Dressing up vs. Growing up

A recent story in the New York Times, “Dressing for success, again” cited the show “Mad Men” as influencing the younger generation to dress up, in contrast to us middle-agers who (at least as a generation) made dressing down the norm.  On the one hand it’s interesting to have a generational flip-flop where getting dressed (as opposed to dressing down) might be a signifier of youth.  On the other hand we may be witnessing a regressive flight toward fashion (particularly materialism) in the context of a culture on the brink of both collapse and new growth.

“It’s these young guys rebelling against their boomer dads,” said Russell Smith, 45, the author of “Men’s Style: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Dress” and an advice columnist for The Globe and Mail in Toronto. “But it’s very amusing and paradoxical that the new anti-parental paradigm involves a pinstripe suit and a pocket square.”

Wow.  We have a “new anti-parental paradigm” folks.  But what does this really mean?  And what might a “pro-parental paradigm” be?  A badge of baby spit-up on the pinstripe?

Only connect!

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, And human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect…

–E.M. Forster, Howards End

“Only connect” was going to be the theme of our Holiday Card this year, the one we never got around to doing.  My wife, Andy, suggested it—saying how much “only connect” seemed to capture the essence of this time.  The card (she’s the photographer) was going to be something about our kids surrounded by the cacophony of telephony—laptops, iPods, etc.  The only problem was that our teen boys were just fed up with having pictures of them plastered on our Holiday cards.

Still, the phrase kept lingering in my mind:  “Only connect.”

Does it mean, “do nothing but connect?”  Perhaps, “don’t bother if you don’t connect?”  Or maybe, “if only we can connect, things will somehow be okay?”

Honor thy Mother and Father… at the racetrack?

With a thirteen and fifteen-year-old at home, finding a family activity that everyone is willing and interested in has become increasingly difficult.  Now if I imagine some Norman Rockwell sort of Sunday in the Park with George, some sort of “jolly holiday with Mary,” the last thing that would come to my mind is the racetrack.  Yet, that is precisely where our family managed to have a great time last Sunday.

The track is actually a place we go in honor of my now-dead in-laws, particularly my father-in-law who was a bit misguided as a parent—as his big, in fact only, bonding experience (save movie screenings) with his young daughter was the racetrack.  Although we rarely go to the track, we always remember the exit, Baldwin, because my father-in-law was bald… and he never won.

Got Sleepless Nights?

If we frame “parenting” as having a caring attitude toward not just our own children but each other and the world, then even when our kids are sleeping soundly through the night, our own sleep troubles can pose a major parenting challenge.

A reader inquires:

“I read your sleep post with interest. My kids are long past that now (teens), but the issue of sleep caught my attention in general.  That, largely because I have a sleep disorder that has been managed well for many years, but completely out of control for a number of months now.  I’m lost in the murky territories of extended and extreme sleep loss.  At least I know what it is, but it is debilitating, and no light at the end of the tunnel at present.

Certainly, it isn’t as difficult as it was when my kids were younger but it is difficult.  There are many things to do, and I cannot do them, or can only do them in the most limited fashion… How to not make it worse by breaking down in front of a child, and frightening him?  How to live with the guilt and the anger and not let it spill out?

I know I’m still managing to be a decent parent, but it hardly seems enough.  And the mask is heavy.  I’ll continue to wear it as much as I can, but it’s heavy, and getting harder to hold up.

I know, relatively, this is a small thing.  It could be so much worse. But I need to finish my job properly, somehow manage to do that. And it’s getting harder and scarier because physically I’m spiraling down, fast.”

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Slogging through a day when we haven’t had enough sleep is bad enough (unless we’re still in college or early twenties and generally possess more resilient bodies to compensate for our blithely immature minds), but when sleep-deprivation becomes chronic, when words like “insomnia” give way to labels like “sleep disorder,” it can be miserable in the way vampires used to be portrayed (before they became sexy teens)—as a sort of non-living anxiously between worlds, an agony of nether-dwelling that leaves us perpetually drained (and potentially draining to others, particularly children who we are supposed to care for and nourish).

Eating Issues: Breakfast at Tiffany’s… dinner at home

At some point I went from seeing Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s as an idealized anima to realizing that she (or at least her character) was an anorexic woman in a hat with a lot of issues (after all, Holly Golightly is essentially a self-involved prostitute who is ashamed of her uneducated hillbilly roots—a lost kitty in a rainstorm and someone who needs treatment more than a lover).

Given that body image, weight-loss obsession and eating issues are legion in our culture, I thought Privilege of Parenting would take a plate and get in line at the buffet.  My focus is on the parenting aspects of eating disorders (an excellent place to read and learn more about anorexia in a New York Times Health Guide on the subject which also has links to Bulimia, and other eating disorder sites).

I think that most of us get the general gist that anorexia is about dangerous levels of weight loss while bulimia is about eating and purging via vomiting, over-exercising or laxatives/diuretics.  A less well known, but more frequently diagnosed acronym is EDNOS (eating disorder not otherwise specified); in this case some people, when given this less severe diagnosis, will actually go further in their extreme non-eating to, for example, stop getting their period and thus qualify for the full diagnosis of anorexia.  For more on this see a recent New York Times story on EDNOS, “Narrowing an Eating Disorder.”

Out in the cold—balancing attachment and a good time

A reader inquires:

“I must say, I am enjoying parenting more and more…but I am feeling ‘out of balance’ personally and in my relationship with my husband, as I stay at home with my daughter (and the four or five times we have had a babysitter in the past 2 years to go have dinner alone, it has not gone well at all, with my daughter being unable to separate).  My husband, who works such long hours and travels so much, just wants time for ‘us,’ and so do I.  It doesn’t feel right to leave my daughter with a babysitter when she cries and is miserable most of the time and then continues to get upset about it for weeks, but it also doesn’t feel right not to make alone time for myself and my husband.  Parenting is certainly not easy, and sustaining and nurturing a marriage relationship alongside is something I am finding to be getting more difficult instead of easier.  How do we ‘get it right’ with our children and our spouses during these early parenting years?”

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This is a rather classic challenge and I’d start by acknowledging that, my wife assures me, I was quite frustrated with things at this point in parenting.  While I might like to think of myself as having been a paragon of patience, alas I’m told that I would angrily say things back then like, “We never have any fun.”  Over a decade later (even if it seems to have flown by) it’s much easier to talk about that time without anyone getting too defensive.

A bullet-proof vest for the soul: psychological abuse in relationships

In a recent  NPR interview by Michele Norris, about psychological abuse in relationships, Dr Steven Stosny (Psychologist; Author, Love Without Hurt) spoke about the gender difference regarding the things that we are mean about when we systematically put our lovers down.  While Stosny acknowledges that we all say mean things sometimes, non-abusive relationships allow for apology (and hopefully a change in behavior moving forward) while abusers tend to be self-righteous in telling the other that they deserve the bad treatment or are at fault for “making me do it.”

Stosny claims that one in four relationships have some degree of psychological abuse, and that this abuse can be a precursor to physical abuse (in about 40% of cases); yet he points out that as wrong as physical abuse is, unless it results in disfigurement or overt maiming, it is the psychological abuse that causes more damage—making people feel lastingly unlovable and worthless (while physical abuse is easier to recognize as “wrong” and out of control—about that other person having issues).

Passing the baton

After a turbulent week that brought both a Wolf Moon (the biggest, and allegedly most provocative full moon of the year) and the iPad (a great name for something to catch the eFlow.  Period.), the Grammys brought a healing, wii are the world, unity.  Although I can’t say I’m a huge Lady GaGa fan, when s(he) sang with Elton John at the Grammys I have to admit I thought it was very sweet and packed with poignant potential portent.

I was a big Elton John fan as a kid (a natural high school follow-up to digging Alice in Wonderland in elementary school); and even though I was hetero, I was rather partial to French Nouvelle Vague, Rocky Horror Picture Show, neon colored clothes from punk boutiques and all manner of second-hand-store anti-conformist statements in a time and place when wearing a beret to school in a working class Chicago high school could be grounds for an ass-kicking.

And so it warmed the cockles of my heart to see Elton singing across from GaGa, a complicit and knowing passing of the torch that seemed to bookend the later moment of Stevie Nicks and Talyor Swift singing together like they were a groovy mom and daughter just back from a Montana Ave shopping afternoon (where they might have ran into Elton and his daughter, LGG and all shared a single muffin).

Farting on the couch

I once worked with a boy who had a habit, despite lactose intolerance, of being sure to drink a big glass of milk before our sessions.  He would sit on my sorry plaid couch in a decrepit, sometimes leaky, trailer on the edge of the property that held assorted special needs schools and administrative buildings huddling around a cracked blacktop and fart enormously.

This boy had been severely abandoned and had been in the system for six of his fourteen years, bleaks times in which he’d seen a lot of damaging things.  He was quite smart and also quite funny.  He was also more used to the sad reality of his circumstances than I was used to them on his behalf, and he would often challenge me to maintain my empathy—drawing me in with heartbreaking stories of sorrow, and then sending me reeling with his secret weapon.

Math anxiety is elementary… if you’re a girl

A recent AP science story by Randolph E. Schmid suggests that Girls may learn Math Anxiety from Female Teachers.  A cited study showed that at the beginning of a school year math ability was not related to teacher math anxiety, but by the year’s end the more anxious the kids’ teachers were about their own math skills, the more often their female students (and not the boys) endorsed the statement that “boys are good at math and girls are good at reading.”

Given that 90 percent of elementary school teachers are women, and separate research suggests that elementary education majors in college have the highest levels of math anxiety of any major in college.