July 2007

I see my 48th birthday on the horizon, and I begin to take stock again of where I am in my life. The stock I’m taking is not so much about retirement savings, or professional accomplishment (although, I’m human, and there’s an element of that). Rather, it’s kind of a “am I walking the talk” evaluation. Am I putting my money where my mouth is. If I’m not doing that, then life is a lie, really. A story I tell myself.

This year I was baptized. To those who have known me in the past, this is probably an ultra-creepy proposition, and I understand it. To my brothers and sisters, I think it’s off-putting, but our family is so repressed that instead of a discussion, there’s more like the polite smiles followed by a run to the fridge for a beer. I love them so.

But being baptized, for me, was not about wanting to be saved from hell because I don’t believe in hell. My faith in Christ’s divinity was very hard to admit to in these days of fundamentalism and misconceptions galore about his life and its meaning. I kind of felt like, in a public way, to some folks I’d be aligning myself with the likes of George Bush and the late Jerry Falwell. Like getting sober, publicly admitting that faith was a challenge to synchronize my inner and outer lives. An opportunity to get honest, even though it’s kind of embarrassing for this ex-Unitarian and recovering Catholic.

Now, as with getting sober, I’m challenged within the more private space of how I’m actually living my life. Money has come to the surface as a place where I need to look hard and work hard. I waited to have a child because I was too busy being selfish, drinking and divorcing. Later, I needed years to recover before I could take the plunge and plan a family. So, at the age of 43, I finally had a baby, and I just poured everything I could into my love for that child. Unfortunately, that has meant a lot of money that maybe could have been spent differently.

My spending on my son has exceeded levels with which I am comfortable. I will do without basics because he wants a new toy. His room has become a shrine to the wonders of the injection molding industry, and may account, single-handedly, for the uptick in the Chinese economy. I have rationalized this well — I had so many brothers and sisters that we each had only the basics. Mom would buy you an Easter outfit which consisted of shoes, coat, and dress. There was never that cute little barrette for your hair, or the plastic necklace, or the little purse that matched. Just the basics.

So, I’ve reversed the paradigm and eschewed the basics for all the frills. Now, I feel like I have indigestion after a long time of overindulgence. I remember when I felt this years ago while walking around the Short Hills Mall, a chi-chi mall in New Jersey where mothers walk ahead of their kids in strollers, pushed by the au pairs. I felt nauseous, like why was I in this place where so much unneeded junk was being sold within an infrastructure that was consuming resources like mad. It all felt so wrong.

So it is that my spending on my son, which rationalization has made feel right for 5 years, now feels wrong. I fear he has become expecting of materialistic rewards, and now I have a challenge on my hands to re-shape things. I need to re-shape what it means to be a good parent with regards to money. He needs my help, in turn, to re-shape his thinking on the terms “need” and “want.”

When I was a kid, my jaw would have dropped in awe had my Mom offered to buy that little purse. What happens with Blake is that when I say “no,” he throws a fit. Something is very wrong with what I’ve done to have moved his response so to the opposite side of the dial so as to conflate desire with entitlement. In a way, I have achieved everyone’s goal of “not being my mother.” On the other hand, there’s probably somewhere in between the two places that I need to examine.

My mother was highly practical, and fulfilled her 8 kids’ needs in a dutiful way. When I was 10 years old, I had been taking piano lessons for two years, practicing on our old used upright piano that was donated to us by someone at my Dad’s job. But I was getting really good, and my Mom wanted to do something nice for me. So, she told me she was getting a tax refund, and that the check would go to buying me a new piano. I ran out to that mailbox every day. When it came, I asked right away if we could go, and we did, and we bought that piano, and it was like Christmas. I have never, ever forgotten my Mom’s generosity that year.

I would like break the paradigm here and be more like my Mom. So, I will document here where I fall short, and where I triumph. Straddling that line between need and want is not easy for me, and at this point, probably distorted for Blake. I so want him to experience the joy of the “special,” and I think in a way I’ve removed that from his life. So, I’m going to work to get it back. Tantrums await, no doubt, but it’s important that I do this. My narrative about my childhood is not so important as the reality of my son’s happiness.

Let’s hope I can pull it off.

I have seen the future, and it’s so pretty that I’m scared for our children. It’s pretty, perfect, fun, and just the BEST EVER!

I’m talking, of course, of the current run of My Little Pony at the JPJ Arena in Charlottesville. To your kids, it’s just another opportunity to squirm and eventually leave their seats to dance in the aisles because, although they are bored beyond comprehension, you will NOT leave an event that you paid $54 + $8 parking to see. It’s one thing to leave a movie early because your kids can’t sit still. It’s another when you’ve just spent a half of a week’s groceries to sit in a folding chair and have all the colors of the pastel rainbow burned into your retinas like the ESPN logo on a first-generation plasma screen. GOD! SHOW ME A SINGLE SATURATED COLOR! BLACK, IF POSSIBLE! OKAY! I’LL TALK! I PLANTED THE BOMB! NOW, SHOW ME SOMETHING DARK, DEEP, RED IF POSSIBLE, PLEASE!!!!

To deconstruct…

We had not planned to go to the My Little Pony show. As a matter of fact, I wrote it off because it seems like a girl thing, and being that I have a son who has never watched a single My Little Pony episode, I figured we didn’t need to go. But the JPJ Arena does weird things to you. Weird, insidious things. Let me explain.

In New York, the main arena for EVERYTHING was Madison Square Garden. Getting tickets at the Garden for anything was an ordeal. Of course, in the pre-internet days, you could buy them on the phone, but the seats usually were not the best, and the Garden was in a part of town that you didn’t want to, well, “hang out” in. It sat above Penn Station, and the only reason to go to Penn Station was to get the Long Island Railroad, or the subway if you just left Macy’s on the seventh avenue side. Other than that, not a great part of town.

So, if you wanted tickets to a Garden event, you had to really WANT them. I was among those who camped outside with a plastic bracelet to get Elton John tickets. It was an EVENT to go to the Garden, like an ancient ordeal, a right of passage. If you went to the circus, it was because your Dad pulled some strings to get a good seat in the ginormous arena. Then, he cabbed you all around to keep you from the seedier sides of the city (which you eventually became quite familiar with as an young adult while camping outside for Elton John tickets). The Garden meant something eventful.

But, the JPJ Arena is different. It’s right next to Blake’s pre-school, so the kids are all privy to what’s happening there. You can see the loading dock for JPJ from the playground. When the Monster Trucks came this year, the teachers were watching them load the trucks into the building, commenting on how they couldn’t wait to go.

Also, it’s right on Emmet Street. Just next door to the UVA main campus, and just beyond the Harris Teeter. So, you see the JPJ all day throughout your travels. As much a part of your day, and as accessible, as a 7-11.

So, I go to pick up Blake, and he informs me that the Monster Trucks are at the arena. I don’t think that’s right since I monitor the Web for upcoming shows for him all the time. But, to show him, I pull into the parking lot and ask one of the reflective-vest parking guys what’s playing. In a rather sheepish way, the old craggy guy says “My Little Pony? or something?”.

TOO LATE — BLAKE HEARD HIM!! “I want to go!” he says enthusiastically. My stomach drops. I tell him it costs a lot, and I have to check to see if a check cleared at the ATM, which is, of course, unlike NY, easy to get to without even leaving my car. So we go and the money’s there. I’m okay with spending it since I would have taken him either bowling or to a movie, either of which, with some pizza, would not have been much less. So, what the hey? I pull back into the parking lot, purchase a ticket, and off we go. How bad could it be?

Oh. How wrong I was. How very wrong. This show had me thinking of Ronald Reagan and how he de-regulated television programming for kids, essentially allowing for cartoons that would be long commercials for products. In the past, that kind of craven product tie-in would have been disallowed by the FCC. But, since the 1980s, thanks to what some hail as our greatest president, we have ready access to some of the most content-free content for our kids. I don’t really let Blake watch this stuff since it’s one long commercial, peppered with commercials. We stick with PBS and Disney (which is in its way one long commercial, but for other Disney programs which are okay for the most part).

The writing in the My Little Pony show was positively non-existent. The songs were, oh my God, the most unimaginative ever. And, as with many kids’ things, they had that little racist nod where the only male character, some Barney knock-off with a British accent, wears sunglasses and a bling-bling letter “S” around his neck (they removed the vertical line that would have evoked the dollar) and does the human beat box thing, complete with turntables, to a stolen disco riff.

The first 20 minutes were dialogue and songs about what a GREAT day it was and WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO? 10 minutes into it, I’m thinking, “Do something! Clean the house! Go for a walk! Stop TALKING about it!” They did nothing productive. They took turns commenting about each other’s appearances, how PRETTY they were. They danced around in these costumes where the person was in the front of the horse in a costume where the horse’s rear ends were attached like an appendage that kind of hung there so their rear legs, at any point in time, seemed to float off the ground.

My favorite dance move was when they would turn around and raise their hinds into the air to show off their tails made of rainbow-colored plastic-streamers. They were, essentially, mooning the audience to get an AHHH! at the site of those gorgeous plastic streamer tails. Oh my God.

I turned to a mother next to me, whom I did not know, and exclaimed “This is the most mind-numbing thing I’ve ever seen.” She looked at me and said “Chinese water torture.” Blake turned to me and said “When is this over.” I told him to go dance with the other bored kids, thinking of the $62 bucks, of course.

I’ve seen The Wiggles at JPJ, and it was extraordinary. The kids got off their feet and danced because they were moved to by the music, not squirming because they were bored. The Wiggles were real writing, people with talent and commitment, energy to burn, giving it out to the kids like candy, pure joy. But, My Little Pony reminds us that there is a lot of bad stuff out there that seems to assume kids have no taste. The personal passion and vision of a team like the Wiggles can’t be reproduced in a corporate board room. My Little Pony is an example of just how low our culture can sink to create markets for our kids.

Stay away. Take them bowling. Get a nice, dark, black bowling ball, and go to extreme bowling in the black lights. Your retinas will thank you.

Blake and I went to the Short Pump Mall last week. He likes to go there to ride the train, and to play in the food court. He always meets new kids when we go there. This time, we saw two tweens playing with their respective little sisters. On the way home, Blake was silent, and then said, “I want a big sister, not a little sister.” What ensued was a very interesting discussion, on a kid level, of the vision for our family, how we want to live, and that we’d have to think about it and talk with Daddy.

The idea of adopting an older child, vs. an infant, is a big shift. But, in the course of the discussion, I felt the weight of worry lift off my shoulder. This is not the first time that I’ve allowed myself to indulge in the possibility of adopting a child that truly needs parenting to give them a shot at a life. Infants are so in demand, but the older kids are available in abundance for many, many reasons. The stories are diverse, and the kids sit in limbo in childhoodus-interruptus waiting for someone to let them relax and feel secure again, if they ever have.

As a mission for a life, raising such a child seems like a more satisfying challenge to me. I’ve always had a vision of adopting a 10-year old girl. Now, we may go for someone a little younger (7 or 8), but the vision of my adopting a young girl, vs. another infant, resonates strongly with me. Blake also didn’t want another baby — he wants someone to play with. So, we broached the subject with Daddy the next night. I was frightened, because in the past, Noel has strongly objected to the possibility of bringing in a child with so much baggage that it could destroy the family or, worse still, victimize Blake in some way.

But, he was totallly on board, and I breathed a sigh of relief. “I don’t have another baby in me!” he said, and I felt the same. Not that we want to do this to avoid diaper changing, potty training, and midnight feedings, anymore than we want to adopt to avoid stretch marks and droopy boobs. But, there’s a sense we both have that what we called “maintaining the organism” that is the first two years of a child’s life is not nearly so compelling as engaging a child in the amazing act of becoming fully human. We also each have a soft spot for people who’ve had it tough, who’ve got a past and a story. We don’t really get along very well with folks who’ve always had it easy, whose lives have been along an easily-proscribed path. There is something about our own pasts, full of adversity and crooked choices, that makes us feel closer to those who have encountered the hard knocks of this imperfect world.

We are meeting with the social worker on Monday to discuss all the pros and cons of moving in this direction. The cons are obvious, and what we fear. The pros are that we have no expectation of being considered “heroes” by any child. Children don’t need to be grateful. I think they need to presume that they will be kept safe, fed, clothed and loved. To deliver that to a child, however late, is not heroic. It’s our duty, and I’m looking forward to signing up for it.

More reality to come on this, for sure, but for now, it feels like we’re on the right road…for all of us. I can’t wait!

I would never presume to understand the depth of Blake’s experience of having been adopted. I see his questions unfold day to day, his puzzlement over who is Jenny (his birthmother) vs. who is me. I got the “how does a baby get in your belly?” question in the car the other day. This is one of many questions he has about birth, death, and piecing it all together. It’s as normal as normal can be, but, for an adopted kid, it’s harder to finish the whole narration with a succinct and compassionate way of saying why, at the end of the “belly” thing, he was given to us to raise.

It’s a tender time for him. He’s getting it that being adopted is different. And he has a great need to feel embraced, to belong, to be one of the guys. Blake has yet to discover that there are folks out there who will make him feel like being adopted is being less-than others. People aren’t horrible about it the way they probably used to be, but kids can be cruel, and adults can just mean well, but be dumb.

When we first found out that Blake’s family chose us to be his parents, I was recounting the details to some curious co-workers. It’s amazing how little people know about adoption — I guess they don’t have to, in a way, but I think a little knowledge would help to normalize things for these children. Upon talking about how Blake’s birthmother, Jenny, agreed to have me in the delivery room, a woman exclaimed, “Oh! It’s almost like being a real parent!”

This kind of parent-centric stuff is quite prevalent in parenting, I find. But being in the delivery room is not like some awful scene from “A Handmaid’s Tale” where the barren woman is trying to emulate birth while the handmaid goes through labor. It’s about being able to give your child the story of how he was born, the story that every birthparent can give in high detail.

Also, the use of the word “real” is pretty prevalent, and something folks should begin to check themselves on. It’s been pretty “real” with midnight feedings, a year of sleep deprivation, diapers, teething, bathing, cuddling, singing, laughing, feeding, playing, watching the amazement in his eyes with that first step, remembering how he looked up at me from my arms in the NICU. It’s real, alright. If you ever feel compelled to use the word “real” before parent, give yourself a beat, and substitute “real” with “birth” or “biological.” it’s not a political correctness thing. It’s an accuracy thing. “Real” is mushy. “Biological” is precise, and it describes accurately the role that Jenny had in his life. Her body gave rise to him, and she cared well enough for herself during that time to make sure he was born healthy. She endured labor and letting him go to a place she thought would give him a better life, in a way that she could start again, knowing she allowed his life to happen at all, despite what was probably unimaginable pain.

That was being a birthmother in the most pure sense. Jenny will always be his birthmother, and I will always tell Blake how much she loved him and cared for him and considered her choice. That’s what great birthmothers do, and Jenny was one. Would that she continued to care for herself beyond his birth, but I fear tragically, from reports from her family, that she has not. She is in my prayers.

I know she is on Blake’s mind these days from all the questions and probing about birth. He asked me where she was, and I could not tell him because she left home and we have not heard about her in about 2 years. So I said I didn’t know. I can’t imagine how that feels. It moves me to utter tears to not be able to fill in the canyon-like gap between Jenny’s belly and my arms. It is a leap he made that only the adopted can understand, and only adoptive parents can hope to help heal, to give him tools to cope, and to let him have the pain of that separation all for himself. I wrote a song this week about it, trying to get inside of this, knowing that I may never be able to do so. Blake, I hope I honor you with this. I don’t mean to trivialize, but your questions make me want to give the answers in any way I can. Here it is:

“DOES YOUR BELLY MISS ME?”

Mom and Dad gave me a picture
Of you with me inside
I can’t tell if you loved me then
I’ve tried and tried and tried.
I wonder what you’d be like
If you had let me stay.

Mother, does your belly miss me today?

Is my brother or my sister
Growing now in there?
Will they have my smile?
Or maybe have my hair?
Will you let me meet them
In a time not far away?

Mother, does your belly miss me today?

Mommy and Daddy love me so,
And I love them just the same
Still a part of me is still inside
The one from where I came.

Do you ever stare at stars at night
And look there for my face?
Does the world sometimes feel lonely
Like a big old empty space?
I grew up so small inside you
Inside me you will stay.

Mother, does your belly miss me?
Does your belly miss me?
Does your belly miss me today?

————-

Blake, my darlin’ I love you so.

My Dad passed away on July 6, 1989. Hard to believe it’s been 18 years.

His name was Thomas Joseph Finn. He was an athlete, coach, eventually a hospital administrator, and a frustrated singer.

My father and I had a distant, and at times difficult, relationship. There was a large age difference (he was 49 when I was born), and a cultural rift that was hard to bridge. He was first-generation Irish, born in 1910, and with old-world sensibilities about child-rearing.

Daddy was quick to anger, and quick to apologize. I spent the better part of my life with him trying not to anger him. In his absence, I’ve spent an awful lot of time trying to figure out what he was about. His presence in my life was like one of those subway trains that pulls into the station when you’ve been waiting, but it never slows down or stops, it just keeps barrelling through, and no one announces what just happened.

Daddy was the only son, the oldest, and his mother’s pride and joy. He was beaten by his father, who seemed like a hard man given to drinking (he died before I was born). My father drank, too, but in that 1950s 3-martini-lunch kind of way, during a time when businessmen could get away with being tipsy at work.

We had only one heart-to-heart in the entire 30-year history of our relationship with each other. It was over drinks on December 7, 1988. I told him of how I viewed music in my life, how I viewed it as a service, and a potential to help others. He told me that, of all of his kids, he saw me most likely to enter the religious life.

If you look at the details of my life from the outside, that’s downright laughable. But, I think that Daddy sensed I had an inner life. I think that he wanted to know me, to know all of his kids, and was struggling to figure out how to do that after years of scaring us half to death with the Irish-style rage and the draconian punishments.

Two weeks later, Daddy had a stroke. He passed away seven months after that. Irony of ironies, he lived so long afterwards because he was in incredible cardiovascular shape from running every day. He ran 5 miles on the day he had the stroke. He came into the house, made himself a sandwich, and slouched over the table. Mommy called an ambulance, and he never came home after that. He spent the rest of his days in a rehab center and acute care hospitals, being treated alternately for physical disabilities and pneumonia. The pneumonia is what got him in the end.

Daddy, I miss you very much. I wish we had been given more time. I wish we could have had another 10 years to mend fences, to stop scaring each other off, to let down our guards, to explore the God in each other. I hope you are peaceful, wherever you are. Thank you for being my Dad. Considering all you had to fight, and how few tools you were given to face life, you did okay, Dad. Thanks for everything you gave that was probably not easy to give.

Every once in a while, I hurt myself on purpose by looking up current fertility treatment technology to see if things have progressed to a point where it’s relevant for most families. Alas, such services are still in the category of boutique medicine, and, it would appear, that rather than advance the technology to the point of accessibility for a broader group, they are instead increasing special services to tack on more fees to the financially fortunate, fertility-driven few.

Such a new service is called “family balancing.” For those of you not familiar with this term, it’s kind of a new way of saying “eugenics.” It’s kind of a way to select for the kind of kid you want so you don’t get disappointed with the “product” so to speak. It’s a way to select for gender and for diseases. But, by calling it “family balancing” we avoid the pesky issues associated with the much-needed (and not so “boutique-ey”) medical treatments that could arise from stem cell research.

So, let’s get this straight: There is no outcry from anyone, anywhere about discarding a down’s syndrome, or male/female embryo, and throwing it in the trash because the child would create, shall we say, an “imbalance” in the family. But, to use one of these discarded embryos to help someone with Parkinsons, well, that’s just WRONG.

I do not get this world, and I get it just the same. The rich can do all kinds of things, in plain site, moral, immoral, amoral, or whatever they choose. The poor can do the same, under the radar and judged when visible. The rest of us suckers are stuck in the nonsensical realm of what George Bernard Shaw referred to as “middle class morality.”

I have a great idea for family balancing. I say, for every child someone conceives, they are then required to adopt an unwanted domestic orphan.

Well, we didn’t get the house. Turns out, the guy got an offer at UVa, and is staying in town. So, after a couple of days of indulging in the fantasy of having a backyard for Blake to play, I’ve come down, and I’m bummed.

What’s bumming me out? When you look at it objectively, we were planning to stay in the apartment until next Spring anyway. So, there’s really nothing changed about our circumstances or our plans. What changed is that I took a trip in my head to some other, “better” place. And my mind is what has to recover.

I wonder about the utility of fantasy, and if fantasy is one of those things which should be indulged in moderation, or if it has no utility whatsoever — if, in fact, it has a harmful effect on our humanity.

I think I’d like to distinguish “fantasy” from “imagination” in this instance. Imagination as I experience it is given to the creation of possibilities through removing limits on our vision. Those possibilities need not be tangible. Imagination is what gets us to envision a world of peace, a better life, or little things like what color to paint the living room.

Fantasy, on the other hand, seems like a mind trick that takes us to places we’d long to be, but probably never will get to. Now, there’s probably not a psychotherapist on the planet that would say fantasy is bad. Afterall, people need to “escape” now and then. I don’t deny that. But, I wonder if our modern American culture, which is skewing towards greater mental rather than physical labor, puts too much emphasis on meaningless exercises of the mind that actually take people out of reality.

Interestingly enough, in the book “Natural Structure: A Montessori Approach to Classical Education at Home” there is a commentary about Maria Montessori’s views on fantasy play:

“Play, on the other hand, is something that does not help the child to reach any developmental goal. Play is an activity based in fantasy (or make-believe). If a child (to borrow from Dr. Montessori’s example) sets a ‘table’ with leaves for ‘plate,’, acorns for ‘cups’ and proceeds to have a ‘banquet’ with stuffed animal ‘guests’ he has not gained strength physically, mentally, or spiritually. Although this child may have spent hours conducting this (fantasy) banquet, he has done no work. It is make-believe. In fact, this type of fantasy play not only does not help a child to master reality, it can hinder him from doing so, setting him back so that he will have to work harder to focus on reality afterward. It could rightfully be called ’spiritual junk food.’”

Spiritual junk food, indeed. Part of my son’s play is to imagine himself as Superman. This is very cute, but fills me with anxiety about the expectations of reality that come from this. As we grow, other sources of unreachable fantasy take hold: The perfect life, the perfect partner, the perfect child, the perfect car, the perfect body, etc.

When is imagining other possibilities a catalyst for spiritual growth, and when is it a hindrance? I think it’s about more than the moderation/quantity argument. That argument would say that it’s desirable to have a little bit of this kind of over-the-top fantasy stuff in life. I would argue, however, that this kind of cheap imagination, the “spiritual junk food” of adult life, actually takes us away from our happiness in any quantity.

We put up with it in ourselves, and in others, but I fear that the fantasy junkies inside of us are taking over. There are industries built on our addiction to living in other realms: television, diet industry, pornography, fashion, travel, you name it. These industries are betting that we’d rather put our money and our energy exploring momentarily an IMpossible world rather than imagining what is possible for this world.

They are not wrong. There is a reason why a couple of hundred people go on American Idol, but millions watch. It’s not all about winners and losers. It’s about the implicit nature of adult fantasy that seems to rely on our believing, in a deep way, that no better world is possible so let’s grab all the pleasure we can in this moment.

It’s sad really. Every time I am caught in line behind someone buying $30 hard-earned dollars on lotto tickets, I see this sickness of fantasy and how it invades everything about our lives.

For a moment, I indulged in the sickness of WANTING A HOUSE RIGHT NOW! The hangover from that desire, misplaced in time and not entirely realistic right now, shows me that it was not a noble pursuit. It was, as they say, a conceit.

A good world that is pursued, and then not attained despite honest effort, leaves no hangover. Just a bittersweet wish that it had worked out better. A fantasy about something inappropriate, however, doesn’t end with that kind of honest defeat. It merely ends, and leaves us hanging in a reality that’s harder to recognize once we re-enter.