Butting my nose into other's business OR saying what needs to be said

All it takes is one Google search of my daughter's school and the word "dress code" to see my name blasted all over the internet. 

If anyone can tell you that one event posted on social media can change how others perceive you and have impacts on your life, it is me. 

At the time, I spoke out because it was the right thing to do. I didn't say shitty things about the principal or the school. I didn't cuss anyone. I maintained my dignity and integrity while pointing out that what the school did was wrong.

But I was in mid-40s so my pre-frontal lobe is totally done developing. 

And there was fall-out for me. The number of times I was called to substitute teach at the school after that was ZERO. I picked up jobs there that were canceled. My assumption is that they didn't want me in the building. To them, I wasn't to be trusted. 

I doubt I would have felt any differently had I been in their shoes. 

But enough about my experience. 

I get that teenagers are going to say stupid things on social media. 

(Background: A student on another team at my daughter's school posted a not-great comment about a local school that included a picture of members of the team. A parent from that other school told me about it. I emailed the team my daughter is on because some of the girls in the picture play on both teams. It was a notice that 1.) Something on social media had been shared with me and 2.) Be careful what you post on social media (because talking smack about other schools is childish and reflects poorly on your school and coach...WHICH IT DOES.) And maybe be careful about who you take pics with because some of them post stupid stuff.)

But as a 1.) person committed to integrity and a believe that social media should be civil if nothing else and 2) a parent of a teenager at that school and 3.) a parent member of the SBDM council for the school, it is my responsibility to remind students (any of them) what is expected of them while they are in their school uniform. 

The teacher in me came out a little bit, ok.

It is my responsibility to remind them (and parents) that conversations need to continually happen about 1.) who you pick for your friends and 2.) that your friends may post stupid shit that makes you look bad simply because they posted a picture of you with their asinine comment. 

(I KNOW about logical fallacies, including guilt by association. I may not agree with it, but it is part of how the world works. I don't make the rules.)

And to be perfectly honest, this kind of behavior simply burns me up to the core. I HATE bad sportsmanship, and it may be one of the reasons why I despise sports in general. If you see too much of it, and you don't love sports enough to forgive it, it sort of ruins it all for you. 

I didn't go looking for this problem; my kid isn't even on this team. This problem was brought to my attention (and subsequently brought to my daughter's attention). And, unfortunately, I'm a "if I see something, I say something" kind of person because I recognized some of the girls as being teammates of my kid. I know some of their parents, and I like to think that if I would be angry to see my kid's picture on a post like that, they would too. 

I ended up having two people (full grown adults) say something along the lines of "Well, the other team was doing X,Y and Z." To which I responded, "Just because the other kids or other team does stupid stuff doesn't mean our school and our students stoop to that level." 

I don't have many lines in the sand, but this is one of them. 

So did I overstep? 

Maybe. 

Did my email cause the coach more grief? 

Maybe.

Did I further my reputation as somebody who says shit no one likes to hear and is a bitch?

Almost certainly. 

Would I do it again?

Yes. Because it isn't a bad thing to remind young people with undeveloped pre-front cortexes that social media can follow them around and cause an awful lot of stress in their lives (even if they never intended it.)

I'm starting to feel differently about death

I have always been fascinated by death, and I doubt that will ever change. I have also always been terrified of death, although that bit seems to be changing. And yet, I've always understood suicide--the need/desire to end it all, to just be free of consciousness forever. 

The actual physicality of dying and decay is intriguing. 

This past summer I read Mary Roach's book Stiff, and I couldn't read it fast enough. I didn't know this place existed until I read this book. I regularly tell G that he should be a forensic doctor because he loves to poke at dead things or cut into preserved corpses (of worms, fish, etc). N has an interest in forensics, too. M gets "sicky" easily, so he will be the one who opts out of anything remotely related to blood and bone.

I have been reading the kids the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman for the past several months. I read this series probably 20 years ago before I had children, so I had forgotten a TON. 

The other night, though, we got to the point in The Amber Spyglass, where Lyra meets her Death, and I loved the idea that from the moment a person is born, their death essentially hangs with them through every experience, ready when the time comes to take their hand and gently escort them into the great beyond. Essentially, the death functions similarly to the soul. In this book, both are personified. 

I don't know what I believe about death...what happens after, although my biggest sense is nothing. You simply don't exist anymore. Just as my consciousness of life didn't happen at the moment of my birth, and I remember nothing of the "before" or my birth or the several years after my birth, I think death will be the same. 

A while back I listened to an audiobook by Barbara Ehrenreich titled Natural Causes, and there was a part that struck me:

"You can think of death as a tragic interruption of your life... or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and see it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us."

I think it is pretty normal to feel scared of death when you're young, but the older I get, the more I understand that death can begin to feel like a relief. This doesn't mean you don't want to live anymore, but it means that due to the physical burdens of living (fatigue, disease, aging bones and muscles, etc.), you are tired. There is a point when many people if they live long enough are simply exhausted. They don't actively wish to die but they are okay with the prospect of eternal "sleep" and rest. 

And yet, I also understand the desire to not exist anymore as a young person due to the confusion and the angst and the general unmoored feelings that a person can have when they are still raging at figuring things out or if depression has taken hold of them. 

Several years ago I spoke to a mom whose son was having suicidal thoughts, and she had never had those herself. She couldn't wrap her head around the idea, and so I explained to her that I had sort of always had suicidal thoughts. It was as strange to me to imagine a person never having such thoughts as it was to her to imagine someone having them at all. 

My dad's diagnosis with face/neck cancer this summer and his current chemotherapy (which is preventative since his cancer has not metastasized) has me tuned into mortality. For this to coincide with a pandemic that has taken over 200,000 lives makes it even scarier. 

I don't like to think of my parents dying, and yet being forced to reckon with it provides a silver lining. Last year when Dad had his open-heart surgery to repair a valve and was still in the hospital, I helped him out of bed one day and bathed his back while my mom went home to shower. I am not a sentimental person, but this was a profoundly important experience for me (and why are my eyes getting bleary right now.) 

Sorry. Needed a tissue. 

Helping my dad in that moment was one of the most meaningful experiences in my life, right up there with marrying and having children. Seeing my dad vulnerable was a gift. 

Damn. More tissues. 

Seeing my dad vulnerable then was a gift. Seeing my dad vulnerable now during his cancer is a gift.

It is not a gift I expected or want at all. AT ALL.

But to see it only as a burden and sadness misses a large part of the picture of what it means to be human and have a meaningful life. 

The role of the parents?

I was reading last night about the Larry Nassar trial and his "pelvic adjustments" of young women, and I could not help but wonder about what was going on in the parents' minds during all the times when he was "adjusting" these girls.

This was not intended as an exercise in blame, but rather a "Would I be able to sniff out bullshit if I saw it?" type activity.

I am not a trusting person by nature, and I'm not sure why.
Most people haven't given me a reason to not trust them.
Perhaps it is the anxiety?

I do know that when my kids were little, and I was looking for a pediatric dentist, I wouldn't even consider taking them to a dentist who refused to let parents come back to view the cleaning and whatever else the dentist was doing. A friend told me about a male dentist in my area who had this policy, and I knew there was no way in Hades I would ever take my kids to such a place.

Until or unless my kid doesn't want me in the exam room and says it to my face, my butt is in the room.

I also know that when I was in college, I went to a male gynecologist who very quickly made me decide I would never, ever so long as I lived, see another male ob/gyn again.

He did not assault me.
But I distinctly remember looking down when he was getting ready to examine me, and he was looking in the wall mirror next to him and fixing his hair.
Now, I was in college, but I had the good sense to think to myself, "Are you trying to impress my vagina with your hair? Because my vagina doesn't give a shit."
It felt perverse to me, and so it was the first and last time I ever saw that doctor.

A cousin of mine worked for him for a time, and she loved him.
I remember her saying he was "smooth as silk."
I'm not sure what that meant, and I didn't care to ask.
It didn't sound like a descriptor I wanted for any gynecologist.
(This cousin also started asking me when I was 17 when I was going to marry my high school boyfriend, so I have never thought she had much sense on the whole.)

Anyway, this memory makes me think that I've got a pretty good "skeezy" radar, an ability to know when things just don't pass the sniff test.
And this makes me wonder whether any of the parents of these girls also had their skeezy radar dinging away.
And if they did, I wonder why they didn't quickly get their girls the hell away from this situation.
And this makes me think of Shakespeare because Shakespeare was all about ambition and the stupid things that ambition makes people do.
I wonder how many parents' radars were dinging, but they didn't listen because of either their ambition or the ambitions of their daughters.
Or perhaps there was another reason, although ambition seems the most obvious.

Perhaps fear? A fear of accusing people who have "authority" of not doing something right and then, perhaps, as a result, their daughters not being allowed to compete (which takes us back to ambition).

I had a recent situation when I might have allowed the fear of accusing someone of doing something wrong to keep me from saying something.
No one wants to come across as a troublemaker, but sometimes you just have to be THAT PERSON.

At D's work, there is an on-site clinic that recently switched from one provider to another.
The first time I took the boys there for their allergy shots, they gave M G's allergy serum which, had it been more potent, could have sent him into anaphylactic shock.
(Fortunately, it did not, and you better believe they were johnny-on-the-spot calling the allergist to figure out what to do.)

I didn't say anything then, but when I went back again, they gave the boys the correct serum but not in the correct arms (and I know this because I paid close attention and made sure to say, "THIS IS M" and "THIS IS G" as I stood right next to them and watched them get their injections.

I wrote a letter to the provider letting them know what had happened and that they were playing with a big honking liability issue. I was contacted by some big-wig in Nevada, who apologized like crazy.
I told myself I would give it one more chance.
The office is now following the procedures to.the.letter, and I am fully prepared to let them know if they do not.

So I said this was not an exercise in blame, but as I write this, thinking about my kids getting an allergy shot mix-up and how infuriated I felt about that, I feel myself wanting to say to the parents, "What were you thinking?"

It is just so tragic.

Why people keep quiet

There has been no great fallout from my blog about math homework.

Yet.

(A conference has been scheduled with the teacher, and I did email the principal to ask if this homework policy is a school-wide policy and how it can be justified as being in any way helpful to students.  I said it politely, but I think my point was clear.)

Although there hasn't been a response to that, what there has been is numerous discussions in person or via email with 8 friends who have experience as principals, counselors, and teachers who are like, "Wha?"  I've also perused the district's progression, promotion and grading handbook for middle school to see what it says (or actually doesn't say).  Oh, and I've put in a call to the district ombudsman to see if there is any JCPS stand/policy on this topic.

I want to go in fully informed.

The input from my friends/colleagues has been valuable to me because even though I have prior teaching experience and have held a valid license for 16 years, I questioned whether I had any authority to question the teacher's policy.  I questioned whether I was wrong for thinking it was odd.  I mean, I haven't worked full-time in a classroom for 13 years, so what do I know?

And this realization helped me better understand why so many "odd" things happen in schools, in government, in businesses, in churches.  People doubt their authority to acknowledge what they find screwy and actually say something about it.  

They keep quiet because they think they don't know enough about the situation to notice something is weird (which can just be plain ole weird but could also potentially be corrupt).

They keep quiet because they think their input doesn't matter.

They keep quiet because they don't want to "start trouble."

They keep quiet because they don't want to hurt feelings.

They keep quiet because they don't want to gain a certain reputation.

They keep quiet because they don't want any fallout to hurt their family (or child, in my case).

I realize this grading thing is small fries compared to what N's school is dealing with---overcrowding and a lawsuit about bullying--and so it is entirely possible it will be shoved under the rug.

If it is, it is.

But you better believe that next year, I'll be asking at Open House what her teachers' policies are on homework and its consistent return to students.  And I'll be encouraging every parent I know to ASK QUESTIONS often.  

The whole point of Boyhood is that it was boring

This past weekend we watched "Boyhood."

At 2.5 hours in length, chances were pretty good that I wouldn't sit all the way through it.  I rarely sit through a film that long.

Much to husband's dismay and the cat's delight, I sat still and watched the movie in its entirety plus the 20 minute extra feature on the making of it.

There were many things I liked about the film.

I liked that the transitions from one stage of boyhood to another were so seamless that I had to zone in on the boy's haircut to understand that a transition had taken place.

I like that the film showed the physical transition of the adults, which were in some ways as astounding as the boy's.  I appreciated that the film also showed how adults, depending on their personalities, can change/mature over time (the dad) or stay perpetually stuck in dysfunctional choices (the mom).

Of course, I loved the music.  The Black Keys and Flaming Lips in one movie=my kind of awesome.

After it was over I felt a sadness that lingered into the following morning.

It wasn't a sadness like what I get after watching "On The Beach" or "Melancholia," which is sadness and irrational fear bound into a tight bundle.  It was a sadness for something that I know without a doubt is coming---my children growing up.  But as with all things parenthood-related, that sadness is interlaced with joy at knowing that my children are supposed to grow up and create their own lives beyond me.

"Boyhood" reminded me that maybe I should stop worrying about making every moment count with my children.  Every moment doesn't count.

"Boyhood" reminded me that 98% of life is the in-between stages, not the milestones.  Not the big deal events, but the little forgettable moments.  The things that we don't remember anyway.

We are left with a feeling, a sense of who we are, where we're from, why we matter.  The nuts and bolts of that feeling, that sense, are long gone by the time we start to really try to get a handle on ourselves and where we are in the world.

I liked that the film gave me a ray of hope that my two boys, who talk about their penises all day long and really get way too much enjoyment from "Uncle Grandpa," may turn into pretty cool dudes when they mature.

I liked the movie's reminder that as a parent, you do the best you can with what you have, and the kids will probably turn out ok.  

My Brownie "husband"

I have never understood the interest in polygamy.  Perhaps my opinion would differ if I had a penis and had the prospect of multiple sex-partners before me.  But as a woman, I just.don't.get.it.

Which is why my Brownie "husband" makes me want to tear my hair out.

My daughter's Brownie troop is very small, and one of the girls lives with her dad.  I have known her family since 2007 when she and N were in preschool together.  The past five years have been ones of turmoil for this girl, although she seems to handle it remarkably well.  Suffice it to say, her mother abruptly left her father and due to a whole slew of soap-opera like circumstances, he has full custody of the kids.

Now I know of plenty of single mothers.  I don't for a minute think these women have it easy, but I also know that women are generally more "with the program" than our male counterparts.  Men can do great things, but given their evolutionary history as hunters, they are simply ill-equipped to handle the multitudinous tasks that a "mom" generally oversees.  Honestly, how many men do I witness in the grocery story calling their wives/girlfriends for assistance?  I don't see this same thing amongst the female shoppers.

I digress.

This dad, I believe, does the best he can given the hand he was dealt.  He tries really hard.  And so I try to be charitable, to help out within the parameters of troop leader as I can because I think he does appreciate it, and I think his daughter needs as much stability and follow-through as she can get.

But it sometimes feels like I have another man to nag (in addition to D) without the benefit of a paycheck being brought home, honey-do things being done, a warm body in bed at night.

Just someone else to text and remind, "Be there at 7:30" or "Be sure to bring the vest."
Someone else to wait on while they are running late.
Someone else to shake my head at and wonder, "Why did he do that???"

Baby naming

Our cousin is expecting a daughter in the spring and recently selected a name.  In the car this afternoon, I told N the baby's name.  She said, "Ooooo, I like that.  But she might want to name it Claire instead."

N and I got to talking about how the names you think you want to name your child when you are young are often not the names you select once you are actually having your own baby.  When I was a preteen, I liked the name Jocelyn but there is no way in heck I would have selected this for my child as a 30-something pregnant person.  I don't like names ending in -lyn (Brooklyn, Caitlyn, etc.).

Yesterday in a fit of couch-potato-nesss, I watched Freakonomics.  One of the segments in this documentary is about what people name their children and whether a name itself plays a role in how successful a child becomes.

I love the names D and I selected for our children because they are common enough to be recognized as "real" names, not trendy made-up ones that don't stand the test of time.  But they are uncommon enough that you don't hear tons and tons of kids with those names, as you do Emily or Aidan.  I would be willing to bet my children will be the only N, G and M in their classes.

And though I wasn't crazy about my name when I was a kid and still am not a fan of my first and middle names together (Carrie Ann sounds so whiney, but that may be because of the whiney-ness of the Hollies' song), I like each of them individually.

After 38 years, they feel like me.  They fit me to a T.