The hits keep on rolling at our house. I wrote before about my partner coming down with mumps — a form not indigenous to the US and not included in our immunizations — and while she was never officially quarantined, she’s been out of work for three weeks (so far). Of course, she’s going steadily out of her mind with boredom (though she has gotten a lot of knitting done).
Now the kids are sick, and while we don’t know for sure that it’s mumps, the health district has flown into high gear to avoid an outbreak in the schools. So they’re on isolation (the new way of saying “quarantined”) for 9 days. No school, no Christmas shopping, no playing outside with friends. You can imagine the fun! Especially since none of them feel all that ill; my step-daughter doesn’t feel ill at all, and has no symptoms, but is included as a precaution.
Let me say that again: Three kids, nine days, none of them particularly ill, no leaving the house.
My partner just said we should be keeping a journal: “Day two. The natives are getting restless. We can hear the drums beating in the night…”
Since she’s a trained phlebotomist (that’s someone who draws blood, if you didn’t know) she usually does all the kids’ blood samples herself — it is generally much less traumatic to be stuck by a caring mother than an anonymous doctor or nurse. Plus, she’s really good at it, not always guaranteed with whoever the doctor’s office or clinic has on-duty at any given moment.
So yesterday she had to draw all the kids blood for the Center for Disease Control (CDC). Since this strain of mumps virus isn’t indigenous to the US, CDC wants to track it closely and make sure it doesn’t spread, and I’m assuming add it to the general immunizations. The older kids, no problem. She took my blood last week, no problem. (I’m not sick — except for a nasty cold last week — but they wanted it as a baseline in case I do get sick.)
Then there’s our 5-year old. He was not thrilled at all about the prospect of mom sticking him with an inch-long needle. We tried everything, even at one point holding him down on the floor, but eventually I called “enough”. While the needle-stick itself isn’t likely to be all that traumatic — you really don’t even feel it — I didn’t think we wanted our child to associate us forever with the trauma of being held down and jabbed with needles. Let some stranger carry that burden!
So. Day two. The natives are getting restless. The 12-year old will be fine; he’ll stay in his room playing PlayStation and we probably won’t hear from him until it’s time to complain about going back to school. The others, though — how are we going to keep an 11-year old girl and a 5-year old boy from driving us insane over the next 8 days?
Oh, and since you asked, no, we haven’t worked out the logistics. It doesn’t look likely that worker’s comp will cover their mom staying home; I have a week left of classes that I can’t miss so while I can be home a half-day Monday and Thursday and all day Friday, I can’t take care of the kids on Tuesday and Wednesday. Meanwhile, the health department wants their mom back at work after three weeks — so how do we take care of the kids? We don’t know, but obviously we’ll work out something.
I don’t post here very much, not because I don’t want to but because I’m busy with so much else. In addition to teaching and doing my own research (currently for a piece on Sexuality, Gender, and Taboo) I have three other active blogging projects:
- Lifehack.org: a personal productivity site where I write about studying and writing strategies in addition to general organization and productivity topics.
- Savage Minds: An anthropology group blog. I’m currently working on a series on academic publishing. I also post quite a bit on the relationship between anthropology and the State, as well as material drawing on my American Indian research.
- StepDadding: This is my newest project, a site dedicated to practical advice and personal experiences drawn from my life as a step-father of three.
I’ve been blogging for just over 7 years now, since just before the 2000 election, and on the web even longer, and a few good projects have fallen by the wayside:
- ThinkNaughty: This is the site I set up to collect notes and resources on my research on sexuality and gender in American society. The host went out of business without any notification, and the database was trapped (although I have a fairly up-to-date backup). I don’t know whether I’ll move the site to my current host or import the posts to this site.
- One Man’s Opinion: My original blog back in 2000, One Man’s Opinion was really active from about 2003 – 2005. Unfortunately, trouble with one host led to the loss of a great deal of content, and eventually the loss of the domain name when my renewal was messed up. All the posts I could recover were imported to this site.
- Being Better Students: I started this project as a way of helping my students by providing tips and tools to help them master their student lives. It was also lost when the hosts went out of business. Some of my posts here follow in the same tradition (search for “best practices for students”, and of course much of my writing at lifehack.org does what BBS did, only better.
- Jewish-American.com: My first site. I lost this domain, too; now it’s a link farm for Jewish personals sites. When I was studying Jewish-American immigration and labor activism as a graduate student, I set this site up as a) a repository for sources I had found and wanted to remember, and b) a project to test my then-fledgling web design and coding knowledge out with. It got some nice attention, and was written up in a syndicated column on the Jewish web, which was nice. I still have all the files, so maybe I’ll put it back up someday, although most of the links are probably dead by now.
For a while, I was posting weekly round-ups of my posts at lifehack.org; this got to be a hassle as my schedule got more and more full, and also as I began producing more types of content there. And, really, I started thinking about what this site was about, and that’s not really it; I’d like this site to be more about my academic work and about my personal thoughts, filling in some of the gap left when One Man’s Opinion disappeared. THat is, when I want to write a Foucauldian analysis of Matrix II or rant about some stupid thing Bill O’Reilly said, this is the place.
I still have a great deal of content to add to the portfolio section of this site, too. My goal is for this to be a as-complete-as-possible repository of my work and thought. Believe it or not, I use it a lot just to remember what I was thinking about some years ago on some topic.
Lisa Hendey of Productivity @ Home suggests several ways to encourage thankfulness in children. At the top of the list is “pray together”, and we’re not a praying family at all, but the rest of the tips are good, especialy the fourth, “Remember to thank your children”:
Next time your child brings home a test that falls short of your expectations, why not try genuinely thanking him for his efforts in school prior to launching into an interrogation? Thank the child who helps with chores, lovingly helps a sibling, or is kind to a friend. Take the time to say you appreciate the person they are becoming.
To be honest, it took me a little while to figure out how to be thankful and express thankfulness when I moved in with my partner and her kids. In fact, it was one of the early challenges we faced. She is always careful to thank me or the kids when one of us does something, like setting the table or finishing the laundry or cleaning the kitchen counter. I considered these acts part of the regular running of the home and did not see them as anything special to remark on. So, I would cook dinner one night and she would thank me, nad the next night she would cook and I would… not say anything.
The tension built and built until we finally got into a row over the laundry, but it wasn’t really over the laundry, it was over me taking all the stuff she did or me for granted, while she too nothing I did for her for granted. And you know what? She was right. We do things in the home because they need doing, and because it’s our turn, and because we happen to be there at the time, and for every other reason — but we also do them for each other and for he kids out of love, and that really is something to be thankful about and to offer thanks for.
So, now I’m a big thanker, and the kids are growing into big thankers too. And you know what? I’m thankful for that, too.
Have a great Thanksgiving!
 I’ve been on a bit of a Neil Gaiman kick lately, since Stardust came out and I read and enjoyed Coraline. Although I’ve been way too busy to read much more (I picked up M is for Magic and another Gaiman book about a month ago) I did have a chance to listen to this single-CD reading of four of Gaiman’s works for children, and was overall pretty impressed.
The Neil Gaiman Audio Collection is read by Gaiman himself, and includes three short stories and a poem, as well as a short interview conducted by his little daughter. Two of the stories, “The Wolves in the Walls” and “The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish” are available as beautifully illustrated children’s books. The other, “Cinnamon”, was only available on Gaiman’s website. I’m not sure what the origin of the poem, “Crazy Hair”, is.
Gaiman reads the stories with a deadpan voice, ably distinguishing between the different characters without actually “doing” their voices (with a couple of exceptions). There is a great deal of humor in the way he relates the absurdities his stories revolve around as if they were absolutely normal, everyday events. “There are wolves,” he says in the character of the little girl Lucy, “in the walls”. “No”, says her mother, her father, her brother, who all have an explanation for the noises she hears in the walls of their big old house. To which Lucy responds, matter-of-factly, “Wolves.”
“Wolves in the Walls” is my least favorite of the stories, although kids will love the silly premise and the girl Lucy’s frustrations at convincing her parents that, indeed, wolves are living in the walls of their house. “Cinnamon”, the next track, I liked somewhat more; the story tells of a faraway princess who does not talk and the tiger who awakens her to the world and gives her something to talk about. “The Day I Swapped…” is my favorite (and Gaiman’s daughter’s favorite, too), detailing the journeys of a boy who foolishly swapped his dad away and must follow the trail of ensuing swaps to recover his poor, absent-minded old dad. The poem, “Crazy Hair”, is also loads of fun, a very Shel Silverstein-like poem about the wild things that roam the jungles of a boy’s crazy hair.
What Gaiman’s work — both the stuff intended for adults and the children’s work — has in common, aside from a keen eye for the absurd and hilarious, is a dark anxiety about the relationship between kids and their parents. Lucy’s parents are distracted and pay her little attention, like the parents in Coraline; the dad swapped for two goldfish doesn’t even seem to notice, he’s so wrapped up in reading his paper! So it’s surprising and touching to see Gaiman’s easy candor with his daughter in the interview that closes out the collection, in which the young girl asks whether he prefers writing children’s books or adult ones, how he decided he wanted to be a writer, and which of his works are his favorites (among other things).
The Neil Gaiman Audio Collection is a great thing to have on hand for even short car trips, since the longest story is only 15 minutes or so. Kids will love hearing some of the stories over and over, and on a CD that’s easy — just hit a button. I can’t imagine most kids being all that interested in the interview more than once (if that) but again, it’s easy to skip. Gaiman’s stories are generally deeply complex and will reward repeated listenings, even for adults. (Christmas note: it would also make a great gift!)
You can find out more about Neil Gaiman and this collection at The Neil Gaiman Audio Collection page on his website; you can also liten to a short snippet ot Gaiman reading “The Wolves in the Walls”.
Well, not yet, but on the table. Here’s the story:
My partner works for the division of the health department that monitors and reports infectious outbreaks. Last month, she was sent our to gather samples from several neighboring families of Ethiopian refugees, some of whom had mumps. Since this kind of exposure is part of her job, she receives regular inoculation boosters, and had a mumps booster just a year ago. No problem, right?
So the samples go to CDC (Center for Disease Control) and, lo and behold, it’s a strain nobody’s seen before! And they’re not sure if the inoculation currently in use covers it. So she’s been on “symptom watch” for the last few weeks, to see if she develops any symptoms.
Guess what? Monday night the oldest boy says “Mom, your face looks swollen.” Sure enough, one side of her jaw is a little puffy. She calls the lab, they tell her to see a doctor and have the symptoms confirmed (as it happens, there’s no quick and easy test for mumps), the doctor confirms the symptoms but won’t say mumps, and she’s put on paid leave while samples are collected and analyzed.
Mumps isn’t an awful disease — aside from the swelling of the salivary glands (which only happens in some 30% of cases, believe it or not) the symptoms are basically flu-like: fever, headache, muscle ache, tiredness. You don’t die from it, and there’s no long-term complications. It just… sucks.
And it’s the health department’s mission to stop the spread of suckiness. So she’s off work, everyone in her lab is on symptom watch, the kids and I are all having blood drawn in the morning. (My partner is a trained phlebotomist and promises she’ll be gentle — that’s right, I’m going to let my partner stick me!) And swabs stuck in our mouths.
(Random aside: Firefox’s spell-check doesn’t have “phlebotomist” in its dictionary; it suggests “lobotomist”. Hopefully my partner knows the difference!)
CDC is thrilled. They can barely contain their excitement. Her and I are now a case study, and apparently some biologist at CDC is looking to score major points by discovering “type H” or whatever they end up calling the new strain.
If there is a new strain. The first lab tests don’t come back until tomorrow, and apparently lab tests aren’t conclusive — it’s an elusive virus. It may be she has the flu, and just coincidentally has an infected gland. There may be no telling for sure.
Aside from feeling bad, she gets 9 days of leave with pay, so it’s not terrible. And the kids and I get to report every minor fluctuation in the way we feel for a month (mumps can incubate for up to a month). And we’re still waiting for a call from the health department’s epedemiology section to say whether she’s quarantined, and whether we’re quarantined with her.
So mumps just sucks even when you don’t have it.
Yet?
Shall I write a post since I’ve been away the last couple of days? OK, here’s a quick one.
Today, my brother and sister-in-law took our kids to the airshow. Every year my sister-in-law’s stepdad, an ex-Navy (I think) flyer and owner of an aerospace company in California comes in to take his grandkids (my nephew and niece) to the airshow. Knowing both my partner and I were busy this weekend, and that the kids love planes (the oldest wants to be a pilot and knows every military plane and their specs by heart), my brother invited the two older kids along (their younger brother, 5, was off to his dad’s today).
At the show, my sis-in-law’s stepdad took my stepkids under his wing, so to speak, buying them t-shirts and hats and talking airplane with them all day. He even got them something to bring home for their little brother. He can afford it, but that’s not the point — the point is he went out of his way to make these kids he hadn’t even met before today feel welcome, like part of the family.
This is something I hadn’t realized I was signing up for when I became a step-parent: other people’s kids. As it happens, you aren’t just a parent to your own kids, but to their friends, to your neighbors’ children, to any kid that needs a parental hand. It changes the way you look at children in general; suddenly, you’re the responsible one, and that extends beyond your own family. We just had to talk our daughter’s friend, who is staying the night, out of a full-blown panic attack when she realized she’d left her bag, with her asthma medication, at my brother’s (we’d taken her over when we went to pick up my step-kids). My older step-son is asthmatic, so we have pretty much the same medication here; there was no reason to panic. But try reasoning with a high-strung hyper-ventilating 11-year old! And what it takes is being “fatherly”, talking to her like your own, being the voice of authority and surety that kids need to feel secure.
There’s so much more to this stepdadding business than meets the eye…
I spent the last two days at BlogWorld Expo, here in Las Vegas. It was pretty cool, though I spent a lot more time on the exhibition hall floor than in sessions. First of all because my schedule is so hectic, and second of all because the sessions — at least the ones I was in — weren’t all that interesting (or, rather, weren’t that interesting to me).
Thursday I had class until 2:00, then dashed over to the Expo only a few blocks from the university. Parking was $10.00! On the other hand, there was plenty of parking, which isn’t always the case at the LV Convention Center. A sign of how small BlogWorld was — the parking attendant told me attendance was only about 3,000, when I asked if I’d have any trouble getting parking on Friday. Compare that with the 200,000 that come for CES or the 50-100,000 that come for a lot of trade shows at the convention center.
Once I registered and got my pass, I headed over to my first session, called something like “Building Community on the Web”, but it wasn’t about that really, it was about comments, and most of the questions people seemed to want answered were about dealing with negative comments. I was hoping for something more along the lines of how to write to inspire discussion, or more generally, how to create a sense of community around your site. I mean, you enable comments and put up a forum or wiki; then what?
So I left that session pretty early and hit the exhibition hall. I talked to a lot of people about their products, services, and sites. The ad stuff doesn’t impress me, although I’ve nothing against ads per se. Half of the industry seems to be focusing on ways to sneak ad content in front of web users in the guise of “services”, while the other half features a proliferation of ever-smaller affiliate and performance marketing companies doing the same thing as all the other ones. Frankly, what we need aren’t more ad sources but help understanding how to use and place ads — and how to promote their sales with our sites without losing our editorial independence.
I thought this would be picked up more in my Friday session on affiliate marketing, but it wasn’t, and I blame this on the panel make-up. While the speakers were really interesting and engaging, they spoke as industry insiders, and I really would have liked to see a panel with a range of bloggers — small niche bloggers, A-list bloggers, maybe someone from a blog network — talking about their strategies for making affiliate ads work. The presenters did give one example, a site that posts video reviews of products they have affiliate relationships with, which is fine, but that’s a whole site built around their advertising. I want to know how to better fit advertising in a site where the editorial content is *not* ad-based.
Friday morning was Leo Laporte’s keynote, which was fantastic — of course, I already knew Leo was a engaging speaker. (I didn’t expect him to wear such ugly pants, though!) His talk was on new media and basically said that bloggers should be doing text, audio, and video to reach our audiences on three different levels: the cerebral (written word), the intimate and personal (audio), and the “monkey mind”, the part that goes “look, pretty pictures!” (video). Maybe we could call that the gratification-oriented level. I kind of disagree with him about the innate intimacy of audio, though — while I have no doubts that Leo’s radio and podcast listeners find him very approachable and see him as an “old friend” rather than as a “celebrity”, that’s a persona that Leo has spent a long time developing an perfecting. I don’t think that other radio hosts — say Rush Limbaugh –have the same personal relationship with their fans. I could be wrong, of course.
I had wanted to meet Leo, but after the keynote he was swarmed, and I had to go try to change my session, since as it happened I wasn’t going to be at the conference for my early afternoon session. I wanted to cancel my 1:30 session and replace it with a 10:15 am session, but the computer wouldn’t let me, and I had to talk to a half-dozen staffers in four different places before someone told me that my registration status didn’t allow me to attend the Friday morning sessions.
As it happened, I finished right about the time Leo was heading from the keynote hall to his next session, and passed not 5 feet from me, and I froze. I’m not really good at approaching people, and in the context of a random hallway encounter, I couldn’t think of anything to say fast enough to get his attention. Stupid me.
So I went back to the exhibition hall and ended up talking for a long time with a woman from BlogTalkRadio. They have an amazing system that allows you to create live audio webcasts, with integrated chats and callers, all in the browser. There’s no special download to record or listen to the show, and the player can be embedded anywhere. It’s really slick and they’re really nice. I’m going to be thinking of ways to use this for all my web projects.
At 11:00, I had to leave for a field trip at a local museum, that I had scheduled without realizing I had the conference that day. The field trip went really well — 15 students showed up (out of something like 33 in the class) and brought 4 friends, so we were a really large group. The Barrick Museum at UNLV has an amazing collection of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican art, from the collection of Mannetta Braunstein who has volunteered to lead my anthropology students through the galleries for the last three semesters now. If you’re in Vegas, you should definitely check out the Barrick!
With the field trip over, I headed back to the conference, hit the late afternoon session I talked about above, and then headed to Mark Cuban’s closing keynote. I have to admit, I didn’t really care much about Cuban — aside from making a huge business deal with a company that had no idea what it was doing (his billion-dollar sale of broadcast.com to Yahoo), what did he have to do with any off this? Why was he worth listening to? And for the first 15 minutes or so, I kept thinking this. “Be honest,” he said. It didn’t take a billion dollars to qualify him to say that — every blogger in the room knows that. “Be careful about ads.” Again, we know — many of us are attending sessions about ads precisely because we want to figure out how to deal with the pressures of advertising on our independent editorial voices. And so on — there was nothing that a Blogging 101 class wouldn’t cover in the first session.
But I enjoyed the keynote, and ended up staying even when it went over time, because a) as it happens, Cuban is a pretty engaging speaker, and b) it’s a different perspective. So many of us were there because of our passion for writing and a desire to make at least part of a living doing what we love, but Cuban isn’t really a writer, he’s someone in the public eye who found he had some things he needed to say. I think a lot of bloggers are in the same boat — they don’t care about writing, they care about telling their stories, and blogging, podcasting, making videos and uploading them to YouTube, Twittering, and all these other social media we’ve invented in the last few years offer them ways to do that. In the past, even someone with the clout of Mark Cuban would have had to, say, issue a press release or hold a press conference if he had something to say, and hope the media covered it fairly, if at all. Blogging gives Cuban some degree of control over how his stories are told — and some degree of feedback.
And along the way, I think he’s discovered, it’s fun, too.
So that was BlogWorld. I have a stack of business cards I need to go through and sites I need to look at and evaluate and see if they’re useful to me. I got some pretty good schwag, most of which has been distributed among my step-children already. I didn’t network too much, which is a shame — I’m not particularly good at it, but I’d hoped to meet at least a few fellow-minded bloggers. It’s a funny thing, though — I could have sat next to my favorite bloggers in the world and not known it, since I don’t know their faces and my eyes aren’t good enough to make out their names and sites on their badges without being painfully obvious. They oughtta print the site name HUGE so it can be seen quickly when people walk by! One other thing I noticed is that the conference was strongly conservative. There was a sub-conference of religious bloggers and another of milbloggers, which definitely shaped the overall feel of the event. In any case, I had fun and learned some things, and I’m looking forward to next year’s Expo.
I just noticed a bunch of quite old comments — like, 10 weeks old and older — that had gotten stuck in the moderation queue. If you’ve ever commented here and didn’t see your comment come up, I apologize; I hadn’t understood how Akismet’s spam filter worked in Drupal (I’ve only used it in WordPress before). If that sentence is sheer gobbledygook to you, let’s just say “I screwed up” and leave it at that.
A funny thing happened at the Barnes and Noble last week. I had stopped in to browse a little before an afternoon class, and picked up an issue of Writer’s Digest. As I checked out, the clerk — an older woman — asked if I was a writer.
“Yeah,” I responded, “I am.”
“What do you write?” she asked.
“Well, I’m a professor at the University, so a lot of my writing is academic stuff, but I also write quite a bit online, mostly how to-type articles.”
At the mention of my teaching, she lit up. “What do you teach?”
“I teach Women’s Studies at the university, and anthropology at the community college.” I’ll admit I wasn’t all that interested in a chat — I wanted to get some lunch before my class started, too — but I’m always willing to talk about my work with an interested party.
“Oh, I took women’s studies at San Jose State years ago. All the professors were hardcore bull dykes!”
Oh. So we’re not going to talk about my work, I see. To be honest, I was pretty taken aback — was the bookstore clerk trained to insult customers’ academic fields, or did she learn it in her spare time?
“Well, you know, there’s all sorts…” I started.
“I’m a femininist,” she declared.
Always one for the wordplay, I asked if that was the opposite of a femin-out-ist.
“No,” she replied, apparently missing my subtle linguistic tricksterism, “it’s the opposite of a feminist. I was one of the first card-carrying members of NOW, back when it started. The ACLU, too. But I learned better, believe me!”
“Well, yeah, ok,” I said, backing towards the door. “Well…”
“I have a master’s degree in child development, and [something something something — I wasn’t terribly interested at this point]. I worked with autistic children for years — you know you’re getting through to them when they say ‘fuck you’.”
“Well, I have to go,” I said, lamely, and walked out the door. I admit, while I generally give employees of stores I patronize a lot of latitude, having been a clerk for several years of my life, but seriously, I’ve never had a job, no matter how bad, where I felt justified in attacking a customer or free to use profanity with a customer (and I’m not exactly sure how we got to the autistic children thing). I probably should have complained, but I think the world’s better off with her behind the register at a B&N than going back to childhood development!
What a strange thing to happen. All I wanted was a magazine!
About 10 weeks ago now, my two oldest stepkids’ (12-year old boy and 11-year old girl) dad dropped a bomb on them (and us). During their bi-weekly weekend stay-over at his house, he sat them down and told them that him and their stepmother were going to go to a lawyer and file to terminate his relationship with them. The reason: they did not pay him and his wife enough respect.
That’s right — he told them he didn’t want to be their dad anymore and it was their fault.
There was more justification — they were poorly behaved, they squabbled, their mom lets them “run free” too much — but the takeaway is “bad kids, no daddy”. He also decided to let them know him and their mother had divorced because she cheated on him. (She didn’t, but he followed her around for two years, threatening her co-workers, sneaking home through the backdoor so he could catch her, and generally stalking her in an attempt to prove she was — with no success. Eventually he beat her up and held her at gunpoint tying to get a confession; she divorced him while he was in jail. I should add, the kids were 5 and 6 then; she hasn’t felt any need to remind them of why she divorced their dad, because you don’t involve your kids in the reasons for divorce — you love them and let them love both mommy and daddy whatever their parents’ beef with is/was with each other.) Eventually the kids agreed to “be better” and the matter was dropped.
Then he took them to dinner and brought them home. The kids came home furious and upset; the girl went straight to the bathroom and threw up. We didn’t know what had happened at dad’s, so we thought she had food poisoning; a call to dad was unanswered, but he answered when we called from her phone, and we asked him what they’d eaten, etc. That was the last reasonable conversation we’ve had with him.
An hour or so later, the whole story came out, and over the next few days we were in hell. Tried calling dad dozens of times, texted him, and so on. Now, the boy’s had some issues with his dad before, but the girl worships her dad, and so the implication of “you have to earn daddy’s love” hit her pretty hard. She cried a lot over the next couple days, including in class, and started sending him a lot of text messages — proving herself, basically. We called the school and talked to the counselor, who started seeing them when she could; she also got them into a group for children of divorced parents. And we got them into a child therapist’s office, though they’ve only been twice so far.
Two weeks later, things had started to return to normal when dad came to pick up the kids for his weekend. The boy decided he didn’t want to go, which we respected, but the girl did. We asked them to stay inside so we could talk to dad, since he hadn’t returned any calls for two weeks.
It went badly.
He refused to see that he’d done anything wrong, and was upset that my partner was “filling them with psycho-babble BS” and had gotten them into counseling. When I spoke up, he told me to keep my mouth shut; that kind of male “staring-down pissing contest thing” was in the making when my partner stepped into his line of sight and continued. A few minutes later, I said something else; “I told you to keep out of this,” he said, to which I replied “I’m sorry, that’s not going to happen. I’m with them every day and have to deal with this stuff!” (I should add that I’m cleaning the language up again; use your imagination.) “Fine,” he said, and drove off.
Without his daughter. By the time we got upstairs, he had already called her and told her we wouldn’t let him take her, which was a lie and fortunately she knew it. She was crying, and she wanted to go over to her daddy’s, so we drove her over. She called and told him, and he told her she could only come if she came to the door alone. The whole way over she begged her mom not to walk her to the door; she was literally terrified that if she didn’t follow daddy’s directions daddy wouldn’t accept her. When we got there she wanted us to leave her off a half-block away; instead, mom found a place to stand where she could see the door and let her walk up alone.
Bad mojo, right? Let me tell you, I haven’t even got to the bad stuff yet — but this post is already long. I should have been posting about this as it happened, but it’s too hard — and we’re spending most of our free time dealing with the fallout. I’ve tried to keep to my rules; after a couple of weeks of defending him (”no, he still loves you, he’s just confused”) with no response from him, we told the kids that we weren’t going to try to explain his actions any more and they’d have to ask him why he said the things he said, but though I’m not making up good things to say about him anymore, I’ve been careful not to say anything bad about him if I could help it. In the next post on this (Part II, within the next week if I can manage), though, you’ll see that I couldn’t always help it.
The issue, at least at the time, seemed to be his feeling of not having control over the kids. He knows if he hits them (their step-mother beats the hell out of their 11-year old stepsister) mom will come down on him with the full force of the law, so he hasn’t ever hit them (I think he slapped his daughter once right after the divorce, and learned well that this would not happen again). His parenting agreement gives their mom full deciding authority about their school, activities, lifestyle, etc., and I suppose he feel left out (emasculated, even — masculinity means a lot to him, that kind of small-minded, muscle-bound, chest-thumping masculinity that gets upset when mom has any sort of power). And of course, there’s some sort of control/jealousy/rivalry thing going on with me, which is understandable — in the year I’ve been here I’ve spent more days with the kids than he has in the last five. And of course he blames my partner for his lack of access to good-paying jobs; his use of a gun in a crime precludes him from working with any government agency, and he was pretty badly embarrassed when his wife set up a cakewalk job for him through a contact in the school district that fell apart when they did the background check.
So he’s angry at his ex-wife, after some seven years. But there is absolutely no excuse for taking it out on the kids — adults talk to adults about their problems, not 11-year olds. We’ve struggled in vain to figure out what kind of problems he could have with the kids. Because here’s the truth: the kids are amazing, and I’m not just saying that because I’m close to them. Everywhere we go, complete strangers compliment us on their behavior. Parents in the neighborhood compare their kids to ours and wish their kids were as well-behaved. They are A students, in a competitive science-based magnet school, with a full slate of after-school programs and sports. Their teachers nominate them for awards and trips, like a junior leadership forum in DC next spring. There are 12-year olds in Las Vegas who are out killing people and whose parents are scared to death of them; our12-year old says “pleased to meet you” when he meets a new person, and calls them “sir” or “ma’am”!
There’s more, lots more, but this is long already and I’ve got to get ready for work. Part II coming soon…
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