10 Ways to Win at Parenting This School Year

I’m kidding. I don’t have any actual tips to "Start the School Year Off Right", or "Make Mornings Your Family's Favorite Time of Day", or "Love Every Minute of Carpool."

To be honest, I actually have no freaking clue what I’m doing. I’m wandering around blindfolded in a dark room filled with mostly shin-high furniture and scattered Legos. Instead of beautifully crafted memes filled with misty lakes and burgeoning sunrises, I have the refrain “meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless” to offer. 

OK, that may be a bit bleak. I don’t actually think my parenting wisdom is meaningless, but I do think it may or may not be useful and there’s really no way I can be sure for at least, like, 40 years or so.

As we rocket toward another school year (that calendar by which parents measure time far more closely than by the New Year), my social media feeds are full of "10 Ways to Keep Your Kids Organized" and "13 Tricks to Healthy Lunches all Year Long". And maybe they work. If you find a suggestion or color coded calendar available for download that helps you out, Brava. I hope it fulfills all of your #momgoals for the year. But I don’t live with your kids in your house and you don’t live with my kids in mine so there’s really only so much that either of us is going to be able to teach the other one about how to do this parenting thing “right.”

You know who’d I take advice from? Some grandma with lovely grown grandchildren who were raised by her well-adjusted, productive children. She, however, is probably not writing a blog or posting carefully distressed signs with messages of love on Pinterest because she has transcended the realm of daily motherhood and no longer worries about such mundane things. She may also not exist because no matter how great of a parent you are, our kids can all decide to be drug addicts or shack up with a stripper named Glitter that they met during that gap year we convinced our spouse to let them take.

All the best advice in the world, all of the best ways to do this, or creative ways to do that may or may not be “best” in your life, or my life, or—and this is terrifying—even for all of our own kids. What works with one may or may not work for another. We really can’t tell in the middle of it.

I, for instance, teach my kids random things through pop songs written primarily before my birth.

Learning the seasons? —“You’ve Got a Friend” James Taylor,1971

Having trouble with prepositions? –“Under the Boardwalk”The Drifters, 1964

Wondering if there is such a thing as a Space Cowboy? –“TheJoker” Steve Miller Band, 1973

I send my kids to a pretty conservative private Christian school where I have to say things like “I think dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago no matter what your teacher said” and yet I also am explaining phrases like “we’ll be makin’ love…under the boardwalk” and “I’m a midnight toker” to my children. Fortunately, none of them asked about “I really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree.”

What in the world am I doing?! Have I no sense of the middle ground?!? We've got Creationism and stoner anthems at the same time??!! I am totally afraid that I am breaking them most of the time. That they will turn out weird or ignorant or lost or lonely or afraid or….well, I don’t even know what. The reality is that they will be one or all of those things at some point. We all are.  

One of my kids has spent the last year in therapies attempting to address both physical and academic challenges that we can’t seem to find a cause for. In our last meeting our pediatrician looked at me and said, “This is a unique case for me.”

Well, damn. Is that unique like “that’s a unique smell” or what?

He said, “unique in that most parents aren’t as involved or knowledgeable about their children’s development and education as you are. Honestly, most of them want me to just fix it so they can go back to playing tennis.”

I suppose that’s a compliment (I took it that way because I have an overinflated ego at times—not all the time, mind you—that might actually be useful to my sense of accomplishment—just sometimes), but it was also terrifying. I don’t want to have a unique case. I don’t want my kid to suffer because maybe I’ve spent too much time thinking I know what to do or how to fix it and I’ve just made it worse. Maybe I am blowing this whole parenting thing to hell even in the one field I thought I may actually have had an advantage. Maybe I should have just gone to play tennis. I’ve heard they have wine there.

Earlier today, my oldest was looking at her brand new binder and said, “OOHHH, it says, ‘resists taaares.’ So the binder doesn’t tear on the inside.”  When I looked up she said, “I read it as ‘resists teeers’ and kept thinking, ‘how many people cry onto their binders’”?

Having taught AP World History to 10^th graders in a highly academically competitive environment, I’m pretty sure I could name several kids who may have cried onto their binders. I also think that if you could sell a binder that could resist tears, the kind that pour from your children’s eyes and into their lives and hearts, Target would never be able to keep that thing stocked.

But we would be wrong to buy it. Our teeers and taaaares and hurts and heartaches and struggles and successes and even false successes are what make us valuable human beings full of love and compassion and not fragile robots prone to general jackassery. (That’s a word. I promise.)

I am probably breaking my kids. You are probably breaking your kids. We are, probably, right this very minute, doing something that could have been done with just a little bit more patience or grace or love or joy or meaningful stares at one another. Although that sounds vaguely creepy.  

Our parenting choices are far from meaningless, but they’re not all paramount, either. I think it’s easier for us to focus on the logistics and look for advice about discipline tickets or chore charts because that feels like something we can DO, not something we have to be. 

And that's the rub, isn't it? Really great parenting is when WE are full of peace and patience and kindness and love...not when we manage to do the back-to-school paperwork on time. This is both the most important job we’ll ever do and also the one in which there will never be an accurate year-end review until the job’s all over. Our only option is to go hard for the duration in the hopes that we get something right.

So, what are my actual "10 Ways to Win at Parenting this School Year?" 

1. Do your best—at whatever thing it seems to YOU needs attention at the time.
2. Ignore all the other parents’ social media feeds. They don’t have your kids.
3. Pray. This is actually 3-9. We’re all just guessing at what our kids need, but God in heaven knows.
4. (AKA number 10) Do it all over again every day for every year you get to be a parent. It’s the only totally exhausting job that you never want to end.

I hope that all of our kids have meaningful years of growth and maturity. I hope they learn and expand and rise. I hope they experience, and recover from, tears of all kinds. And I hope we all remember to treasure it as much as humanly possible. Happy Back to School.

The Most American Week Ever

It's been a rough week for America and if you don't know why, you need to read this more than most. Or, if not this, then almost anything other than your heavily curated Facebook feed. But I'll assume that you do know why, and that you, too, are hurt and angry and disoriented by the violence and pain in our nation over the last several days...or decades...or centuries, depending on your point of view.

I'll assume that, like me, you want a better America than the one you've seen on television or out your window, or through your own experiences. I'm going to, for the sake of this one-sided discussion, begin with the assumption that you are both proud to be an American and willing to make that mean something greater than it already does. It's a decently large set of assumptions, but I think we're all up to that challenge.

I've seen and heard multiple versions of the comment, "this isn't my America" or "what is this country coming to?" --not just in reference to this last week, but also during our incredibly weird election cycle and never-ending spate of mass shootings. But I actually think this week may be the most American week we've had in a long time.

The major news stories of this week have involved police shootings of minorities, a suicidal/homicidal soldier, mental illness, death of police officers, peaceful protest, arrest of protesters, and, as is increasingly common, the proliferation of guns. If we could throw in immigration (although one of the fallen Dallas officers was, in fact, Mexican-American) and a privileged white guy getting away with campus rape we'd probably have the crux of every news story of the last year.

There is chaos and tension and blood. As disturbing as that is, it's not exactly new.  From our violent beginnings in the Revolution to the Civil War that nearly broke America's back...from the gang riots of immigrant groups in New York to the violence of Bloody Kansas...from the Civil Rights Movement to border wars no matter where our border might have been at the time.., the pain and the violence and the continually readjusting to a new normal, a new people group, and a new way of doing our lives has always been present.

It is, in fact, the most amazingly beautiful thing about the American Experiment--that we can face the inevitable clashes that come with living in close proximity to those with whom we do not feel related and find some common ground to stand on anyway.

When I taught AP World History to 10th graders, one of the tasks they needed to learn was to answer Document Based Questions. They were given a set of historic documents and expected to draw conclusions about the time and place in which the document was made. To be honest, most of them were very bad at it, especially at first. They continually wanted to use the documents (ships' logs, photographs of pottery fragments, royal decrees) as they would an encyclopedia.

They wanted to believe what they could see in front of them was absolute fact.

Over time, and with a lot of practice, they learned to always, always look at the source first. Was that ship's log made by a captain for his own use or to hand over to his investors or boss? Was that pottery used by an everyday citizen or was that something only elites had access to? Did the king have the power to enforce that royal command or was it just for show? Who, what, when, where, why, and how--those interrogatives you learned if you ever took a journalism course--became the bedrock of understanding historical events.

In order to accurately assess what happened in any given moment, students had to put themselves in someone else's shoes...to imagine their motivations and experiences...their worldview and sphere of influence..instead of looking at it solely from the students' own points of view. Although not all students became equally proficient at this task, every single kid I ever taught about sourcing a document got better at it over time. Every single one. Every single time.

I wish I could lead courses for adults to teach this skill (because it is absolutely a skill) and use current news articles as our documents. There are kind, well-meaning people who are completely clueless when it comes to thinking about life outside of themselves. And our social media obsessed society makes it so much easier to look like an insensitive moron. These social issues--race relations, policing, mental illness--they don't lend themselves to 140 characters or a snap shot.

I understand the desire to say something, anything, when there is pain...but your Insta-ready white family's pic at the beach in Seaside stating that you "stand with your African-American brothers and sisters" doesn't hit quite the right note. Find some actual humans with brown skin to stand next to when they need a friend, not when you need a "black friend."

If you commented that "perhaps some good will come from this" after the assassination of police officers, you clearly aren't related to any cops. Only victims, of any race, of any crime, of any profession, get to look for the silver lining. Bystanders should bring blankets and water and hugs and only say, "I'm sorry."

If, every time there's a mass shooting, you post that the problem isn't with guns, but crazy people with guns and we really just need to "fix" our mental health system, you just prove that you don't know anything about mental illness. I know about both guns and mental illness and only one of those things can be locked up in a safe.

If you post passive-aggressive messages about the "sanctity of the family" even if you don't ever actually say anything about gay people, your gay friends and relatives read between the lines even if you really didn't "mean it that way." Stop that.

If you post that you "support our troops" but don't bother to learn that Memorial Day and Veteran's Day are two different events (neither one of which is about active-duty soldiers), your thanks sounds kind of hollow. Same goes for complaining about your out-of-town husband on Facebook when you have a military spouse as a friend.

Social media is fun and interesting, but it is far more about blips of information than about relationships and understanding.  Your one comment about a complex issue is never all you think and feel about the topic and you know it...let's all try to imagine what it might sound or look like to the people we love who might be listening.  Save the other comments for face-to-face conversations.

If you want meaningful social media, go ahead and follow DeRay and the Dallas PD and the White House and Mitt Romney and It Gets Better and Focus on the Family. If you don't want political social media, that's cool, too. Stick to food and vacay pics and we can all keep following each other and looking at each others' kids.

But in real, actual life, this is my proposal:

Find someone you're afraid of and love on them, without ever expecting anything in return. We owe it to our children to get this right.

Go to a police station and take some food at a random time. Cops work weird hours and they're hungry.

Ask a woman in a head scarf at the gym how her holidays have been. Can you imagine the dedication to fitness it takes to work out with your head covered?

Talk to a gay coworker about their kids. Gay people have kids sometimes and they love theirs just as much as you love yours.

Learn how to both pronounce AND spell the names of your neighbors from India.  It may not sound "American", but that's o.k., you can do it.

Listen when your classmates and coworkers and friends from church with brown skin say you don't have any idea what it's like to be black in America. Because you don't. And I don't. But we can both learn a little bit more every day.

I'm going to be honest...if we do this right...if we do this well, it's gonna get real awkward. You might say something ignorant and feel dumb. You might mispronounce a holiday or misunderstand a comment. You might ramble like I do.

I'm still feeling stupid about the rant I went on about the treatment of the history of enslaved people at Mount Vernon---to African-American friends of Jay's I had never met before. (Uh, if you guys read this...sorry, y'all. My mouth works faster than my brain sometimes. Hope it wasn't weird.)

We're going to have to get over the strangeness and love each other anyway. And listen. And learn. And be generally uncomfortable. It won't kill us, but it might just save us.

I, like a lot of people who like both music with great beats and Revolutionary history (I'm assuming there's more than just me), have been singing the songs from the Broadway musical Hamilton. It's amazing and you should listen to it right after this if you haven't already. There's one song with the refrain, "when are these colonies gonna rise up?" It's about actual, violent rebellion, but the story of Hamilton is also about rising beyond the violence to get to something better. One of Lin-Manuel Miranda's lines (as Alexander Hamilton) is "for the first time I'm thinkin' past tomorrow." It's about achieving freedom and equality and hope and opportunity without burning the house to the ground in the process. It's about change for the present in hope for the future.

Conflict in America is not new. When this many different groups of people live together it will never be "over," merely always evolving. But this IS America--to rise up, rise on, rise through. To forge better and truer, stronger and braver not in spite of, but because of our differences.

So sing along everybody, "when are these colonies gonna rise UP, rise UP?" We can do it together.