This Explains A Lot - Moral development, gender roles & religious beliefs from when I was a kid.

My assignment this week is to examine my moral development as well as to look at factors in my childhood that effected how I perceived gender roles and religious beliefs. And the thing that I found most interesting about this reflection is that by looking back upon my history, so many of my ideas on my own sense of morality has developed after what would be considered my childhood, and have occurred almost despite my socialization into my gender and my family’s religious beliefs.

My symbolic inheritance was for all intents and purposes that of the typical Yankee WASP upbringing. By the time I came along to my already full family, my parents had an upper middle class lifestyle. We had two cars and a regular summer vacation in Vermont. As a small independent group, we valued work and school and baseball. In a nod to our Anglo-Saxon ancestors and assumed Protestantry, our custom complex consisted of spending Sundays with our extended family, but outside of my grandmother, they had little to do with our daily existence.

My father was for a time a very successful commercial banker, and my mother was an operating room nurse who had retired as soon as I had come along. She stayed at home with me, but oddly had very little to do with me throughout the day. I can remember from a very young age that we never exactly saw eye to eye on things. I am perhaps a bit critical of her, because I know that she would reach out to me, on occasion. But deep down, I had always felt a disconnect in our relationship – I half-expect that she assumed I would have interests and feelings that would be just like her other three children, and I think she was repeatedly surprised when she found that I wasn’t like them at all. I think I was confounding as a child.

In a burst of enthusiasm, my mom would sometimes exclaim to me that she had a wonderful idea for the two of us to spend some time together one on one, “Let’s play Scrabble!” She thought that I, like her older children, would love to play Scrabble, despite the fact that on many other such occasions I had informed her that I actually hated Scrabble. But in an attempt to capitalize upon her reaching out, I might then suggest, “Let’s go pick blackberries in the woods behind our house, like the Sjobergs did and we could make some jam for your toast!” She liked jam on her toast in the morning, so why did she then look at me quizzically? We usually ended up with me taking her up on her following suggestion that I should go ride my bike or something. We would part ways, both generally disappointed.  

I was exposed to very traditional gender roles in that sense that my mother stayed at home with me, however, I didn’t believe that women couldn’t achieve or go out of the home and work. My father encouraged us that we could do whatever we wanted to do – and my brother and I both took out the trash and shoveled snow. I was fascinated at my grandmother who worked in the Linens Department of TW Rogers in Lynn until she was eighty years old. Although she hadn’t worked outside of the home when her girls were young, raising her five daughters and trying to keep tabs on my grandfather, who was predisposed to quarts of gin and the horse races was I’m sure a full time occupation. When she found herself home alone at fifty years of age, she went out and got herself a job. She retired thirty years later, and legend has it, the administrators thought all along that their loyal employee was rounding out her career at a traditional 65 years of age, and gave her a lovely send-off. She knew this, but never corrected their error.

My grandmother could make things happen. If it were snowing so badly that the buses weren’t running in the city, she could somehow persuade a guy in a firetruck to give her a ride downtown to her work. And upon arrival, when she discovered the store was closed due to the weather, she could then get that same fireman to drop her back where he had found her at the bus stop. She could convince a bus driver that it was silly for him to drive her all the way to South Station in Boston back from Nova Scotia when she could walk the two miles to her daughter’s house from the junction of 128 and Route 1. And she could ease my father’s temper when he discovered that while he had been waiting for three hours to pick her up in Boston to find that she was not on the bus from Canada but was back on Clearview Avenue, ironing his shirts.

Shortly after she had retired from work, my grandmother would ask my father if she could come and live with us.  She moved into a tiny bedroom on the second floor of our house and occupied the rocking chair in the living room for the rest of her days. Ma was our only link to a more collectivist way of life. Our aunts and uncles would visit her and of course see us. But we remained singularly, The Blatchfords - fiercely independent, not requiring any one else’s assistance for anything. At the time, when we were in the black, it seemed like it was the right, the only way, to live. And it was a hard thing for my dad to let go of when things turned sour for us a few years later.

For a good deal of my childhood, I spent Friday or Saturday nights at my grandmother’s apartment a few miles away. I liked being with her, she seemed to like to have me there, but like my mother, she let me alone to do as I liked. Unlike home, I was the only other kid there, and when eventually after running in the yard, picking through her clothes and jumping on her beds, I would come to my grandmother she treated me as though I were special and paid very close attention to my particular likes and dislikes. Ma never mixed me up with another child, despite the fact that she occasionally worked through a stream of names before she got to the right one to call me for dinner. She fed me chocolates from her private stash, made me the waffles I liked in the morning and let me swim in her enormous bathtub.

I never felt as close to my mother as I did to my grandmother. The only time my mom and I really gelled was watching TV. She wanted to rest a lot, I remember. I would come home from school and would suggest to her a game of hide and seek, or ask her if we could please to go to the park and she would say, “Let’s take a rest, you’ve had a busy day.” And we’d end up watching TV. At the time, she, a middle aged mom, was pretty heavy, I never put her unhealthy weight together with her requests to sit all the time. I just thought she was boring. Still, if I wanted to spend time with her, I sat. One of the kids’ networks played Lassie reruns in the afternoon, so we had that. Or we would catch an old I Love Lucy, or Carol Burnett Show when I was home sick. I felt closest to her when I was sick actually, she was a nurse and would spring into action to take care of me. Her disinterest in my interests or urges turned to regular temperature checks, a steady stream of ginger ale and propping of my pillows and a straightening of my sheets upon the couch. She would even go so far as to sit with me in the living room and rent old movies that she had gone to see with her father when she was a child. 

Like her own mother, she had a beautiful singing voice and loved musicals, I did too. I remember laying on the couch and listening to her sing along to the soundtrack. It was my greatest insight into her as a person, and I think I tried to emulate the characters that shone on the screen that held her interest – Bette Davis, Lucille Ball, Audrey Hepburn, Cyd Charisse, Carol Burnett, Julie Andrews – their clothes, their style, their speech, their humor, their femininity. I began to mimic with some accuracy and regularity.

Which also brought me success with my beloved father.

 For the most part on most weekdays, I occupied myself with a couple of friends or the dog or the cat or my stuffed animals and Barbies. I didn’t really want for anything in my life, so I spent most days just sort of hanging around, reading and waiting until my dad came home. Like my mother, my dad was the highlight of my life – although unaware of the feeling, he would have put it as we thought “the sun shone out of his ass.” I would do or say anything that would make him smile because he was the one who really tried to connect with me since I was very young. He and I read together and would talk about different books, he took me fishing and taught me how to throw and catch a baseball, I learned how to play golf so I could play with him and my mom in Vermont. He was my real way into Kohlberg’s moral reasoning Stage 3, I felt loyal to him and wanted to do with all my heart what pleased him the most.

I guess I had a sort of double standard when it came to my mother and father, but I like to comfort myself by saying that I liked the things he liked because he would actually be interested in doing them with me, and when I did them right he would praise me to my face and to everyone around us. The real clincher was, he remembered and tried the things that I liked. I loved horses, so he would take me to go riding, he would help me brush and handle them, and eventually, he bought me my own.

Yes, I was the girl with the pony.

My sisters, who did not benefit as well from my parents’ middle aged wealth, never let me live that down. They can take comfort in the fact that my horse-owning days were pretty short-lived - my parents, when I was about sixteen, pretty much lost everything but our house. That changed so much of our life, but that is a whole ‘nother can of worms.

Anyway, my dad loved a good story. In Vermont, he would laugh until tears ran down his faces as we sat and listened to the crazy stories the family would share at night. Or he would recount them, my father had a tendency to repeat himself, particularly as the Budweiser empties began to pile up in front of him, and I, being an annoyingly astute audience, would follow as the storylines shifted, the characters emerged or faded, as facts seemed distorted or exaggerated for humorous effect or a change of intention. Early on, my dad had been a poet of sorts, writing prolifically throughout school and his earlier life, even going so far as publishing one or two of his works during and shortly after college. But I think he suffered from the mindset of his generation, which Lily King in her novel Father Of The Rain, accurately notes as “caring too much about anything only sets you up to be the fool.” I don’t think he ever let himself care too much about his writing, because it made him vulnerable. As was publically acceptable, he only showed that he truly loved his family, but anything outside of that, was a weakness to be exploited. The man’s role was to be strong, wasn’t it?

He didn’t even show his deep faith in God publicly after a time. He had been involved in his church in his younger life, and could quote Bible passages if the occasion called for it and there were hard and set rules on what was right and what was wrong out there in the world. But he did not go to church. My mother went sporadically, I was baptized but never confirmed, my brother and sisters were, but by the time I came along, no one had the time to take me to Sunday School. My mom was again discouraged by me because I didn’t go along with her to help her set up communion when she had to go. I wanted to sleep in or watch Captain Bob.

It wasn’t until I approached my teen years that I got interested in going to church, which follows along Fowler’s ideas of religious development, the idea of poetic-conventional faith. My father’s mother, Grammy, attended church every Sunday and had always been adamant about getting me, “the heathen,” into Sunday School. So, I went. And I liked it. I became quite interested in the ideas and the life of Jesus and Bible study and sin and eternity. I read the Bible cover to cover a few times, I actually liked the Old Testament a lot. I liked God who handed down justice just as much I liked that he had a really nice son. According to Kohlberg, I was enjoying Stage 4 of moral development. I reveled in the idea that there were social rules and laws as well as universal ones. I felt closer to my Grammy, who had always been a distant and disdainful figure in my life. She thought I talked too much about things I didn’t know about and had no problem telling me or my mother or father about my impertinence. But as we sat together in church, we had a connection. It was short-lived, however, because my budding desire to be close to God was actually derailed by an embarrassing experience with my mom, one that I am not sure she had reason to think twice about.

On New Year’s Eve one year, oddly enough I was home with my parents rather than hanging with Ma, I wrote out a list of New Year’s Resolutions which I handed to my mother for her perusal and hopeful subsequent approval. She sat on the couch in our living room, and read them aloud, and when she came to the one that read, “Become more knowledgeable about the Lord,” she laughed. It was a short laugh – kind of a bark, “HA!” It sounds awful telling it like that, it was a sarcastic laugh, but it was based on the fact that I had shown such little interest in going with her to her church previously. I think she thought I was being funny.  It makes far more sense, looking back on it. Typical of Northeastern children, who are born and raised on a rich diet of sarcasm and scoff, I was a wise kid, well before Piaget would have considered me ready for abstract thought such as that. She thought that I was joking, and I, feeling hot in my cheeks, went along with it, “Ha!” I echoed. “Yes! Got you, Mom!”

I remember carrying out the charade with my Gram until about spring, but as soon as summer came along and we were off to Vermont, I had pretty much had my full of church.

Still typical of Fowler and in line with Kohlberg’s level 3 of postconventional moral reasoning, as a late stage adolescent at a Catholic (of all things for a WASP, but we were poor then, so somehow it made sense) all girls college, I delved into discovering other faiths, under the guise of my study of political science. As I sorted through this individuating reflective faith, I realized I loved reading through ancient mythologies and I especially liked seeming snootily worldly with my quotes from Jewish texts and the Koran and then Buddhist philosophies. But deeper than that, I enjoyed making connections and contrasting these ideas with my Protestant upbringing, and I liked having a different perspective that a lot of my Catholic peers. I was appreciated as well by my professors who noted that so many other students, like my own father, had deep feelings of “one way being the right way and one being wrong.” I liked that my expanding philosophies gave me opportunities for friendships and understandings of people I could not have earlier in my life, I developed a rich palette of affinities for different thinkers and doers, whose lifestyles perhaps could not be seen as favorable under a WASPy light. I liked that I was somehow betraying the life that had at that point all but destroyed my dad.

As I got older, got married, had children, I clung a little more tightly to Buddhism and Toltec teachings, they let me be a little more forgiving, more personally responsible, but as one of my Muslim friends laughingly pointed out to me, “That’s just the next step to atheism,” which in fact was completely true. Atheism is a tough run though. People have a hard time understanding it. They try to substitute science for psalms. What’s funny is, most people I talk to don’t think I have any religious understanding at all, but I must insist that I do. I didn't spent years reading through all those damned bibles for nothing.  I have had people question my morality and I often feel that unlike religions, where you could just say “I’m a Christian” or “I’m Jewish” and that would be that,  I have to justify my own ability to understand what’s right and what’s wrong. I have to explain how I see the concepts of love, or helping others, or kindness, or creation, or death. What people may not see about being what my Grammy called “a godless heathen” is that yes, you may only have to answer to yourself, but I have found I am harder on myself than any God could possibly be. But with all that scrutiny and explanation, I’m not really that open about it, honestly.

Like father, like daughter I suppose.

Mr. Saugus High crowned

Mr. Saugus High crowned

Reflections On LEHS Experience #1: I call this one "Sorry, Pete."

It is interesting to note that so little of my memory of high school has to do with academics. In fact, my only two real memories of the first day at LEHS had nothing to do with the school day at all.  These two experiences weren’t even remotely akin to trying to locate my Biology class, or avoiding the upperclassmen who would try to direct you to the nonexistent fourth floor pool I had been so warned about by my siblings, but rather, I remember very clearly standing in front of the main door in my new pastel green skirt and white cowboy boots coming off of the morning bus, and the Drama Club meeting after the 2:30 bell. The former memory is merely me, completely unsure of what is to come on that fateful first day of high school, the latter is pretty much how the rest of my life panned out.

I had chosen carefully the outfit I was going to wear but I do remember that the weather was not necessarily cooperating with my choices. It was unseasonably cool that morning and my sister’s boots had become damp on the inside from walking across the campus grass. I was a good six to ten months younger than most of my classmates but unfortunately taller than most, with feet that could fit inside a twenty four year old’s cowboy boots.

 My height had plagued me since I was in sixth grade, and here I was three years later, an inch and a half shy of the full 5’9” I would eventually reach and I was working hard to stay cool, blend in, look natural, with wet feet and ruined boots that would catch me all sorts of hell as soon as I got home. But I couldn’t think about that yet. I was focused on what did I look like? Standing here, did I look like this was normal? Did I belong? How about here?

To this day, I see pictures of myself from back then and can’t see anything but the head towering over the boys nearby, the white and pink knobby knees the only curves I possessed. Even now I can’t forgive that skinny little thing enough to even think that she may have been okay looking – her hair was pretty good, right?  No, I was so wrapped up in that pubescent awkwardness that I still have a difficult time looking at that poor girl with any objectivity.

The drama meeting had been one of the hundred announcements coming over the crackly loudspeaker that morning, after our moment of meditation and reverent silence that was intended to allow room for school prayer if one was so inclined. In all four years I was there, I didn’t know anyone who really was.

Since the third or fourth grade, when I had first seen my older sisters come out from behind that black and gold curtain at an assembly at the big high school auditorium, I knew I wanted to be in the Lynn English High School Drama Club. The DC performances had been stuff of legend in Lynn during those years just previous and even the new director, and all of the changes that the old director’s hasty removal had implied, still couldn’t dampen my enthusiasm to be close to that magical place in my own right. My new friend Heather and I looked at one another across homeroom and silently agreed to go right to the theater after school got out.

I had only met Heather at the bus stop that morning. She was new to the neighborhood and I had seen her around once or twice over the summer.  I was glad that she was in my homeroom and we could take the later bus together after the meeting. She was a nice girl, with a big smile and tiny teeth. We sat together in the huge theater, a two person homogeneous grouping clinging together for safety, a vestige from our junior high school days when the girls ran in deep packs. It was better not to be noticed individually just then, we were not quite ready to be unique just yet. Heather would leave LEHS at the end of the school year, and I would not see her again until at a party after graduation at a mutual friend’s who had bothered to keep in touch with her.

The meeting mentioned something about upcoming auditions and a production in early December and then quickly wrapped up. I don’t remember much about the content, but I do remember that mostly everyone hung around talking. We stayed, lingering for a minute, not sure if we should go yet or maybe we would miss another announcement. Two boys approached the two of us. I could see they were older boys. Senior boys, as a matter of fact. One had a backpack and one had a case I could only imagine held cassette tapes.

The cassette tape one seemed to take a lot of pride in the case and made a great show of displaying its contents. He could have had it handcuffed to his wrist and opened it with a key, it wouldn’t have really added much to the performance. He made a good deal about setting it down gently on the seat in front of us and making sure the seat didn’t tip back as they introduced themselves.  The four of us chatted well enough, and I peered over at the cassette tapes and noticed something familiar.

“Hey, I have that one,” I nodded.

The older boy took a moment, his eyebrows went down. He smirked right at me. “That one?”

“Yup.”

He asked again, “That one?”

“Yes, that one.” I affirmed. His obvious disbelief annoyed me.

“Oh-kaay,” he dragged out the syllables and he smiled at his companion, like he knew something.

What? Why couldn’t I have that tape? “I’m not kidding. I have that one too.”

He looked down at my second choice, “Yeah,” he nodded. “Sure.” He was nodding but not agreeing. He was agreeing but not believing.  

He didn’t believe me. Why wouldn’t he believe me?

I folded my arms, “I’m telling you the truth.”

“I’m sorry.” His superiority was maddening.

“For?”

“No one has ‘Nursery Cryme,’ you have to special order it,” he replied smugly. So smug. So smarmy. “It takes six weeks.”

This was completely infuriating. Why would I lie about something like that? I don’t even know him, why would this boy think I was lying?

“I know. My sister works at a record store.”

“Of course she does.” He and his friend laughed. He closed his precious tape case. “You know what, suck ups, let’s show you the auditorium.”

They escorted us around the entire theater and made jokes at our freshman expense. I don’t know why I let them, I was seething.  Weren’t they talking to us to be friendly? That little exchange was decidely not friendly. I tried to make light of it, tried to be game about it, but honestly, by the end of that tour, before Heather and I in my ruined boots would breathlessly catch the late bus home, I firmly concluded in my head that this older boy, this senior boy with his stupid - well, not stupid because I had a lot of them at my house - with his cassette tapes was a complete and total asshole.

And I just realized that I will be married to that asshole fifteen years this June.

A Spy In The House of What Is It Exactly?

This week’s assignment was one that I found particularly appropriate. My son is 11 years old and my daughter is 9, and if the rate at which I am buying new pants and shoes is any indication, I think we are rapidly approaching puberty, which has made me reflect long and hard on my own experiences.
The readings from this week’s assignments brought me back to the Health and Biology classes that I had to take in junior and high school. I remember understanding very little of the material, but it may have been because I was giggling over the photos of boy’s development, and hotly embarrassed over the pictures of girl’s development in the text books. I learned about the physical changes of puberty much like a few of the children in the introduction of the chapter, in quiet late night conversations with my sleeping-over girlfriends, by researching in my older sisters’ trashy Jackie Collins novels or by half-listening during my classes at school. It all felt so clandestine, and mysterious, like I was some ne’erdowell spy looking for some kind of information that if someone actually had to tell me, they would then have to kill me. My parents, being of an older generation than most of my peers, were decidedly close-mouthed about the whole experience, at odds with the fact that my mother was a nurse.
I spent my summers at our home in Vermont with my parents. My brothers and sisters were upwards of eight years older than I was and so much of my time was spent in the company of my mom and dad. I remember having my first period in the August of my 11th year. My mother must have been doing the laundry and noticed some blood stains, and I remember laying in the top bunk of my bed and my mom coming in, waking me up and red-faced explaining the process of menstruation, about how my body was getting older and changing, but in her stilted explanations she failed to mention the changes in relation to *gasp* S-E-X. I was still half-asleep, but I nodded and tried not to look her in the eyes. I had already discovered the secret a few days earlier, and pretty much had figured out what was going on from my surreptitious and calculated fact-gathering.
At that time, I was not quite yet privy to all of the information about the periods in my household, but after a few months I would find out how the Blatchford girls historically had periods so painfully debilitating and irregular that I would soon be spending random days out of school in such physical agony near to the point of fainting. At the time I wondered, how could someone so skinny lose that much blood and not die? I often felt that I wanted to die from the pain, and my dad, in on the family secret I imagined only through necessity, would prescribe from his living room chair, “an aspirin, some gin and a M1 helmet.” From beyond the code of silence, over the coming years, our collective periods were dealt with through humor, but still, sex, or even the idea of what my brother may have gone through was not discussed in front of me.
 Sex made me ridiculously curious. I was preternaturally annoying about knowledge in general as a child; I needed to know everything, all the time, right now. And adolescence had kindled a new fire in me, there was something that everyone was keeping from me and I needed to know what it was. Jackie Collins, for all her raunchy descriptions, did actually very little to inform me about the process of sex and how it related a boy to me. I needed, although unaware of the pun at the time, hard facts. I remember picking through some of my sister’s things and stumbling upon her birth control pills, something that she had clearly forgotten to take, which had caused a minor scandal in our household, and poring over the information packet folded inside the funny yellow hexagram. She caught me with them and I tried to explain that I knew she wasn’t using them so why couldn’t I just see what they’re… That was not a pleasant day.
 Thankfully, school came to my rescue. I was able to piece together a somewhat cohesive picture between my own findings and what happened biologically as described by my science teacher. I am thankful for sex education, because I sure wasn’t getting it at home.
 Which as I have come to believe has informed my relationship with my own son and daughter. As my husband and I had compared notes on the subjects of puberty, development and sex, we found that neither of us were ever told anything from our parents that we a.) didn’t actually figure out already b.) could relate ourselves to another human being. We had made a decision together that we would answer any of our kids’ questions with as little or as much detail as they asked for. We have been pretty honest with them about their private parts, how and where babies are made and what happens as you get older and how they will change. I was always surprised at how satisfied they would seem with just some small description and they would move on, either we could congratulate ourselves that we had successfully sated their curiosity with our deliberate matter-of-factedness, or my husband and I could admit that maybe they just had very short attention spans.
Still, despite all this preparation, I feel like I should be doing something right now to prepare them for the physical storm about to brew. My son is heading into middle school in the next year, and I feel like I still haven’t told him enough to prepare him for the sexual onslaught that junior high can bring. I have taught middle and high school for a while and I know how rife with misinformation and confusion and ridicule this time of life is. I know that soon, we will have to sit down and have, not just the short Q&A, but the real life “talk.” But then again, can’t I just do what my parents did? We have always had books about the human body lying around, maybe I will just leave the chapter on puberty open on the coffee table and hope that “someone” picks it up and does a little clandestine spy research of his own.
I know. I know. It was just a thought.

Finding strength through U2 in Saugus

Finding strength through U2 in Saugus

Curses!

Sean was four and a half. Please be sure to include the “half”- it was important to him.

His brothers were much older than he, by almost seven years, and Sean heard them calling one another names – “You’re stupid! No, you’re stupid! Shutup! No you shutup!” And then usually, an impromptu wrestling match would follow. Most of the times, it was fun-wrestling, like he and his dad did, or the dogs did when they were being silly. Some of the times, it was mad-wrestling, when one or both of the big boys would end up in their in their rooms. But usually it was a lot of fun, because the big boys would smile breathlessly as they pounded on one another.

Sean had a small feeling that these words might be very powerful – they brought on the fighting! - but he hadn’t known quite how powerful they were until one day, when his mommy spilled his juice and he had laughed and called her stupid, just like James did to Mike. Surprisingly, his mommy had admonished him. So he thought he’d carry the jokes on and told her to shut up. Sean had been sure to smile when he had said those words to her, but mommy didn’t seem to smile back. And she did not want to wrestle.

Sean learned on that day those two words could cause a lot of trouble. Mommy had banished them from the house.  “Stupid” and “shutup” were not allowed in her house. By anyone. Ever again.

But those stubborn words would not disappear completely.  The big boys said them outside sometimes, and Sean heard them at preschool. And there were vague grumblings about the “forbidden s-word” from his dad. But Sean was confused – weren’t there two  s-words? Was it all just one? Which one was daddy talking about? Still Sean thought it best not to bring them up.  Despite the fact that they occasionally still swum around inside his brain, especially when he was feeling really silly, or maybe a little mad, but he most definitely wouldn’t let the s-words swim out of his mouth. He didn’t want to be banished from the house, like they had been.

But there was one day, Sean couldn’t help it.

He had woken up grumpy. One of the dogs had taken his slippers downstairs and his feet were cold on the bathroom floor. There were no waffles for breakfast – the big boys had finished them - and his favorite shirt was in the wash. Sean had also forgotten it was Tuesday. He thought he was going to be able to go to Abby’s house this morning, but instead he realized he had to go to preschool.

Preschool was fine, but it wasn’t as much fun as Abby’s house.

Things were just getting worse and worse.

He had been just sitting down to watch Blues’ Clues, when his mom reminded him to get his shoes, they were leaving in fifteen minutes. Sean’s brow had furrowed, he had just sat down.  And besides,  “I don’t want my shoes. I want my sneakers.”

His mom’s eyebrows had gone up, but she just said, “Oh-kay,” and helped him get his sneakers out of the coat closet and on his feet.

His mom had then said, “Sean, please go get your backpack.”

Sean had replied, “I don’t want to wear my backpack.”

His mom had explained, “You need it to bring your snack.”

Sean had countered, “I don’t want a snack.”

“Oh boy,” his mom had sighed. “Come on Sean, let’s get moving.”

“I don’t want to get moving.” He just wanted to sit on the couch. And finish his sippy. And watch Blues’ Clues and go to Abby’s and find his slippers and not have cold feet and eat his waffles.

His mother picked him up off the couch, he went stiff. “Sean, please cooperate.”

“I don’t want to cooperate!”

His mommy put the unusually stubborn little boy on her hip, and grabbed his backpack, her keys and her purse.  Her eyebrows were drawn down but not as far as Sean’s. Sean pulled them down even further, he was mad. Mad words wrestled around inside of his head.

She opened up the door to their silvery mini-van and put him down in his car seat. ‘Let’s buckle up.”

“I don’t want to buckle up.”

“Sean,” she said, attempting to soothe with her tone and placate him with the logic of the situation, “we have to drive to school, so for safety, you must buckle up.”

“I don’t want to have safety!” Sean yelled.

Clearly, there wasn’t much room for further discussion, Sean’s mother patiently pulled his stiff arms through the harness and clicked her frustrated son in to the seat. She glided his car door shut and sat herself in the driver’s seat, buckled in, turned her keys and slid the minivan down the long driveway. She saw her son’s upset face in the rearview mirror – his mouth set, his brows drawn very low over the bridge of his little red nose, his eyes shifting angrily first left, and then right.

Then Sean’s mommy heard him mutter under his breath the only words that he could think of to accurately portray his unrelenting frustration of this ridiculous mandatory preschool attendance, “I’m not going to that stupidshutup school.”

It was all she could do to keep from laughing right out loud.

Facebook Friends or Foes? A post from my SSU class blog.

Facebook Friends or Foes?

A family member and I been having an argument. Not a bad one, we haven’t yelled or screamed at one another about it, but we definitely have been dancing about the boundaries of polite conversation. Not dancing well either. And sadly, it is over something generally considered to be, and more truthfully, unimportant.

Facebook.

I do spend a bit of time on the site, however I will clearly state for the record that I am not an addict. (And no I do not protest too much.)  I do not ignore my family and friends for FB time, and I also prefer a nice lunch out together than an online chat session. Still, I am a notorious procrastinator, and will check on my FB before, during, and after my homework. But that would put FB on the same level as laundry and dishes  – a reason to step out of my brain for a second or two . I love Bejeweled Blitz and Words with Friends. And nothing has given me greater pleasure than posting photos of friends and family at a recent wedding.

But at the same time, I am not interested in having my profile and photos to go public; no one else needs to see pictures of my children running around in their bathing suits at camp from this summer. However, I will still readily admit that FB has enhanced my life in surprising ways.

I’m generally a private person. Although I am very, very comfortable in a classroom setting or in a writer’s chair, as a rule I have always been somewhat of weirdo. Not in the sick, creepy way, but I can be awkward, I often am not sure what to say, and I make strange jokes that not everyone finds funny. In person, without liquid fortification, I am often caught with my verbal pants down. Also, I unfortunately am a member of a peer group who is at a certain stage in life where they spend most of their free time carting around kids and/or elderly parents. It can be sometimes extremely difficult to connect with friends at all. I am in the middle of life and I will tell you, it’s a busy place.

To make matters worse, I am more of an idiot on the phone than in person. I want to know what you need and then I must get off the phone. I am not interested in carrying on a conversation while children are yelling and dogs are barking in the background. I do not have the phone filter required to maintain a chat in the midst of chaos and for that, my friends, I am sorry. To add to my social inadequacies, I have also been known not to answer an email or a text with any expedience. It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you  trust me – it’s not you, I swear, it’s me.

Luckily, I have a social savior, or more accurately, an ally in arranging easier social interactions. FB friend requests have put me back in touch with people I generally don’t get to see, people for whom I have saved a seat at my kitchen table, but I never quite forced myself to make an awkward phone call, “yeah, uh, hi, this is Sarah. Do you want to come over for pizza Friday night? Yes. Okay see you then. No, I don’t want to talk anymore. Bye.”

Status updates and uploaded photos keep me in touch with what is going on in their lives, so instead of spending those first few moments together before the wine is able to create that magical magnanimosity, you can ask about that Red Sox game they went to, or mention how big their three year old has gotten. And best of all, there is a modicum of control as to who and what you are interacting with,  I may hide someone, or unfriend them, if things get too strange, or their posts cause recall about why I stopped being in touch with them in the first place  - yes, I’m looking at you, Mr. KnowsWhoHeIs.

And most importantly, and more rewardingly, I have had multiple students who have contacted me through FB.

Many of these kids were from my LEHS days, some of these kids were from my days at Breed or waay back at Marshall Middle – all of them posting how they were doing in college or high school or work;  telling me how much they have missed me;  all of them eager to report their success. It has been wonderful to see how these children have grown up and I value that they consider me, not necessarily a friend, but perhaps an ally.  They have asked me for advice, they have messaged me with questions about reading or grammar issues or how to tackle a paper, because they see me as a resource and they know that I will point them in the right direction. Isn’t maintaining this mentor-mentee connection a goal of teaching? Aren’t those teachers for whom we felt that connection the reason many of us became teachers?

There are of course exceptions  - on both sides of the fence. There are students who have sent a friend request that I have messaged quite simply, “Do you really want me to read your status updates?” Most of them have understood that even in this forum I continue to be a mandated reporter and a responsible adult, I ignore the request and we move on with our lives. Not that I don’t worry about them. I’m just not stupid.

My family member thinks I may be stupid. He/she in fact sees FB as a danger, particularly in regards to teachers, citing the cases of teachers posting inappropriate status updates about their weekend drinking, or questionable photos of them in various states of undress. He/she worries about relationships with students crossing boundary lines. I get it. I do. In this day and age, teachers may perpetually be one wrong post from a sexual harassment lawsuit. I try to argue about levels of privacy and appropriateness, but I understand he/she has a valid point.

But, I say, If there is a medium where we know the kids are spending their time, why shouldn’t we be there? Shouldn’t we be a presence, even if it is a background one, in their lives? Shouldn’t we seek out ways to connect with our students in a place they feel comfortable? And please, please tell me, when did teachers lose their status as role models in the community and become creepy, or potentially criminal?

I know! I know. It’s a delicate issue.

I have been in contact with several of my teacher friends, not just in Lynn, but in other places. In the past few years, several school systems have made changes so that all teachers must post syllabi, long term goals, projects, schedules and daily assignments, allowing for greater transparency for parents and administrators. I have long been in favor of web presence and despite certain grumblings about changing their usual routines, the general teacher response was  mostly favorable. I have often noticed that most teachers are willing to explain and show what they are doing, what they hope to accomplish and what they have found out from their students.  And parents are most often eager to see what is happening on a daily basis with their kids. It was a great idea.

But unfortunately, no one is able to see it.

The most of the school systems have sites that are not easily accessible. The login process may be unintuitive and cumbersome, and it is difficult for parents and even some of the kids to navigate through the menus to find their classrooms. Simply putting up a website and having the teachers participate is not enough to create the desired transparency. Many teachers I know, who thought that the website would ultimately streamline their processes, are now in conjunction with the original grumblers, who are now correct in their naysaying, “It’s a waste of time.”

FB is friendly. FB is populated with most of the parents in the school system, maybe we wouldn’t necessarily want to see the parents’ status updates of weekend drinking or photos in various stages of undress, but we do know that it is a forum in which to reach them easily.

In David Friend’s literacy article on the Daily Nonpareil, First-graders use Facebook as a Learning Tool, Friend gives an example of a classroom using a page as a “teaching tool, recapping lessons and ‘synthesizing concepts’” – a highly valued educational goal – as well as a “way for parents and students to communicate.” The class’ page was “100 percent private. You have to be accepted as a friend of the page and to be accepted you have to have a connection. We control everything going onto the page.” Friend even comments on the fact that it works because FB is “familiar. Many already know how to use Facebook and now their kids can’t say ‘I don’t remember what we did in school today.’” 

I am convinced that both socially it is important that children realize that FB is not a parent-free, adult-free forum, a place to say or do whatever they want. There is no mythical Neverland where we don’t know what you’re doing, kids. It didn’t exist when I was a kid, pre-Internet and it doesn’t exist now. They, and now We, ALWAYS KNOW.  

And in fairness, the same goes for you too, Mom and Dad. I must also emphasize that parents and adults also realize that FB is the social media equivalent of being out in Times Square, and if you don’t think that it would be a good idea to be seen with most of your clothes off in that very public place, it probably isn’t a great idea on FB either.