10 Tips for Creating a Can-Do Child

In response to my previous post about the best advice Martha Stewart ever received, a friend emailed me, "So how do we teach our children what Martha Stewart's dad taught her?" 

Now, Readers, I have absorbed a lot of material about success over the last year – year or two (can you believe) – and it’s changed me in ways I can no longer parse into categories. Things have blended together in my head into a big smoothie of success. This analogy is my acknowledgment that I may repeat something someone else, someone much Bigger, someone much more Expert, someone much more Famous (which is not at all hard) than myself may have said, and if so, I apologize. In advance. In advance of any advance I may eventually receive for work not yet published, in fact.

Now that’s out of the way. 

My amalgamated advice is as follows:

• Believe your children are capable of great things – however they may grow up to define them.
• Tell your children you believe this of them.
• Praise and encourage all effort, persistence, and progress your children make.
• Encourage them to make and meet goals.
• Allow them time to be autonomous when possible and to find the creativity in all disciplines.
• Model, model, model for them your own effort, persistence, and progress toward goals you set yourself.
• Model your creative engagement. As one reader commented, show them that it’s worthwhile to devote full attention to whatever you do, and not to hold back in hope of something better coming along.
• Celebrate achievement – but focus on achievement being the result of effort. And persistence and progress.
• Model resilience after setbacks.
• Hope for the best!

Now, this list may skew a little vague and touchy-feely, and it is. Oh, it is. But I think and hope it works. I guess we’ll find out eventually. 

All of this advice begs a deeper question that came up from several emails and comments from my treasured readers: How much control do we actually have over our children's development? You see, Readers, I've noticed a tendency, a propensity, shall we say, among people to change their views on how much influence parents actually have over their children, depending on how old their children are, and how much of a mess their grown up childrens' lives appear to be. In short, Readers, I’ve noticed that the older children get, the less their parents say they have any effect on or control over their choices and personalities. 

Buddhists, Kahlil Gibran (“your children are not your children, they are blah, blah, blah"), and anyone who’s a grandparent will tell you: NONE.

And Madeleine Levine, my current book mama, says that once your kid gets to 11, 12, 13 and so on, it’s pretty much up to their friends to shape them. Krikey. This is somewhat distressing to the parent who spends a good part of the night obsessing over what courses her child should take in high school. 

So what good is my list?

One way of looking at this problem is that our parental understanding develops as our children develop from infancy to adulthood. We move from the SENSATION of having no control, except (and this is big) over their physical selves, due to our relative gigantism compared to them, to FEAR that we have no control over them, to HOPE that we aren’t responsible for them. That is, unless they turned out fabululious, and then we take CREDIT.

Another way of looking at this trajectory of responsibility divestment is that by the time our kids are adults, possibly with children of their own, they’ve defined themselves by making many mistakes and having many triumphs, and we are developing dementia. Because we humans tend to forget things were ever different from how they seem in the present, we feel we have no influence on them anymore and that, therefore, we never did. Neither of which is true, as anyone who has spent any time in psychotherapy will know. We did influence them, and we still do. Their eyes are always on us. But the enormity of responsibility for how a person grows up to interact in the world is much easier, perhaps, to disavow than to accept. Which is fine, Grandparents, if you must. You may wash your hands of our stupid choices. But then you aren’t allowed to take credit for our successes, either. And that extends to the offspring of those children you feel you had no ability to influence. And our eyes are on you.

For some reason, I am recalling that when the 9^th grader was two, she became obsessed with dressing herself. And undressing herself. And re-dressing herself. Her room was a shambles, with everything always spilling out of the dresser and onto the floor. Needless to say, her outfits were not exactly matchy-matchy Garanimals. That didn’t bother me, actually. I’m not into matchy-matchy. But I didn’t want her wearing bathing suits or party dresses to school. Her very wise Toddler Time teacher suggested I designate one or two drawers of her dresser into which I was to place several outfits appropriate to the season, which she was allowed to wear in any combination she chose. I could rotate these outfits as needed. So, freedom to choose, but limited freedom. Parameters. It worked like a charm. Stripes and florals, skirts over pants, whatever. I didn’t care. In fact, I liked it. Eliminated some of the mess and all of the power struggle.

What does this have to do with the reader who responded that he felt it would have been useless to tell his daughter she could do anything she wanted to, because he knew it was untrue, and she would have known he knew it, too? He went on to explain that there were too many random factors at work in determining what a person could be; ultimately, he said, citing Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow, success depends about 30 percent on ability and 70 percent on chance. This is a pretty bleak outlook, in some ways. It’s tempting to say, why bother trying, then? And yet, because I am not yet old, I persist.

I guess the connection is this: that we all operate within constraints, and yet those constraints can be the mold for our creativity and for our sense of autonomy. None of us can control the external world, but we can still learn agency from within that constraint. The point is not to say that the world is going to throw you curveballs, so you’d better spend your life ducking. The point is not to say that you must wear a red shirt with your blue pants, or else. The point is to say that given the need to wear clothes and your parent’s need for some kind of order, your choice is limited by circumstances, but within those limitations you can create your own outfit. Similarly, teaching your child that she can do whatever she wants allows her to stretch. The world may – will – prevent or hinder or complicate circumstances, but the child who believes she can do, will do what she can with what life hands her. Goals may need altering, but the can-do child will accommodate that. That’s better than not trying stuff in anticipation of chance working against her. Besides, hard work and creativity may alter goals and circumstances in positive ways.

Sonnets. Villanelles. Sestinas. Sometimes restrictions are liberating. Look at it this way. By frustrating your young child’s desire to do whatever he wants (wear a bathing suit to school in winter in Albany, NY, say) yet giving him some choices, you teach many lessons. One is that the world will not always bend to his wishes. Would you not say that is a useful lesson? Another is that he still has some control over himself and his person. Is that not also useful? And a final one is that there is satisfaction from working within constraints. Again, useful. It teaches him he can do anything he wants to do. In this case, he wants to pick his own outfit. It also teaches him to modify his goal to accommodate his limits - to revise what he wants to do, if necessity forces him to. And that, I think, is the way of the world. Success is determined by how fully you express yourself within your limits. 

Selected Bibliography

Dweck, Mindset

Faber and Mazlich, How to Talk So Your Kids Will Listen & Listen So They Will Talk

Ginott, Between Parent and Child

Halvorsen, Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals

Levine, Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success

Mogel, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee

Pink, Drive

Whose Screw is Loose?

Is it mine?

Last week I had this piece in the New York Times Motherlode blog. It ran in tandem with KJ Dell’Antonia’s response to it. In case you missed them, they are about how my daughter's course selections for next year triggered my anxiety about how much to push for prestigious colleges and KJ's lack of anxiety about it and her heartwarming belief in passion and hard work. Together, they are still generating comments, which is good, since there’s no such thing as bad publicity, I am told. If only I could publish my blog in the NYTimes everyday, I’d get a lot more comments on it. Of course, I would have to grow a thicker skin. Maybe just let my tendency to eczema fulfill itself…

Because some of those comments – hoo boy. Let me tell you. I’ve tried not to read too many of them, because I can only stand so much. Plus, I am suggestible, so it’s best not to pay too close attention or I might start (really) believing them.

Interestingly, every comment I saw suggested or downright declared that I had better seek help for my mental illness. Which, you know, rankles, since I’ve been doing that for years. And none of those professionals has ever told me I’m crazy. Except one, but she was joking. I am pretty sure.

Meanwhile, every comment the husband read was about how the commenter hadn't been a bit concerned one way or another about college, yet his/her child had grown up to be an exemplary human with absolutely no stress or intervention of a parental nature.

Yet my friends told me they thought the comments were overall kind of in agreement with me.

Go figure. We find what we are looking for, I guess.

*

I thought, Readers, you might be interested in a few background details about the posts.

First of all, Gym Mom immediately identified herself. Not to worry. We are still on excellent terms. In fact, she emailed that she was “excited and proud" to make her debut in the Times. So all is well there. And you can see she has an excellent sense of humor.

I, too, have retained mine, despite glancing at one too many exhortations to let my kid eat lunch already. Far too many commenters use as evidence of my mental illness and my terrible mothering the “fact” that I am “making” the 9th grader skip lunch. Hello? She took lunch this year, her first year in high school, because I/we insisted. She has put her foot down about next year. None of her friends take lunch, so why should I force her to if she doesn’t want to? Eventually, one HT from Ohio wrote in explaining why she avoided lunch all through high school: "my high school cafeteria was like something out of The Lord of The Flies, and anyone who could avoid it, did." Of her cafeteria experience, the 9^th grader says, simply, that it's full of “drama.” 

Furthermore, since we live in a town that has its school schedule organized for the benefit of the all-important athletic teams that “need” to practice in the afternoons, high school starts at 7:30 a.m. and ends at 2:07 p.m., and not at the time that would most fit with adolescent development and support academic achievement. (Do NOT get me started on that.) The point is, the 9^th grader can have lunch slash snack when she gets home.

By the way, many of these kids take that extra period and use it for art or music, because they’re only allotted time in a regular schedule for one or the other, and this way they can take both. So it’s not as if it’s only the Type A tiger cubs who drop lunch.

Second of all, almost better than having something published was emailing with KJ Dell’Antonia about publishing it. After she accepted my initial essay, I decided I wanted to rewrite it, making it less flippant and self-deprecating, which doesn’t play well when Motherlode readers are ready with their comment-trigger-fingers. Subtlety doesn’t really work, as I’ve found on both occasions I’ve published in Motherlode. In fact, half the readers don’t even finish the piece, which I could tell this time, because they criticize me for being too invested, when I concluded by letting the 9^th grader make her own decision about her extra class. Yes, that little factoid eluded most readers. KJ told me she hashed out her response with her husband, who comes down a little closer to my side than she, and then it was a go. Still, she worried that she was “letting me out to hang,” because my piece was going to offend people who didn’t have ways or means of getting their children into top colleges. I could see that my piece hinged on my emotional conflict, while hers was a reasoned, logical argument, and therefore I would be blasted by people who didn't read the subtext, but I told her it was fine. I am all about conflict. So I put my head on the block and wham!

I am still here.

TMI? The Tao of Worry

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Readers, I am obsessing about my left breast. I feel nothing different in it. It doesn’t hurt. And yet, in the past, I have had pain there, and a few months ago, I had a pulled muscle basically right underneath it. I spent so much time poking around the area that I bruised myself. Right now, nothing is going on. Yet I feel like I feel something, in the sense of sensing something. I feel like I sense something there. A thickness. A weirdness. Which reminds me of two things. One is this story about the sister of a friend who went to the doctor complaining that her breast hurt, “Right here.” She said, jabbing at the spot. The doctor said, “have you been doing that a lot?” “What this?” She said, jabbing at the spot. “Yes.” Said the doctor. “Yes,” she said. The doctor said, “Stop doing that.”

The other thing I'm reminded of is the homeopath I visited for a while in hopes of curing my chronic exercise-induced urticaria. (That’s hives, for the uninitiated.) I was also having problems breast feeding my kid with my LEFT breast. After taking my medical history she pointed out that  I have issues on the left side of my body. Left ovary removed. Mastitis in left breast. Then she gave me a little bottle of something. It didn’t cure the hives. Years later, acupuncture alleviated them - and also led to the discovery of the lipoma (fatty benign tumor) on my left shoulderblade. Left, left left.

So the explanation of why I’m obsessing about my left breast may be that because I have a history of things going wrong on the left side of my body, when I start to worry about things going wrong, I tend towards the left (sinistra in Latin - root of sinister, if you think about it) side.

Good thing I’m going for my annual mammogram on Monday. After which, the husband asked, will I be able to relax about my boob for a while? Yeah, probably for about a month. Realistically.

Of course, maybe the mammogram will reveal something wrong, and then I’ll have the very shallow pleasure of knowing that I was right. Except that I’ve spent a portion of pretty much every day worrying about cancer, so eventually, I may be right, no matter what. Lately, I’ve added cardiac concerns to my worry list. Not that I have heart trouble – at least not that anyone’s discovered. That's precisely the point. No one has discovered any problem. Yet anything could develop at any moment. And it’s the stuff you don’t know about that will get you. It happened to a couple of friends of mine. Of course they are still alive and healthy. But they are living with the knowledge that there’s something wrong with their hearts.

The real question, though, is why the worry in the first place?

Aren’t we all living with the knowledge that there could be something wrong? Indeed, isn’t there something wrong with all of our hearts? Hello? They are eventually going to stop working. We are going to die. That is what is wrong. That is why the worry.

Here are two pieces of advice I've been given by Professionals for dealing with worry:

1. Set aside a certain amount of time every day to worry, and then don't worry until that time.
2.  Or, worry once and worry well. 

This advice doesn't work for me. I cannot "worry once," and the time of day I set aside to worry is usually 3-5 a.m., which is kind of a drag.

I’ve concluded that I need to think about death. “Come to terms with death,” as some might say. Perhaps all you Readers  have come to terms with death and live worry-free lives of great empowerment and fulfillment. If so, please share.

I find it interesting that my worries increase as things get better in other areas of my life. For example, I have paying work. I recently got a raise. I’ve had some success with my blog. My kids and husband are healthy, and I have friends. So the question is, do I have some kind of homeostatic mechanism at work trying to keep me at emotional equilibrium? You know, don’t fly too high, don’t dip too low?  Is it a self-protective system to remind me to balance my life and pay attention to my physical health so I can continue? Is some kind of tao of worry at work? 

Or is it a pathological set up, a self-sabotage that keeps me from fully expressing whatever it is in me to express? The time I spend in useless, pointless worry about illnesses I don’t have, is time spent not doing things that are useful. And it's not as if it's protective. 

How to remove the anxiety? Besides medication, I mean. Perhaps, Readers, you are thinking that I am an excellent candidate for some kind of pill. Perhaps you are right. But I prefer not to take pills. I prefer  to manage my anxiety in other ways. This attitude, I understand, is one symptom of the anxious person. Or one symptom of one kind of anxious person. My kind.

But I digress. The idea is to Come to Terms with Death. Is that even possible? Have you, Readers? I know that Tibetan Buddhist monks sometimes meditate in graveyards and charnel houses to accustom themselves to the idea. And there is a nifty mantra – sutra – on impermanence:

I am of the nature to grow old. I cannot escape growing old.
I am of the nature to become ill. I cannot escape illness.
I am of the nature to die. I cannot escape death. 

It’s just not that appealing to meditate on these ideas. Yet, remembering that these processes – illness, old age (if you’re lucky), and death – are part of everyone’s parcel does relieve some anxiety. If you’re like me, you get into the mindset that everything in life is supposed to have a certain baseline: things are good, people are healthy, jobs are there, work is productive. So anytime something dips below baseline, there's a sense that there’s something wrong, abnormal, and let’s face it, kind of shameful. So it’s good to remember that there isn’t really a baseline, and that there’s nothing shameful about experiencing these natural processes of life.

All this blather reminds me of a high school weekend party I attended. I had a “deep” teenaged conversation about death with a person I won't name, because he was somebody’s boyfriend. Also because this is a blog, and I don't name names. But I apparently can't resist bragging about this boy obliquely. One of us was angsting about it (death) –guess who? The other one, he said he didn’t worry about death, because when he was dead, he wouldn’t care. And I found that so comforting. I had this moment of total release. It was so simple. Just letting go of the problem. It would come, life would be over, but it wouldn’t matter. Then he kissed me. 

Linking sex and death. Gee, has that ever happened before? Is there any literature on that? Well, anyway, it's a much more pleasant connection than I started with. Although mentioning sex does remind me of my left breast....

I Regret Nothing - With Name-Dropping

Product of Good Parenting

I recently passed a diverting lunchtime with a writer friend revisiting some of the opportunities we failed to grab, back in our twenties. Turns out we have a couple of doozies. For example, I offer my tour of the The New Yorker, about 20 years ago. Through a connection I can no longer recall - something to do with his mother - Louis Menand gave me a tour of The New Yorker. Yes, that Louis Menand, who writes regularly for the magazine. He gave me a tour. Through the offices. Of The New Yorker. 

What was it like, The New Yorker? What was Louis Menand like? I hardly know. I doubt I had a better notion then. It’s as if I were led, blindfolded, on that tour. I have one memory, a glimpse into a small office space. It was empty, but showed signs of occupancy. Which famous writer worker there? I don’t have the faintest idea. Maybe it was a plebe’s office. Who the heck knows? As for Louis Menand – I have only the recollection of the sensation of being with a person. I wouldn’t recognize him now, and frankly, I wouldn’t have recognized him a week after that tour. I don’t know that I ever looked him in the face. He was with me – beside, ahead, behind? – the way any authority figure was throughout my childhood, a shape or a bulk of anonymous but indisputable existence with which I could expect no real interaction. Like a coat rack draped in an overcoat. Certainly not like person with whom I could (ought to) communicate as an equal.

Looking back, I see the whole thing as a failure of imagination, not of courage. I wasn’t nervous. I was simply unable to consider my proximity to Louis Menand and that tour as opportunities for career advancement.  It’s possible I stood on a point of honor: I didn’t want to be like everyone else he toured around The New Yorker on his mother’s request and then ASK something of him, career-related. It’s possible. And stupid. More likely, though, my muteness sprang from seeing him as an authority figure, and seeing myself – or not seeing myself at all.

So why was he an authority figure? And why was I – a child?

This where I indulge in a little parent bashing. I don’t really like to do it, because, now that I am one, I understand that parents are mere humans, full of insecurities and fatal flaws that can obscure our good intentions. Nevertheless, I have to say that some responsibility for the stupid lack of imagination I showed then lay with my parents. For who else but they were supposed to teach me how to see my possibilities? I came across this bit by none other than Martha Stewart, in which she says the best thing anyone ever taught her was that she could do anything she put her mind to – and the person who taught her that? Her dad. She says, “I think it really often is up to the parents to help build confidence in their children. It is a very necessary part of growing up.”* (Then she applies another layer of decoupage to the birdcage she's making out of strips of six thousand thread count Egyptian cotton sheets for her gazebo.)  

Now, Martha's run the gamut from model to mogul to jailbird and back. Whatever you may fault her for, you can't fault her for lack of imagination for where she could be and what she could do.

It never even occurred to me that my tour with Louis Menand could be anything other than that, a tour. I never for an instant considered myself equal to anyone working there. Even though there were people my age, people from my high school class, working there around that time, I just felt different from Those People. They were on some other existential plane. So that’s the bottom line.

I left Louis Menand and The New Yorker, and I returned to my stultifying data entry job and my novel in progress, and never followed up. If Louis Menand noticed I didn’t write him a thank-you note, I hope he didn’t tell his mother. It never occurred to me, not because I was rude. I wasn’t. I was raised to write thank-yous. I had a supply of cards with my name printed on them for this purpose. No, I didn’t think of writing him because I didn’t imagine I had registered on his brain. He was one of Those People. 

So, my point, Readers, is that it’s necessary to imagine yourself using your talents and skills for work you want to do, and it’s important to help others imagine these things for themselves. Not unrealistic things. Realistic things. Who’s to say what’s unrealistic? That’s where imagination kicks in – imagining seemingly out-of-reach places reachable. Like taking advantage of an in at The New Yorker to explore how you might fit there. If it’s too late for you, then do it for your kids, or for your niece. Do it for your mentees. You might help shape the next Martha Stewart – or, if that gives you the heebie-jeebies, the next Louis Menand. You want people to believe you could be a contendah, and you gotta do that for them, too.

My friend has a doozie of a regret story. It also involves The New Yorker. I won’t tell it here, because it’s her doozie. I’ll just say it might beat mine.

*Martha on the best advice she ever received (in LinkedIn)

In Honor of Kindness: Primum non Nocere

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Primum non Nocere – first, do no harm – is one of the fundamental precepts of Buddhism. (Ahimsa, FYI.) It’s also the underpinning of medical ethics, handed down from the Ancient Greeks (Hippocrates, anyone?) in slightly different words. Oh, and it's also basic to the Judeo-Christian religions, among others.

When I was a young mother, one of my uncles told me the most important thing to do as a parent was to be kind. I was (am) the sort of person who looks to others for advice. Growing up without a mother, I looked for mothers everywhere. Books have often been pretty good substitutes, and I can recommend a few essential ones on parenting. My uncle’s advice, however, has always stayed with me because it was surprising. Not that my uncle is unkind. Far from it. But something about kindness as a principle struck me as foreign. It was certainly different from much of the advice I’d read in my book-mothers. Not that they advocated unkindness - not at all - but their focus was on handling specific problems or certain phases of childhood, on theories of discipline, or on modes of communicating. “Be kind” was something else, an underlying principle, a rudder to steer by, if you will. A secret to parenting success.

Anyway, the point is that after all that theory, “be kind” struck home. It spoke to my role as the attitude shaper for my offspring, to my role as Person Responsible for How She Acts and reacts in any situation. This agglomeration of actions and reactions being, well, life.

“Be kind” also, now that I think about it more, gives a nod to the little tykes’ individuality, to their little autonomous selves, and gives me space to recognize that whatever it is they might be doing, they are doing it to create their own individual selves, and those selves must not be crushed. So, be kind. And recognize how hard that is. Developing the self, that is, and being kind. They are both hard.

Be kind functions as a mindfulness tool. If I can take a tiny step away from the emotion of the moment and see my child as a separate critter, then I have a chance of acting in her best interest, not just reacting.

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I was reminded of my uncle’s advice a few weeks ago, while reading the New York Times Magazine’s Dec. 30, 2012 issue, “The Lives They Lived.” Basically it’s a giant obituary section. Nothing wrong with obituaries. As my friend Reyna points out in her blog post, they can be instructive. In it was a tribute to David Rakoff, a writer and contributor to “This American Life” and a general wit. The tribute was this lovely letter to David Rakoff written by one of his friends, and my point, because I know I have one, Readers, my point is that this letter mentions that he once wrote an essay in which he said that “as fun and Margo Channing as it might seem to be drunk and witty and cutting, it’s probably better in the long run to be kind.”

To be kind. To forgo the thrill of the harsh joke and the ensuing laugh in favor of kindness. Well, Readers, this struck me, in light of my previous blog post about my friend Let’s Call Him Mark. Because I agree with Rakoff. And my uncle. And the Dalai Lama. Let’s not forget him. Overall, I do, although occasionally, what I hope a 19^th Century British novelist would have described as my “charming high-spiritedness,” overcomes my better judgment, and I give in to the urge to be, uh, mean. I’m in good company, after all. Doesn’t Emma Woodhouse do just that? And of course she is terribly wrong to make her joke at Miss Bates’ expense, as Knightly so rightly points out. (Internal rhyme unintentional, yet pleasing nonetheless.)

Readers, I have perseverated on this blog post for weeks. I have umpteen drafts of it. I can’t figure out why it’s been so hard to write. It’s really a simple post: I value kindness. Brené Brown talks about the importance of vulnerability. She talks about how we are afraid to be vulnerable, but that from vulnerability comes true experience. By allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, which she considers an act of bravery, we allow ourselves to fully be in the world with what matters most to us. From that place of essential meaning flow goals, acts, and endeavors that impact the world. Maybe stating something essential in which I believe relates to her message about the challenge of being vulnerable.

Or maybe it’s because any of you who follow my blog or know me in real life, know how far short of kindness I repeatedly fall. Kindness is subtle, so easily underrated. And I lack subtlety. After I read that appreciation of David Rakoff, I felt kind of intimidated, or inferior – unevolved – by comparison. I checked out three collections of essays by Rakoff from the library and began reading them, looking for the source of that quotation.

I could not find it. I did, however, come across an essay he wrote about Fashion Week in Paris. Apparently Karl Lagerfeld made a rather unkind comment to him about how on earth he’d find anything to say about fashion week that hadn’t already been said. Rakoff, despite his credo, responded in print describing Lagerfeld thus: “with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavored muffin overrisen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money. How’s that for new and groundbreaking, Mr. L?” 

Frankly, his outburst was a relief. And, while much lengthier and more literary than anything I may have said recently - or ever - was also much meaner. So there’s the aspiration and there’s the reality.  Be kind.

However, I still wanted to find the essay in which David Rakoff wrote that sentence about kindness, so I emailed Ariel Kaminer at The New York Times, who wrote the piece. She soon responded, sending me the link, which was very kind of her, along with the comment that she’d simply googled the sentence in question and found it easily - which, perhaps, was not.

But at least her tone was ambiguous. And she did send me the essay. Rakoff wrote it in 2010. His florid and biting description of Karl Lagerfeld was part of a collection of essays published in 2005. So, he mellowed over time. According to the Dalai Lama, that’s a gesture in the right direction. As he said the other day on Facebook, “If you can, help and serve others, but if you can’t at least don’t harm them; then in the end you will feel no regret.”

Am I Allowed to be Petty?

I just read on somebody’s blog that next week is Random Acts of Kindness Week. This turns out to be true. (http://www.randomactsofkindness.org/rak-week) I don’t know this week’s theme – suggestions welcome – but I’m pretty sure last week’s was Random Acts of UNkindness. Because, well, let’s just say there was a little exchange between me and a stranger that was unpleasant. A pricking kind of exchange.

I am sorry to say this happened in the auditorium of our middle school, during the musical. (“Annie,” Readers, if you care.) The 5^th grader and I got tickets at the last minute, so we were in the nosebleed section, right in front of the 8^th grader manning the spotlight. And making extraneous comments not related to the show into her headphones. But whatever. We were at the end of a row, next to the wall, and the 5^th grader couldn’t see too well, even when we traded seats. Neither could I, for that matter. Next to her was me, then an empty seat, then a party of four people, a grandma, a mother, a young child, and a child with an electronic device, in that order. 

Right before the show began, when the empty seat next to me was still empty, I leaned over and asked the grandmother if anyone was going to be in that empty seat, because if not, maybe my daughter could sit there and see a little better? She shrugged and said they were expecting someone (which I am just naïve enough to have believed) and I said, Oh, sure, well maybe if they don’t show up? Dot dot dot. The grandmother said she wanted to use it for her stuff. That was slightly annoying, but that’s life, as they say. Just then, the mother, catching wind of some discussion happening between us, leaned over. The grandmother filled her in on my request, and the mother said, to me, “We PAID for that seat.”

Readers, that was bitchy. It was also unnecessary. I wasn’t going to argue with Grandma. Even if I thought she was being a little selfish, I knew she was within her rights. But because I am an Aries, I couldn’t just let Mom’s comment roll off my back. The unnecessary aspect of it was as nasty as her nasty attitude. I flapped my hand at the mother and said, “WhateEVER. JEEZis.” Then I spent part of the first act regretting that I had said anything. (Responding to nastiness with anything less than witheringly perfect politeness always demeans the responder. )The second act I divided among enjoying, listening to the random comments of the 8^th grader manning the spotlight behind me, and saying to myself, “Hey, Miss Hannigan is my gynecologist’s daughter.”

It’s a small town.

My point, Readers, is not to get back at Bitchy Mom and Unkind Grandma by blogging about them, at least not entirely. My point is how unnecessary that unkindness was. I’m not talking about the empty seat, although I suppose I could. If it had been me asked about the empty seat, I would have surrendered it so a child to see better. That’s why I asked. I asked, she declined, it wasn’t a big deal. It was the way Bitchy Mom jumped at the issue, and the implication that I was some kind of sneaky person trying to weasel her out of something she paid for that made it a big deal. No one ever showed up for that seat, so maybe they didn’t actually pay for it. Grandma made full use of it, filling it with water bottle, coats, and snacks. I leaned on the armrest. Way in. Because I am many things, but one thing I am not is petty. Anyway, it was Bitchy Mom’s comment that really prickled me. In the scheme of distressing things I have encountered and will encounter in my life, that prickle is just a tiny pain; but it is a pain nonetheless, and an entirely unnecessary one. In its small way, it has a disproportionately long lifespan. It’s so much better to not let those prickles penetrate; and better still to forbear from causing them. So let that be my first act of kindness: remembering to forbear causing unnecessary pricks - or being near them.

A Brief Post on Challenge

The other day I read an article about combat training for women in the military. I didn't read it carefully, and I didn't think about it much at all. Nevertheless, I woke up this morning thinking, By gum, a 62-year-old woman in the Army is required to run two miles in 25 minutes, so I've got myself a goal.

Seriously. I may have mentioned that I started running this summer. Well, I haven't stopped, but I am slow. Really slow. I'd been thinking about how to get myself to speed up. My blond, ponytailed, Star Trac treadmill, personal coach avatar - starting now, I call her Tina* - has been very encouraging; but I am still slow.

According to the article, there will be some changes to requirements for combat, such as how many chin ups women will have to do now (three) versus how many they used to have to do (none. They did the flexed arm hang, which I recall from taking the Presidential Physical Fitness Test in P.E.). These requirements vary by division - Army, Marines, etc. However, it was the 25 minutes for two miles thing that really bought my eye (Python speak, FYI.).

(Oh my God, I have suddenly become so confused about punctuation of parenthetical phrases at the ends of sentences, thanks to David Rakoff, whose usage completely upends what little I thought I knew. Now I will have to find my Strunk & White and check it out.)

So this morning, I determined I would start on my journey towards the 12.5 minute mile.

Readers, I did it. Today. I met my goal immediately.

This would be cause for congratulation, but for two things:

1. I am multiple years south of 62, though I am a woman. I've been told. Which means that unless I pick things up, speedwise, by 62 I probably won't be able to run at all. 
2. My self-image is so lame I thought that it might take me months longer to reach this goal. 

I think that sometimes I under-challenge myself. I did in this case. My starting speed turned out to be what I'd intended as a goal. And because we live in a culture rife with sports-life metaphors, this under-challenging thing must be applicable to other areas of my life.

Hmmmm. To ponder.

Do you do this? Or do you expect too much from yourselves?

In the meantime, take a quick look at the video.


*A moment's research on YouTube has brought this: Kimberly, not Tina, the Star Trac Coach. Not that I'm trying to advertise for Star Trac. You can watch just a few seconds to see her.