OmegaMom

When I was growing up, there was a saying:  "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me."

Of course, kids still called names, and it still hurt, but having that said often enough sort of conditioned one to think that being called names was an ephemeral thing.

Then there was the "turn the other cheek" philosophy, in which, if you were hurt, rather than hitting back, you offered a further target.  Sort of pre-Gandhi-ism.

So what’s changed?  What makes a nice middle-class mom decide to fake an online personality to gain friendship with a depressive teen, then yank the "friendship" away, all as a way of "teaching a lesson" or some such thing to a girl who had "hurt" her daughter–resulting in the teen’s suicide?  What makes fresh-faced cheerleader gals decide that a previous buddy’s namecalling on MySpace warrants a half-hour long smackdown to be posted on YouTube?  What makes the mother of one of the beaters go onto national television and say–in all seriousness–"This is all blown out of proportion"?

Of course, these incidents have caused folks to come out of the woodwork to blame the Internet.  It’s MySpace’s fault!  It’s YouTube’s fault!  My girl wouldn’t have done anything like that if the eeeevul Internet wasn’t there!  Or, I wouldn’t have done anything like that if the eeevul Internet hadn’t made me do it.

Seriously.  In these cases, the parents seem to have something missing.  Us old-fashioned folk would call it "conscience", I guess.  Or morals.  Or a sense of proportion.  Or something.  What happened to saying something like, "If that girl is trash-talking you, surely you don’t want to associate with her?"? 

Currently, the dotter is deep in the midst of the standard "If you don’t do x for me, I won’t be your friend anymore!" pronouncement phase.  I give her the hairy eyeball at such statements to me, until she breaks down into a grin and giggles.  She knows that saying those things doesn’t cut it with me.  And I’ve had to intervene once or twice at after-school care when one or another of the girls says something like that as well.

The idea being that it’s not what someone else thinks of you that’s important:  It’s what you think of yourself.  It’s knowing you’ve done the right thing.  It’s knowing when you’ve done the wrong thing.  It’s realizing that some of these great dramas won’t mean a damned thing when you’re forty years old.

These internalizations don’t spontaneously emerge, of course.  You have to work on them.  And it’s not faux self-esteem B.S. that we’re talking about here–the "I am Special" entitled attitude.  It’s the feeling that you’ve worked hard on something, tried your best, done the right thing, have stuff inside you that is worthwhile…

These girls–and their parents–seem to have missed the boat on all of this.  The jockeying for prestige and station becomes the be-all and end-all of their existence.  They’re judging their own worth by what other people say, in the heat of the moment, either to their friends or on MySpace.  Now, I realize that names hurt.  They sting.  You can, indeed, end up crying in the middle of the night over what one of your acquaintances said behind your back.  And it continues even when you’re forty-something.

But the thing to do is move on, concentrate on what’s good and going well in your life.  Not beat the shit out of your former best friend so you can toss it up on YouTube and get lots of comments.

The perennial discussion about “Gotcha Day” is rearing its head once again on a China adoption site.  First there’s the person who posts a link to an article about how “Gotcha Day” is offensive to some adoptees with a “something to think about” comment.  Then some more folks post pointers to other articles.  Then someone gets offended by the offense and says it’s all PC-talk.  Someone says that the kids feel kidnapped by their adopters.  Someone takes real offense to that, saying they didn’t kidnap the kids, and should they just leave them in an orphanage?!  Things escalate, and feelings get all hurt all over the place.

Nothing new.  It’s been a topic of discussion for years.

Articles by adult adoptees who say they find the term offensive have been available for years, too.  I read those articles way back when, and posts by adult adoptees on adoption triad lists, and decided to ditch the term myself, because I could see how it could be offensive.  I “got” a car.  I “got” a dog.  No-one asks when I “got” my husband, eh?  They always ask when I “met” him.

So we’ve gone on our merry way, and I’ve trained myself to use the phrase “when we met you” to the dotter so it’s become ingrained in my psyche.  When talking about that day, I use “Metcha Day”.  But other than that, I don’t think much about it until a hoo-rah like this rises up.

A few months ago, when we were newly come to Alaska, the dotter and I had gone for a hike along Little Lady River in Margaret Pass and were returning to the parking lot.  As we emerged, my Caucasian-parent-with-Asian-children radar went off, focusing in on a guy with a bunch of boykids with him, all of whom were Asian.  At some point he hailed me and I wandered up to introduce myself and the dotter.

At some point in the conversation, he asked, “We got him” (pointing at one son) “in (some city), and him” (pointing at another) “in (some other city) and him” (yeah, there were a bunch!) “in (third city).  Where’d you get her?”

Now, he was an utterly nice guy.  The boys all looked like fine, happy, healthy lads, playing all over the place and doing boyishly romping things in and out of his eyesight.  But y’know, this was the very first time someone had ever asked me that question in that way, and it just…jarred me.  And I guess I hesitated, or something in my face showed, because he was suddenly somewhat defensively apologetic, saying, “Or are you one of Those Folk who don’t like that term?  I know some people don’t like it!”

Erg.  Well.  Um.  Yeah, I guess I’m one of “those folk”. 

Anyway, I answered that we had met the dotter in Guilin, avoiding the whole question of where I stand on “get” versus “met”, back in 2002, and yadda yadda yadda.  We talked some more, the dotter and I left, and I sort of forgot about it until the topic came up again.

I don’t know how OmegaDad feels about it.  I’m pretty sure he’d like the cuteness of “Gotcha Day”, and thinks more in terms of the daddy chasing the giggling girl, catching her, and going “Gotcha!”  Whereas I listened to the nice guy at the parking lot “getting” his boys (a pre-teen two of whom were sitting right there listening to the conversation), and just imagined going to the kid shop and “getting” one.

I dunno.  I suppose I’m turning all PC, and a lot of my readers are rolling their eyes at me and my oh-so-Victorian sensitivity to the term.  But for some reason, that meeting just cemented in me why I don’t like it, and made me understand just why some adult adoptees (and teens) might find it offensive or just icky.

(On a totally different note:  Have any of my blogging buddies gotten a slew of separate multi-page hits in a row from a new-to-them reader, all of them direct links without a referring page?  It’s just kind of weird…)

One of the intriguing things about having a child in the house is that you (the adult) realize just how many things you take for granted that are hard to learn (for kids).

Walking.  That’s a big one.  A toddler demonstrates, in no uncertain terms, just how difficult walking upright really is.  It requires immense concentration.  A sense of balance isn’t intrinsic–it requires practice.  It takes months of constant practice before a toddler can turn the Frankenwalk into something graceful and thoughtless.  Daily practice.  Hours and hours of it.

Somewheres along the line, after all that practice, the brain switches from conscious effort to unconscious act.

It’s fascinating.

Dimes, pennies, nickels, quarters.  It’s only with a kid around that you really grasp the idea that it’s utterly senseless, to the naked eye, that the different sizes of these different coins has no correlation to the “worth”.

Then we come to reading.

English is a language with lots of input from a variety of other languages.  It’s a mutt, pure and simple.  There’s Latin.  There’s Saxon.  There’s medieval French.  There’s a slew of native American words, from a variety of different native American language families.  There are Arabic words.  Made-up words.  Acronyms.

Then there are regular verbs versus regular verbs.

Then there are the archeological remnants of old pronunciations that linger on, like a linguistic appendix.

When you get down to learning to read, how do you distill all these disparate ingredients into a set of rules?

Take, for instance, the word “knight”.  Once upon a time, it actually was pronounced somewhat like it is spelled–kunihcht, with that ch being one of those gutterals that modern Amurrikans can’t handle.  But a child just learning to read, and sounding out the letters…you have to explain, well, the “k” is silent.  Why?  Um.  (Here you can diverge into two vastly different approaches:  “It just is.”  Or “Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a Germanic language that pronounced the ‘k’ in a word like that, but as time went on, people who spoke English slurred that ‘k’ more and more until it simply disappeared…but our spelling still shows it.”)  Then you have to explain that “igh” is pronounced “eye”.  (At least, in this case it is.)  And decide whether to do the short version or the long version or the medium version (”English is a funny language, dear”).

Or the letter “e” in all it’s variety.  Why, for example, is the “y” at the end of the word “variety” pronounced “eee”?  Why did we stick “y’s” there, instead of something else?  Why is the “e” at the end of most words silent, but in “the” and “he” it isn’t?

How about “ed”?  Why is it pronounced just like it looks in the word “red”, but not in “looked”?  Why does it sound like a “t” there?

And on and on.  And on.  Oy!  It’s a miracle you guys can read this bloggage at all!

This is brought to you courtesy of the dotter, who read her first full page from a Jack and Annie book today.  Woot!  (OmegaMom is doing the Snoopy Dance.)  Yes!  A full page!

But man.  That one page of The Magic Tree House #2,721 was full of such pitfalls that adults (read:  OmegaMom) skip right over as they read, while children (read:  OmegaDotter) stumble over and question and wonder why.

Yes, in reality there are rules.  But there are so many of them!  And so many exceptions!  And so many rules that depend upon the placement of letters!  And lots that depend upon the word itself!

And, yes, it’s easier than ideographic languages, such as Chinese, where a literate person has to learn between three and four thousand individual ideographs.

But, still!  Good lord.  OmegaDotter was simply exhausted by the end of that one page.  It takes a child an immense amount of focus to do something like that.  Thank heavens for the vast variety of reading material out there, so that most kids can find something to read that interests them enough to motivate them to focus that hard, that gives them a reason to continue to practice, practice, practice.  Because the only way to internalize that intricate, labyrinthine mazework of phonetic rules is to just keep plugging away at it…just like learning to walk.

Right now, the “No, I wouldn’t”s are in the lead.  The tally is OmegaDad, EzFez, Margaret and Theresa, all of whom essentially say “Why?  It’s just another thing I would worry about!”

I do like Theresa’s idea of “just feed me ice cream and gummi bears!”

The “Yes, I would want to know”s either have a family history of Alzheimer’s or a deep-seated need for control.  ;)  Del says while he might use it to prepare, he might just blow his retirement savings on fast women and booze.  Sister Carrie doesn’t quite put it like that, but says she wants to enjoy while she can, as does Kat.

I’m squarely in the middle on this one.  On the one hand, Medical Science Is Doing Amazing Things These Days.  (Hear that plummy announcer’s voice?  I swear I have Marlin Perkins’ voice forever engraved on my mind–pseudo Alzheimer’s aside.  “As the sun sets on the Serengeti, my intrepid assistant Jim is dangling from a rope in front of a hungry lion…”)

Anyway, Amazing Things.  The point being that, perhaps, sometime soon, they’ll come up with drugs or therapies or a brain-artery Roto-rooter that scrubs the plaque away, and Alzheimer’s will no longer be the soul-sucking personality destroyer that it is now.

In which case, hell, yeah, I’d like to know ahead of time, so that I can trot myself down to the local medico and say, “Gimme drugs!”  (Or “Gimme that Roto-rooter; I’ll do it myself!”)

On the other hand, I have the experience of OmegaBro’s maternal family to scare me silly.  Aunt J. (OmegaBro’s mom, dad’s first wife) had an ongoing edgy relationship with her own mother, with a hefty thread of resentment coloring everything.  And then her mother started the downward spiral that is Alzheimer’s.  She got tossed out of the assisted living home–either because she had become so nasty and bitchy that no-one wanted anything to do with her or because she kept forgetting that she had put a pot of water on to boil for tea.  Then she lived with Aunt J., who had to cope with a slew of emotions based on obligation, resentment, tainted love…

Of course, to me, L. was a lovely lady, but I still remember the first year she lived with Aunt J., when, at Christmastime, over the course of five hours she asked the same set of questions five or six times.  It was my first experience with Alzheimer’s, and made me incredibly sad, because L. was a vivid, vivacious, witty, proud and self-sufficient lady, or had been.  And that was at the early stages; by the time she died she had been bedridden for a year, no longer recognized her daughter, her grandsons, or her great-grandsons, couldn’t clothe herself or take care of herself in any manner.

So, on the third hand, knowing ahead of time, coupled with my memories of L., would give me incredible incentive to investigate any and all possible treatments and rage, rage against the dying of the light.

But, on the fourth hand, I am prone to stewing, and, like all the “Hell, no!” folks above, it would be just yet another thing to stew about.

Okay, so far I’ve got four hands going here.  I am not an octopus.  But obviously I am not decisive on this issue.  Finding out early if I had cancer?  Hokie doke.  No problemo.  Let’s find out, let’s kick that cancer’s ass, and if it doesn’t work, well, we’ve fought the good fight.

Ditto with diabetes, heart disease…

But these are all physical.  It’s the mental and emotional capacities that get clobbered by Alzheimer’s.  It’s so easy to be strong (at least in theory) with physical problems, but not so easy with a shrinking fear of the Essential Me just…fading away.

Anyway, it’s an interesting mental exercise.  Part of my issue is that I have all these incredibly long-lived women in my mother’s side of the family…so I keep thinking it’s not possible that can last more than three generations, that the strong pioneer stock must be diluted by now, so there must be some catastrophe awaiting me as a legacy from my dad’s side, to put the kibosh on the long-lived Mills women.

In the meantime, given that the first of the Baby Boomers has just begun picking up her social security check, and there are millions more just like her following along, the field of gerontology and elder health is just going to be busy and booming for quite a while.  Since I am towards the end of the Baby Boomer cohort, it’s quite possible that all the research that is going to go on in the next twenty years will pay off with exceptional dividends for me…and those like me.

Onto less morbid topics tomorrow!

That’s me.  Yup.  Because I’m an atheist.  (Well, okay, agnostic, but in many people’s minds, it’s all the same.)

Tsk, tsk.

Ah, well, at least this person didn’t pull out the usual chestnut about atheists being immoral, and how all morals are the result of religion.

I know I run the risk of running off bunches of my readers with this, but statements like the above just bother the heck out of me, and they got trotted out on a regular basis.  A writer on a group blog wrote about his lack of religion, and how he is teaching his kids that religion isn’t needed to live a moral, just life, and the very first comment that pops up says that all the atheists this person has met are “unhappy, cynical people”, and that religion is all about luuuuuuve.

And when some other atheist, agnostic, or (gasp!) liberalized Christian types said that, to them, religion reeks of justifying hatred, this same person comes on and tut-tuts, saying that this just exemplifies the ignorance about religion in the U.S. these days.

Let me just say to that:

• The Crusades
• Northern versus Southern Ireland
• Palestinians versus Jews in Israel
• Jihadists whose dream is to fly an airplane into a tower filled with unknowing businesspeople who are just living their daily lives.
• Fred Phelps and his ilk
• Kicking a city manager of 17 years out of his job because he’s going to have a sex-change operation
• Hitler (what?  You think Hitler was an atheist?  No, he was a Christian.)

Need I go on?  Ah, sure, there are plenty of atheists who have tolerated or promoted or inflicted hideous miseries upon their fellow man en masse, and I know it will be brought up to justify how good religious people are and how narsty atheists are.

My point is:  we’re all human beings.  And human beings are a wild and wooly bunch, subject to the same passions and inclinations towards unpleasantness, regardless of religious belief or lack thereof.

I personally feel that a great deal of the inequities and injustices that man has inflicted upon his fellow human being are historically justified on religious grounds.  Don’t talk to me about being “ignorant” of religion; I am merely looking at the evidence.

And when someone trots out the “Jesus says he is the way, truth, and light” as a counter-argument to someone talking about how all religions seem the same to him, what on earth can one say?  How about, “Well, Mohammed said the same thing.  So, I am sure, did Zoroaster.”  Why should I believe the one over the others?  They all seem equally improbable to me, and equally worthy, or unworthy of my respect and belief.

As I have said before, I am an agnostic, not an atheist.  I don’t know.  I don’t claim to know.  I have my own woo-wooistic set of feelings and beliefs about an inherent harmony in the universe…but I’m not going to go out and kill my fellow human beings if they don’t believe in the same Kozmik All.  And I sure as heck know that my beliefs are just that–beliefs, totally unbacked by any evidence, totally unscientific, and I have absolutely no right to tell anyone else that My Way Is The Right Way.

Grumble, grumble, grumble…

(And, to add to my grumblishness, the “B” on my keyboard is being recalcitrant and causing me no end of misery.)

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