Learning the Rules, Breaking the Rules

I love being married to an art major.  I’ve said this before.  I love going to museums with him and trailing behind him like an infatuated student following a master teacher. I love that he can explain a hidden meaning in a painting, or a subversive technique used by an artist on the canvas in front of us.  I find it fascinating. I love watching him look at our kids through his camera lens.  I love it when we’re heading out the door and he runs back and grabs his camera bag.  Whenever he does that it’s like a switch goes on in my head and I immediately start paying attention to my surroundings, playing little guessing games in my mind as to what kind of pictures I think he’s going to frame.  Most of the time what turns up in his viewfinder is never what I think I’m going to see. 

He has an expression that he teaches his students.  He didn’t make it up- in fact, I’m sure it’s something many art teachers say- but I love it nonetheless.  He tells his students “You have to know the rules before you try to break the rules.”  He tells them this because people like to think that in art, rules do not apply.  They would be partially right- sometimes rules don’t apply in art.  But the people who cause the biggest stir in the art world are usually the ones who are most familiar with the classical traditions and methods.  For instance, did you know that Picasso- possibly the most famous rule breaker the art world has known- was a classically trained painter by the age of 19?  I mean, he was considered the premiere Spanish master of his time.  So, he knew the rules of art.  He just decided to push them a little bit.  Then he became famous for it.  So then, (and I absolutely adore this about him), he went on to explore the rules of art in other mediums so that he could break them later: light painting, print making, drawing, photography, ceramics.  

Such a creative mind.  Too bad he was such an asshole in real life.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking of this expression lately.... knowing the rules before breaking them, and the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that this applies in so many areas of life.  

I know a couple of people who have become first time parents in these last few months.  I’m watching them on Facebook and they all are so concerned with getting it right.  Doing well.  Knowing the best way.  I think I’ve kind of forgotten that feeling, but I’m so grateful that I’ve been paying attention to them lately.  It’s made me reminensce.  It’s also made me think about something I said in my last post about Parenting magazines.  

To quote myself, I said: I've come to hate parenting magazines with all their ultra PC articles offering clean, formulated, logical solutions for any parenting conundrum imaginable.  Nine years of motherhood has taught me that there is no formula, parenting is mostly illogical, and it is most definitely not clean.

Look.  My stance has not changed in this short time. It probably never will.  I think parenting magazines, at this stage of my experience, are useless.  I believe they project a very shallow image of what constitues “good” parenting, and worse, too often they employ fear mongering tactics.  (My favorite example comes from a magazine in which there is a monthly series titled “It Can Happen To You!”.  The title itself irritates me, and the content is usually worse.  For example, one month featured a story titled “My Son Slammed His Penis in the Toilet Lid.” First of all, if your toddler’s-ahem- appendage was large enough to actually reach from his pants and lay all the way across the toilet rim in such a manner that the toilet ring could actually close on it, well...... congratualtions, I guess.  Second of all, I think I’ll forego your “experts” advice on purchasing a toilet ring lock and accompanying my kid to the bathroom every time and just live with the fact a) the chances of this happening to my kid are next to nothing and b)if it does, it’ll only take one time before he gets smarter about making sure the lid is all the way up before he goes.  Problem solved.)

(Forgive me for that above paragraph.  I’ve needed to vent about it for a while.)

Moving on. 

However, I remember now.  I remember, after having PG, feeling disbelief and dismay that the hospital staff was actually going to let me take her home and be in charge of keeping her alive by myself.  I’m not being sarcastic.  I sincerely questioned their intelligence.  Yes, I was in love and enamored and I loved her little baby smell, but I was also exhausted and incredibly hormonal and sore and weepy and full of self doubt and I just knew that I was going to screw this up somehow. 

 When I needed to feed her, I bombarded the nurse in the room with a million questions.  Was this right?  Was she latched on?  Why was she making that weird noise?  What do I do if she stops suddenly?  I was frustrated at the nurse’s seeminly ambivalent answers: Yeah, sure we looked fine.  If she wasn’t crying, then she was probably latched on.  Babies always make noise.  If she stops, maybe it’s because she’s not hungry.

When it was time to burp her, I called the nurse in.  When it was time to change her, I called the nurse in.  When she cried, I called the nurse in.  I had a million questions and no one answering seemed to pick up on the urgent tone in which they were delivered.  They were all as cool as cucumbers.  Cool, gentle, patronizing little cucumbers outfitted in light pink scrubs.

I tell you, it was a little frustrating.  And crazymaking, too.   

Looking back I know, as you know reading this, that the nurses didn’t respond to my urgency because there was no need for it.  They knew I had to just find my confidence.  But what I also see, in looking back, was that when I was asking all my millions of questions, there was really only one question that I was seeking an answer to: What are the rules?

I have to feed her.  What are the rules? 

I have to change her.  What are the rules? 

I have to burp her.  Bath her.  Trim her nails.  Pick her up.  Put her down.  

What are the rules?  What are the rules?  What are the rules? 

Now I see it.  

So also do I see it in my friends with their own new babies.   When you’re starting out, you need the rules.  So you read.  You read What To Expect When Your Expecting.  You read the parenting magazines.  You read whatever baby books are hot on the best seller list at the moment.  

And then you grow as a parent.  Your confidence grows.  Your experience grows.  You discover that you don’t need the rules as much anymore because you can make up your own.  You can leave the rules behind- but how wonderful that they were there for you because that feeling of overwhelmingness?  It’s terrible.  It’s paralyzing.  The rules are like a nice, little bridge with a safety net under it.  As long as you don’t stay there too long, you’ll be just fine. 

There’s one more thing that Matt teaches his students about art and rules.  It’s actually a quote from Del Close, and it says “The last rule is that there are no rules.”  

I guess if you even get there, it could be considered supreme parental enlightenment. 

Huh.  

Well, good luck with that.  I bid you all a good night!

Preachin' What You Don't Believe

Sometimes, as a parent, you have to preach a lesson to your kids that you don't fully believe in yourself. For example, I tell my kids that because we're a family, we share everything.  Do I believe that?  Heck no. There are items around this house that I am absolutely without question unwilling to share.... like the secret ice cream at the back of the freezer.  That is not to be shared.  Ever.

Ever, ever.

Yet I still tell my kids that families share everything.  There're two reasons I do this: one, it simplifies my life.  It's much easier to tell my bickering kids to "share it or lose it" than it is to investigate the conflict, play judge and jury and then deal with the unhappiness of whichever party doesn't get their way.  So there's that.  And then there's the fact that I also believe in the idea that families should share everything.   It's a fair concept, and perhaps if I were a more generous person who was able to find a healthier way to release my stress late at night, well.....then I probably wouldn't mind sharing my secret ice cream.  (But I'm not.  So the ice cream stays hidden, it stays secret, and it stays mine.)

This past week, I've realized that there's another lesson I've been teaching that I don't fully believe in (though I really wasn't aware of just how wishy washy I am on the subject).  I've been preaching "use your words, not your fists" since my kids were itty bitty.  And, like the above example, I preached it mostly to simplify my life.  I also believed in the idea of it- which I still do- just not as much as I did at the beginning of the week.

After school last week, I went to pick up the kids.  I could immediately from the way the kids were walking towards the car- J stomping along with a defiant look on his face and PG following behind looking slightly troubled- that something huge had just gone down.  So I decided to spook them with my swami mommy powers and asked as soon as the doors opened, "What'd I miss?".  They froze, exchanged uneasy glances, climbed in, and then PG, in her best "let's be reasonable" voice turned to J and said, "Jake.  I have to tell her, okay?"

Jake slammed himself back against the seat rest and scowled.

I confirmed that, yes indeed, she had to tell me, and this is what she said:

"A few minutes ago a second grader grabbed J's arm and twisted it up behind his back.  So J got mad and punched him in the stomach."

I narrowed my eyes and clarified.  "A kid just went up to him and twisted his arm?"

They both nodded, with J still scowling.

"And Jake PUNCHED him?" My eyebrows reversed direction and shot up to the middle of my forehead.

"Yes," said Grace.  "And then that kid got all red and he started crying."

"The kid started CRYING?" My eyebrow calisthenics continued.

Again, an affirmative nod from the back seat.

"Good!"  I said, and then mentally clapped a hand over my mouth.  There was no doubt that I was proud of Jake, but I started questioning not only whether it was okay to feel that way, but whether I should even let him know that I felt that way.  Fighting is very un-PC nowadays.  Most schools have a zero tolerance policy against it- it doesn't matter if it was self defense or not, all parties involved are held accountable.  Not to mention there's all the articles in the parenting magazines about how to teach your child to solve bully conflicts peacefully (someday I'll write about how much I've come to hate parenting magazines with all their ultra PC articles offering clean, formulated, logical solutions for any parenting conundrum imaginable.  Nine years of motherhood has taught me that there is no formula, parenting is mostly illogical, and it is most definitely not clean.)

I was suddenly very confused.  I thought about the few fight stories I've heard from guy friends over the years.  In all of them, it seemed that their parents' main concern after hearing that their child was in a fight was who got the best of who.  I realized that this generation is a whole different ball game and for a moment I was a little jealous that we no longer lived in that time.

I glanced in the back seat at Jake.  He was still angry, but I thought I saw a bit of smugness blooming at the corners of his mouth.  I thought about how, since he started school I've always been a bit worried.  He's small for his age.  His pants from preschool still fit him around his waist (although they're highwaters).  His little sister only weighs 2 pounds less than him.  I can wrap my thumb and forefinger around his bicep and have them touch.  How in the world did he hit a bigger kid hard enough to make him cry?

I made them both repeat the story.  This time I asked for more details.  J still wasn't sure if he was going to be in trouble or not, so it was PG that did most of the talking.  Turns out that the kid had been at the corner before.  He'd never been physical with the kids, but they said he taunted and teased a lot.   On this day, he was bragging about how strong he was and he decided to demonstrate by grabbing J and twisting his arm.   Then he let go, and it was then that Jake punched him.  So it wasn't so much self-defense that made J punch him in the gut as it was the fury at the violation of being manhandled.  To which I still say, good for him.  To every fight, there are two aspects: the psychological and the physical.  If you ask me, triumph on the psychological side is a bigger victory, and I believe in this case, J probably came out on top.  I have a hunch that the other little boy's tears were more from shock and humiliation than from any pain.  This hunch was confirmed when Grace later told me that as they were walking to the car, J angrily muttered to her "I didn't even hit him that hard.  That kid is a wimp."

The next part of the story is my favorite though.

I asked PG what happened after the kid started crying.

"Then, (and she gets very indignant here) the kid looked at me like I was supposed to do something about Jake!"

"What'd you do?"

She shrugs. "I said to Jake, 'Tell him you're sorry.'"

I couldn't help it.  I started smiling.

"You made your brother apologize?"

She is totally exasperated now and says "I don't know, mom!  The kid was crying!  Jake wasn't.  So I made him say sorry."

Whenever I play out this entire scenario in my head, that part of it just makes me so happy.  I think it might be because even though G doesn't realize it, she is totally Jake's mom when I'm not there.  (No one say anything though.  The realization would probably be the end of her.)

Once we pulled into our driveway, I turned off the engine and turned around to look at the kids.  J still didn't know if he was off the hook, and frankly, I still wasn't sure if he was either.  This is the kind of thing I like to handle with Matt, but since everyone present was waiting for me to make a call, I felt kind of backed into a corner.  So I said "Look.  When you guys are at school, or really, anywhere in public, I expect three things.  I want you to be kind, I want you be one of the helpers, and I want you to never start anything.  But if you've been all those things and someone else starts something, then I expect you to stand up for yourself.  I'll never be angry at you for sticking up for yourself." Then I looked at J, who was looking a bit too smug now that he realized he wasn't going to get in trouble, and I said "Jake. You probably could have handled that situation just as well if you had told that kid if he touched you again, you'd hurt him.  You didn't have to hit him."

He nodded while I thought silently to myself, "But I'm glad you did."

Then I went inside, grabbed the phone and took it into the bathroom where I locked the door and called Matt.  I related the whole story to him and he parroted back the surprising parts as I had done ("He PUNCHED him?" "The other kid cried?") and then he said, "Well.  GOOD!"

Apparently we were on the same page.

After all that, here's the lesson I learned this past week:  One, I'm proud of my kids.  I'm proud of Gracie for making her brother apologize.  I love that she did that.  Of course, I would have been equally proud of her if she had said "Yeah, kid.  There's more where that came from SO BACK OFF." (Obviously you can tell that I've been fantasizing about what I would have done.)

Also, I'm proud of Jake- not for punching the kid, but for standing up for himself.  I would have preferred it if he had used his words, but that's asking a lot from a six year old in this situation.  While  I've been teaching my kids that fighting is not an answer, I've also learned that sometimes such situations aren't that cut and dry.  I guess Jake figured that out ahead of me.  And he did what needed to be done for his own self respect.  He felt on his own, in those few moments, the psychological side of what was going down, and for Jake the physical pain in his arm was nothing compared to the emotional injustice of being manhandled.  The fact that someone treated him that way pissed him off and he felt the need to let that kid know that he wasn't going to tolerate it. And you know what?  I'm glad he did.  I feel relieved of a lot of my worries about him.  Thank you, God.  The boy has gumption.  He has guts.  He has some self respect.  He's small, but he's mighty (ish).  This mama's going to sleep a little better tonight.

Right after I finish off the secret ice cream hidden in the back of the freezer.