The Plain Dealer published this op-ed, written by me, on May 5, 2005. I cannot state any more clearly why I believe parents should share with other parents, “how they do it,” and particularly a parent, such as Sarah Palin, who is holding out that status as a qualification for being second in line to the United States President.

There’s no shortage of documentation about how mothers feel crushed between simultaneous responsibilities. Earlier this year, Newsweek published a cover story based on Judith Warner’s book, “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety,” which explores women’s feelings when their career woman role collides with being a mother. A New York Times piece, called “Mommy (and me),” detailed the explosion in online chronicles of parents’ angst. And a new industry — parent coaching — seeks to capitalize on the critical mass of worry.

Unfortunately, this type of sympathy perpetuates the very assumption we need to attack: that integrating motherhood into our lives can and should be performed perfectly, without anxiety and in harmony with all other desires. I say this as a mother whose family would nominate her to be the poster child for Warner’s book faster than she could speed dial the pediatrician.

We need to refocus the debate and affirm a mother’s efforts without applying a win-lose analysis to them. We need to stop pandering to the belief that a mother can function perfectly if only she watches enough episodes of “Supernanny,” digests enough parenting manuals and increases the memory in her PalmPilot.

Take me, for example.

By the time I turned 30, I’d earned two graduate degrees, gotten married and was pregnant with my first child. Over the course of eight years, I took three maternity leaves and worked a variety of schedules at a large, mental-health agency. For the last three years, I’ve worked 10 to 15 hours weekly from home. I circumnavigate the same six streets up to nine times a day as I take my kids to and from school, dance, art, friends’ homes and birthday parties. I volunteer in the schools and attend a variety of monthly meetings in the evenings.

What’s not perfect?

Well, I’ve had multiple fender benders, locked my kids in the car and locked all of us out of the car (both inadvertently), blown three tires in four months by driving over a stroller, a bungee cord and a curb (I was late to the carpool pickup line), mailed thank you cards two months after receiving the present and, this year, I sunk to a new low: preschool guests at my son’s birthday party received candy-filled Chuck E. Cheese goody bags because I was too lazy to scour stores for politically correct items like puzzles or inexpensive books.

Heck, I’ve consumed three brownies in five minutes just exposing these flaws.

And still, I don’t view myself as a slacker (loser) mom or a super (winner) mom.

Why not? Because no matter how many trips I take to the body shop or how many gallons of gas my car guzzles, my situation isn’t tough, or even undesirable. I’m lucky, and my kids are lucky, too.

I’m not single, unemployed, financially poor, in my teens, or physically or mentally disabled, and none of my kids require assistance beyond my means or abilities. To rant about my life as difficult, when thousands of mothers who bear the burden of these special circumstances live within miles of me, would be insensitive and insulting, to say the least.

I’ve also always expected that motherhood would demand that I drop a ball or two in order to catch others, no matter how big or heavy they got.

Where did I get this idea?

From my own mother, who married at 19, had three kids by 26 and viewed millions of fruit flies as a lab researcher. Her intellectual passion occasionally kindled embers of ambition, like when she studied at night to take the law school entrance exam. But my father’s home business consumed her talents, the family needed her job’s health benefits and her law school plans flamed out. Yet, at 66 years old, she still rejects the label of martyr.

When beliefs about how mothers should fulfill numerous roles clash with reality, we need to correct those beliefs. We must not settle for merely educating others — through our complaints — about the pain or impossibility of role integration. Rather than cater to the unattainable and destructive goal of perfection, we need to change it. Through our actions and our words, we must model a balanced and achievable image of motherhood.

How else will our children learn to value it?

Zimon is a contributing editor and columnist for Cleveland Family magazine.

Republicans may not like the type of questioning that the American media is subjecting McCain’s shock VP pick to, but it isn’t only American journalists asking ‘personal questions’ about Governor Sarah Palin, who could soon be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

For Switzerland’s Nachrichten newspaper, Patrik Etschmayer writes in part:

“Even if she tries to smile it away and to make it look pretty: The pregnancy of her daughter - in contrast to other pregnant U.S. teenagers in a financially comfortable situation - can be directly attributed to the twisted sex education policies of Sarah Palin and other conservative Christians, which still assert (despite clear statistics to the contrary) that vows of celibacy keep teenagers from having sex.”

Read the rest of this entry »

War zone security has arrived in the US as cities are shut down at night by police struggling to control a deadly wave of gun crime, reports The Independent.

“The police state has not arrived quite yet but it may feel like it to the residents of some American cities, where a handful of embattled mayors and police chiefs are imposing strict and sometimes sweeping curfews as a last resort to quell new waves of gun violence this summer.” More here…

Here is my earlier post about schools allowing teachers to carry guns to schools…Please click here.

With school starting up again, so comes a long list of college presidents calling for a new drinking age debate:

The movement called the Amethyst Initiative began quietly recruiting presidents more than a year ago to provoke national debate about the drinking age.

Bloggers are more than happy to oblige. Atrios says let them drink, then adds a proposal of his own:

Perhaps they should consider my cunning plan to let 18 year olds have a drinking license or a driver’s license but not both, which would have the added benefit of helping my plot to make everyone move to Manhattan increasing the appeal of less car dependent locations.

Ezra Klein calls 21 a bizarre marker:

Demanding that kids refrain from drinking for three years after they become legal adults and, in most cases, leave their parent’s supervision, is a bit odd. “Welcome to adulthood, except when it comes to beverage choice!” But this could point the way towards a grand new education policy scheme: Drinking age is 18…if you attain a college-worthy GPA. Otherwise, 21. Implement that and you’ll blow those other, way lamer, educational attainment proposals out of the water.

Andrew Sullivan says Ezra’s a genius! Overlawyered’s Walter Olson says lowering the drinking age is a good idea. “MADD, of course, is having a fit.” He’s got good links; one of which led me to The Volokh Conspiracy’s vigorous comment debate thread. Ryan Grim says, “Fine with me, but can we keep the 18 year olds out of my local bar, at least?”

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week a California judge ruled that trying a 14-year-old boy accused of murder in an adult court does not violate the constitution:

“I cannot say that this is unconstitutional,” said Ventura County Superior Court Judge Douglas Daily.

Teenage defendant Brandon McInerney of Oxnard is charged with first-degree murder and a hate crime in connection with the Feb. 12 killing of classmate Larry King, 15, who sometimes wore makeup and told friends he was gay.

Today a Ventura County Star editorial pleads with District Attorney Greg Totten to use his discretion to rethink that decision:

The Star Editorial Board respectfully asks Mr. Totten to step out of his office, ask for counsel outside his prosecutor peers to lessen the real influence of groupthink, look at the question anew and reflect again on the circumstances before making a final decision. (His initial decision was made within just two days of the shooting and his office had left open the possibility it could change as more facts were learned.)

We hope Mr. Totten also considers the information that has come forward recently in the national discussion of whether children should be tried as adults. A November 2007 report by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law organization in Montgomery, Ala., stated that the United States is one of the few countries in the world that allows children to be prosecuted as adults and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

The majority world opinion of civilized nations is that juveniles should not be subject to dying in prison — certainly not 14-year-olds.

There is science on the competence of 14-year-olds that ought to inform our legal and ethical decision as to whether or not we should declare kids adults fit for trial. William Saletan, for example, has reported:

In a forthcoming review of studies, Laurence Steinberg of Temple University observes that at ages 12 to 13, only 11 percent of kids score at an average (50th percentile) adult level on tests of intellectual ability. By ages 14 to 15, the percentage has doubled to 21. By ages 16 to 17, it has doubled again to 42. After that, it levels off. […]

Steinberg reports that on tests of psychosocial maturity, kids are much slower to develop. From ages 10 to 21, only one of every four young people scores at an average adult level. By ages 22 to 25, one in three reaches that level. By ages 26 to 30, it’s up to two in three.

Emphasis mine. The case at hand presents a psychosocial challenge that was daunting for all involved. In fact, the evidence indicates it pretty much overwhelmed all of the adults involved.

Arguably, what we have here is the scapegoating of kids for the inability of adult individuals and institutions to cope with the complexities of psychosocial challenges of our own making. We built this society; we birthed those kids; we raise and educate them!

Some of the indicators become clear in last week’s Newsweek Cover Story — no matter what your political persuasion (or perspective on the objectivity or lack thereof of the reporters of the story). Extended illustrative excerpts follow. Read the rest of this entry »

If puberty happens in middle school, why shouldn’t we expect lgbt awareness would begin then too?

From today’s WaPo, Owning His Gay Identity — at 15 Years Old; Youths Coming Out Sooner, but Protections Against Harassment Lag:

Saro, who first said he liked boys to a classmate in sixth grade, is like many of today’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youths who openly discuss their sexual orientation and identity with friends, and sometimes family, before entering high school. In doing so, experts say, these youths are escaping the isolation of generations before them but also finding themselves vulnerable to harassment — or worse. A California eighth-grader who expressed interest in asking another boy to be his valentine was fatally shot in February in a case that drew national attention.

“Within any given school system, there may be a very accepting crowd and a very hateful crowd,” said Robert-Jay Green, executive director of the Rockway Institute in San Francisco, a national center for LGBT research and public policy. “You have to find a way to avoid the people who will hurt you and keep close to the group that will accept you.”

In recent years, 110 Gay Straight Alliance clubs, which are common in high schools nationwide, have sprouted in middle schools, including nine in Maryland and Virginia. Kevin Jennings, the founder of the first club, said he “never anticipated” they would also form in middle grades. His organization, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, is creating age-appropriate pamphlets to respond to the trend.

This year, students in 1,046 middle schools took part in the Day of Silence, a protest against LGBT intolerance, organizers said, double the participation level of the previous year.

“Unlike people of my generation, where there was very little visibility and a great sense of sadness, these kids know gay people are out there,” Jennings said. “They have a language now to understand their feelings.”

And there’s this:

The first time Saro said aloud what he had always felt — that he liked boys — came when he lived in Prince George’s County. The words tumbled out, Saro said, as he and another sixth-grader were walking home. The boy shrugged it off with a “So?”

Later that year, that boy called him an anti-gay slur. When Saro ran to tell the teacher, according to a letter his parents wrote to the school, he was told: “Well, you act like one, so you should be used to it by now.”

The issues are difficult and complex — for parents and for kids. The article is sensitive and complete. Please read it.

Now that Jesse Jackson has reassured us about Barack Obama’s genitals, it’s time to consider what prompted the Reverend’s rage–the candidate’s criticism of African-American fathers for failing their children–as part of a larger subtext of this election.

On all sides, it involves issues about American manhood in the 21st century and the troubling rites of passage from one generation to the next.

Start with George W. Bush who was moved to take up a war left unfinished by paternal prudence and turned toward “a higher Father” for guidance.

Enter John McCain, son and grandson of Admirals who, after writing “Faith of My Fathers,” is campaigning for the White House based on the premise that the Head of State in an age of terror should be a reassuring paterfamilias.

Then there is Obama, searching for a father he never knew in “Dreams from My Father” and, in his presidential campaign, calling out men who aren’t there for their children and challenging them to take up their responsibilities.

Read the rest of this entry.

Whether you’re white, black, or anything else:

It’s now cliche for white folks looking to justify their own paranoia and fears to invoke rowdy black kids on the train, with no parents, acting a fool. Word up, I hate it to. But my ability to see this threw a racial lens is undercut by one observable fact–white kids act a fool in full view of their parents. In the last three months, I’ve seen a white child hit his mother, tell her mother to shut up, and run up and down a subway car, ignoring his parents pleas to stop. Yesterday, on my plane to Denver, I watched a white kid get up and walk the aisle–while the plane was ascending. He kept going even after the stewardess warned him.

That’s Ta-Nehisi Coates arguing for no more complaints about how black kids act in public please. He says he’s been watching scenes like that his whole life. And that white parents are far more permissive than black parents.

He’s got some pretty good stats to back him up. Black parents are more likely to spank and…

…black parents punish their children more than white parents in all ways. If you’re black and you misbehave, you’re both more likely to get spanked and more likely to lose your allowance than your white neighbor, who in turn is both more likely to get spanked and more likely to lose his allowance than the Hispanic kid down the street. So on average, poor people spank more and withdraw allowances less, whereas black people spank more and withdraw allowances more.

Coates concludes:

I know the white kid with his mother is just rude, while the black kid is “scary,” but to me, they’re just annoying–both of them.

Worth keeping in mind over a long hot summer holiday weekend.

Boston Herald:

In the strongest rebuff yet of the national “pregnancy pact” story that has scandalized Gloucester, top city and school officials say there’s no evidence that nearly half of the 17 pregnant teens at Gloucester High conspired to have babies together.

“We have not been able to confirm the existence of a pact,” said Gloucester Mayor Carolyn Kirk, trying to defuse the national story on the school’s teen baby mama drama. “The information from the principal has not been verified by any other source.”

Principal Joseph Sullivan, in an explosive story published last week in Time magazine, said about half the 17 pregnant teens at Gloucester High made a pact to get pregnant, even high-fiving each other when they had a positive test at a school clinic.

Here’s AP video of this afternoon’s press conference. Here’s the original Time story. In their follow-up they stand by it.

In my post last night I was highly critical of one writer’s inclination to criminalize the girls.

Developing… Update added minutes later… Anatomy of a media-made pact. From the horse’s mouth, GloucesterTimes.com:

Through stories and editorials, we have occasionally noted that at least some of the 18 girls who became pregnant this past school year did so intentionally, with the idea that it might be “cool” to “become moms” and raise the babies together. Could that be considered some sort of informal “pact”? Maybe. It depends on how formally one defines that word. But one thing has become certain over the past two days — that’s the fact that “pact” can certainly be a magic word. As soon as Time magazine reported the presence of a “pregnancy pact” — as its headline blared in its online edition Thursday — this story, which had already sparked local and some national talk about teen pregnancy and the distribution of contraceptives in schools, exploded worldwide.

How? Well, shortly after Time posted the story, national news network CNN — a corporate partner of Time Warner, and thus a close partner of Time — added the “pregnancy pact” story to its online and broadcast reports. It wasn’t long after that the other major news networks joined in, and the frenzy was on.

By Thursday night — before the print edition of Time was even on newsstands — Gloucester and its teen “pregnancy pact” were featured on the CBS Evening News, and Patrick Anderson, our reporter on the story, was called upon for a guest spot on MSNBC’s Dan Abrams show. By yesterday morning, I was getting calls and doing live radio interviews with WABC in New York, with BBC World News in London and with Ireland national radio in Dublin. All, of course, were looking for more information about a story that has literally thrust — or plunged — Gloucester into the global spotlight.

In the midst of all of this, our own coverage has maintained a different focus. Yesterday’s Times focused on the fact that none of the pregnant girls — not one — dropped out of school this year, a fact officials credit in large part to what has become something of a controversial day-care facility at the school. And while today’s story leads with local officials questioning the status of any “pact,” (Please see news story, Page 1) it also includes coverage of the media’s sudden, intense interest in our community on the heels of the explosive Time story. For Gloucester, we believed that had, indeed, become part of the story as well.

So, you may ask, why has your community’s newspaper covered this global story like that — with only peripheral mention of any “pact”? Because, frankly, no one had used that term in describing the girls’ intentions to us — as no one apparently had with local school and other officials, either.

Answer that Time Magazine!!! Parenthetically, more confirmation of my point last night, heedless adults taking thoughtless advantage of kids for our needs. In this case the need for a good story! There are doubtless real, complex, nuanced, important issues and problems that need to be addressed in this story. I’m not sure we’ve done anyone any service! (I’m still reading…) I hate it when I rant! It was the principal who gave the quote. Sounds like he got carried away.

The story would have benefited from more caution all around. None of the girls would be interviewed; a recent graduate of the school who “thinks she knows why these girls wanted to get pregnant” is quoted instead. You can get by with that I guess but it’s not the best journalistic practice in the book…

RELATED: Roy Edroso has a roundup of Rightblogger reaction to the Time story.

THE NEXT DAY ON TODAY: The Time reporter, Kathleen Kingsbury, on The Today Show, 8:12 a.m. EDT, “…repeatedly the story I heard out there was that there was a group of girlfriends who decided to get pregnant and raise their babies together…” Hey??? I didn’t hear the word pact! Did you??? BAD REPORTORIAL PRACTICES!!! Confirmed on Today!!!

Methinks she doth protest too much…

Geveryl Robinson tells us in the Savannah Morning News today that she saw the Today Show this week. She didn’t like what she saw:

I saw a story about 17 girls in a Gloucester, Mass., high school who made a pregnancy pact to get pregnant by any means necessary because they wanted to raise their children together.

And that’s exactly what they did.

Now this upsets Ms…. er, I’m thinking that in this case “Ms.” just won’t do! The appropriate honorific really has to be either “Miss” or “Mrs.”… Robinson and she goes on at some length about it. I’ll spare you the rosy prose and cut to her proposed solution:

One of the women from the town - I believe she was an attorney - said that they had to try to figure out what to do with all the guys who were having sex with girls who were 15.

“That’s statutory rape” she said. You think?

The parents of these little baby makers need to be slapped… HARD.

Then the baby makers and the men - correction - boys they had sex with need to be slapped… HARDER.

The last time I checked, statutory rape was a serious crime. In Massachusetts, offenders can receive up to a life sentence. So there’s nothing to figure out. Do to these guys what the state of Georgia did to Genarlow Wilson when, at the age of 17, he had consensual sex with a 15-year-old girl. Put them behind bars.

Now I know there are some people who would say locking the kids up wouldn’t do any good. But I don’t just think the boys should be locked up. I think the girls should go to the slammer as well.

Flummoxed, I hardly know where to start. Count me among those who believe locking up kids won’t do any good. It will do great harm! And I know just a little bit about the topic. I live in a town with six state prisons — prisons are economic development in rural towns like mine — and I sit on the advisory board of the youth prison. I invite anyone who thinks a young person convicted of consensual sex belongs in a prison to go visit one!

For God’s sake, do you really think the punishment fits the crime?

But let’s just say for a minute that you do. I promise you, you put that kid in that prison and he (or she) is going to come out a prisoner. There are real prisoners, real criminals, in there! What have you done? Made another prisoner! And what has it cost you? Prisons are expensive! Fortunately, most of the law enforcement professionals I know understand that. Apparently it’s the politicians — and the public — who don’t!

The Genarlow Wilson case that Robinson cites made Georgia a national embarrassment and was overturned by our Supreme Court (Genarlow is now attending Morehouse College and his attorney was named Newsmaker of the Year last year in a 7,000 word piece by the Fulton County Daily Report). It was messy and complicated but few believe it should have gone the way it did and the laws have been changed as a consequence.

To throw kids in jail is to give up. It is an abdication of our adult responsibility. And it is a shameful attempt to blame our failing on the kids. A look at the divorce, infidelity, child abuse, and abandonment rates suggests just how utterly and completely hypocritical the fine upstanding adult population is that seeks to lock up the kids for doing the same thing their parents’ generation did! Further, evidence indicates these kids want information about sex from their parents. The parents aren’t giving it!

What’s worse, instead of talking to our kids about sex, we talk about abstinence, then turn our backs on them as we sexualize, fetishize, and ogle them in every advertising, media, and pornographic (where’s the middle-aged porn?) representation of them in our culture. Then we blame them and want to lock them up for our our desires! Kids don’t need us to leer at them — they need us to talk to them!!! And they don’t need us to criminalize them because we are afraid of either our desire or theirs!!!

So, what of the legitimate interest of the law to protect young people? William Saletan wrote a piece last fall in Slate on rethinking the age of consent.  “Age-span” provisions in the law have become common. Using the research that finds differences in the age of physical, cognitive and emotional readiness, he would extend those provisions accordingly and finds the beginnings of a logical scheme for regulating teen sex:

I’d draw the object line at 12, the cognitive line at 16, and the self-regulatory line at 25. I’d lock up anyone who went after a 5-year-old. I’d come down hard on a 38-year-old who married a 15-year-old. And if I ran a college, I’d discipline professors for sleeping with freshmen. When you’re 35, “she’s legal” isn’t good enough.

What I wouldn’t do is slap a mandatory sentence on a 17-year-old, even if his nominal girlfriend were 12. I know the idea of sex at that age is hard to stomach. I wish our sexual, cognitive, and emotional maturation converged in a magic moment we could call the age of consent. But they don’t.

OTHER RESOURCES: Recently John Stossel did a full hour on The Age of Consent which features 14 video reports still available online. The Midwest Teen Sex Show is a video podcast done on a shoestring budget by three 20somethings who say they’re frustrated by the relatively chaste sex-education taught in high school. Go see Juno. I sensed an emergent millennial morality in it and the ultrasound scene is particularly relevant to this post…

N.B.: None of this is to suggest that I advocate kids having sex. I advocate sex education and adults talking appropriately with young people about sex.

South Australia (SA) is often celebrated as the Down Under’s food and wine centre. Its capital city, the picturesque and laidback Adelaide, and its suburbs have rightly earned a well-deserved sobriquet of being the “cultural capital” of the country (and among the top liveable cities in the world). As a visitor here, I can vouch for the excellence of wine and the enjoyable concerts!

I hope to explore Australia’s extraordinary natural environment, history and indigenous culture…and the great outback. (Meanwhile I learn that “Aussie” Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman are set to star in an “epic” Australian outback movie with the goal of promoting the country’s spirit and luring more tourists Down Under, reports Reuters.)

A memorable Adelaide event that I attended recently was the “Young Accompanists On Show”, where one of the performers was 13-year-old Candy Liang. Her parents arrived from China only three years ago to start a business here, further contributing towards making this city a vibrating multicultural hub.

“Young Accompanists on Show”, which was presented by the Accompanists’ Guild of SA at Pilgrim Church as part of the 25th Anniversary celebrations of the Guild, was supported by the Adelaide City Council. I wonder how many civic councils/bodies in the world encourage young students/musicians in the field of classical music in their cities and suburbs. It was indeed a grand gesture — to offer two concerts by leading musicians, a lunch and a masterclass for young performers.

…All for free with a view to focussing on young accompanists and bringing different groups of people into the City for a cultural event. Having an Adelaide trained pianist (David Barnard — who at just 26 is now working very successfully out of London as a freelance pianist) at the centre of this event was an added bonus. David listened to the concert (mainly secondary school piano/wind duos), performed with three wind soloists from the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in the concert, joined approximately 150 for lunch, and then conducted a very stimulating master class with the young performers.

Also, among the audience was the internationally-acclaimed pianist Malcolm Martineau. “I don’t think there has ever been anything quite like this in Adelaide before,” said a delighted Diana Harris, the moving spirit behind the musical event. “There are regular Wednesday lunch-time concerts but never for free and never with lunch and a M class added.” Read the rest of this entry »

In the wake of Father’s Day, John McCain and Barack Obama offer, among other contrasts, a confrontation between old ideas about manhood and new–the hard-drinking, womanizing Navy flyboy turned politician and the New Age husband in equal partnership with a powerful wife.

Stereotypes, yes, but the biographical facts are beyond dispute. On his nostalgia tour after clinching the nomination, McCain talked about misadventures in the places he was visiting.

“I remember with affection the unruly passions of youth,” he said in Meridian, Miss., where he had organized an off-base toga party for military buddies and local girls.

At his Virginia high school, he recalled that his disobedience earned him the nickname “worst rat” for sneaking away to Washington burlesque houses and bars.

Outside the Naval Academy in Annapolis, McCain described “nocturnal sojourns” and the hundreds of miles he was forced to march for insubordination.

“I wanted,” McCain recalled in Pensacola, “to live the life of a daring, brash, fun-loving flyer…In truth, the image I aspired to was, in the end, only irresistible to one person–me, and it was a very childish attraction.”

McCain’s vision of manhood comes from life as a carousing son and grandson of admirals and then his sobering experiences as a POW and a Washington politician.

Obama, on the other hand, as he tells it in his books, was an uprooted young man searching for a sense of the father he barely knew and, despite experimentation with drugs, a serious and ambitious young man, described as “grounded, motivated and poised” by his peers.

As they present themselves to voters, McCain and Obama are both remarkable products of their life histories, representing a contrast in styles of American manhood that go far beyond their other generational differences.

Cross-posted from my blog.

“He was the meaning of joy,” said John Nordmeyer, an uncle.

There are a bunch of middle aged men across the nation who tonight sit quietly in their living rooms. The TV set might be off.

They didn’t want to eat much tonight.

Many are at their laptops now, silently tap tap tapping out messages to reach out to others. To try to find some, something. Words would help. But, maybe accurate words would actually hurt.

When my husband heard the news at work, he’d immediately sent me an email. The email header said something this rough gruff guy never says. The subject line read: Please pray with me. His email ended, “I’m so sad for them I can’t even talk about this.” I called him right away. He said in that semi-strangled voice that men use when they feel everything and yet numb all at the same time: “Baby we lost four of our boys.”

I had heard; a call had come from a post-trauma colleague just before who was 20 miles outside Little Sioux camp. It’s bad, my friend said. It’s bad. More than half injured bad. 4 dead.

My husband is a scout master, has just raised by hand along with other hardworking scoutmasters an entire litter of little guys for the last many years. They just crossed over from cub scouts to boy scouts three months ago.

I go to banquets with long tables covered with paper tablecloths and eat baked beans and barbeque and soggy corn. I sit through the many awards and beadings and orders conferred on grown men (and women) of every age and condition …those who give huge amounts of their lives weeknights and weekends to teach wood lathing, survival skills, soup kitchen hash slinging, cooking, sewing, finances, stalwartness, honor and manners to a bunch of darling fissioning young scamps.

Then one day, it all comes together. The young scouts line up and their shirts are not sloppy at the belt line anymore, their ties are on straight instead of flying sideways They carry on a conversation that has content instead of giggling like squirrels, they pray together and mean it, play together and achieve together, and mean it.

There are some who critique the Boy Scouts for various reasons, but tonight, with two dead boys aged a mere 13, and the other two dead boys having merely 14 years on this earth… that they are gone after a fierce tornado hit a special Boy Scout camp, a camp called to rendezvous under the banner of Leadership… well, in the Scouts, even though people don’t know each other when they live hundreds and thousands of miles apart, they know each other. They do. Brothers by different mothers. Siempre.

Details about the four boys lives follow here…
Read the rest of this entry »

To arms, citizens, to arms!

I will confess that I do, on occasion, make jokes with some of my more Libertarian leaning friends about rounding up all the conservatives and liberals and sending them off to reeducation camps once President Barr is sworn into office. All humor aside, though, I’m opposed to internment for anyone. Stories like this, however, make it awfully tempting to start rounding up some vegans and putting them on trains heading west.

Parents of ill vegan girl may face police

A 12-YEAR-OLD girl in Scotland brought up by her parents on a strict vegan diet has been admitted to hospital with a degenerative bone condition said to have left her with the spine of an 80-year-old woman.

The girl, who has been fed on a strict meat and dairy-free diet from birth, is said to have a severe form of rickets and to have suffered a number of fractured bones.

Even given my natural distaste for the subject, I tend to adopt a “live and let live” attitude toward vegans, providing they are independent adults. As I see it, it simply means less competition for the available supply of Kansas City ribeyes for yours truly. What you do with your own body is your business. But when this philosophy is taken to extremes and applied to children who may have no choice and not know any better (particularly during their formative years when nutrition is so critical) the stakes go up. How people can continue this madness when we keep hearing about case after case after case of vegans literally starving their children to death is a mystery to me.

And don’t even get me started on the complete loons who try to force a vegan diet on their dogs and cats! (I need to start typing more quickly at this point so I can finish this column before my head explodes, so please forgive any typos.) You might be able to dance around some of the realities of omnivore living when it comes to your own body, but your helpless canine and feline wards are carnivores, like it or not. The odd bit of grass they may chew on to relieve indigestion on occasion does nothing to change the fact that, in the wild, they live on a diet of other animals.

Personal liberty and freedom are wonderful things, and a cornerstone of our society. You can go out and join a plants’ rights movement if you really feel so inclined. But when you start imposing these rules on vulnerable children and helpless animals, you have crossed a line which society should not accept.

To arms, citizens! Herd those vegans into the internment camps before it’s too late!

If the criminals are multiplying fast courtesy the internet, the same technology is also helping the police to nab them. Australian law enforcement agencies have so far arrested 70 persons, in the 19 to 81 age group, for child pornography and abuse offences across the country. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that a further 20 people have been issued with summons to appear in court where they will be charged with possessing child exploitation material. More arrests are expected in coming weeks and months.

Those arrested include community leaders, a police officer, a teacher and a youth worker following the nation’s biggest anti-pedophile investigation. ” ‘The possession of the images, the downloading of the images was the tip of the iceberg,’ said Andrew Colvin, the Australian Federal Police’s national manager of high-tech crime operations. ‘It’s the networks. It’s the children they might have access to. It’s the potential for grooming and procuring that these people are involved in as well’.

“During Operation Centurion, police became aware that offenders were using web-enabled devices such as Playstation 3, X-Box and new-generation mobile phones to access the images. ‘They don’t have to worry about a family member checking the history on the family computer, or ask why they are spending so much time on it,’ said one investigator. ‘Most people don’t know games consoles can be linked to the web’.

“Perhaps most disconcerting is the scale of the internet child exploitation. As many as 3.5 million child abuse images are on the internet and cannot readily be removed. Identifying and locating children in the photos can be difficult.

“The social networking revolution that has swept the internet has been adopted by purveyors of child exploitation. Child porn chat rooms pop up, then close almost as quickly. Here, pedophiles trade images, alert each other to new ones and share tips on how to groom potential victims and avoid detection by police, work colleagues and family members.”

More here…

The medical fraternity has hailed as “miracle” the birth of an “ectopic” baby at Darwin in Australia on Thursday. The healthy 2.8 kg baby survived despite developing in her mother’s ovary instead of her uterus. The delighted parents have named their daughter Durga, after one of the most powerful goddesses in the Hindu pantheon.

Most ectopic pregnancies end in miscarriage or are terminated early because of the risk to the mother, reports the BBC. “The mother and baby were both doing well.

“The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said the odds of survival in such a pregnancy were ‘no more than one in a million’. Just 1-2% of all pregnancies are ectopic, and in 95% of those cases the egg is fertilised in the fallopian tubes on its way to the uterus. In 0.5% of cases, including this one, the baby grows inside the ovary itself.

” ‘We’re calling it a miracle,’ said Robyn Cahill of the Darwin Private Hospital in Australia’s Northern Territory, where Mrs Meera Thangarajah, 34, gave birth to Durga. Robyn added: ‘Only 1 in 40,000 fertilisations implant in the ovary, and it was unheard of for one of those foetuses grow to full term.” More here…

Ravi Thangarajah, 40, father of the “miracle” baby did not quite understand the gravity of the situation, and what the fuss was all about. “The doctor and the paediatrician came in and told me it was like a miracle baby — you’re one of the luckiest men in the world at the moment,” he said. Mr Thangarajah added he had to “go to Google” to find out about the “miracle” condition. More here…

This guest voice is by Martha Randolph Carr, whose latest book, A Place to Call Home, is about the reemergence of U.S. orphanages.

The Polygamist Children
by Martha Randolph Carr

The decision by a Texas court to remove in one grand sweep 400 children from a polygamist sect was the right thing to do even if it sent a chill down the spine of every parent in America.

It’s unnerving because all of us who have kids, myself included, know that some of the decisions we have made as parents haven’t turned out well. If we were held up to public scrutiny there would inevitably be some explaining to do. The difference is, we meant well and stayed within the law.

Our choices were based on the highest possible list of what we thought was best for our children at the time. Unfortunately, we brought our fears, misplaced aspirations and friends or family’s advice along with us. That can lead to some bone-headed decisions about putting little Jane into too many extra-curricular activities or fighting for our small Bobby to be on the track team even though he can’t run.

But we were still operating from a set of boundaries of what we would allow our children to do that were within distinct broad-based parameters. Giving permission to a teenager to get married and to a man who already has a wife and kids is never one of them. In fact, having sex as an adult with a minor is against the law in this country and is viewed as harmful to the child’s well-being. Marrying the teenager might make the sexual act legal in a very few states but doesn’t make it any less harmful. It only gives a wink-wink nature to the crime and says we’re supposed to look the other way.Tough luck, kid, it says, while the rest of us are expected to mind our own business.
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At the close of the second of NPR’s two part look at how parents are addressing their children’s gender-identity issues which aired last week, Robert, the father of Violet, who is “absolutely certain” that she is “genuinely transgender,” explains how he finds himself “almost offended” when people suggest that he and his family have been too quick to embrace a transgender identity:

“It puzzles me because we even have well-intentioned parents who we care about and who know us … say, ‘Well she’s too young to know!’ Well, when did you know you were a girl? When did I know I was a boy? I knew my whole life, I can’t tell you exactly when, but it wasn’t like I was 10 and realized, ‘Oh gee, I must be a boy!’ ” Robert says. “What people fail to realize is they made that decision way earlier than that. It just happened that their gender identity and their anatomy matched.”

The story’s focus is a highly controversial treatment, monthly injections of a medication for preteen kids to postpone puberty and avoid developing the physical attributes of the sex they were born with. The family found a therapist and after a two-month evaluation, a gender identity disorder diagnosis was rendered; on a family vacation, Armand, their son, would “transition” to Violet, their daughter.

When I am asked how old I was when I realized that I was gay, I answer, “five.”  How I knew when I was that young, I do not know, but that’s my honest answer. So my sympathies are with those parents. My sympathies are, however, complicated by the condition known as Body Integrity Identity Disorder. Also called Apotemnophilia, and Amputee Identity Disorder, I first learned of the condition in an 8,800 word Atlantic piece from December 2000, by Carl Elliott, titled A New Way to Be Mad:

I am on the phone with Max Price, a graphic designer in Santa Fe, who has offered to talk to me about apotemnophilia. (He has asked me to change his name and the details of his life and history if I write about him, and I have.) Price is a charming man, articulate and well-read, and despite my initial uneasiness about calling him, I am enjoying our conversation. I had corresponded by e-mail with a number of wannabes, but had not managed to talk to any of them until now. The conversation has taken on an easy intellectual tone, more like a discussion between colleagues than an interview. Price is telling me about his efforts to get doctors to adopt some guidelines for deciding when a person with apotemnophilia should have surgery. I am tossing out ideas, trying out some of my thoughts, and I wonder aloud about a relationship between apotemnophilia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. I ask Price whether he feels that his desire is more like an obsession, a fantasy, or a wish. He says, “Well, it was definitely like an obsession. Until I cut my leg off, of course.”

That brings me up short. I had been unaware that he had actually gone ahead with an amputation. “Ah,” I say. I pause. Should I ask? I decide I should. “May I ask how you did it?” Price laughs. “It was kind of messy,” he says. “I did it with a log splitter.” Read the rest of this entry »

CNet:

Two Harvard researchers have concluded that there’s no data to support the notion that violent video games cause the kids who play them to act out violence in real life, contrary to the vast majority of media outlets that would have the public thinking otherwise. The $1.5 million study, which began in 2004, closely examined 1,200 children after bouts with violent games like Grand Theft Auto and not-so-violent titles like The Sims.

Psychologists Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson found that for most kids, playing these games was nothing more than a stress reliever… Some researchers, including the Harvard psychologists, even suggest that video games have a positive effect on the brain.

Kutner and Olson have written a book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games, which they discussed recently on On The Media:
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Today John McCain is unveiling a sassy TV commercial with his 96-year-old mother to remind voters about his good genes and American values. Iffy as it may be to call attention to his age, the ad underscores the diversity of motherhood in this campaign.

Roberta McCain, who gave birth to her son at a Naval Air Station in Panama, where her husband, the son of an Admiral and a future Admiral himself, was based, radiates the aura of a strict, no-nonsense parent out of a bygone era. John McCain always knew exactly who he was.

Barack Obama’s mother was a dreamer with, in his words, a “combination of being very grounded in who she was, what she believed in…but also a certain recklessness…always searching for something. She wasn’t comfortable seeing her life confined to a certain box.” Her travels and exotic marriages produced a unique bi-racial man who has spent his life finding and creating himself.

Somewhere between these extremes of certainty and self-invention is Hillary Clinton’s biographical journey from a well-to-do suburban childhood that took her to college as a Goldwater girl, transformed her into a Eugene McCarthy protester against the Vietnam war and eventually the first woman within striking distance of the presidency.

In this post-Victorian, post-Freudian era, motherhood comes in all shapes and sizes, producing remarkable diversity in the generation that will define the 21st century.

Happy Mother’s Day to one and all.

Cross-posted from my blog.