Ordinary Woman, Extraordinary Life

On Friday afternoon, 16 sets of parents descended on my classroom to participate in an annual Kindergarten tradition: Candy House Day.  Created years ago as a part of our focus on holidays and celebrations,  it has evolved into something more; something that helped changed my attitude towards the event.  It has not, traditionally, been my favorite affair.

I am a tyrant for healthy foods in the classroom.  I have a reputation in the school community of being borderline-ridiculous in my demand to keep junk food out of my sphere; a well-deserved reputation, I admit openly.   When class parents offer to bring snacks, I send a list of acceptable fare: fruit, veggies, crackers, cheese, pretzels and the like.  I have a list on my first parent letter of September as well, of morning snacks that will be allowed to be consumed by my charges.  If a child brings in something not on the list, it will be saved for lunch.  All the tears in the world won’t sway me, as I dash off another copy of the snack letter to the parents and highlight the list of allowed contraband.  It’s all I can do to hold in a comment about the parents’ reading ability.  If parents send in cupcakes for a birthday,  the children eat them fifteen minutes before dismissal and then the families can deal with the sugar rush.  My own children never tasted a sweet until they were probably four or five.  I worked hard to develop their pallets towards a varied and healthy direction.

So to expect the junk food Scrooge to be thrilled to have bags and bags and BAGS of candy placed in front of my students goes against my grain at a cellular level.   Even though the “rules” of candy house specifically state that the children are not actually allowed to eat the candy (a rule I find unnecessarily torturous and cruel and another reason I’m not a fan of this day- I don’t like to torture kids), I caught at least one child with his cheeks stuffed full like a hamster.  His smile when he saw me looking could not cover his guilt even one iota.  Candy is a kids’ drug and this kid, like most, are unashamed addicts.

Another problem I have with this day is the fact that, each year, at least two or three students have no family member show up to help.  My mother or my husband will come in and be a rental dad or grandma, and I have teaching assistants who jump in happily; but you can’t fool a kid.  Everyone else has a mom, or dad or a big brother or a grandmother or sometimes all four that shows up for them.  It doesn’t help either when I tell these event orphans that I could almost never make it to my own children’s school events because I was working, and that I know how they feel.  Nothing can take away the loneliness and even shame as the other kids are yelling, “mom!”  “dad!” as each parents walks in, and no one shows up for you.  This falls under the “I can’t save the world” umbrella, but still it hurts.

Finally, it’s the absolute frantic mess and chaos created by the sheer number of bodies in the room, the bowls and plates full of stuff spilling on the floor, the kids running wild in the room while the parents watch and say nothing, and the families who forget to send in the requested supplies causing me to either run out and buy with my own money or force the responsible ones to share.  What’s to love about this day??

My friend and colleague helped me to see just what this day has become.  In a way, it saddens me to see it and to accept my new role.  I was venting to her after everyone had gone and the room was eerily quiet.  I told her how much I dislike this event and how making candy houses is something families should do together, the kind of thing we loved to do with our kids, and she said, “yeah but they don’t.”  Simple words that stopped me cold.   They made me think about the parents who had shown up that day; some of them I had never even met before in spite of the fact that we had already done a Thanksgiving Show and finished parent-teacher conferences.  I realized that most of those who showed up are working people who took the day off from jobs in the city to come spend forty-five precious moments with one of their kids.  I thought that Candy House Day would probably be one of the things these little ones would hold in their memories for a long time; how it made those children whose families did come feel special for a few minutes.   Mommy and me  or Daddy and me time that they likely do not get too often.  I remembered that, at my parent conferences when I suggested old-school board games as good gifts and good ways to spend time together, many of the responses showed that these adults had forgotten about such an activity.  So, in addition to all my other hats, I now don Family Time Maven.

While we were involved in this activity, covered to the elbows in frosting, the events were unfolding in Newtown, Connecticut, in a classroom that resembled ours in a town that was as just as small and tight-knit as ours.  News coverage was, at that point, very spotty and the story was changing every five minutes.  Parents, receiving AP pushes on their cell phones, were whispering bits to each other and to me, and it was all I could do to keep repeating, “not in front of the kids.” At one point, I left the class to go to the bathroom and struggled to keep my lunch down and to keep from crying.  As I write, two days later, more details about this unspeakable act of evil with no possible explanation are still developing.  And it has put my newest role in a perspective I wish I never needed to have.  Every second is precious; every stolen moment that families can spend together cannot be overvalued.  If that has to come during the school day at a function that I help perpetuate, so be it.  It’s a brave new world.

To all those out there in the blogosphere who celebrate Chanukah (Hannuka/Hanukkah/Hanuka…), enjoy this warming, fun, but not-really-all-that-important-to-Judaism holiday.  Chanukah, celebrated because of a miracle that happened during  a war over  land considered holy, is actually a minor holiday that has been blown way out of proportion due to its calendarial (I made that word up) proximity to Christmas.  Even so, it is one of my favorite holidays, with its tradition of family, songs, food, games, candles and presents. 

Our kindergarten social studies curriculum includes a focus on family and holiday celebrations, and I do Chanukah up pretty big.  This year I made latkes for 45 kids, taught everyone to play dreidle and sing the dreidle song, and sent each child home with a wood dreidle, a gold-covered chocolate coin and a picture of a menorah.  We have a very diverse population and it was pretty funny for the father of one of my Chinese girls to tell me that all she talks about at home is Chanukah.  I heard that from a few of the families.  What is not to love about this holiday?

Our family,with its older generation of Holocaust survivors and refugees and its newly American younger generation, knew how to party on Chanukah.  We would gather at my Aunt and Uncle’s home where we would eat some warming meal that always included steaming hot, greasy and incredibly delicious potato latkes, followed inevitably by chocolate.  In a Dutch/Belgian family, Jewish or not, chocolate is its own food group.  And Chanukah is, for some reason,  associated with chocolate.  Say no more.  Every year each child would be given a chocolate alphabet letter corresponding with his/her first name.  Most of those were nibbled down to crumbs before the end of the night.  And what a night it always was.

Piled by the window, the full length of the living room wall and up to the window sill itself, was a mountain of presents wrapped in blue, white and silver paper. You could not even tell there was a folding table under the mass of boxes because there were gifts in front of the table, next to the table and on top of the table.  When we were young, we thought we had died and gone to kid heaven.  As we grew older,  we found the sheer abundance of gifts and the hours it took to get through opening them somewhat of a mortifying embarassment.  Not to mention expensive.  And it did take hours- someone would be designated gift-giver and would give out one gift at a time.  His (always one of the boys) job would be to keep track of whose turn it was to open a gift, and to keep an informal count so that it all came out even.  The receiver would open the gift while we all watched with as much anticipation as if it were our own.  Many of the presents came with a poem that had to be read aloud and discussed before the wrapping paper was ripped off.  The poem sometimes gave clues about the gift and sometimes poked fun at the person about to open it.  My father was the master present-poet; he could write Odysseus –length odes to a single present, while the rest of us usually scraped out a four-line rhyming bit of silliness. 

There were several other traditions that my family overdid during this holiday.  Every year there were gifts to one cousin that revolved around nuts.  I’m still waiting to learn the origins of that whole thing, but every package he opened had walnuts falling out of it or was made from walnuts.  There were always gag gifts in among the pile for a variety of people, but every year one person was really targeted.  One year a cousin received no less than twenty pairs of socks, each sock being wrapped individually in large and small packages.  The poor sucker probably bitched to his mother months before that he could never find socks to wear.  In my family, you watched what you said lest you become the next Chanukah victim.  Seriously.  Sometimes there was that gag where a large box had a smaller box inside and inside that was a smaller box and so on until you came to an envelope or tiny box, like a Russian doll.   It was often a really treasured gift but sometimes it was…a sock. 

When all of the visible presents were open, the kids got really quiet and impatient.  For under the tablecloth covering the folding table was a big gift for one lucky child.  We never knew who it would be and since there were five of us cousins, it could be years until it was your turn again.  A bicycle, a sled, a dollhouse or doll carriage, a television or a boombox; the lucky recipient would jump up and down screaming while the rest of us kids, sitting among ridiculous piles of stuff looked on with envy.  Our Chanukah parties were legendary.

Our family continued the tradition with the next generation as long as we could, but now it is down to a very much simpler and more realistic gift exchange that revolves more around the latkes and the chocolate.  Of course it helps that we also celebrate Christmas- and the presents are piled up to the bottom of the tree and all around it, and there is often a large gift hiding under a table cloth for some lucky kid…

For those who wish to be entertained by a modern Chanukah song, here is a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EeC8nTYEwQQ

For those who wish to further educate themselves on the history of this holiday, here is a helpful link: http://www.chabad.org/holidays/chanukah/article_cdo/aid/102978/jewish/The-Story-of-Chanukah.htm

Did you ever feel this way about a person in the room but didn’t have the cojones to say it out loud? Or you just didn’t want to deal with the fallout of such a comment?  Sometimes I feel like I have just had enough of someone’s presence and I am barely holding on to some semblance of common courtesy (which by the way is a lot less common than you think).  What I really want to say is something like the above title or “why don’t you take your sorry behind home?  No one likes you and no one wants you here.”  Or at least I don’t.   There are just some people who suck the joy out of a room.  And I’m not even talking about Debby Downer-types.  Those I kind of understand and feel empathy for. I don’t like to hang around them too long either, but that’s different.   It’s the people who are in-your-face rude and consider it entertaining to put others down and tear them up in public that I refer to today.

You know the type:  he or she will walk into a room and talk in a really loud voice, making observations about the situation in the world today or something or someone in the room.  No one else has a right to an opinion, no one else’s thoughts matter, no one else is as smart or savvy.  Woe to the person who even tries to stand up to or share a rebuttal or a counter argument with this type.  Might as well paint a target on your forehead and wait for the arrow, or jump in front of an oncoming train. This type of person draws a crowd of curious onlookers and then performs incredible feats of social nastiness.  The rest of the crowd either sticks around silently to rubber-neck like they are witnessing a car accident,  or quietly slinks away hoping not to draw the attention of the main attraction to themselves.

Even when there is no crowd, and it is just me and such a person in a little one-on-one,  he or she feels obligated to continue ranting and overpowering my every word.  It just gets old having to spar continuously with certain people.  I always feel like I have to be 100% on and not let my guard down, lest I say something that opens me up for more ridicule.  What a tremendous amount of energy it takes to be around someone like this.  I’ll pass.

I’m not saying I can’t deal with confrontation.  I actually have no problem with that, especially if I feel there is an injustice of some sort being committed. That’s the New Yorker in me saying, “HEY!  Let’s hash this out here and not pussyfoot around! Lay it on the table and let’s deal!”  The type of person I’m referring to is someone I usually would be around in social situations or even work situations, where everyone should be open and sharing and eager for discussions that enlighten.  There is no chance of enlightenment when you are being bulldozed by one of these egotistical, narrow-minded types.  Every utterance of mine is viewed as an attack to be defended at all costs.  Exhausting.  Aggravating.

Don’t get me wrong; I am known as a pretty opinionated person myself.  My blog is a testament to that fact.  But I also pride myself on being an intense learner and a pretty good listener.  I am fascinated by the opinions of others, even when I think they are incredibly misguided (read as “stupid/insane/ignorant”.   You can take the girl out of New York but…).  The only possible exception to this is FOX news- I can’t stand it.

I just think narcissistic, self-absorbed people  should shut up at least half the time and let others share their views without fear of verbal assault. Otherwise, seriously, buh-bye, thanks for coming…

Some people are world-class procrastinators;  I mean, on a professional level.  These people, and some of them are friends, family members and colleagues, can wait until the last minute when a deadline is looming large, to begin a project or complete a task or whatever else they need to do.  Just thinking about this gives me hives.

When our report cards are due on Monday morning at 8 a.m., one of my fellow teachers will call me Sunday late at night to ask a question so she can get started.  Some of my older students, even with “checkpoints” to assure good time management, somehow manage to leave the work until the very last second.  My own kids had a very bad habit when they were in middle and high school of waiting until 9 pm when all the stores are closed to inform me that they needed a large blue poster board for a project due the next day. I don’t know if these people get some weird rush doing this or see it as a personal competition between themselves and the clock.  Most of them will tell me, when I am freaking out for them, that they work better under pressure.  What does that even mean?? When I am under pressure, my brain tends to short-circuit and my stomach does the shimmy shakes.  No thanks.

When the report card “window” opens on our  software, I immediately begin to input information.  We are given about two weeks to get them done before the “window” shuts with a scary clank.  Once that happens, it’s over and anything I put there is set in stone.   So each day I accomplish enough to allow me to sleep at night and keep the anxiety hounds at bay.  I try to finish completely at least a day ahead of clank-time so I can review everything before it’s too late.

When I was a college student, I would immediately begin any long-term projects the day I received the syllabus.  I would hand things in early for review and then take the feedback and rework the final draft.  I preferred early morning classes, mainly so I would be done with classes by early afternoon, could spend the rest of the day and early evening involved in the follow-up work, and then hang out with friends until the middle of the night.  Who needed to sleep anyway?  At the same time, I had close friends who would party their brains out, sleep until one in the afternoon, take classes from 2 pm until 9 pm or so, and then do the minimum amount of work until party time.  When they had an exam or project to deal with, they went into cram session hibernation 24 hours prior to the event.  I guess that worked for them;  or not.  I never asked.  Time did tell though- some of those friends graduated and some didn’t.

When I teach grad school, I prepare my syllabus and  plan my lessons weeks ahead.  I create the Powerpoint presentations at least on a skeletal level, and gather materials I think I will need. I would rather edit and revise them as the dates get closer than leave them until the night before.   As an elementary school teacher, I tend to sketch out vague plans a week or a month ahead,  and then fill in the fine details as needed.  This way I can be sure I am meeting the needs of my students as they come up.  Still I am prepared for just about anything ahead of time.

If I sound a bit anal about getting things done, well, nothing could be further than the truth. Organization is not my strong suit and something I still am working towards.   It’s just stress-avoidance, pure and simple.  And this only seems to apply to things I actually enjoy doing on some level.  It does not seem to apply, for example, to paying my bills.  I just hate most things that have to do with managing money and think nothing of not thinking about due dates for bills until I get a reminder threatening email.  But that is fodder for another blog posting.

Which is cheaper to use at the table: napkins or paper towels?  Does shampoo that says it is designed to help maintain hair color really work? How does my car stereo sometimes pick up radio broadcasts from Ohio?  What happens to swallowed gum?  As you can see, I wonder a lot.  I think it’s a very good thing to wonder; it’s fun, it helps me entertain myself and keeps my curiosity sufficiently piqued.  It is, in fact, one of the sixteen Habits of Mind of successful learners (see my post of July 9 for more on this https://ordinarywomanextraordinarylife.wordpress.com/?s=habits+of+mind).    According to the brain think-tanks, people should spend more time wondering.  When you walk around and let the world in, and I mean really in, you open synapses in your brain and allow new connections to form.  New connections become the scaffolding for even more learning and understandings.  So seeking out wonder around you and stopping to embrace it is like adding floors, walls, stairwells, pathways and elevators to the ever-growing construction in your head.

I tell my little ones in my kindergarten class that they carry a toolbox with them at all times that helps them learn about the world around them.  I am referring to their senses: sight, sound, taste, smell, touch.  As adults, I believe we allow the mundane everyday routine to beat out of us the attention that needs to be paid to the little things.  Much of the recent research on senior citizens shows that getting stuck in a routine causes more rapid deterioration of processes like memory and learning; and many of us are in those ruts by the time we are thirty or so.  It’s not easy to stay out of these mind-numbing routines when there is a full-time job and/or a family to manage.  But it is important to remember to stop and, as they say, smell the roses.  Instead of rushing from work to the train or car, slow down just a little.  Look around you at the storefronts, the gardens, the cars on the street, the people, whatever you pass.  You are likely to think: When did that new deli open?  Look at the colors of that sunset!  Nice car (shoes/dog/eyes)!   Since I have made more of an effort to notice my surroundings, I have felt more content with my days, I kid you not.  I have learned to find little pleasures in little things:  the flowers growing in the gardens, the leaves on the trees, the clouds, the dogs walking past.  And these things make me feel happier.  Who knew that the secret to happiness was all around me, waiting to be noticed?

Some good friends have noticed a difference in me over the last few years.  Not that I was ever a miserable person to be around (except during some of the teen years, I’m sure) but they have made recent comments about my patience level, about my more serene disposition, about how easy it is to make plans with me because I seem happy doing just about anything.  It’s true- I actually find it difficult to choose between two activities most of the time because they both sound fun, and unless I feel very strongly, I’m just as happy to have someone else make the decision. It’s all good.  I really think I owe this to embracing that openness for wonderment and awe every chance I get.

What is capable of amazing each of us is different.  People with an artistic eye can and should spend a lot of time looking at paintings, sculpture, drawings, and the like.  I kind of get it; after all I consider myself an amateur photographer and I think that may help the way I see the world.  And I do love museums; but my idea of a trip to the museum better involve friends and food or I won’t last long.  People who love music can and should have the tunes going all time when possible, and attend concerts too. I’ve seen many folks lost in the music, letting their bodies sway or their hands conduct an invisible orchestra.  I do love music, and it is usually playing wherever I am.  I enjoy live music and really good guitar riffs or some sweet saxophone.  Still, not the thing to really catch and hold my attention.  If I had to pick one “thing” I think it would be nature.  I can walk in the woods for hours, stare at the crevices on a cliff or sit by a stream for endless periods of time alone.  I watch woodpeckers at work, marvel at the stars on a dark moonless night, closely examine a particularly gorgeous flower, climb mountains, listen to the wind blow, and am blown away by rainbows.  The other day, my husband was driving us home from an evening in the city, and suddenly I went, “WHOA!”  He almost caused an accident as he was looking for an oncoming car or pedestrian diving into the road.  When he couldn’t identify any cause for panic he asked me, “What??”  “Look at that moon, it’s huge! And isn’t that Mars right next to it?? Look how red it is!”  Poor man.

Wonder and awe does not come to you; you have to seek it out.  You have to open your eyes and mind, and breathe a bit slower, and listen, and look and sniff.  You have to chew each bite of your food twenty times until you can identify the individual flavors (eating slowly has proven to be nearly impossible for me- not sure why I gobble my food, but when I do chew and really taste, mmmmm. Very rewarding!)  You have to watch for something interesting and catch it when it happens.  It’s always there, just  waiting for you to discover.

Friday evening after Thanksgiving, when we were all sick of turkey and stuffing and yet somehow hungry again,  we ventured to the local burger and beer restaurant near the house.  As we were enjoying our last night together with stories and loud laughter, Magic Dave, who works the room every Friday night at this place, wandered over.  He played card tricks and mind tricks, turned his wallet into a flaming mass and entertained us with a flowing comedic patter for a good long session of old-fashioned illusions.  Dave is a seasoned pro and we were a willing audience.

Magic is something that has always fascinated me- that combination of performance and audience buy-in that just does not happen in other types of entertainment (except maybe professional wrestling).  When you are watching a good magician, part of you automatically becomes a small child again; because although you know in your adult brain that what you are seeing is just an illusion,  your reptilian brain is making your hands clap and your eyes all big and shiny and your mouth yell for more.  You cannot help sounding like a five-year-old as you look around at your companions in complete confoundment and ask each other, “How did he do that?”  In every crowd there is at least one skeptic who tries to trip up the magician or follow his hands with driven precision, and claims to have seen the solution.  I love to watch that person’s face when the magician, who is highly aware of that cynic in the crowd, does something flawlessly.  I think a true magician lives to impress the doubters.

When I was a seventh grader at Hunter College High School, one of my good friends was really into magic. She carried her wares  in her backpack and would practice on me whenever she could.  She taught me about the importance of patter, and she showed me the sponge ball tricks and she took me to the secret haven of NYC magicians of the seventies: Tannen’s located on Times Square.  We would open the barely marked door in the middle of the then-filthy and x-rated 42^nd Street area, and climb a narrow staircase and walk into another world.   Sometimes she would buy stuff but mostly we would just watch and listen to the adults sharing trade secrets and looking for the latest materials for tricks and illusions.  At Hunter we had no Gym so we left the building to do our Physical Education, and my friend and I took swim class at the Hunter College building on 68^th Street.  After swim class, dripping wet and looking every bit of our thirteen-year-old selves, we would stand inside the lobby of the college’s main building and perform for the students.  She was a consummate performer and so much fun to watch.  I did try a trick or two in public myself.  Safe to say there is a reason I pursued a different career.  But what fond memories.

Aside from the stream of patter that is essential to performing magic, there are the physical requirements.  The sleight of hand, card and coin manipulations and illusions require lightning quick finger movements and agility.  In the discipline and art of magic, which takes years of study and practice to perfect, the magician manipulates the environment to create an illusion using a variety of skills including (love these two words, just because) prestidigitation and legerdemain.  Even knowing some of the secrets from my own “training” as a teenager, I am entranced by disappearing balls, coins that move from one hand to another or change size in front of my nose, cards that show up at the top of the deck.  When a table-side magician such as Dave pulls one over on me, I am beyond delighted. On my birthday, Magic Dave gave me a small sealed wooden box and had me put it far away from him.  Then he asked me to write my name on a playing card which kept appearing and disappearing for the next fifteen minutes.  At one point he ripped it into pieces and it showed up whole.  He did a variety of fun tricks and at the end told me to open my present.  Inside the box was the card I had written my name on.  Fabulous!

Magicians who perform on stage must necessarily aim for big illusions due to their distance from the audience, and the need to deceive a large number of people at the same time.  How do they saw someone in half, make a live tiger disappear, cause items to float in the air, and turn rabbits into doves?  How do they escape from shackles while hanging upside down, and change places with an assistant who is tied up and locked inside a trunk?  I don’t actually want an answer to that question, and I never watch those reveal shows and videos that spoil the trick.  When I am watching I want to be fooled- I want that performer to amaze me. Magic is the type of entertainment where you must suspend belief and let the inner child come all the way out.

Back in the day, no one did it better than Doug Henning.  This one is for you, Rrrrrr. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFtV69i36Pg

It was the middle of the night.  Of course- do women ever go into labor at a convenient time?  But it was too early; I was barely thirty five weeks pregnant and  the doctor had already stopped labor once a month ago.  This time felt different and I knew he would not be able to stop these babies from coming.  We rushed to the the University of Arizona hospital across town and went through the usual check-in procedures.  I was not yet in hard labor but things were progressing pretty rapidly.  I had little time to think about how my life was about to change forever.

The doctor came in and checked on me and went away again. Poor bedside manner;  I seemed to bore him.  He appeared so old to my twenty-six year old eyes,  but he was probably all of late-50’s.   I dozed off and on as the labor progressed.  After eight or nine hours things kicked in to high gear.  I refused the epidural offered, as I wanted to do this as naturally as possible, cavewoman that I am.  The doctor came in and ordered one anyway, but the technician stabbed me in the back several times with no luck finding the sweet spot.  When the birth started happening for real, the doctor was nowhere to be found.  It took a half hour to locate him, hiding out in a lounge and watching a football game.  He seemed pretty annoyed to be disturbed. 

Due to the fact that I was having twins, and that one was presenting breach, I was wheeled into the OR and prepared for possible surgery.  Hubby bravely held my hand and did everything we had learned in Lamaze classes.  The first baby came pretty quickly and was held up: a pink, beautiful but tiny five-pound baby girl.  Girl!  I laughed out loud- we had no idea we would have a girl.  I was the only female in my family, and on hubby’s side there was one girl and four boys.  We had not even discussed girl names!  I was beyond delighted. 

Then the doctor became very serious and the feeling in the room changed.  The breach twin was not cooperating.  The doctor tried exterior manipulation but it was not working.  The doctor told the nurse to prepare for surgery as my blood pressure hit the roof and the baby’s vitals were dropping.  Then he did something that I was later told no other doctor in the hospital would have done. He went in and grabbed that baby by the feet and yanked that newborn out of me.  He held up the second baby: a tiny, beautiful girl! I started to laugh out loud again until I realized she was not breathing and she was not pink, but a milky white color.  I had never felt so terrified in my life as they whisked that second infant girl away and I yelled at hubby to follow that baby.  He was gone for the longest fifteen minutes of my life, while the doctor attended to me.  By the time he returned to say she was breathing and fine,  I was hysterical and called him a liar.  I demanded to see my babies.

The doctor, annoyed again at me, ordered morphine.  I yelled at him: now you want to give me morphine??  I threatened to get of the table and go hunting the entire hospital until I found them.  With an aggravated sigh, he told the nurse to wheel me to to neonatal nursery, and he went back to his football game.

At the nursery, I found my cousin, a nurse who just happened to work at that hospital and who just happened to be on duty that night, tending to my girls.  I never knew  such emotions existed as I felt during that twenty four hours.  To this day, I am happy that she was there as I knew they were in the best hands possible.

Back at the hospital room, I asked hubby (poor man-what a saint) to get me a Kippy’s burger with mushrooms and onions. Kippy’s   was known for grinding the burgers to order and I had not eaten in a long time.  When he came back, I was ravenous and raving.  I tore open the package, took two huge bites and pushed it away, full. Then  I fell into a dead sleep…

…until two hours later when the lactate nurse came in for the first feeding.  She taught me how to feed the babies, with her strong Asian accent causing quite a confusion:  Tlin A first light blest last time? Tlin B first left bleast this time?  I guess it mattered who went where when.  She actually pinned little signs on my hospital gown over my chest to make sure.

After several days we came home and the routine of feeding and caring for babies made a blur of the first month.   It took a while for the new normal to take shape.  And now, twenty five years have gone by, and I look at pictures of those two amazing baby girls as they have grown into women I am proud to call my daughters, and I get a bit teary-eyed.  Happy birthday, wonderful girls.

Here’s a good game to play when you are alone:  think back on your life and the paths it has taken so far, and try to imagine what your life might be like now had you made different choices.  We make decisions about everything everyday, like what to eat for dinner or which route to drive home, and all of these have consequences.  What I chose for dinner didn’t sit well and I didn’t sleep well and now I’m tired and cranky and what I had planned didn’t go the way it should have.  The route I drove home was clear and fast, but the other choice had a one-hour delay due to an accident that I did not know about- whew, lucky choice since I had an appointment that I couldn’t miss.  But we also make big life decisions such as whom to marry (or not to marry) and what job to take and where to live.  Those times in my life when I face a huge path-altering decision, I usually write a weighted list of pros and cons;  this really helps.  But the truth is, one never ever can know what new paths will open from the choices one makes, and that lends a lot of uncertainty, insecurity and anxiety to these big questions.

When I met my husband, I was still in high school, but I already had a plan: graduate and move out west to start my adult life.  I was not sure at that point whether I would go out there and attend college or find a job; I just knew I was going.  When he followed me out and proposed marriage, I said “yes” without much thought.  I knew I had found my soul-mate even though I was so young.  But what if he had not followed me out there? After all, he had his own path laid out for him- when he got out of the Navy he had an apartment with friends waiting for him in Florida and he was already accepted to the University there.  He blew off all of that to take a chance on me (chew on that for a minute…).  But what if he hadn’t?   Would I have found someone else who was man enough to be my man?  Would I have stayed in Tucson for over ten years?  Would I have missed him so much that I would have changed course and moved to Florida and chased him instead?

When I was in college, I had NO idea what job I wanted to do after I graduated.  I was heading into my junior year when I finally decided to become a teacher.  At the time I was majoring in Spanish and when one of my friends asked what in hell I was going to do with a Spanish major, it forced me to think.  I thought about becoming a translator at the United Nations, but I did not want to move back to New York City at that point.  Someone dropped a casual suggestion about the bilingual education department;  and I, who had never really liked kids when I was growing up (true confession), decided what the hell, I’ll try it. I fell head over heels in love with the program and the kids and have never looked back.  But my other area of interest was science.  I loved hanging around the Geology department with the cool, brilliant scientists.  They traveled all over the world exploring and bringing back valuable information that helped shape our scientific knowledge base.  What if I had gone that way? How would that have affected my marriage and family plans- spending lots of time away from home out there in a field that was completely male-dominated and very exciting?

When we were both tired of living in the desert and wanted to move where there were seasons, and to find a healthy place to raise our family, I applied for a PhD program at the University of New Hampshire.  There, one of the world famous professors in the field of writing education had two openings in his program.  I interviewed very well, and with my great references, he told me verbally that I would likely get one of the spots.  We packed up, sold our house, I quit my job and hubby closed out his business. We moved like the Beverly Hillbillies with all of our stuff, which we put in a storage facility in New Hampshire, and stayed with my mother in New York City to await a confirmation….which never came.  I was rejected from the program.  When I rack my brains, I can come up with a few reasons why, but one possibility is that I chose to take my nine-week old infant to the interview and nurse him then and there.  I think maybe the deciders thought I would be too busy with a new baby to take on the responsibility and commitment of a doctoral program.  What if I had gotten accepted after all and had completed the PhD?  Would my children have grown up in New Hampshire then?  Would my husband have been as successful in his business?

Recently, a sweet real estate deal came up and although we were very comfortable in our life and our home, we had to decide: go for the deal or not? Sell our house or rent it out?  Move into the new house or rent that one out instead?  What if, what if, what if…

It is also entertaining and thought-provoking to  ponder possibilities that are not based on my own choices that would have changed the course of my life, or even changed whether I would have one. What if Hitler had never been born or had not been so successful in his evil plan- would I also not have been born?  Would my parents have met anyway over in Europe and would I then have been raised as a wealthy German debutante? What if John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr had not been assassinated?  What would this country be like today?  What if the Native Americans had chosen not to help the Pilgrims survive in this country, but let them die out?  Certainly, at the very least, your plans for this Thursday would be affected.

It’s an exercise of the mind to wonder about things.  I use this natural human mental process in teaching students when I ask them: what if there were four kids to share ten cookies instead of five?  What if we leave one plant out by the window and water it but put another plant in the closet and forget about it?  What if the Lazy Dog and the Lazy Cat and the Lazy Cow had decided to help the Little Red Hen make the bread?  Kids love these questions almost as much as they love to ask “why?”

So next time you’re bored, let your mind wander and wonder.  It’s a great use of “down time”, and who knows, you might even make some interesting discoveries about yourself. Just have fun with it, and don’t let it take you to the Regret Zone.  That’s a waste of time and an exercise in futility….

Postscript: an article on What If…                                                                  http://news.yahoo.com/jfk-had-survived-assassination-100212215–politics.html

Was I born this way, or was I hammered out by the experiences I have lived through?  This is a question that has been argued for over a hundred years, and the debate was modernized by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (fascinating man that I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit I never heard of).  I do not expect to answer the question in this posting; I simply share my thoughts on the topic.   I came to wondering about this after a nice evening with my hubby discussing the behavior of our various family members and my own place in the family tapestry.  I’m sure your family is completely normal and all good; but no musing about nature/nurture is possible without bringing in one’s upbringing, skeletons in closets and all…so I wonder how much of who I am is a reaction to life and how much is predetermined and written in my DNA.  I remember in high school and college the 80/20 argument on both sides- but I think the truth is that the ratio is different for each of us.

How many times have I heard, as a teacher at a parent conference, “oh she is just like her mother/my great aunt, or he is just like my brother/his father” or some such rationale for a social, emotional or academic behavior? How many times have I said those words myself?  Little things such as spelling ability and big things such as how people handle situations have all been attributed to some poor, possibly deceased relative who can therefore not defend herself or blame someone from even further up the family tree.  But how much of this is really inherited, and how much is due to the way one was raised? 

I think we are all aware of the sibling studies that show how children raised in the exact same situation come out to be very different from each other as adults. The hell with studies- I can just look at my own family.  And we have all heard stories about how identical twins separated at birth with no knowledge of each other’s existence wind up in the same career, marrying a person with the same name and drinking the same beer.  There appears to be no possible answer to this question, except that, as I said before, it is different for each of us.

I have my father’s and grandmother’s gift of gab and for languages in general; I have my mother’s and both grandmothers’ cussed levels of independence (apparently my first word was “no” which I used often, even when the question involved cookies. Go figure.); the issue of whose brains I have inherited is a mystery to me. I did not inherit musicality, unfortunately; I did not, thank goodness, inherit the uncanny ability to not take responsibility for anything or to run from bad news.  And having grown up when and where and how I did, I can certainly give some credit to the experiences that have shaped me up to be who I am today.

So next time you want to blame Great-uncle Morris for your bad stomach, or your mother for your issues with dealing with confrontation, you can get away with it.  Or you can just own up and try for some good old fashioned self-improvement and not put the fault and responsibility (and/or guilt) on someone else.  But that’s no fun, is it?

Somewhere out there we have a daughter and a son who would be in their late twenties.  They were ours for a few short months and the truth is they were so young they would not even remember us.  But they left a deep imprint on my heart and I hope that at some cellular level they feel that someone at some point cared for them the way they deserved.  I am talking about our foster children; the brother and sister who came to stay with us when we were just in our early twenties and getting ready to start a family.

The whole foster care thing came up the first year I started teaching.  I was just twenty-one, and teaching in a poverty-stricken and dangerous area of South Tucson.  It was love at first sight with that class of third graders (who are now turning thirty-eight; holy crap). Everyday I leaped out of bed and showed up at school with the custodians to open the building and get the room ready for them.  When they came in, I hugged each one and warmly welcomed her or him to our day together.  Many came from homes that were toxic and where there was not food to eat or a bed to sleep in.  School was a safe place where the lunch ladies cooked rice and beans from scratch to go along with whatever often-unidentifiable main course was on the menu.  That was 1983, the year Ronald Reagan declared that ketchup could be counted as a vegetable on school lunches; which made me so angry I wrote a nasty letter to him explaining how school lunch was the only meal my students would eat each day.  Although I had a wonderful relationship with each of my thirty students, one did stand out for me:  Eddie.

After school each day, I would walk the neighborhood and make home visits.  Sometimes a mom would invite me to sit for coffee and fresh tortillas off the grill; other times a door would be slammed in my face by a threatening-looking man or a scared woman. Once I sat in a living room telling a boy’s mother that he was not reaching his potential because he chatted too much and was not making a good effort.  She excused herself and went into the next room with him, and before I could even stand up she was screaming at the child and smacking him.  As I came running in the room to stop her, she picked up this tiny boy and threw him against the wall.  I pulled her off of him, yelling that this would not help him and left after she promised not to hit him again.  That afternoon I called our full-time Child Protective Service caseworker who shrugged it off with a sigh.  You can believe that I never talked to that mother about her child again.  But that was not Eddie.

Eddie was the first child at school each day and the last to leave for home.  He smelled bad and wore the same filthy clothes for days.  But his round face with his deep, dark eyes and his bright smile belied any sadness that he might have gone home to.  It was not unusual to see Eddie, barefoot and nearly naked, running through the streets after school as I made my rounds.  One time I stopped in at his house and his massive father, reeking of alcohol at four in the afternoon, threatened to kill me.  That night I came home and told my husband that I wanted us to get certified as foster parents so I could bring Eddie home and give him the love he needed.  My husband, being the most generous human being I know, was all for it.  It took us a over year of training and completing the investigation of our personal information and our home to obtain our foster care license.  By that time, with CPS sniffing around Eddie’s family, his grandmother had taken him in to raise him and I never saw him again.

Within a few short days of our license being granted, we received a call from our social worker with the happy news that they had a sister and brother who would be coming to stay with us.  She was three and he was one, and we would pick them up at the foster-care home called Casa de los Niños.  Their names were “Laura and Doug”.  We showed up at the Casa with car seats waiting in the car, and a stuffed animal for each child.  We were seated in a room, and a woman brought in two kids, brother and sister aged one and three, and said, “We are giving you these two instead of Laura and Doug.”  That was it, introductions were made, and off we went home with our two little ones.

The first few weeks were actually hell.  The sister was a wildcat, a scratcher and a biter who was fiercely and ferociously protective of her baby brother.  She changed him, fed him, bathed him and watched him sleep, and would not allow me in the room when she was taking care of him. It took a long time for her to trust us and even longer to truly embrace what I kept telling her, while hugging her squirming fighting little body:  we are here to take care of you both.  Once she bought in, she would not get out of my lap and she totally ignored her brother the way a three-year-old older sister should.  For a long time, things were great and we let the social worker know that we would adopt these two if their parents lost custody.  We went on day trips to the zoo, and to the top of the Mount Lemmon to play in the snow, and for bicycle rides around the desert roads.  It was all lovely.

A month or so after these two came to live with us, we were invited to bring them to a Casa de los Niños reunion at the local playground.  I thought it would be nice that the workers there could see how happy these two were, and that the kids would see their little friends they had spent time with.  As I was pushing them on the swings, a small girl with a smaller boy in tow came up to me and asked if I was Maureen.  When I answered in the affirmative with a curious look on my face, she began to cry as she spoke: “We are Laura and Doug.  You were supposed to take us home.  Why didn’t you take us? Why did you take them instead?  Please take us too, please don’t leave us here.”  To this very day, I do not think I have ever been more shocked than I was at that second.  What in the world was this and who told this three-year-old my name and that I was supposed to take them but took their little friends instead and what the hell?  I had no words but murmured something lame and apologetic, and took my two home, crying the whole way.  This was a harbinger of worse yet to come from the foster care system.

My entire family had embraced our foster children, buying them toys and clothes to supplement what we could purchase with the small state stipend.  Christmas was approaching quickly and my mother, who was coming to visit, told us she had a whole suitcase full of stuff for the kids from the rest of the family in New York and could not wait to meet them.  Early in December, our case worker suddenly told us that the children’s birth parents (a drug-addicted prostitute and an alcoholic unemployed abusive biker-gang member) were working on rehabilitating to reclaim their kids.  Our two would be spending the weekend with their parents and we were to pack up enough clothes for several days.  We sent them home with most of their new clothes and their favorite books and toys, and many hugs.  When they came back to us three days later, they were dressed only in underpants/diapers and ragged shirts. The clothes we had bought were gone.  They were filthy and exhausted, and she was carrying a handwritten note.  I undressed them on the carport and threw the crap they were wearing in the garbage and carried them into the house straight into the tub.  After I had fed them and put them to bed, I read the note which was from their grandmother, thanking us for taking good care of them.

The case worker told us there was nothing he could do to get back the stuff we had sent home with the kids, so we had to start all over again.  It was with utter disbelief that just two weeks later, I got a phone call from the caseworker to say the parents had been deemed rehabilitated and that the kids would be going home for good.  Once again we packed up all of the things we had bought, and this time the hugs were dreadfully charged with a feeling of loss and fear for the kids.  When, three days after they went home, we received a call saying the girl had an injury and we were now being investigated for abuse, the fear for them turned to fear for ourselves.  Through Christmas and New Year’s Day, we waited for the results of the investigation.  To say that our holiday was a stressful disaster would be a sad understatement.  The feeling of relief when we were finally found not responsible (with no apology) turned to rage at the system.  We called the social worker and told him to take our names off of the foster care list, as they had already been calling us with more children; but that when our two came back into the system we would take them back and we would adopt them.  We found out months later that they had in fact been put back in foster care almost immediately, and given to a woman with ten other foster kids.  We told them to rip up our license and to never call again.

So, somewhere out there are two young adults who may or may not be having a good life, who may or may not have been bounced from one foster care situation to another, who may or may not have a family of their own.  I will never know and can only hope for the best because I don’t want to think the worst.  I truly hope the foster care system has improved since then, because it was an unmitigated disaster for us and for our two foster kids.  I prefer happy endings….