us laughing our heads off the whole time, and me thinking, that's what you get for being in a hurry. I've gotten to where I try very hard not to be late anywhere, but if it's unavoidable I'd rather be late than get in a hurry and make myself even later.

Tertia has a couple of posts about a kid in South Africa who made prank emergency calls from his cell phone and caused a lot of trouble. (Scroll past her funny post about her terrible-two twins. Actually, read it as you scroll. I feel for her.) Tertia wonders what punishment would be appropriate for him, and how much the parents ought to be held responsible.

One of the guys at work told me his son, age 15, had to do 50 hours of community service because he spray-painted his name, in letters 6 feet tall, on a brand-new freshly-painted water tower. I said, "His OWN name? He didn't have enough sense to paint somebody ELSE'S name?" I'm sorry ... I know it's vandalism and all ... but I think it's really funny.

Poor F has had to submit to Lectures from me all her life. If I had had a blog while she was growing up I would have posted them too, because they are always about things I feel strongly about. The meaning of success, which I posted about earlier, was the subject of one of those lectures.

F said something the other day that reminded me of a screed that I subjected her to when she was in the 9th grade. She had to read several books for English, among them Jane Eyre and The Good Earth. Her English teacher, who I think had no sense at all (ask me sometime about the research paper assignment) asked this question about The Good Earth: Was Wang Lung a moral person? She asked this on a test, and the only acceptable answer was "Yes". I blew my stack when F told me this, and I told her that Wang Lung was not a moral person!

F thought that it was because he kept concubines in his later life. It turned out that she thought morals always have to do with sex, a notion I was glad to find out that she had so I could disabuse her of it. Morals have to do with judging that a particular behavior is right or wrong, independently of how we feel about it, whether we want to engage in it or not, what other people will think of it, or whether or not we will benefit from it. A moral person will not always do the right thing. He may try to find ways to rationalize what he does and convince himself that he's not in the wrong. But mostly he'll feel remorse when he leaves the path, and he'll try to straighten up, make restitution if possible, and resolve never to repeat the error.

Wang Lung, if you recall, had a daughter who was profoundly retarded. This was possibly due to the wretched famine that his family had to endure while she was in the womb and in the months following her birth. Wang Lung loved his daughter and felt compassion for her, so he made sure that she was taken care of. No one else cared whether she lived or died, not even her mother or her brothers, and certainly not the servants whose job it was to look after her physical needs. It's clear throughout the book that Wang Lung is a nice person who cares about others' feelings. He's obviously a warm-hearted, loving man. But if he had not loved his daughter, he would not have thought twice about letting her die from neglect. He regretted his family's lack of concern for her, but he didn't think they were bad people because they would have let this helpless innocent suffer. Right and wrong just didn't enter into it.

In contrast, Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre hated his wife. He felt that he had been tricked into marrying her and that she had ruined his life. He began hating her even before her descent into madness. But he continued to see that she was cared for because it was the right thing to do. He made sure little Adele was taken care of for the same reason - he didn't spend a lot of time with her, so it was clear that he took little pleasure from her company, but he saw to it that she was well-clothed and fed and educated by people who were kind to her because he felt a sense of responsibility toward her. It was wrong of him to try to marry Jane without her knowing that it couldn't have been a legal marriage, and he knew that. But the thing is, no one would have known if he had walked away from his responsibilities. No one knew about his wife (except his brother-in-law) or would have known about Adele, who IIRC wasn't even his child. He didn't come across as a particularly religious person, so he didn't do what he did from fear of hellfire. So there wasn't a single reason for him to do these responsible things, up to and including risking his life in an attempt to save his wife when his house burned up, except that he felt that he should. And that makes Mr. Rochester a moral person.

Here is a creepy article about former Pres. Carter: Jimmy Carter has some advice on morality and values. (via www.opinionjournal.com)

"I was teaching a Sunday school class two weeks ago," he recalls. "A girl, she was about 16 years old from Panama City [Fla.], asked me about the differences between Democrats and Republicans.

"I asked her, 'Are you for peace, or do you want more war?' Then I asked her, 'Do you favor government helping the rich, or should it seek to help the poorest members of society? Do you want to preserve the environment, or do you want to destroy it? Do you believe this nation should engage in torture, or should we condemn it? Do you think each child today should start life responsible for $28,000 in [federal government] debt, or do you think we should be fiscally responsible?'

"I told her that if she answered all of those questions, that she believed in peace, aiding the poor and weak, saving the environment, opposing torture ... then I told her, 'You should be a Democrat.'"


Interesting opinion Mr. Carter has of half of his fellow Americans. We want to destroy the environment, we support torture, etc. And what a profound depth of thought he wanted to encourage in that 16-year-old, not to mention respect for her fellow Americans and a willingness to engage in discussion, understand their views, and possibly modify her own, as I and all independent thinkers sometimes do.

I remember that when F was 7 years old, during the elections in 1994 that saw the upheaval of the Democrat-controlled houses of Congress, she asked me what made a person a Democrat or a Republican. I told her that everyone wants what's best for the country, we just have different ideas about what that is and how to go about getting there. Right after that Harold Ford Sr., who had kept his seat but lost the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee, went on TV complaining about the "East Memphis devils" who voted Republican and said that his people were writing down the addresses of people who had yard signs promoting his opponent. (The newspaper reported that people whose yard signs had been picked up phoned the Republican headquarters and asked for them to be put back. Even some people who hadn't HAD those yard signs asked for them. Some wrote in letters to the editor in which they spelled out their addresses and asked that special note be made of them.) It's not a Democrat thing to hate and despise half the population of the U.S., is it?

Lileks:

When I picked Gnat up from the after-school program she was in the auditorium, listening to a lecture.

“And we should remember that when we cut down the forest to build shops and houses that these are homes for animals,” said the lecturer.

Why do they do this to little kids who can't think critically? When F was in the second grade her school had a speaker who told the kids that every time they ate a hamburger, they were helping to destroy the Amazon rainforest. She refused to eat the hamburger I prepared for her dinner that night. I was so irritated - it felt like somebody had gone into my kitchen and thrown out food. I finally asked her if her school cafeteria served hamburgers. Well, yes, they did. "Wouldn't you think that if they were that torn up about it, they would stop serving hamburgers?" Uh, yeah, come to think of it. "Don't let yourself be jerked around. Eat your burger." And that was that.

Today we took F back to school and left her there.

It seems wrong to leave my baby. When she was a toddler she would fall on the grass and look at me, wrinkling her face to cry. I would say, "You're OK!" and she would get up and toddle on. I wanted her to be independent and self-reliant. Now that she's 18 I want to smooth her way. I want to tell all her professors and all her friends that they must be kind to her. I want to make sure every little thing goes right for her. And she's 150 miles away.

I knew this would be hard but it's a lot harder than I expected.

Had a brief discussion with M, my coworker, today. His son, who is in 3rd grade, is learning about animals; specifically, predators. Kids love that stuff, you know. And parasites. They talked about fleas and ticks at school, but M told his son about tapeworms. It took the kid a moment to understand what M was telling him, and then - oh my God.

You know, it's fun to gross out or startle a child like that. Usually it's the other way around with the bathroom humor and all. They think they have it all over their parents for outrageousness. They forget we were once kids, too.

Edward Gorey knew it.

Here is an article about restaurants where the misbehavior of small children is discouraged.

I think this is a significant quote:

"I love people who don't have children who tell you how to parent," said Alison Miller, 35, a psychologist, corporate coach and mother of two. "I'd love for him to be responsible for three children for the next year and see if he can control the volume of their voices every minute of the day."

You don't have to control their volume every minute. What you do is, you teach them that there's a time to run around and scream (and I hope her kids have such a time, at a playground or in the back yard) and a time to be quiet. This is how children start to learn self-control. People do their children a real disservice when they don't start working on this during toddlerhood.

And here:

Kim Cavitt recalled having coffee and a cookie one afternoon with her boisterous 2-year-old when "someone came over and said you just need to keep her quiet or you need to leave."'

"We left, and we haven't been back since," Ms. Cavitt said. "You go to a coffee shop or a bakery for a rest, to relax, and that you would have to worry the whole time about your child doing something that children do - really what they're saying is they don't welcome children, they want the child to behave like an adult."

Ms. Cavitt isn't taking into account that other people go to the coffee shop or bakery to rest and relax, too, and they don't want to hear her screaming kid. And I say this as the mother of a wonderful person who once was a screaming kid on occasion. I had to put up with her screams because I am her mother, but other people are under no obligation to do so and they do not find it charming.

Here's one more quote from a parent:

"The litmus test for me is if they have highchairs or not," said Ms. Dehl, the woman who scooped her screaming son from his seat during brunch, as she waited out his restlessness on a sidewalk bench. "The fact that they had one highchair, and the fact that he's the only child in the restaurant is an indication that it's an adult place, and if he's going to do his toddler thing, we should take him out and let him run around."

In other words, the world doesn't revolve around her son. How about that.

Via Joanne Jacobs.

We get an extra hour tonight. I wish they would leave it alone. I remember F's indignation the first time she noticed losing that hour in the Spring - "Are they going to do something about that?"

R and I visited F at school today. We took her and a friend to McDonald's and to WalMart, walked around campus a little, looked at old yearbooks in the library, ate dinner in the cafeteria. It's right for her to be away from home so she can separate from us and finish growing up, but we miss having a young'un around the house. I've read that "freedom is when the last child leaves home and the dog dies" and I think that's funny in a limited kind of way, but maybe the person who came up with that statement didn't have as nice a kid as we do. Besides, we have cats, ha ha. Molly is leaning on the keyboard right now. She's gotten too sophisticated to try to catch the cursor, like she used to do.