Cleaning Out (originally published July 31, 2013)

Today I tackled the monster under the stairs. That’s the big closet where we throw everything when we don’t know where else to put it. Suitcases? Check. Giant sleeping bags that could probably sleep more than one person? Got two of those. Bags of tissue paper, gift boxes, and gift bags? Lots of those. I even have gift bags with Noah’s Ark on them, which means that they date from Adam’s baby shower, twenty years ago.

Stacks of DVD’s and old videos. Those I carefully sorted and alphabetized. Someday we might want to watch the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers movie again. Then again, probably not. But it’s under M, just so you know. We did toss the videos we had taped of old Barney, Sesame Street, and Shining Time Station episodes. Pretty sure the boys have outgrown those.

That stuff was easy to clean out. It was the other stuff that was harder.

Two boxes of crayons, colored pencils, protractors, and other homework necessities. Don’t need that anymore. But that didn’t go in the trash. I sorted it all out, bagged it in ziplocks and stowed it elsewhere. You never know when you might need a burnt sienna crayon, after all.

Three bags of college brochures and SAT prep materials. That all went in the trash. College decisions have been made, tests taken. So much stress at the time, but irrelevant now.

Lots of half-used notebooks with equations and notes. Old folders with Yu-Gi-Oh (is that even on TV anymore?) and Star Wars characters. All trash now.

Adam’s backpack, abandoned after graduation, and since he left three days later, never emptied. My son saw no point in taking anything out of his backpack. I think it had the contents of his entire senior year stowed inside. His philosophy was, “If I never take anything out of it, I’ll never lose anything, and I’ll have everything I need.” Yep, plus lots of other stuff. 50 cents and two bags of candy inside. Permission slips I had signed and apparently never turned in by him. How did he get to go on that field trip, anyway? Progress reports of grades. Might have wanted to have seen those at the time, but maybe he was sparing himself the parental drama.

I carefully went through all the papers, not wishing to throw something valuable away. My efforts were rewarded – I found the letter he had written to himself when he was a freshman, returned to him his senior year. Priceless. A poem he had written about himself. Things he’ll want to have later, a portrait of who he was back in high school. The letter’s envelope also had his freshman year band photo and two ticket stubs – one to a Ducks hockey game, one for the Star Trek movie. A mini time capsule.

You know how when you clean out one thing, it just leads to more tasks? That was my day. The crayons and colored pencils had to go somewhere. I have another stash of kids’ art supplies in the kitchen buffet. Time to pull all of that stuff out, sort it, and add the other items. We still have coloring books down there. Those stayed, with the random pieces of construction paper and the four bags of crayons. We will have grandchildren someday, after all.

Above the shelves, we have four drawers, some filled with more junk than others. Two of them were so full that when you tried to close them, stuff spilled out the top and fell onto the shelf below. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except for some reason the push pins were what had escaped and were all over the place. Apparently we need two boxes of push pins and about eight rolls of Scotch tape. Who knew?

So now I was tackling the junk drawers and organizing all those odds and ends. That’s when Josh walked in on me. “Why are you cleaning out those drawers, Mom?” Really. Like he’s never been frustrated trying to find a Post-It note that’s actually sticky on the back and a pen that works. By the way, if you need a pen or a pencil, see me. I have about a thousand, and that’s not exaggerating a whole lot.

The good part? Sending my husband a picture of the closet that you can actually walk into without crushing something. Realizing that I will probably never have to buy office supplies again in my life. Tossing two giant bags of trash and saving two bags and a box of random things for a future yard sale. And marking another passage in the life of our family, one that doesn’t require lunchboxes and notebook paper.

The Cruelest Job (originally published July 29, 2013)

I’ll say it up front: I miss my oldest son. Adam graduated from high school on May 22, 2012, and left the nest on May 25. He spent an amazing summer touring the country with the Academy Drum and Bugle Corps. After only two weeks home, filled with shopping and laundry, he was off again. Since that May, he has only been home for weekends and school breaks. As I write this, his room is filled with a mountain of boxes from his college dorm while he is touring for a second summer with the Academy.

Last summer, I missed him so much it ached. I counted down the days until we would see him. In a way, I didn’t want it to stop aching. That would mean that I was getting used to him being gone, and I wasn’t sure I was okay with that. But after a four-week long visit at Christmas, I realized that I missed him less. I was adjusting to his absence, as it should be.

In August of 2012, my husband and I delivered him to Northern Arizona University, moved in all of his stuff, and left him there. Driving home, both of us a little misty-eyed, we looked at each other and realized, “We did it!” And then it hit me.

This is what we had been working toward for the past 19 years: The moment when we could leave our child at college, a complete and prepared human being, and know that he would be successful. In the telescopic way that memory shrinks our life down, I realized that every action we had done as parents had unconsciously led us to this very moment. From enduring two-year-old tantrums to hours sitting supervising homework, we had been molding and shaping him into becoming a self-reliant and responsible person. So that he could leave us.

And that’s why parenthood is the cruelest job. From the moment when the nurse places that tiny baby in our arms for the first time, we start the process of preparing that baby to leave us one day. His utter dependence on us slowly dwindled as he learned to do things by himself. From rolling over, to crawling, to walking, he slowly took steps to independence. There was no clinging to my leg in preschool. He would wriggle out of my grasp, so eager to play with his little friends. The exhausted mother of a toddler, thinking “When will he ever grow up?” doesn’t realize how quickly the days go by, how soon he will be grown and gone.

This day, though unseen at the time, shaped so many of our decisions regarding our son. Holding him back in first grade as he struggled with ADD and vision problems so that he would be successful in school. Encouraging him to go to the 5th and 6th grade church camp alone when all of his friends were going to the junior high camp. Telling him as he started high school that this was his chance to reinvent himself.

In each situation, he succeeded. He made new friends when he repeated a grade and became a good student. He learned that he could go someplace by himself, make friends, be accepted, and have a great time. And in high school, he joined the marching band, switched instruments to play the tuba, and became section leader twice. What he learned in these situations would come into play as he prepared to leave for college.

As parents, we see the irony: This child, whom we love so much, we have to teach, guide, and mold so that he can fly on his own. We want to hold on to him, saying, “Don’t leave us!” and yet that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. With tears in our eyes, we let him go, knowing that he will come back…but it will never be the same.

Exploring Prejudice with Hannah Goldsmith and Azar Nafisi (originally published July 17, 2013)

Prejudice and racism are hot topics right now in the news. George Zimmerman and Paula Deen are just two current examples of people who have been accused of being racist.

I, too, was once accused of being racist – in, of all places, a Christian school. As a white girl raised in multicultural southern California in the 1970′s, I was used to being around people of different ethnicities. I didn’t know that one of my kindergarten friends was half-white/half-black until I was in high school. She was just Lynn to me. I had friends who had been adopted from Korea and Vietnam. We thought that was interesting and different, but we liked them for who they were. We didn’t ignore race; it just wasn’t an issue.

My high school was in La Habra, and we joked about it being in the “barrio”. We had a large Hispanic population as well as other races. Just last year, my friend Julie told me that our school was considered low-income, which had enabled her to get a discount on a musical instrument. I had never noticed.

The issue came when I was teaching third grade. At the beginning of the year, I always seated my students in alphabetical order. After a few weeks, I would move them around based on behavior issues or just for variety. I was careful to make sure that all of the kids had a chance to sit in the front of the class.

So, after Back-to-School night, I was shocked when my principal called me in. Some of my African-American parents were upset and said I was being racist in the way my kids were seated. Then I realized: I had four African-American students in consecutive alphabetical order, and that row happened to be against the wall of the room. I had never noticed it. To me, they were just Austin, Michael, Alisha. Race had never entered my thinking.

My principal was kind and supportive. He told me that I didn’t have to change the seating chart, but I should consider it. I went back to my room that day and rearranged the desks. I was careful to spread out my African-American, Hispanic, and white students, as well as considering which students could or could not sit next to each other.

The funny thing was that I felt MORE racist making my seating chart that way. I had never considered race, and now I was forced to. For the remaining three years of my teaching career at that school, I always had to include race as a consideration in my room.

So, was I being racist because as a white girl, I never considered race? A book I was reading last month caught my attention. The book, The Monster in the Box, by Ruth Rendell, is a mystery set in contemporary England. Rendell’s characters are a group of police detectives. One character caught my eye: Hannah Goldsmith, a young detective sergeant. Hannah is a character who is deliberately politically correct, determined not to be racist at any cost. She is careful to use language that reflects equality and is horrified when the older people say things that could be racist.

Yet Hannah, too, finds herself in a quandary. She visits the home of a Middle Eastern family and is surprised that the furnishings are English. The mother of the family sneers at her, asking Hannah what she had expected – Oriental rugs? Hannah realizes with a shock that she had expected those things. Hannah is forced to realize that even the most careful person on race issues can still have preconceived notions about race.

When we think of it, we all have preconceived notions about others. It’s simply because they are different from us, living lives in a different way than we do. We have ideas about how the rich and the poor live, about city dwellers and country folk. We see images on television about people of other races and form conclusions.

Then, when I was reading Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi, I came on this same issue myself. Nafisi describes how her reading club girls would come into her apartment in their black robes and then remove them to reveal colorful t-shirts and jeans. I was surprised to read of girls with stylish haircuts, makeup, painted toenails, and fashionable clothing in Iran. The images I had in my head from television had never shown that to me. I shouldn’t have been surprised, knowing that women are really the same the world over, but I was.

I realized I was full of preconceived notions, too.

But isn’t that why we read books and magazines? To learn more about others and to expand our thinking? To gain appreciation of the magnitude and breadth of our world? To walk in the shoes and lives of those who are different than we are?

I love this quote from Nafisi: “Someone who is engrossed in literature has learned that every individual had different dimensions to his personality…Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual’s personality into account. It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless.” (p. 118)

And that’s it – we all have different and contradictory sides. We are all people who are still learning and growing and changing over time. Our personalities are not static. We can’t fully understand people of other races because we haven’t lived their life and walked their path. But we can accept that we’re all human, making mistakes and acting in contradictory ways.

Is Paula Deen a racist because she used the “n-word”? Is George Zimmerman racist because he had a preconceived notion about a young black man? Maybe. But aren’t we all, a little bit, when we look honestly at ourselves?

Literature teaches us that are all frail human beings, and therefore we must refrain from being too ruthless on others. That is one of the reasons why I read.