Writing the First Chapter

The assignment: to write the first chapter of The Great Connecticut Caper, a serialized storybook that would be created by twelve different writers and twelve different illustrators living in Connecticut.

The target audience: children in grades four through seven.

The premise: Gillette Castle is going missing!

The challenge: to create an engaging, fast-paced opening chapter that would introduce sympathetic characters and lay out some basic plot elements. And to do it in under 650 words.

The process: The first step was research. We made a family trip to Gillette Castle in East Haddam where we learned about William Gillette, the eccentric actor who brought Sherlock Holmes to life on the stage and who designed his twenty-four room mansion to resemble the ruin of a medieval castle. We toured the home, looking at hidden passageways and the surveillance system based on strategically placed mirrors, and we wandered the grounds, admiring his personal railroad track as well as his woods and views of the Connecticut River.

But we weren’t done yet. On another weekend, we took a ride on the Essex Steam Train and the Becky Thatcher Riverboat, learning about the Connecticut River, getting a different vantage point of Gillette Castle from the water, and discovering more about William Gillette.

As a writer, I often start projects with research. And as a parent, I often take my kids along. But this assignment was different. I am primarily a writer of books for adults, and this project was writing for children. Luckily, I had my own kids to consult.

So after the research stage, I had a long brainstorming session with my fourth grader (with the first grader listening in and offering occasional advice). We discussed what makes a good story and interesting characters. We talked about mystery books for children. We tossed around ideas for the story and possible character names. The fourth grader taught me how to make a character map, and she created several for possible characters. The first grader made one as well.

We agreed early on that the protagonists should be children, and that there should be two of them—a boy and a girl. (We discussed Ron Roy’s and Mary Pope Osborne’s books as examples.) The names and character traits of the boy and girl kept changing, but we finally settled on Thomas and Li-Ming. And during a long walk through our neighborhood, the fourth grader and I discussed different possible openings. Should the protagonists be touring the castle? Should they be on a riverboat cruise? What other characters should be introduced? What should happen at the end of the chapter?

There would be a cliffhanger, we decided, so readers would want to tune in for the following installment. And we needed to create openings for other writers to build the story—characters who could be further developed, situations that could be interpreted in more than one way.

Finally, once we had hashed out everything, I wrote the chapter. The first draft came in at over 900 words. So then I cut, and I cut some more. And finally, when the chapter was just under 650 words, I read it to my kids. They loved it. But they also had a few suggestions. I revised. I read it again.

It was a process of learning together. I shared what I knew about storytelling with my kids, and they shared what they knew with me.

The outcome: See for yourself here where the first chapter was posted on January 4. And please check back every two weeks as more chapters go live. I am looking forward to seeing where the story goes from here. And so are my kids.

We Turned Off the TV, for Good

In a recent post titled “We Turned Off the TV,” Allison Hart writes about the amount of television that her children used to watch in the mornings and what happened after she decided to eliminate it. Just two weeks into the new regimen, she reports, “I can't tell you how much of a difference it's made.” I applaud Hart for the change that she’s made for her family. And if two weeks without television can make such a difference, what effect might years without a television have on young children?

I can tell you what I know, based on my own experience. My children, ages nine and six, have lived since birth in a house without a television.

“So what do your children do?” people ask. Many other parents can’t imagine how we fill the vast chasms of time that seem to stretch endlessly from waking (sometime around 6 a.m.) to school (the bus comes after 8 a.m.). What do the children do on weekend mornings without cartoons to keep them occupied? What do they do in the evenings in that extra time between dinner and bed?

The short answer: they do a lot.

Here are some of the things I’ve found them doing in the morning: reading, writing, drawing, playing with Legos, playing with stuffed animals, watching the fish swim in the tank, solving math problems, cooking, building marble runs, putting together snap circuits, playing with paper dolls, dancing, devising a comedy routine, listening to an audiobook, taking photographs, telling jokes, cutting and gluing paper, making a doll house out of recyclables, making cookies with Play-Doh, nailing together pieces of wood, stringing beads, pressing leaves, and . . . talking.

And not ever having had access to a television, they don’t miss it. Seemingly not one bit.

That’s not to say we’re completely against technology, or that we’re purists when it comes to TV. Of course the kids have seen TV—when they visit their grandparents or when we stay in a hotel, for example. And they are occasionally allowed to watch videos on a small portable DVD player. But for the most part, our lives are TV-free. And though we have computers in the house, the kids rarely use them—usually only when required to for school. And they don’t have access to other devices with screens either (no smartphones, iPads, or video games).

But before I wax poetic about how idyllic our lives are without television, I should add one disclaimer: My husband and I had decided we were better off without TV years before we had our first child. So not having a television was not so much a conscious parenting decision as it was an extension of what we were already doing. And what seemed natural to us became natural to the kids. Only in the last few years have some of the effects of our TV-free life become apparent to us.

If all of this sounds like bragging, I apologize. My family is not perfect, and I could easily make a list of our faults. On the other hand, since I believe that not having a television has had a remarkably positive influence on our lives, here I’m going to focus on the good qualities in my children that I believe can be attributed, in part, to their lack of TV exposure.

So what are the benefits of raising TV-free kids? I’ve come up with a list of seven broad areas.

1. Behavior

My kids are well behaved. All their lives, I have been getting compliments about their behavior—from teachers, from flight attendants, from strangers in restaurants, from other parents. They’ve never had public meltdowns of any sort (and very few private tantrums either). They’re “easy” kids—they entertain themselves, they become engrossed in tasks for long stretches of time, and they are generally happy and good natured. Yes, they complain from time to time, they get whiney or obstinate, but for the most part, they’re fantastic kids. They listen to us. Almost always.

How is this related to television? Kids mimic what they see. As Hart notes, “my kids were watching obnoxious TV shows and were acting obnoxious accordingly.” Studies have linked high rates of television viewing with antisocial, aggressive, and even criminal behavior. And even if the content is geared toward young audiences and seems harmless, ask yourself if you want your child’s behavior and values influenced by the shows they’re watching. Personally, I don’t want a little Hannah Montana on my hands.

2. Concentration

My kids have long attention spans. When my son started preschool, his teachers marveled at his ability to sit still and focus on a task. He would still be sitting at the table, drawing or working on an assigned activity an hour later when all of his classmates had become distracted and wandered away. My daughter can read a book for hours at a time—for even longer than I can sit still reading! She’s read 300-page books from cover to cover without hardly moving. In short, my kids can concentrate on a single task for a long time. They don’t get distracted.

Researchers have been telling us for years that television (along with video games, texting, and other technologies) erode children’s attention spans. Watching a television show does not require much mental effort or complex thought; it is largely a passive activity. And the constantly shifting images are not conducive to concentration; in fact, some researchers have suggested that exposure to television and video games may contribute to ADD/ADHD. So why offer my kids a frenetic, fast-paced cartoon—possibly with frequent commercial breaks, making the experience even more disjointed—when I can offer them a book?

3. Academics

Probably not a day has gone by in my daughter’s life that has not had a book in it. She’s been read to or has read on her own every day for nine and a half years since the day she came home from the hospital. She has been exposed to thousands of books. Think of all the hours that the average fourth grader spends looking at screens (television, computer, etc.). Now imagine what would happen if that fourth grader had instead spent all those hours reading books. That’s the reality my daughter has lived.

And it shows. She excels academically. Her vocabulary is extensive—better than that of many adults. One of her teachers calls her a “walking dictionary.” She performs well above grade level in virtually every subject. She has been deemed “gifted” in math as well and receives individualized enrichment, allowing her to advance several years beyond her grade level. I could go on and on, but you might ask—how can you attribute all of this to the lack of a television?

Of course I can’t. It would be folly to say this is all due to our TV-free lives. In the endless permutations of the nature versus nurture debate, it’s impossible to isolate any single factor. If my daughter had spent hours in front of a television screen every day of her life, she would probably still be smart. On the other hand, she would unlikely have her stunning knowledge of Greek mythology or her extensive arsenal of Shakespearean insults.

4. Materialism

My kids are not materialistic. Or at least they’re a lot less materialistic than their peers. When we go shopping, they don’t ask for things. Admittedly, I go shopping as infrequently as possible, but they do end up at the grocery store with me every couple of weeks. During our last trip my son asked if we were getting raspberries. I told him no, the price was too high—and that was the end of it. Last Christmas, my daughter asked Santa for a ball of yarn. Yes, just one. That was the extent of her Christmas list. She hates shopping even more than I do and has no interest in clothes, especially the clothes that some other girls her age seem to obsess over. My son has a weakness for Legos, art supplies, and all things Egyptian. He is a little more materialistic than his sister, but his wants are minor compared to some kids, and the requests are few and far between.

How is TV involved? TV makes you want things—especially the programming that is interrupted every few minutes with advertising. The average American child sees somewhere around 20,000 commercials per year. This is an astounding number! The cumulative effect of being told 20,000 times that you should buy something—toys, articles of clothing, food products, video games, digital devices—has to be monumental, especially for an audience of children who have not yet learned to distinguish information from persuasion. Viewing all of these ads not only makes children believe that their lives will not be happy or complete without certain products, but it also affects their behavior, causing them to nag their parents to purchase the products. Researchers have dubbed this the “Nag Factor,” defined as “the tendency of children, who are bombarded with marketers’ messages, to unrelentingly request advertised items,” and advertisers design commercials to specifically encourage this behavior in children.

That’s why my kids don’t ask for much—they aren’t being told, 55 times a day, 385 times a week, 1,667 times a month, that they want stuff.

5. Gender Stereotypes

If you want a girl to believe that she should play with dolls and fluffy stuffed animals, that her favorite color should be pink, that she’s likely not that great at math or science, that she should like clothes and cosmetics, that she should behave like a drama queen, then turn on the television. If you want a boy to believe that he should play with trucks and machines, that he should be macho and tough, that he should hide his emotions, that he should like violent video games, that he’s better than girls, then turn on the television.

Otherwise, just leave it off.

While some children’s shows have made great leaps in portraying gender equality, many are still lagging sadly behind, and what’s worse—much of the advertising, especially for toys, targets boys or girls exclusively, maintaining the divide between the genders and creating fixed notions in children’s minds about what it means to be male and female.

My son has taken ballet lessons and art lessons. My daughter loves science and chess. We want our kids to explore their interests wherever they may lie, to reach their potential, to be fully human—and that means not being pushed into narrow spheres by the outdated, rigid gender roles that sadly, are still perpetuated in so much of the media.

6. Nonconformity

My daughter is an individual, someone who is comfortable in her own skin. She plays the tuba because it is “awesome”—never mind that she’s the only one in fourth grade who picked that particular instrument. The height of fashion, for her, is a navy blue T-shirt that has a somewhat obscure math pun on the front, a faded pair of tan shorts, mismatched brightly colored knee socks, and worn-out sneakers. She loves mythology and Shakespeare, puns and logic puzzles. She’s proud of the fact that she’s the only one in her class who doesn’t have a TV. It makes her even more different. And being different, she will tell you, is awesome.

And it’s not having a TV all of these years that has enabled her to be different—without exposure to television, she’s never felt a need to conform to the stereotypes perpetuated by popular programs and advertising.

My kids have never said, “I have to do XYZ because Jane is doing it.” Or, “I need to have XYZ because all the kids have them.” Or, “But Tom’s parents let him do XYZ.” Or, “But all the kids are watching XYZ, so I have to.” Or anything along those lines.

7. Finding Their Passion

If your kids don’t watch TV, they spend a lot of time doing other things. A lot of other things. And as they do those other things, they just might find something that they love.

My son is an artist. He’s only six, so it’s hard to tell if he’s going to stay with it, but for now, art is his passion. He draws, he paints, and he sculpts. His art teachers have commented that he has talent. And he can sit still working on a piece of art for an astonishing amount of time. He finishes his pieces with painstaking attention to detail and care.

Maybe if he watched TV he’d still be an artist. But we might not know it yet. And he wouldn’t have had all of those many hours to sit in silence with a pencil and a piece of paper. Just the pencil, the paper, and him.

Watching television would have made him more like other kids. Not watching television has allowed him to be himself.

***

But it’s hard to give up television, you might argue. It’s deprivation, torture, a punishment too severe for the adults in the household. Remember, you don’t have to go cold turkey, chucking your flat screen out on the curb. Give up TV in the mornings, as Hart did. Or evenings. Or limit it to weekends only. Or to one carefully selected film per week. Make sure the TV isn’t on as background noise. Be selective and thoughtful about when you turn it on. And pick programming that is ad-free and that emulates the behavior and values that are in keeping with your own. Your kids will benefit. Really, they will. Even with just a small change.

We are not really radicals. Since we had already been TV-free for five years when our daughter was born, we never felt deprived. I can understand, though, that many parents might feel inconvenienced giving up TV. But having children is not a matter of convenience. It’s also not convenient to be up all night with a fussy baby or to change diapers or to read a dozen storybooks before the sun even comes up. In fact, I’ve discovered that most of the things worth doing in life are not especially convenient or easy. It’s a matter of what we choose, where our priorities lie. If it’s more important that the children be quiet and occupied in front of a TV so that you can sleep in or stare at your own screen to check email or Facebook, then you have made a choice. Turning off the television is another choice. It’s not that hard. And it’s important. Because our choices have repercussions that extend far beyond the here and now.

Treasure Hunt

It’s the last day of school, and the treasure hunt is ready.

The first year, there were just a dozen clues. The second, we were up to twenty-five. Last year, thirty-four. And this year, they’ve requested fifty clues. Hard ones, they told me. They want clues that will send them looking in the dictionary or searching for abbreviations on the periodic table, clues that will test their knowledge of the Greek pantheon and Harry Potter lore, clues that contain algebraic equations and puns, scientific names for plants and animals and words in foreign languages.

I will hand them their first clue as they get off the bus, and for the next couple of hours, they will run all over our property—upstairs, downstairs, basement, front yard, backyard, garage, shed—as they solve the riddles I stayed up way too late writing for them. They will consult books. There will be words they may not know—ornithology, velocipede, codex, antiquated, subterranean, textiles, cathode, pate, doppelganger, supine—that will require a dictionary. There will be inside jokes. (And there will be some bathroom humor for the six-year-old.)

And there will be a few small prizes along the way, with a larger prize at the end, but that’s not the point. They don’t even remember what last year’s prize was—but they learned nearly every clue by heart. After the hunt is over, they will carefully redistribute all the clues to have the hunt again—and again. They will soon be chatting about velocipedes and doppelgangers.

They still have last year’s clues, and the ones from the year before. They still hide them for one another to find. And they make their own treasure hunts for one another, hiding scraps of paper all over the house with their own riddles. I find them occasionally, in the backs of drawers, between the pages of books, in coat pockets. They are always writing these little notes to lead one another on to the next good and surprising thing.

Their bus will come in an hour. I have the first clue in my pocket, ready to go. I can’t wait.

Xylotheque

When the box of books finally arrives, when I lift the top one out and hold it up like a newborn, feel its weight in my hands, trace the length of its spine, riffle its pages, marvel at the number of words that I have somehow put down on paper, it is all a little like giving birth, like seeing for the first time the face of the child that I felt kicking within me for so long, like touching the infant’s skin, holding the weight of that new being, marveling that somehow, I created this person. And it is also like a reunion, to finally meet this being I have thought of for so long. There is a keen feeling of recognition. Oh, I have known you all along. Oh, there you are at last, and you are just as I expected. Babies and books—both erupting suddenly into the world out of their long, hushed crafting. Babies and books—now I have two of each.

Christmas List

The eight-year-old goes to see Santa. After some small talk, he asks her what she wants for Christmas. She replies, “A ball of yarn.” He asks what for, and she explains that she is learning how to make yarn bracelets. He asks her what else she wants, and she replies, “Nothing. Just a ball of yarn. That’s all I want.” Santa presses her, insisting there must be something else. She maintains that there is nothing else. Santa presses on. Does she like dolls or video games? Clothes? Stuffed animals? “Just a ball of yarn,” the eight-year-old concludes firmly.

I am watching this exchange, and I am tempted to chastise Santa. Instead of suggesting there is something wrong with a child that wants only a ball of yarn for Christmas, why not praise her for knowing her mind and for not being greedy? A ball of yarn is enough for her. How many of us can be content with so little?

The line is long, and publicly chastising Santa seems a questionable approach to take. So I bite my tongue. As the eight-year-old comes back over to me, her five-year-old brother approaches Santa and begins the small talk.

“Am I supposed to want more than a ball of yarn?” the eight-year-old asks, clearly exasperated.

“No,” I tell her. “That’s perfectly fine.”

“I mean, I like to give presents more than I like to receive presents,” she explains.

The five-year-old is laying out his list to Santa. It has three items. 1. A Lego set. 2. A bow and arrow. 3. An Egyptian mummy. Santa seems more pleased with this list, though he is not sure he can fulfill the mummy request. “Well, an Egyptian mummy kit,” the five-year-old clarifies. “I guess the mummy doesn’t have to be real.”

Later, the visit to Santa over, the five-year-old says, “I don’t think my Christmas list is long enough.”

“Why do you think that?” I ask.

“Because all the kids at school have like a hundred things on their lists, and I have only three.”

The eight-year-old chimes in. “You don’t have to be like all the kids at school,” she says. “Three things is enough. It’s plenty. Besides, if you had a hundred things on your list, you’d never get them all anyway. And you don’t even want that much stuff. Trust me.”

I am certainly biased, but I’ll say it anyway: she is the wisest eight-year-old I have ever known. Instead of a Christmas list, she wrote this letter.

Photo/Text 7: Offerings

They have brought me acorns, quinces, rose petals, catalpa pods, seashells, beads, bookmarks, broken coconut shells, folded notes the size of teeth, bluets pulled up by the roots, paper hearts, sheets of birch bark, leaves from many trees, fistfuls of dandelions, green tomatoes, chestnuts, plastic bags bursting with pine needles, branches with and without foliage, twigs, samaras, drawings, clay sculptures, sharpened pencils, unsharpened pencils, pumpkin stems, broken pens, the springs from pens, dead batteries, paintings, blocks, tiny wheels from lost cars, erasers, buttons, chalk, nailed together planks of wood, puzzle pieces, milkweed pods, hickory nuts, robin’s eggs, feathers, liquidambar seed pods, rocks, pieces of asphalt, uprooted seedlings, dead June bugs, living ladybugs, butterfly wings, speckled eggshell fragments, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, sticky candies, too-small paper crowns, snail shells, ants, paperclips, screws, washers, lengths of twine, ribbons, pen caps, twist ties, macaroni jewelry, cattails, and just last week, three crabapples. “Is it OK,” I asked them, “if I just photograph the apples, and then we’ll leave them here for the birds? By photographing them, it’s like I’m keeping them forever.” Uncertain, they acquiesced, but as we walked away, they cast regretful looks back at their offerings.

Ginkgo biloba

For three years, I’ve been going on tree tours alone, and my daughter has been asking to go. Finally, this past weekend, I took her on her first tree tour at the University of Connecticut campus in Storrs. Except for one other eight-year-old, the attendees were all adults—many older than me. A number were devotees of Ed Richardson, the grand master of trees in Connecticut. (I’ve written about him previously here and here.) But this isn’t about Richardson or the trees that he talked about; this is about my daughter looking at trees.

At each tree that the group stopped at, my daughter would listen for a minute or two to Richardson’s wavering voice, but then some other tree nearby would catch her attention, and she would wander off, armed with her camera. (For the record, she took 102 photos during the two-hour tour, and I took 89.)

 

UConn’s arborist, John Kehoe, was on the tour as well, and my daughter asked him about seeing a ginkgo tree. Serendipitously, we were at that moment standing about thirty feet away from a blazing yellow gingko. Kehoe pointed at the tree and told her to go get a leaf. She came back with one, beaming. Into her pocket it went—along with an assortment of other leaves, acorns, and cones. Her pockets swelled with treasures; her camera filled with photos.

Later, Kehoe pointed out another ginkgo—this one completely green. She collected another leaf sample and asked the tree expert why one tree was all yellow, the other all green. I didn’t hear Kehoe’s answer, but later she explained to me that it was because the green tree was older, more established, with a more extensive root system. (Yes, she said established and extensive. She pays attention.)

She also asked where the biggest ginkgo in Connecticut is, and Kehoe told her it is in Hartford. Later, I asked her why she liked ginkgo trees. “Because there are no other trees like them alive today,” she told me. “They’re dinosaur trees.”

Later still, apropos of nothing, she said, “You know that champion ginkgo tree in Hartford? I want to go see it.”

Photo/Text 6: Outdoors

Take them outdoors. Lead them up mountains. Let them chill their flesh in icy lakes. Tell them the names of trees and flowers. Show them the ever-shifting dome of sky. Put rocks older than multi-cellular life into their hands. Look for birds and marmots, bees and moose scat. Allow them to be drenched in sudden cloudbursts. Take them to snowfields and waterfalls. Let them climb high into trees. Push them to feel the competence and limits of their bodies. Show them a maimed butterfly in its final death shudder. Read with them the Braille of tree bark and moss. Search the sky for signs of change, for new colors and clouds, for turns in the weather. Listen with them to the wind and night noises. Study the stars. Remind them that they too are animals. Place them not at the center of the frame. Help them feel their smallness in the universe. Guide them towards the promise of themselves, towards what they may become. Show them how to feel in their brains and in their bones these places that are all we have.

Photo/Text 5: Hands

“I want to marry him,” she said when she was five and he was two, and she was indignant when a six-year-old neighbor girl declared that siblings marrying was not only against the rules but also disgusting. Later, when she had to part with him to go to kindergarten, at the end of the day she would run to him from the school bus, grabbing his hands, crying, “All day at school I’ve been yearning to hold your sweet baby boy hand that’s soft as silk and rose petals!” And now he is five, and his big sister, who can read books without pictures, who can braid and multiply, still leads him everywhere by the hand. He says to her, “I want to marry you. Is that OK?” And she replies with her indulgent smile, evasive: “Well, we can live together always. How about that, sweetie?” Yet he protests: “I want to marry you,” the word carrying some special meaning in his five-year-old heart, and so she marches him up and down the sidewalk in front of our house, telling him something in a low voice, explaining the ways of the world, never letting go of his hand.

Photo/Text 4: Skin

When he sees the rim of the blue whale rising from the Pacific like a landmass, most of it hidden iceberg-like below, when he learns that its heart weighs 1,200 pounds and beats only six times a minute, that a human could swim through its aorta, and after the whale goes down, when he looks long at its footprint on water, the kiss of its full body on the surface, I suddenly think of the snakeskin found by his sister years ago on the steppe of western Nebraska under a harvest moon, the dermis still wet and pliable from a recent molt, and how, a trimester away from birth, he shuddered within me, as if in anticipation of one day being gifted this treasure so that he could gently hold the skin of another beast close to his own, asking if the snake that shed it six years before was still alive, and if so, where it was and what it was doing—and so, I hope he continues to remember the whale whose presence is like the snake’s: a being he almost knew, almost touched, a being whose vestige of skin or hidden heart have imprinted on his mind, a being to wonder about always.

Photo/Text 3: Medusa Reading

A friend made the hat and gave it to her along with a book of Greek mythology before she could even read—a friend who perhaps recognized something in her that I could not see, unleashing a love of myth so powerful that she now lives in a world peopled—godded?—with the likes of Zeus, Aphrodite, Hestia, Hera, Ares, Icarus, Hermes, Artemis. She even dreams of gods, mumbling, when awakened, of Arachne’s boastfulness or the Caledonian boar hunt. For half her life she has been Medusa, the terrible snake-haired gorgon with the power to turn those who dare gaze upon her to stone. She wears the hat to school, where the boys sometimes hiss at her, but she doesn’t care because snakes for hair make her powerful, and more than this, knowing the Greek gods and their stories—the knowledge of these other worlds—makes her powerful. She tells her classmates of Hades kidnapping Persephone, of Odysseus’s encounter with Circe, of the tormented Althaea who must throw the enchanted log into the fire to end her son’s life. “You be Athena,” she instructs her classmates. “And you be Poseidon. You be Hephaestus. You be Hades. And I’ll be Medusa.”

Photo/Text 2: Trucks

They strike me as relics, like the Pripyat bumper cars, though it’s been only a month, maybe two, since he left them parked in the sandbox, but so quickly the marks of our presence are buried—pine needles fall, maples sprout near red tires—and though this is probably not the last time he has left them—probably he will return yet, to turn sand, to haul another load—there will nonetheless be a last time. The trucks will be abandoned, and he will be fully grown, a man, a person who does not concern himself with plastic toys. But now, when he sees that I have taken an interest, he comes to explain that he baked a cake with a candle in it for me in the truck bed and it’s been waiting here all this time. I thank him; I tell him I like his trucks. Pleased, he wants to know why I am taking pictures. Because, I explain, I want to remember what his trucks looked like the last time he played with them. But this is not the last time, he protests. I know, I tell him. But I am marking it now anyway, so I don’t miss the last time.

Photo/Text 1: Legs

When I find them, their legs dangling through the slats of her bunk bed, lined up to dip their toes into the bedroom air, it’s as though I had a plan for all of it: a quarter of a century ago traipsing all over Southern California malls with my grandmother, seeking the dolls whose scarcity was nearly inciting riots, looking for particular hair and eye and nose combinations, sewing the dolls elaborate costumes, displaying them like fine china on shelves, and later, after my fetish had faded, packing them carefully away in boxes, and moving them a dozen times in four different states, so that I could discover them again in a basement in Connecticut and give them to my daughter, who would haul them into her bed, undress them, arrange them. And now, when I encounter them here, I can see clearly why I have kept them, why I acquired them in the first place: simply to delight in finding them in a girl’s bright yellow-walled room. “Mom, their diapers are a bit saggy,” my daughter says, apologetically, as though this fact is a reflection on her mothering abilities. “That,” I tell her, “is bound to happen after twenty-seven years.”

Oakling

A ten-minute walk from our house, on the edge of a college parking lot, grows one of the two largest white oaks in Connecticut. A stately, burled giant, it is likely around three hundred years old. I often take the children to visit the tree.

 

I write more about this tree in a recent essay in Adventum. I write about how the tree has become like a friend to us, one that we visit regularly, in every season. I write about how our first fall in Connecticut, nearly three years ago, we picked up one of the oak’s plentiful acorns and planted it in a pot at home. The acorn sprouted, and the following summer—two years ago—we planted the seedling in our yard.

This is the continuation of that story. Our oakling, progeny of a mighty tree, is flourishing. Its first year, the tree had six leaves. This year, it has thirty-four. Oaks are notoriously slow growers, and none of us will be here to witness the tree reach its full mature splendor—if, indeed, it ever does. But this is one of the joys of life we should teach our children—to hope for and anticipate a future that is not for us, but for others.

The Gift of Time

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
—Simone Weil

He wakes up at 5:30 in the morning to build with Legos or answer questions about time travel. He coaches soccer and creates nearly perfect ballet buns. He helps with the construction of cardboard robots and works through complex chess exercises. This past school year, he helped to organize a STEM (science-technology-engineering-math) club at the elementary school. He took four afternoons off from work to help students build bridges out of drinking draws. Just this past week he took another three afternoons to design and build stone walls—and then to knock them down—with the three second grade classes. While he certainly does a great deal to provide material things for our children, what they appreciate most is their father’s attention, his daily gift of time.

This evening, my children made cards and wrapped gifts and arranged the schedule for the Father’s Day festivities tomorrow morning. Before bed, they ran their ideas by me—cook dad a special breakfast, then give him his gifts to unwrap. “And then at the end of it all,” my daughter said, “We’re going to say, ‘Your best present is impossible to wrap because that present is love.’”

 

Signs of Spring

In A Sense of Wonder, Rachel Carson writes about exploring the natural world with her young nephew:

We have let Roger share our enjoyment of things people ordinarily deny children because they are inconvenient, interfering with bedtime, or involving wet clothing that has to be changed or mud that has to be cleaned off the rug. We have let him join us in the dark living room before the big picture window to watch the full moon riding lower and lower toward the far shore of the bay, setting all the water ablaze with silver flames and finding a thousand diamonds in the rocks on the shore as the light strikes the flakes of mica embedded in them. I think we have felt that the memory of such a scene, photographed year after year by his child’s mind, would mean more to him in manhood than the sleep he was losing. He told me it would, in his own way, when we had a full moon the night after his arrival last summer. He sat quietly on my lap for some time, watching the moon and the water and all the night sky, and then he whispered, “I’m glad we came.”

For the past couple of weeks, as I have taken my children on small excursions around town to enjoy the warm weather, I have been thinking about the importance of exposing them, in every season, to the natural world. I have been thinking about the importance of returning, year after year, to see the blooming magnolia tree on our street, to look at the greening trees at Elizabeth Park, to search for wildflowers in the woods at Westmoor Park. Like Carson, I believe that such scenes, photographed year after year by my children’s minds, will mean more to them in adulthood than many other things I could give them.

One summer evening when my daughter was three, a vibrant watercolor rainbow spread across the sky right before sunset. I had just put my daughter to bed, but without hesitation I rushed into the house, pulled her from her bed, and carried her outside in her pajamas to see the rainbow. She still remembers being held in her mother’s arms while looking at a rainbow. She will likely remember it for the rest of her life. What better gift could I leave her with? It’s worth it.

And now, my son notices the starbusts of the forsythias glowing in yards across town, the coral blossoms of the Japanese flowering quince in our front yard. “Mom, I just found another sign of spring,” he tells me, again and again, pointing at his strawberry plants awakening from winter dormancy, at the dandelions studding our lawn. “Everywhere I look, I see signs of spring.”

Touching Trees

When I held my ten-month-old daughter up to a pin oak and she pressed her hand up to its bark, a look of guilty pleasure spread across her face. Furtively she felt out the tree’s corrugations, casting looks of disbelief my way, as though it didn't seem possible that I was allowing her this textured, coarse pleasure, as though placing the softness of her baby skin against such ridges and roughness must be prohibited. The wonder of it was nearly unbearable. She pulled her hand away and her gaze followed the trunk of the tree high up into the branches. “Bark,” I told her. “Tree.”

Since then, my children have touched trees of all kinds—the white scales of sycamore, the smooth bark of beech that gathers up in wrinkles like elephant skin, the sticky places around injuries where sap has run from pines, the wild dishevelment of shagbark hickory, the prehistoric spines of the floss silk tree with its armored dinosaur hide, the gold leaf shimmer of stewartia, the black eyes flashing on white birch bark, the pliable striations of cork, the spongy, ruddy give of redwood bark, the gnarled rind of the three-hundred-year-old white oak near our house, and the smooth-stemmed pencil trunk of its offspring that now grows in our backyard—their fingers exploring scars, burls, lichens, gaps, wounds.

More than seven years after she touched her first tree, on the eve of her eighth birthday, my daughter is still touching trees. May she touch them always.

Birth Stories

In early 2005, I sat in a classroom scribbling notes while the members of my fiction workshop discussed the novel excerpt I had handed out to them the previous week. In the opening scene, a young woman is fleeing across the ravaged Russian countryside during World War II. As members of the class discussed my work, I jotted down numerous comments about my depiction of the war, my use of language, my knowledge of Russian culture. Then a young man cleared his throat and started to speak nervously.

“Umm, this scene where she gives birth?” he said. “It just didn’t seem real to me. It seemed too easy. I mean, obviously I’m not speaking from firsthand experience, but I think giving birth is a lot harder and takes a lot longer. I just found that section hard to believe.”

Although I was not supposed to speak while my work was under discussion, I couldn’t help myself.

“I’ll know about that soon enough,” I said. “Then I’ll be able to revise it.”

The students in the class chuckled. I was hugely pregnant, about two weeks away from giving birth to my first child.

No doubt the members of the class—none of whom, as far as I knew, had ever given birth—believed that I had been inspired by my own pregnancy to write about a pregnant protagonist. In fact, in my novel I had written two separate birth scenes, involving two different protagonists, before I ever became pregnant. I had always recognized the importance of birth stories, even before having one of my own to tell.

Each birth story is unique. All mothers have them, a different narrative for each of their children. We begin by rehearsing the story well before it even happens. We take birth classes to learn the basic plot, the possible twists and complications. We write detailed birth plans, outlining just how we want the story to go. We imagine the birth, again and again. We rehearse and rewrite. It is supremely important, because if each life has a story, that story begins with birth. That is why, I think, many mothers are compelled to tell the stories of their children’s births. Those stories belong to us, but they also belong to our children. And we mothers are the keepers of those stories for our children. It is up to us to tell them where and how they began, to weave for them the narratives of their origins, their earliest years. Life is about storytelling, and we want our stories—and our children’s stories—to be true and good.

My own birth stories are not exceptional or amazing, except that they happened to me. And because while laboring we are in a place beyond words, we can never adequately tell our stories. Giving birth is a cohesive experience, yet we are left with disjointed, fragmented impressions. I can give my children only bits and pieces. When my daughter asks, I will be able to offer her only the sparse, bright gems of experience that are still with me, that I can put into words: The erratic contractions we timed all night, my husband working diligently with a stopwatch and notebook. The questioning: Is it real? Is it time? The drive to the hospital, the bright, crisp world of late winter. The nurses who didn’t believe my labor was real because I was withdrawn and silent, calm as in a trance, awaiting the next wave of pain. Elvis on the muted hospital TV, singing with a lei around his neck. The glint of sun on cars in the parking lot below. The unexpected, rapid delivery. The alarmed nurse telling me not to push, that she still had to call the midwife on the phone. The midwife rushing in just in time to catch the baby. The robust, squalling baby girl, mad at the sudden shock of the world.

I knew none of this when I first wrote that scene in my novel. So yes, after giving birth, I know more. I can write about it firsthand. But in another way, I am no closer to telling my character’s story. It is her birth story, not my own. Giving birth myself is not enough. It is not a credential for writing fiction. To tell my character’s story, I have to enter her world, in a sense become her. I have to write the birth story that is uniquely hers.

And yet, I believe there is truth in the old adage, write what you know. Maybe I can get to her story through my own. All of the characters, all of the stories, that we access as writers of fiction come through the lens of our own experiences. Write what you know. Just as every mother is different, every birth is different. With the coming of the new year, with my son’s fifth birthday approaching, I have been remembering his birth. Write what you know.

This is what I know: My second baby was due December 25. I wanted a fantastic story. Driving through a winter blizzard. A Christmas Eve baby. A completely natural birth. A Christmas baby. He was late. I then hoped for a New Year’s Eve baby. A New Year’s Day baby. He didn’t cooperate. A week late. Ten days late. My wants became simpler. A birth. A baby. Soon.

This is what I know: It is nighttime in winter, and I am in labor, by myself, on the living room sofa beneath the picture window, in a small house in a small windblown town in the Nebraska Panhandle. I am watching the stars, listening to the furnace tick on and off. Outside, crabapple trees rustle quietly. I am still, so that I do not awaken anyone. My husband will need his rest for what lies ahead. There is no sense in both of us staying up all night. I’ve snuck away to be in labor by myself. Between contractions, my thoughts are lucid, calm. I see myself as a participant in a story. I think of the new life story that will unfold out of this quiet winter night.

This is what I know: A contraction pierces my stream of thoughts, a blaze of pain, and then the gradual abating. The story will come. The dawn, the almost-three-year-old daughter I must calmly say my goodbyes to, the potholed road, the patches of snow dotting the yards, the gray winter sky. The small hospital where no other babies are being born that day. Asking to be in the water. No, first the fetal monitoring. No, first the doctor must come. No, I’m too close. No water allowed. There is no time. He he is here, so soon: my howling nine-pound boy, peeing on the doctor first thing.

But for now, I am still here, alone in the night. And this is what I know: I ride the crest of another contraction. The story continues. I think of the ultrasound technician who told me twelve hours ago: you’re not close. The doctor who told me eight hours ago: you’re not close, we need to induce. They do not know. I am close. The induction will never take place. I am close. I wait for my baby to tell me when. He takes his sweet time. I watch the stars. I listen to the trees. I am blessed on this night. The contractions come. I do not count them, I do not time them. I know it is the real deal. I let my story—his story—come to me.

Proximity

I was at work in my office in Massachusetts on Friday, waiting for my students to drop off their final projects, when I checked the news online.  I saw the words, Connecticut school shooting, and my heart seized up for a moment. Both of my children were at school in Connecticut, in different districts. I quickly scanned the article, and seeing the words Newtown and Sandy Hook, I felt only relief. Not me, I thought. Not mine. Before it was known who was dead, or how many, my first reaction was to be grateful for being spared. My state, but not my town. Not my children.

When I was in my early twenties, I worked at several daily newspapers, reporting on crime. Every day, I would make a round of calls to police stations and fire departments, asking if there was any news. And every day, there was news: traffic accidents, burglaries, fires, robberies, assaults, rapes, murders. Every day, the world was rife with crime, with danger. Gradually, I began to see the world in terms of danger, near misses. I could have been on that street when that shooting occurred, or I could have been driving on that overpass when that fatal accident occurred. Every day, I narrowly missed being robbed or murdered. It was just a matter of time. My life became a matter of dodging danger, of not being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I began to believe that somehow, proximity—distance in space, distance in time—could protect me.

In one high profile case, a ten-year-old boy was abducted, and later, he was found murdered. I couldn’t imagine his mother’s suffering. I remember telling myself: At least I don’t have kids. Having children, I realized then, was the worst way of exposing yourself to the world. My brother-in-law once told me that having a child was like watching your own heart walking around outside your body.

Now that I have children, I have multiplied my exposure to danger.  As the news came out of Newtown on Friday, as the full magnitude of the event became clear, I counted the hours until my children would be home safe from school. The superintendent of my daughter’s school district issued an emergency communication promising “increased police presence” at the schools, which, we were assured, was “purely precautionary.” In one online news story, a Newtown resident was quoted as saying that he hoped his neighbor, a Sandy Hook teacher, was not among those who were shot. Like me, he hoped it was someone else, someone he didn’t know.

That evening, my brother-in-law called. “How far away is that school from you?” he asked. “It’s southwest of here, probably forty-five miles,” I told him. “Not that close.” He was asking about proximity. How close are you—in space, in time, in impact—to the horror?

Is it human nature to measure our proximity to events of great magnitude? People older than I often recall exactly where they were when they heard news of JFK’s death, men landing on the moon, Pearl Harbor. My generation has no shortage of momentous events: the Challenger disaster, the Berlin Wall coming down, Columbine, Oklahoma City, Virginia Tech, and, most memorable of all, 9/11.

On 9/11, I was working at a cemetery in Northern Virginia, a little over twenty miles from the Pentagon. My husband and three of my brothers-in-law were all working nearby in Northern Virginia or Washington, DC that morning. Although no one I knew was directly impacted, we did eventually bury one Pentagon victim at the cemetery where I worked. I watched his wife weep during the funeral. That was my proximity.

My students, college freshmen, remember 9/11 through the lens of childhood. On 9/11 they were about the age my daughter is now. Earlier this semester the subject of 9/11 came up in a class. How much were they told? I asked them. What did they know? One of my students said she was told nothing at all about it at school, but another said that her class watched the whole thing unfold on television. “We knew everything,” she told me. “From the very beginning. They didn’t keep anything from us. We were right there watching it all.”

What, if anything, should we tell our children about what happened in Newtown? Many parents here and across the country asked themselves that question over the weekend as they prepared to send their children back to school on Monday.

My own children didn’t yet know. They had been told nothing at school on Friday. We don’t have a television, so there was no chance of them hearing it on the news. I knew it would be best to tell my second grader, since she would likely hear about it somewhere, but I hadn’t figured out what to say. Then on Sunday morning, as she mixed waffle batter while listening to Christmas carols on the radio, the announcer mentioned “the children and the brave teachers we lost in Newton, Connecticut, on Friday.” My daughter looked at me and said, “What happened to the teachers?” I said, “I’ll tell you later.”

I read the articles about what to say to children: that we should give them the most basic information, that we should reassure them that they’re safe, that adults are here to protect them. And yet all of these things that I might say are not completely true. You are not safe. There are other shooters. You are never safe.

It was my husband who told our daughter that someone who had something wrong with his brain shot some people on Friday, that the shooter was gone, that her school was safe. He told her that if she wanted to talk about it, she should talk to her parents or her teacher or the social worker at her school. He asked her if she had any questions. She didn’t.

On Facebook I discovered that I know people who know people who lost a child. I can count my degrees of separation, measure my proximity. And I am just one person away. Just one person stands between me and the anguish of Newtown. An acquaintance knows one of the families. She changed her profile picture to one in which she is hugging a girl who is now dead. They are as close as can be, skin on skin. The dead girl’s mother has posted comments. I see her words on Facebook, and she is almost in a room with me, almost speaking to me. We are not that far apart.

Another Facebook friend who lives in my town and has two young children posted a quote from his daughter’s former kindergarten teacher: “No one’s perfect, but a five-year-old comes pretty darned close.” I think of my son, just shy of five, who doesn’t know about Sandy Hook. And I will not tell him, not now. Because he is still so close to perfection. Because he—and all of our children—deserve to live in a better world, and the only way I can give him even a piece of that world is by shielding him from the real world. In the world I make for him, first graders are not gunned down in their classrooms. In the world I make for him, he does not have to go to school in fear. In the world I make for him, he does not have to measure his proximity to tragedy. I do enough of that for the both of us.

On Monday, I got emails from my daughter’s teacher and school principal. With the crisis team standing by, all went well at school. It was “a routine day.” But that afternoon I made the mistake of turning on the Christmas carols again. During a break, the announcer said, “The first funerals were held today.” I hurried to turn off the radio, but my daughter had already heard.

“Is that related to that thing that happened with the person whose brain didn’t work properly?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I told her. “You’ll probably be hearing about it for awhile.”

“And then what? It will blow over?” Her tone was so flippant that at first I was appalled, but then I realized that she was merely mimicking the way adults talk. She has learned this from us.

“Well,” I finally said. “It won’t blow over for those who were directly affected.”

“Were we directly affected?”

“Well, no,” I told her, desperate to change the subject. “We don’t know anyone in that town.”

And I chose to say nothing more, to make no more of the matter, because being seven years old is not that far from perfect either. Because I can do enough thinking about children being shot for the both of us.

And then there is the proximity of time. Four days after the event, even as we keep burying children, already the headlines are suggesting a hint of normalcy. Already in our yearning to put pain behind us, we begin to turn away from tragedy. And I shield my children from it, fiercely, protecting them in their brief innocence, their perfection. Yet while I keep them out of proximity of fear and tragedy, I remind myself that what happened at Sandy Hook did not happen somewhere near here to someone I don’t know. It happened right here. It happened to all of us.

The Dragons of Fall

When the first glimmerings of fall color light up the trees, I tell my children that the dragons of fall have arrived. First, they spend several nights flying over, stirring the cool air with their massive wings, surveying the trees, seeking out the most tantalizing foliage, usually at the very tips of the highest branches. And then, slowly, they begin their work, gently singeing the select leaves with their fire, turning them red, orange, or yellow, depending on each dragon’s temperament. Wouldn’t their fire burn the trees? the children want to know. Ah, but these are the dragons of fall. Their lungs full of frost, they singe with icy breaths. Every night they come, for weeks, starting the first slow fires of color in the trees. They are the smoldering dragons, the catalyst dragons, the ones that get it all started. And sometimes, if you’re up very early in the morning, you might see pools of fog in hollows and valleys—these are the places where, in the pre-dawn, the big dragons, tired from their night of work, take their baths before winging home, and what you’re seeing is the steam from their recent ablutions. If you’re very quiet, you might hear the far-off creaking of their squeaky clean scales as they head home.

 

During my commute along two-lane roads through rural western Massachusetts, I feast my eyes on color: the fields pebbled over in pumpkins, the roadside stands with their starbursts of mums, wagons piled high with gourds and squash, sugar pumpkins spilling out of bushel baskets, and warty, haggard heirloom varieties piled high in rustic crates. At one quintessential New England church, dazzlingly white against blue sky, orange pumpkins crowd the grass and the front steps, more than a hundred, like a whole congregation flocking to the doors of the church. Every day more leaves change over, and every day I think: today must be it, the most dazzling day of fall, the climax of autumn. And every day, I am astonished anew with more color. This is the time of year when the foliage differentiates itself, the green mass of forest suddenly becoming individual trees, vibrant reds and golds and browns. And in the wild places, the vines that normally blend in so well, secretly, insidiously strangling trees, suddenly have their presence betrayed when their captives redden or yellow in their still-green grip. Sometimes, it’s the choking vine that turns color and is left holding its green prey in a blood red stranglehold.  

 

 

After the big dragons have done their smoldering work, the miniature dragons arrive. Known as the spice dragons, they travel in immense flocks that fill the nighttime sky. Descending on the trees, they send out their little jets of fire—no bigger than the flame on a crème brûlée torch—to color the leaves, continuing the work of the big harbinger dragons, the pioneering ones that come first and leave in their wake the first hues of fall, marking the territory, laying out the palette of colors that the spice dragons fill in, leaf by careful leaf, like a paint-by-number. Why are they called the spice dragons? the children want to know. Each flock is responsible for a single color; the cinnamon dragons turn leaves cinnamon brown, the saffron dragons turn leaves saffron yellow, and so on. Flocks of cumin, vanilla bean, nutmeg, coriander, cayenne, paprika, peppercorn, clove, ginger, and sumac dragons crowd the skies. Each imparts only the color, not the scent, of the spice. But the children swear they can catch a whiff of cinnamon walking under the browning leaves of an oak. What about the leaves that are two different colors, green and red? What kind of dragon did that? Those two-tone leaves are created by the tiniest spice dragons of all, the ones who can make barely a match flame of fire. One such tiny dragon can’t color even a single leaf in a night’s work, so it comes back night after night, sending out its tiny licks of flame until the whole leaf is colored.

 

One night, as I’m putting the children to bed, they demand to know what has become of the moon. I tell them it fell out of the sky so I put it under my bed. How did it fall? The riveting dragons who are responsible for anchoring it in place each night got careless and didn’t put enough rivets in it, and then when the wind blew, it fell out of the sky. Luckily, the nailing dragons who nail the stars into place each night are never so careless, or else we’d have all those sharp stars falling from the sky and walking around barefoot would be hazardous. At least the moon is smooth. Can we go look under your bed to see the moon? Well, it’s pretty dull and lusterless now because it’s early. It won’t really start shining until the middle of the night. The children threaten to peek at it in the middle of the night, but of course they don’t, and the next morning the moon is gone, the space under the bed empty but for a few dust bunnies. All of those moonbeams shooting out from under my bed kept me up all night, I explain, so I returned the moon to the riveting dragons at dawn with an admonishment to use more rivets next time. I told them that I couldn’t keep their moon for them again.  

 

We walk to visit a nearby three-centuries-old white oak. The children pick up the oak leaves that are just beginning to turn to brown leather. Where do the flocks of spice dragons live? They live in the hollows of ancient trees like this one. Oak leaves are good and sturdy for the dragons’ winter attire. Dragons don’t wear clothes! The miniature dragons do. They sew little suits out of oak leaves and spiderwebs. How else are they going to stay warm in the winter months? Are dragons cold-blooded? They’re lukewarm-blooded, with cold lungs and hot hearts. Do the miniature spice dragons grow into big dragons? The lifecycle of a dragon is a long story, best saved for another day. You know the leaves that are yellow and brown, or red and purple and gold? That happens when two or three flocks of spice dragons join and work together on the same leaf. That’s right, I say. That’s exatly right. My daughter peers into the hole in the old oak, declaring that she can see the passageways into two separate chambers, but no dragons.  

 

The children cultivate mums and asters on the front porch. We harvest their pumpkin crop—a mere three beefsteak tomato-sized pumpkins—but we bake them, mash the pulp, and make pumpkin bread, filling the kitchen with the scent of cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, and ginger, the scents of spice dragons. And we dig up the cool fall soil and slip creamy cloves into the ground, our yearly October garlic planting. Eight months from now, in the heat of next summer, we will harvest our fall planting and remember the dragons. 

 

Are there dragons for other times of the year? Oh yes, I tell my children. Every season has its dragons. Just you wait and see.