November 2007

Lowe’s Home Improvement stores recently felt obligated to issue an apology. They called the artificial Christmas trees in their catalogues “Family Trees.” This caused outrage by folks who argue to Keep Christ in Christmas. I remember the refrain Keep Christ in Christmas from my childhood. Then, it was based in using the term “Xmas.” I remember bumper stickers in traditional gothic type with a holly leaf and berries. My very Catholic parents were all over that one.

In the late 1980s, artist Andres Serrano created “Piss Christ,” a photo of a plastic crucifix immersed in a container of urine. As with a lot of the art rooted in social commentary, like the works of Marcel duChamp and even Auguste Rodan in their day, simplistic interpretations and knee jerk reactions abound. This art was intended to repulse, and it’s the business of art to tap into the more inaccessible emotions and imagery to create the possibility for the partaker’s transformation.

But we are a culture for whom art has been largely usurped by commodity, and the free market gives us least common denominators of creativity to ensure the broadest audience. The entire Disney enterprise, full of incredible talent and creativity, embodies this commoditization perhaps in its purest sense. Pop culture, rather than a diversion, has become a new baseline measurement of normalcy. The day-to-day, idiosyncratic nature of human life is now measured AGAINST popular culture, rather than the other way around.

So it’s no longer horrifying to mass-produce, in plastic injection molds, the symbol of the savior of the world. That act of manufacture and free markets is the baseline culture that we now inhabit. Serrano turns it on its head and desecrates the object which is the original desecration, thereby holding up a mirror to our acceptance of the trashing of that which is sacred. He reminds us that the most transcendent phenomenon in recorded history cannot, and maybe even SHOULD not, be reduced to a cheap consumer product. He does it as an artist does it: no apologies, no hesitation, like a child saying the thing that you’re not supposed to say.

But we are not looking to be corrected, to be jarred, by art anymore. We are looking to be represented as we like to see ourselves. Advertising and marketing are so successful and ubiquitous nowl; we want to believe that we can potentially inhabit the perfection they are selling. We have entered the false world of marketed perfection, and want to be part of that world. Megachurches appeal to that, and are open about marketing themselves to the most fruitful target audience: the young male.

Our marketing of plastic crucifixes has become much more sophisticated. Christ was pretty darned clear about his feelings on the proximity of prayer to the activities of the free market. From the anger in the temple(Mark 11:15-19), to the famous “unto Caesar” statement, he saw a clear delineation between the two places.

But we have blurred this line, and now the marketplace has become the temple. That which is most real is that which is for sale. Prayer is what you do between all that shopping, if you have time. Somehow, as “Piss Christ” shows us, somewhere along the line, the profane became sacred. The Christmas tree, which has NOTHING to do with the birth of Christ, and a marketing catalogue from a home improvement store have arguably usurped the place of, and importance of, the sacred in this season.

A person concerned with really keeping Christ in their Christmas should be working for precisely this kind of severing of the sacred from the commodity. The free market sees a market for their trees that goes beyond Christians. It’s not political correctness (although that may have been the impetus), it’s just good business. I am glad to take back my Christmas from Sam’s Club, Wal-Mart, and other retailers. I’m glad that they may be less and less in control of the meaning of Christmas, and the word Christmas. I’m glad that it’s referred to as the holidays in their context, and as Christmas among Christians. I don’t need the marketplace to reinforce my faith. If I do, it’s not faith, it’s something else that I don’t really understand. I think it may be fear and a need to be in control, to be right, to have others agree with us, to bully, and to intimidate.

Somehow, that amazing birth seems dishonored by this discourse. I won’t wear my faith on my bumpersticker, produced by low wage Chinese factory workers. I’d rather put my energy into living it in my heart, which begins, I suppose, by forgiving those who don’t know any better, for those who will elect to “Buy It Now” on this car magnet so it ships before Dec 25.

Blake is so full of anxiety these days. In a five-year old, anxiety gets expressed very inconveniently for most people around them. It disrupts group activities, makes embarrassing noise in public places, makes you late, sometimes hurts your ears or your back, makes a mess you need to clean up, gives you a problem to handle that you didn’t anticipate. It’s a big emotion for a little person, and it isn’t just spilling over, it’s erupting like a geyser, hitting everyone and everything around him.

These are times when people suggest lots of child rearing books. No offense, but I’ve never read one that really helped me. I remember at my baby shower at work, a former supervisor of mine told me to ignore the books and go with my instincts. Of course, that type of advice appealed to me. There are many bandwagons to hop on to explain why kids do what they do, and what you can do to stop it, shape it, change it.

But, in all honesty, I don’t even know why I do what I do, why my husband does what he does, or why most folks do what they do. We are such an irrational, hopelessly rationalizing species, and I see it in my son. We all behave in ways to indulge our emotions, and get crafty as we get older and more facile with the language. Our aggression goes underground, and most of us develop passive-aggression because we know, after a certain age, that plain old in-your-face aggression is not acceptable. So, you get the “church lady” smile from lots of women in Virginia, but no one has the nads to just flip you the bird, except from behind the wheel of an Escalade. To your face, well, that just wouldn’t be proper.

With a world that is so dysfunctional with respect to understanding and managing adult emotions, why do we think that a stranger writing a book can help my little guy? Well, it’s a nice way to make money, I guess.

So what’s the message that Blake needs to hear from me when more institutional settings are telling him he needs to stop what he’s doing? Is the immediate message “don’t do that” or is it “I know you are hurting.” As his mother, I think I need to look beyond the needs of these external groups, which are legitimate needs, to see that there is a REASON why my son is doing what he is doing. He can’t tell me the driving reason why he’s hurting, but the reason why he’s acting this way is because he’s hurting. I know it because I know my son.

So, today when he came home, I sat with him and told him that I know he’s unhappy, and that’s why he’s acting like this. I told him we were all going to work together to make things less stressful. We worked together on a daily schedule, down to the minute, for mornings before school, and afternoons after school. We posted the morning schedule on his bedroom wall, and the afternoon schedule on the refrigerator. We kept to it tonight. Unlike most nights, we didn’t go out anywhere. We stayed home, and he played in the woods with some boys in the neighborhood. He did well, but he still started to break down and act out as the evening wore on and he got tired. No approach is going to help overnight, but it felt like it was the right thing to do, like we were moving in the right direction.

My husband and I are “seat of the pants” kind of people. But our son needs lots and lots of routine and structure. I have not been very good at giving that to him. I wasn’t raised that way. There was lots of chaos, cigarette smoke, drunkenness, an occasional flying fist or piece of furniture. Noel’s parents were each artists, were divorced, spent lots of time away from him dating, and basically left him to raise himself on the streets of Brooklyn. So, the whole structured family life thing is very, very alien to both of us.

I think our son is pulling this family into functional territory in a way. He’s telling us that although he loves us, he needs us to be more than we are. He is right. It’s not enough for me to love him to the point of agony, to get up early and feed him, to wash his clothes. That’s what’s known as the bare minimum. It’s up to us to build a family culture that supports his growing emotions, his expanding knowledge of the world, what has to be the accompanying confusion about the complexities of relationships: older kids, teachers, teachers aides, the bus driver, the lunch ladies, the assistant principal, the librarian, the art teacher, the PE teacher, his invisible siblings, his yet-to-be-identified sister, his absent birth parents, his grandparents, his 40 aunts, uncles, cousins, and second cousins.

The dawn of school is not just a trip on the bus and a new set of friends. It’s an exponential increase in social complexity coupled with a new level of performance expectation. How helpless he must feel in this too-big place. No wonder he fights in the morning and wants to stay home with me. “I love being home!” he said this afternoon. I don’t think he minded not being allowed to go to RE class tonight — I think that’s what he wanted.

These years are fleeting — it’s trite, but it’s true. Every time I groan when he calls “MOMMY!” in the middle of the night, wanting me to sleep in his room, I remind myself that 10 years from now, I will miss those cramped half-night snoozes in his stuffed-animal-filled loft bed with the big blue slide. I’ll miss the simplicity of his transparent 5-year old transgressions. I’ll miss the way he looks with that ridiculously large backpack and unruly hair. I’ll miss the calls for more syrup on his syrup-drenched waffles, just to get my attention. I’ll miss everything about my five-year old wondrous son when he is no longer five, including these days of helping him manage his challenges with the big, scary worlds of kindergarten and Sunday school. Even with all the storms he is weathering, and all the day-to-day headaches he causes and experiences, he remains the purest slice of joy I know.

An AA joke: “Alcoholism is a threefold disease: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s.”

I never really thought this joke was all that funny, or applicable to me. I never really “whooped it up” on the holidays much, except a couple of times. There was the time I met my first husband in a blackout on New Years’ Eve in 1975, but that’s such a long story. For the most part, I’m kind of a homebody on the holidays.

Lots of hard drinkers are also not particularly social. So, why the threefold disease joke? Well, first of all, the Big Book of AA talks about how alcoholism is a threefold disease that is “physical, mental and spiritual.” So, the holiday joke is a play on words, increasing the “in joke” power of it. However, most of us don’t avoid holidays because of the possibility of having some wine with dinner, or longing to feel like we “belong” by drinking egg nog or mulled wine.

Wanting to belong and drink socially never really mattered much to me as long as I was drunk.

No, I think it’s about the heightened emotions of the holidays. Lots of folks “go out” (relapse) around the holidays because they are painful times. They are painful enough for anyone who finds themselves outside the mainstream of the target Christmas shopping audience, which is most of us, by the way. All the marketing for the holidays assumes that the primary audience lives in an intact nuclear family, has extended family close by, time to shop, money to shop a lot, and the ability (and inclination) for lots of cooking. When you’re an active alcoholic, or even worse when you are early in sobriety, you notice how far away you are from this ideal. It’s depressing, and depression leads you to drink. Not partying. Hardcore alcoholics call New Years’ Eve “Amateur Night.”

But, the lens of alcoholism does not distort the truth and therefore produce the alienation. Rather, it focuses on the alienation more strongly, enhancing the sting of it. All the suicides around the holidays are not necessarily on the part of alcoholics. Holidays, unless you are a little kid, basically suck. There — I said it.

In New York City, holiday meetings are packed, particularly the “alkathons” where they serve pot luck dinners. I remember when my Mom visited NY at Christmas and got loaded at a French restaurant in the village. I could not wait to pour her into the cab, and then into bed, so I could get out to the alkathon at the 79th Street Workshop. The meetings were back to back, and I stayed for 3 or 4 until my head felt screwed on straight.

Of course, Virginia, in its infinite “bizarro-world” approach to emotional health, has FEWER meetings on the holidays. My first holiday season in Virginia was pure hell. I kept driving to meetings that were cancelled until after the holidays. Seems folks are too busy with all the shopping, spending, and cooking to worry much about existential alienation. I mean, who’s gonna stuff the turkey? Besides, you can sober up again after New Years — I once wrote a rather dark relapse song entitled, “What the Hell? It’s Christmas!”

We are driving to New York for Thanksgiving. It will be my first time in the city in a few years. We will be visiting my father-in-law and his wife. They live on Central Park West, so are well-located for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade with all the big balloons flying high above the street. In all my 21 years of living there, I never attended this parade. It’s kind of a New Yorker’s point of pride to avoid tourist things that the rest of the world thinks is New York, like the lighting of the tree in Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Building, Broadway musicals, and the Hard Rock Cafe. But, when you’ve got a 5-year old, pride seems to go away very quickly. So, I’ll stand like a dumb tourist, looking up at the balloons, looking at my son for the wonder in his eyes, and walking those cold, hard, hostile streets, avoiding eye contact with everyone, looking unfriendly, feeling suspicious, guarding my valuables VERY inconspicuously, jaywalking without a thought, perhaps flipping some jerk the bird once or twice — AHHH!!! — just like the good old days!

Then, maybe, I just might take in a meeting. 79th St workshop, anyone?

I hate to indulge myself in feeling old pain. I’ve been pushing things down for a while, and some of it is coming out sideways. I hauled off on my husband a couple of nights ago. I’m angry a lot, and it’s leaking out of me at the most unexpected times.

There are so many schools of thought on this stuff, and I think I’ve paid tuition at all of them. Psychoanalysis would refer to this as constructive and cathartic. Some religious doctrines would encourage me to pray for grace and understanding. AA would tell me to make coffee and help another drunk. None of these seems adequate on its own.

My pain? Oh, it’s an old one. My friends are probably sick of hearing about it. I wrote so many songs about it, and even dramatized it in a show a couple of years ago called “Get Over Yourself.” It’s about the lack of true witness to my true self on the part of my parents; the need for me to put on an artifice for them that carried throughout my adult life until their death. They died with a constructed view of who I was, and eschewed opportunities to know things that they didn’t really want to know.

Now, I’m not talking about boundary-hopping things like the intricacies of my sex life. I think that’s no one’s business, not even my parents, and has nothing to do with anyone but me and whoever else is involved. I’m talking about deeper characteristics of what makes me happy, how I view the world, what I value, what gives me joy, what makes my heart sing. They didn’t want to know. They wanted things to appear to go smoothly. They didn’t sign up for the angst-ridden artistic kid. They signed up for the scholar kid who could do neat parlor tricks like play Rimsky-Korsakov for company and star in the high school musical. Once those years of innocent exhibitions of budding ability passed, the ability was expected to live out like a precious bonsai tree, clipped to a manageable size and put on the window sill where you could look at it now and then. But, you wouldn’t want to plant it in the front lawn, in the sunlight, where the neighbors might see.

A grown woman performing in public was seen by my parents as kind of crass. Which is kind of ironic since they went to Broadway musicals all the time, and my Mom’s favorite singer was Ethel Merman. But, they didn’t want the smell of the greasepaint coming off one of their kids. These kinds of things were best left as hobbies.

At the heart of my soul is a bonsai tree. The older it gets, the less likely it will ever grow to full height. It’s been clipped back so far, for so many years, that it has become a precious miniature of the power it could have been. All these years later, though, it catches my eye on a daily basis.

I am embarrassed to say this, which is why I should say it. My kid is obsessed with watching “High School Musical,” which I always thought was going to be stupid. Now, some of the songs are so catchy in an annoying way that it becomes cloying, but, the overall message has me hooked. Which worries me–I never thought I’d see myself in a freakin’ Disney movie. But I’m addicted to watching it with him, and love the scene where the two leads are finally witnessed by their friends and parents, and embraced in a moment for who they are. The embrace looks like it lasts beyond the momentary pride in public at the kids’ talent. It looks like they are being understood and celebrated, like there will be support for them beyond that glorious moment of becoming apparent.

I’m so desperate for this kind of witness that I made it up in my last show. I did a scene where I played my mother on video, talking with me from heaven, with me live on the stage. She was telling me how she wanted to hear a song I wrote. I was told later that this was a profound thing to watch, which tells me that I’m not the only person feeling this lack of true witness by their parents.

But I have a blessing in my life that many don’t have. I have seven siblings, all bonsai’d in their own ways, all trying to bear witness to each other knowing what was missing for us as kids. Hence, the utter joy of the witness to Joanie’s true coming out in her civil union with Annie. After the ceremony, I sat in the kitchen of my brother Tommy’s house with other siblings: Mike, Babsi, and Mary. Amidst the usual stories about our parents, my brother Mike asked me if there was any way I could start singing again. He said if I needed to pay for a babysitter, he’d send me the money. He told me how he did the same thing with his racing a few years back. He said to himself that he couldn’t do it, he had a family to support. But my brother Tom told him that he didn’t want to look back one day at not having done it. And, as Mike put it, he’s now a “happy son of a bitch.” I love my brothers and sisters.

Mike wants me to be a happy son of a bitch, and so do I. I just came down the stairs after watching “High School Musical” long after Blake fell asleep, and I am weeping my eyes out at how deeply I regret the way I have stood in my own way for so long.

I pray for God’s strength and guidance. I have to sing again. Mike is right. And I love him for it. God help me, please. Give me the grace I need to leap into this one more time, to put away the clippers, and to plant the bonsai in the soil, in full sun, where you intended it to be all these years. Amen.

This weekend has had me visiting the local shopping mall (the Fashion Square Mall) twice. Once was for Santa’s first night. The other was this evening’s drive-in movie in the parking lot, featuring “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “Polar Express.”

Last night, the Santa’s workshop setup in the mall was flanked by two Kubota tractors, one for snow removal, and one in “camouflage,” supposedly for hunters? At any rate, Santa made his grand entrance on a standard bright orange Kubota tractor, decked with wreaths, garland, and lights. He then got off the tractor and walked up the stairs to the temporary platform, and his green velvet wing chair from which he read, unintelligibly, “The Night Before Christmas” to a crowd of kids in itchy, uncomfortable “photo with Santa” outfits being chased and berated by their stressed out parents trying to “make some f!@$%n’ memories, for Christ’s sake!” (I paraphrase). Damned kids were ruining the photo-ready tableau with all their running, playing, and unsolicited joyfulness.

Blake was much more interested in the fact that he ran into his friend from school, and got the free jingle bell, cookies, and chocolate milk. But, make no mistake, watching Santa shill for Kubota was a sight I’m so glad I caught in my lifetime.

Then tonight, as we waited for the movie to start in the parking lot, Blake played in the bounce house while I watched them inflate the movie screen. It was a YouTube moment, and I had no camera on me. As the side of the screen, a big, blue, inflatable phallus, gently rose from the ground to its ultimate perpendicular stiffness, the loudspeakers blasted “Oh come let us adore Him!”

Then we went to our car to watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which first aired 42 years ago. The theme, as we all know, is Charlie Brown’s disillusionment with the increasing crass commercialism of Christmas.

There is a very big reason why I don’t like Blake watching Nickelodeon. He has zero sales resistance. He has watched only DVDs, Disney Channel and PBS Kids for most of his life. But, he’s starting to outgrow the Disney Channel morning shows. Yesterday, he asked to watch Sponge Bob.

I got no problem with Sponge Bob. Great drawings, lots of silliness, bad puns, and it’s absolutely harmless. It’s the commercials.

There was not a single commercial that escaped Blake’s notice. “I want that!” “I want that!” for every one. He wanted the “Polly Pockets” racing game (it’s basically Hot Wheels looping tracks, but pink). He immediately stated that he LOVES Polly Pockets (?). This is the first I had heard.

The thing is, he doesn’t really want it. He just responded to an ad the way kids respond to ads. Which is why I don’t like him watching commercial TV channels at all. With Christmas around the corner, the monster list is growing, and it’s simply not do-able. We’ve already had a talk about not needing a trampoline AND a moonbounce, no matter how much Blake loves to jump up and down. I got his agreement to accept the trampoline without the moonbounce. But it took some negotiation.

“Are we poor?” he asks me sometimes. We are not poor, but we are not rich, and even if we were, I’m not sure that carte blanche on Christmas is a good idea for any kid. That being said, I usually do overdo it for his stuff. It’s kind of my version of the political scientists’ axiom where you shape foreign policy to win the LAST war, not the upcoming one. That is, I overdo it to re-cast my own minimalist Christmases of the past, as if that has even a drop of relevance for Blake. Besides, my family wasn’t poor. There were just too many of us to overdo it for any one of us. We got one “big” thing that we asked for, and then a few cheap things in our stocking. My mom would usually stuff them with underwear, socks, or gloves. Then, when she wasn’t looking, my Dad would put in a gag gift like a roll of toilet paper or some Preparation H. Dad was a big practical joker, and we loved it.

I do remember looking at ads when I was young, and asking for this or that. But, I don’t remember ever expecting to get all of it. Blake is now becoming aware of brands. He asked me for Skechers repeatedly until I got him a woopass pair of cheaper sneakers, after which he calmed down. I dodged that bullet for sure, but he won’t always be so easy to distract.

I’m curious what other folks do to limit their kids’ expectations of Christmas. He still believes in Santa, so the “we don’t have enough money” argument really kind of makes no sense. He’s starting to get the Jesus birthday thing, which helps, but he’s still too young to get that there is any connection between that and all the stuff. I think he thinks that these two things are miraculously synchronized, but not in any way related.

Well, I guess he would be right there…hmm..

Does anyone have any ideas about how to give kids a memorable Christmas without going overboard? I think Blake is too young to appreciate the toilet paper joke, so, beyond reinforcing the birth of Jesus story, I need some cheap, joyful, silly, pointless ideas for a wonderful, lively five-year old. Got any? I’m all ears.

Words by me not required.

Christian Charity Raising Money To Feed Non-Gay Famine Victims