Category Archives: Parenting

Poetry for Veterans’ Day

This morning I was reading the daily poem to Shane from our Alhambra Poetry Calendar for Young Readers, a superlative anthology of classic and modern poems that are written on an adult level but safe to share with younger folks. I often follow the reading with a little interpretation, pointing out interesting things about how the poem works, or reflecting critically on its message. Maybe it’s silly to get into this with a 19-month-old, but I feel it’s never too early to introduce the idea that he can think for himself about what Mommy and Daddy read to him. He can appreciate a book without agreeing with everything in it, or with us.

Because it’s Veterans’ Day, today we read the well-known poem “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae, who was a Lt. Colonel in the Canadian Army in World War I. The text and history of the poem can be found on the Arlington National Cemetery’s website.

I remarked on McCrae’s conclusion that continuing the battle was the proper way to make the fallen soldiers’ sacrifice worthwhile: “To you from failing hands we throw/The torch; be yours to hold it high./If ye break faith with us who die/We shall not sleep…” Other war poets, I observed, have drawn the opposite conclusion, that these tragic deaths ought to motivate us to seek peace.

My favorite war poem of all time has to be Wilfred Owen’s “Greater Love“, also from World War I. Owen was a passionate critic of the war’s carnage, yet this poem (unlike, for instance, his “Dulce et Decorum Est“) resists reduction to a pro- or anti-war interpretation. He is simply moved by the holy suffering of the dying soldiers, which is undiminished by questions about whether it was necessary or effective.

For more great poetry on this theme, visit the War Poetry Contest archives (2002-2011) at WinningWriters.com.

Greater Love
by Wilfred Owen

Red lips are not so red
   
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.
O Love, your eyes lose lure
   When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!

Your slender attitude
   
Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,

Rolling and rolling there

Where God seems not to care:

Till the fierce love they bear

   
Cramps them in death’s extreme decrepitude.

Your voice sings not so soft,—

   
Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft,—

Your dear voice is not dear,

Gentle, and evening clear,

As theirs whom none now hear,

   
Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.

Heart, you were never hot

   Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;

And though your hand be pale,

Paler are all which trail

Your cross through flame and hail:

   
Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.

Chopping Down the Giving Tree: Boundaries and the Social Gospel


There are two kinds of parents in this world: those who think Shel Silverstein’s classic picture book The Giving Tree is a heartwarming fable about unselfish mother-love, and those who think it’s a horrible sentimentalization of codependence and narcissism. Regular readers of this blog should be able to guess which camp I fit in.

The Giving Tree is an apple tree, described with female pronouns, who loves a little boy. As he grows to young adulthood through old age, the boy-man asks more and more from the tree, taking her leaves and apples to sell, her branches for a house, her trunk for a boat, till finally she is only a stump that he sits on when he is a tired old man. The tree gives all these things because it makes him keep coming back, and when he comes back, she is happy. Meanwhile, the boy never says a word of thanks, nor does he seem satisfied with the gifts for very long.

Christians who like this book have argued that it’s an allegory of God’s boundless love, which continues to be poured out on us despite our emotional fickleness and ignorance. I don’t buy that. If the Giving Tree is Christ, she’s Christ without the Resurrection. This tree, like my “one wild and precious life“, is a nonrenewable resource. When she’s chopped down, she doesn’t grow back. As far as we know, the boy doesn’t even plant her apple seeds to grow new trees.

This is a perilous model for Christian discipleship because it burdens a finite human being with satisfying infinite demands. The danger of a codependent Messiah complex is particularly acute in liberal churches where God’s direct, supernatural intervention is downplayed or doubted outright.

In church, we hear about stewardship of our material blessings and our fragile ecosystem, but are not sufficiently encouraged to be good stewards of the one resource on which all others depend: ourselves. Our time, energy, emotional health, material possessions, and solitude. Yes, solitude is a resource. That’s why Jesus didn’t heal broken legs and hand out fish sandwiches 24 hours a day; he had to withdraw into the wilderness to recharge his connection to God. By contrast, the Giving Tree is unable to endure her solitude. Are we also compulsive givers because we need the warm feelings of charity to plug the God-shaped hole in our heart? Afraid that God isn’t really there for us, we’ll do whatever it takes to bind another person to ourselves.

The recipient’s angle on the relationship is also problematic. The sentimental ideal of unquestioning generosity forestalls investigation into whether we’re actually helping. The Giving Tree’s boy does not seem to grow in happiness, empathy, or maturity as a result of her gifts. Let’s just say, I pity his wife.

Christians can fall prey to oversimplified ideas about duty and sacrificial love. This comes up in our domestic lives, and also in our efforts to follow Jesus’s mandate to help the poor. It saddens us to pass by the man lying on the pavement, someone who already seems cut off from society, and have nothing more personal to offer him than cold cash. However, a relationship based on the high-sounding principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” can turn sour because both ability and need are elastic. In my family of origin, it soon became clear that the path to dominance was to inflate your needs and let your abilities atrophy. The Giving Tree’s boy is never challenged regarding the importance and consequences of his demands, so he never learns to live within his means.

Before commissioning us to involve ourselves in the lives of traumatized strangers, churches must do more to educate Christians about the user-enabler dynamic and give us spiritual permission to set safe boundaries. Remember, Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself, not instead of.

Generosity without accountability breeds an attitude of entitlement to the lives and bodies of others. This attitude underlies patriarchy, child abuse, and domestic violence — pervasive social evils that are a prime contributing cause of the addictions, mental illnesses, poverty and homelessness that Christian charity targets. Social work has a place among the church’s programs, but our unique leverage point is practical theology: proclaiming a genuinely loving alternative to the relational patterns that keep the cycle of exploitation going.

Poetry by Lawrence Kessenich: “Meditating with a Dog Named Vasana”

Earlier this month we held a ceremony at our house to welcome our 18-month-old, Shane, into my husband’s Buddhist meditation community. We shared some spiritual readings and poetry that celebrated young children’s ability to abide in the present moment, without pretensions or superimposed storylines.

I was reminded of this when I read Lawrence Kessenich’s poem below, which won the 2012 Spirit First Meditation Poetry Contest. Sponsored by a meditation center in Washington, DC, this free contest awards prizes up to $175 for poems on the theme of meditation, mindfulness, stillness, or silence. The current contest is open through January 31.

Like the dog in the poem, the Young Master is very fond of his stuffed squirrel, but he is especially delighted with the singing bowl we bought him for the ceremony. Each morning he reaches for it with a smile, and we have a mindfulness moment as we listen to the ringing echoes fade away. And then he bangs on it and chews on the stick!

Meditating with a Dog Named Vasana*
by Lawrence Kessenich

The mind is not easily ignored.
Told to sit in the corner like
a good little dog, he disobeys
bringing thoughts like toys:
a green rubber block, a stuffed squirrel,
an old, slimy, gnawed-over bone.

Take this simple mantra, I tell him,
and play with that. But he wants to do more.
He barks, licks my face, sniffs my crotch,
drops a brightly colored ball at my feet.
Vasana! I say sharply.
But to no avail. He is my dog
and requires my attention.

I toss his ball across the room
again and again and again.
He brings it back to me
again and again and again.
Until, finally, he drops it,
lays down in his corner, and falls asleep,
dreaming of sticks thrown into rivers.
Good dog, Vasana. Good dog.

*Sanskrit word for concept “monkey mind”

Lawrence Kessenich is an accomplished poet living in Massachusetts—he won the 2010 Strokestown International Poetry Prize, and his poetry has been published in Atlanta Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Cream City Review, Ibbetson Street, and many other magazines. His chapbook Strange News was published by Pudding House Publications in 2008. Another chapbook was a semi-finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award and finalist for the Spire Press Chapbook Contest. His current collection, Before Whose Glory, was a semi-finalist for the Off the Grid contest. His poem “Underground Jesus” was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Kessenich has also published essays, one of which was featured on NPR’s This I Believe in 2010 and appears in the anthology This I Believe: On Love. His play Ronnie’s Charger was produced in Colorado in 2011.

Giving Children the Gift of “No”

It’s been awhile since I shared a picture of His Supreme Cuteness, so I’ll introduce this parenting post with Shane modeling his summer haircut:

Today I want to talk about a strange trend among parents in our crunchy-progressive middle-class demographic (what we used to call Bobos in the 1990s): the belief that “No” is a dirty word.

“I never said no to my kids,” one acquaintance advised me, as her prescription for avoiding the “terrible twos”. Another friend noticed me gently steering the Young Master away from baby-unsafe objects (“Uh-oh, the table lamp is not a toy”), and favorably contrasted that method to her other friends who don’t feel comfortable declaring any property off-limits to a toddler.

This meme is widespread enough that it was satirized last year on my favorite sitcom, “Modern Family“. Cameron and Mitchell are a gay couple raising their adopted daughter, Lily, who has become a spoiled little princess. Claire, Mitchell’s sister, is a well-meaning control freak, i.e. just like me. From ABC’s website: “Claire wants to discipline Lily for repeatedly flicking the light switches on and off in her house. Cameron says they are trying an approach where they don’t say ‘no’ to their child. This leads to an argument about parenting methods. Claire believes her point will be made once Lily flips the garbage disposal switch while Cam has his hand caught down the drain. She has a big laugh once Lily makes her move, as it’s only a light switch that’s flipped.”

I could cite various child-development studies about how kids need structure and limits to learn good behavior, but I think Claire has the disciplinary angle covered. Instead, let’s consider another danger of No-phobia: stunting your child’s ability to protect his own boundaries.

When adults are afraid to say “No”, they are modeling unsafe behavior for their child. They are implicitly teaching him that “No” is a weapon that inflicts permanent damage on the hearer, and that a good person will avoid causing that kind of pain, whatever precious things of their own they have to sacrifice in the process. That’s a recipe for codependence.

Whether they say the word or not, parents have physical veto power over the child and he knows it. Thus, going to great lengths to avoid the appearance of authority only turns an honest conflict into a dishonest one. The child learns it’s not okay to express negative feelings about something that affects him, because the parents aren’t okay with their own feelings. They’re modeling a passive-aggressive way of working around an interpersonal problem.

Children need to be able to signal “No” from an early age in order to feel safe in their bodies, whether it’s by squirming away from an uncomfortable touch or pushing aside food that doesn’t agree with them. Our job as parents is to use our “No” power judiciously, saving it for the most important house rules, and allowing as much flexibility as possible for the child’s safe exploration and mastery of his environment.

What are the “terrible twos” but the child’s experimentation with his own “No”? He’s looking to us to teach him how to set limits skillfully. (“If you don’t want the beef bourguignon, darling, please push it to the side of your tray instead of throwing it on the floor.”)

So bring it on, Bunky. Just let me encase all the furniture in bubble wrap first…

Poetry from Inside: “Of Father, From Prison”

My prison pen pal “Jon“, who is serving a life sentence in California for a burglary-related homicide, continues his efforts to grow in self-awareness and spiritual maturity through writing. I thought this recent poem was one of his finest, expressing compassion for his child-self alongside remorse for the flawed path he took as an adult. It’s a simple but deep story that I imagine many troubled young men will recognize as their own.

Of Father, From Prison

I used to smile in wonder
at the barb of the fish hook
and however you managed to get worms
so delicately placed and pierced.
Then even when you showed me how
I still couldn’t do it on my own
and sometimes couldn’t bear to look.

I used to sit and wander
as the landscapes became cities
with people beneath the lights of day.
Drifting by in gusts of winds
of mountaintops and Mayberrys
and cow filled fields and stars.
Watching from the passenger seat
while you drove your precious truck
and I waited for my turn
that had finally never come.

I used to be amazed
at all the grand and well told stories
of the life you really never led.
I realized I never even knew you
when I noticed they were lies.
You were gentle, very quiet
always private and reclusive.
You could fix anything inanimate
yet never repair the troubled minds
of yourself or those around you.
And I can think of all the places
you would take me as I grew.
Leaving us with memories
of decaying and joyless days,
of worms, fish hooks and barbs.
And I would be amazed
if you ever came to know
how very much alike
we’ve finally become.

I do not wander in wonders anymore
but sometimes think of who you are.
You living in your solitude
and me stuck within my own.
Where computers are your company,
while books become my best of friends.
Your prison is in a house
and mine within a cell.
Inside the worlds of our own making,
trapped within our mortal shells.

Mother’s Day: Honoring Our Complicated Families

Who is like the Lord our God, the one who sits enthroned on high?…He settles the childless woman in her home as a happy mother of children. (Psalm 113:5, 9)

Mother’s Day has always been a difficult holiday for me. Unlike Christmas or Thanksgiving, there’s no larger goal to take the focus off one’s personal life and the ways it conforms or fails to conform to a Hallmark card.

Because of her trauma issues, my biological mother never felt sufficiently loved or special. On Mother’s Day, she was especially disappointed and confused by the contrast between how she was supposed to feel and how she actually felt. No matter what we did, it wasn’t enough. Now that she and my other mom are apart, her ex-partner has had space to grow into the mother I need, no longer forced into the shadows. But it’s been a long time coming.

Many infertile and waiting adoptive moms can relate to the loneliness of those years when Mother’s Day came around again and we still didn’t have our child. We belonged to an unseen minority who couldn’t help but recognize the complexity of this thing we call “motherhood”, so oversimplified by the sentimental mainstream. Birthmothers, too, may wonder what this day should mean to them. There are no words for loss in the language of this holiday, just pink flowers and brunch and cards that say “you’re the bestest”.

Last year, on my first Mother’s Day as a mom, I was depressed, and ashamed of it. I loved my one-month-old son. I was so proud to sit in the “parents with small children” pew in church for the first time ever. But the pain of our adoption journey hadn’t healed. I felt pressured by the rhetoric of motherhood to pretend that everything was hearts-and-flowers, that this moment made all the past betrayals worthwhile.

It didn’t help that it coincided with the date when our birthmother’s consent became irrevocable. Now it’s REAL. Help me, mommy! I called her up to give her good wishes and support. Her confidence in me, her comfort with her decision, made me believe I really deserved to celebrate, at last.

Just as I push back against aggressive projections of masculinity onto my 13-month-old (I swear, he comes by that cowboy swagger naturally), I continue to deconstruct the false choices inherent in popular ideas of motherhood. Adulthood and sacrifice versus immaturity and freedom. Being ridiculed for hypervigilance yet blamed for anything that goes wrong with one’s child. Mothering, as opposed to generic “parenting”, is by definition a female activity. And we all know what fun it is to be female in our society. Maybe that’s one reason I was so afraid of it.

Therefore, mothering, for me, is also an invitation to lean into the political responsibility that goes along with adulthood. This passage from the “Motherhood and Daughterhood” chapter of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born spoke to me during those early days of transformation into Shane’s Mom:

The “unchilded” woman, if such a term makes any sense, is still affected by centuries-long attitudes–on the part of both women and men–towards the birthing, child-rearing function of women. Any woman who believes that the institution of motherhood has nothing to do with her is closing her eyes to crucial aspects of her situation.

Many of the great mothers have not been biological. The novel Jane Eyre…can be read as a woman-pilgrim’s progres along a path of classic female temptation, in which the motherless Jane time after time finds women who protect, solace, teach, challenge, and nurture her in self-respect. For centuries, daughters have beem strengthened and energized by nonbiological mothers, who have combined a care for the practical values of survival with an incitement toward further horizons, a compassion for vulnerability with an insistence on our buried strengths. It is precisely this that has allowed us to survive…

We are, none of us, “either” mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both. Women, mothers or not, who feel committed to other women, are increasingly giving each other a quality of caring filled with the diffuse kinds of identification that exist between actual mothers and daughters. Into the mere notion of “mothering” we may carry, as daughters, negative echoes of our own mothers’ martyrdom, the burden of their valiant, necessarily limited efforts on our behalf, the confusion of their double messages. But it is a timidity of the imagination which urges that we can be “daughters”–therefore free spirits–rather than “mothers”–defined as eternal givers. Mothering and nonmothering have been such charged concepts for us, precisely because whichever we did has been turned against us.

To accept and integrate and strengthen both the mother and the daughter in ourselves is no easy matter, because patriarchal attitudes have encouraged us to split, to polarize, these images, and to project all unwanted guilt, anger, shame, power, freedom, onto the “other” woman. But any radical vision of sisterhood demands that we reintegrate them. (pgs. 252-53)

 

My little pea pod and me in April 2012.

Everything You Need to Know About Emotional Abuse in 2 Minutes (With Music!)

Forget Ariel, Belle, and Tiana. For me, the supreme Disney princess is Rapunzel from Tangled (2010). Underneath the lush colors and catchy songs, this retelling of the fairy tale is a profoundly serious and truthful depiction of a young woman’s escape from a cult-like family system.

From the IMDB summary: “After receiving the healing powers from a magical flower, the baby Princess Rapunzel is kidnapped from the palace in the middle of the night by Mother Gothel. Mother Gothel knows that the flower’s magical powers are now growing within the golden hair of Rapunzel, and to stay young, she must lock Rapunzel in her hidden tower. Rapunzel is now a teenager and her hair has grown to a length of 70-feet. The beautiful Rapunzel has been in the tower her entire life, and she is curious of the outside world. One day, the bandit Flynn Ryder scales the tower and is taken captive by Rapunzel. Rapunzel strikes a deal with the charming thief to act as her guide to travel to the place where the floating lights come from that she has seen every year on her birthday. Rapunzel is about to have the most exciting and magnificent journey of her life.”

A conventional kids’ film would have the villain accomplish her ends through showy displays of force and magic. Mother Gothel uses a more insidious method: professional-grade emotional abuse and brainwashing. Watch and learn, my friends:

In just two minutes, the song “Mother Knows Best” conducts a whirlwind tour of the techniques that an abusive parent, partner, or cult leader employs to isolate and confuse her victim. Notice how Mother Gothel interlaces apparent compliments (you’re precious to me, you’re too innocent and fragile for this dangerous world) with self-esteem destroyers (you’re clumsy, you’re naive, you’re not pretty enough to make it out there). Her lavish caresses are punctuated with subliminal flashes of menace–so quick, it’s almost possible for Rapunzel to block them out.

Dizzied by this personality-switching, Rapunzel feels uneasy and ashamed. Something doesn’t seem right, but it’s too scary to realize that her only caregiver doesn’t really care for her. Only later, when she finds an alternate source of support in Flynn, is she ready to recover her memories of her real identity and parents. (Yes, a kids’ film about repressed memories! How radical is that?)

Besides this song, I particularly love the scene where Rapunzel first escapes from the tower, aided by Flynn. Her mood swings are so true to the joy and self-doubt that an abuse survivor goes through when she begins to emerge from brainwashing. “I’m free! I’m free! I’m a terrible person. I’m free!”

Libby Anne, who blogs at Love Joy Feminism, has written eloquently about how Tangled resembles her upbringing in a Christian patriarchy cult. This film is validating for anyone who’s been in an abusive relationship, secular or religious. It’s also a great teaching tool to help your children recognize and avoid mind control.

The Gorgon’s Head: Mothers and “Selfishness”


Certain epithets can immobilize us, accusations that lock down our brains with shame and make us feel we’ve been turned to stone. For many men in this culture, I suspect, being called “weak” has this effect. For women, the charge that’s supposed to stop us in our tracks is “selfish”.

Remember the Greek myth of Medusa, the most famous of the Gorgon sisters. (If they were Destiny’s Child, she’d be Beyonce.) Anyone who beheld her terrible visage, wreathed in snakes instead of hair, would be turned to stone. The “hero” Perseus managed to defeat her by holding up his mirrored shield before her face. While she was immobilized by the sight of herself, he cut off her head, which later made a handy weapon whenever he needed to petrify someone else. Wikipedia tells me that according to some versions of the myth, Medusa was originally a pretty hot number, but the goddess Athena punished her with ugliness after the sea-god Poseidon raped Medusa in Athena’s temple. Victim-blaming has a long history. Hence my scare-quotes around “hero” above. Reiter’s Block is a no-rape-myths zone.

I think of Medusa these days when the word “selfish” gets thrown into discussions of women’s choices regarding parenting. Like the reflection in Perseus’s shield, a hateful image of ourselves is held up to deflect us from confidently following our instincts about what is right for our bodies and our personal relationships.

Six years ago, when I decided not to try any infertility treatments but skip straight to adoption, I struggled with insecurity that I wouldn’t be a sufficiently committed mother, because there were some physical invasions I would not endure in order to have a baby. I sometimes felt that people were withholding sympathy for our childlessness because I hadn’t really tried everything. Later, when one of the adoption agencies we worked with was pressuring me into psychiatric interventions that were actually dangerous to my mental health, I believe I allowed them to gaslight me for too long because they slapped the “neediness” label on my efforts to direct my own treatment. (Fortunately, in attempting to disprove their charge that I lacked empathy, I went through the volunteer training for our local domestic violence shelter, and figured out that my so-called personality disorder was really PTSD from emotional incest. Thank you, feminist consciousness.) 

Other women get selfishness-shamed around motherhood in other ways. Those who do go through assisted reproduction treatments are sure to hear criticism at some point that it’s selfish to expend resources adding to our overpopulated planet when there are “so many adoptable children needing homes”. (Not true, by the way, but that’s another story.) Conservatives chastise women who choose not to raise children, saying they’re selfishly putting personal fulfillment ahead of the altruistic devotion that our society needs. Double that scorn for women who have abortions. Yet, birthmothers who place children for adoption face insensitive remarks like, “I don’t see how a woman could give up her own baby, she must be so unfeeling!”

We’re all familiar with the “mommy wars” around child-rearing choices, too. Career-oriented feminists scold women who drop out of the workforce to raise children; they’re letting down the team. If women employ childcare so they can return to work, they’d better be prepared to show they need the money; heaven forbid they should have ambitions of their own. Attachment-parenting fanatics preach that co-sleeping, breastfeeding, and constant physical contact are necessary to give children a secure sense of parental love. (I read one mommy-blog where her two-year-old insisted on sitting on her lap while the mom used the toilet, and she was afraid to disrupt their attachment by asking for some privacy.) But, watch out that you don’t become a “helicopter parent” who overinvolves herself in her children’s lives in order to meet her own need for control and significance.

Gee, you’d almost think that women weren’t supposed to have selves…

Last year I began working with an Inner Bonding therapist to heal PTSD and false beliefs from a traumatic childhood. Based on this framework, I’ve come to believe that mothers trigger perceptions of “selfishness” in so many people, regardless of which choices the mother is making, because people are unconsciously angry about their own unmet childhood needs. Someone who had distant and unfeeling parents may view working mothers harshly, while someone who had smothering and needy parents may have a similar disdain for stay-at-home mothers. It’s speculative, but it’s been borne out by sad experiences with former friends. What I know of their personal history correlated with the particular ways they tried to side with my baby against me. By comparison, true friends (some of whom had equally painful childhoods) came in with the assumption that supporting the mother’s well-being helped the child and vice versa, not that motherhood was a zero-sum game of needs.

Again extrapolating from personal experience, I think the accusation of selfishness stops us in our tracks because so many women have suffered some kind of abuse–the ultimate act of selfishness–be it sexual assault, domestic violence, or spiritual domination and mind control. The last thing we want is to bear any resemblance to the person who used us so cruelly.

How about, as mothers or mothers-to-be, we practice saying, “This is what works for me and my family. It’s okay that other things work for other people.” Let’s also give ourselves permission not to answer questions when we sense that the inquirer doesn’t really want to learn something new, but instead is waiting to judge and refute our reasons as soon as she learns what they are.

Motherhood is authority. Whatever abuses of power we’ve seen, we can learn how to exercise authority with maturity and compassion. Growing up is an act of self-care that is also the key to unselfish parenting.

If Mama ain’t happy…ain’t nobody happy.

(Image courtesy of this link.)

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2012


Greetings, loyal readers! It’s time for our annual roundup of the best books, blogs, and other big events of 2012. As usual, the books listed here are ones I read this year, not all published this year.

The Big Event:

Best Parenting Book:

Marc Weissbluth, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child (2005)
Do you know why I have time to write this blog post? Because the Young Master slept 15 hours last night! Dr. ZZZ, as we call him, makes a good case that many behavioral problems seen in infants and young children are really just signs of overtiredness. The doctor tells you how to spot early signs of fatigue in your baby so you can put him down for a nap before he gets too charged up with adrenalin. If the big book is putting you to sleep, Weissbluth’s Your Fussy Baby is a quicker read that covers the same basic principles for infants 0-4 months.

Best Children’s Books:

Stephanie Burks & Kelli Bienvenu, While You Were Sleeping (2004)
This picture book makes me cry every time I read it to Shane. A lesbian couple get the phone call that a birthmother has chosen them to adopt her newborn boy. (I do wish the birthmother appeared as a character, but perhaps that would be too complicated for this age group.)

Anna Pignataro, Mama, Will You Hold My Hand? (2010)
A gentle, poetic picture book. Mother Bear reassures her child Sammy that she’ll be there through all their adventures. Similar to The Runaway Bunny but not so triggering.

Sandra Boynton, Happy Hippo, Angry Duck (2011)
Whimsical board book helps children learn the names for different feelings, and that it’s okay to have them. Bad moods don’t last forever. Good training for little Buddhists.

Best Poetry Book:

Nancy White, Detour (2010)
This poetry collection explores the breaking apart and remaking of a woman’s identity in the middle of her life, through a son’s birth and a painful divorce. Subject matter that in a lesser poet’s hands would be merely confessional here takes on a haiku-like precision and open-endedness, intimate yet unbounded by the confines of one person’s experience. This feat is accomplished through White’s use of the second-person voice and the way she narrates major events obliquely, through peripheral details described with quiet beauty. (Full disclosure: Nancy taught English at my high school, though I wasn’t in her class.)

Best Novel:

Kathie Giorgio, The Home for Wayward Clocks (2011)
An abused boy becomes a recluse who lavishes all his human warmth on the clocks he rescues and repairs for his museum. But a disabling accident, and the arrival of an abused teenage girl who needs his help, compel him to reach out to his neighbors and learn to trust again. His storyline is interspersed with the stories of the clock-owners. Look for the sequel to this beautiful novel, Learning to Tell (A Life)Time, from Main Street Rag Publishing in 2013.

Best General Nonfiction:

Bernadette Barton, Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays (2012)
Sociology professor examines how LGBT people in the American South survive the fundamentalist “panopticon”. Thoroughly researched but never dry, the book strikes a good balance between outrage and hope.

Best Memoir (tie):

Deborah Feldman, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (2012)
This gripping memoir recounts a young woman’s escape from her family of Satmar Hasidim, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect living in the Brooklyn neighborhod of Williamsburg. Feldman depicts a repressive, patriarchal community where women are deliberately kept uneducated and forced into abusive marriages. One quibble: the final section of the book felt rushed. Follow Deborah on Twitter for a feminist watchdog perspective on Orthodox Judaism.

Martha Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Left the Mormons and Found My Faith (2005)
Do you see a trend in my reading habits? Part memoir, part religious history, this compelling, controversial book by a Harvard-educated sociologist describes the fallout from her recovered memories of sexual abuse by her father, a leading Mormon scholar. Her anger is leavened by compassion as she delves into the complicity of a secretive church culture in creating and shielding abusers with split personalities. Though the topic is a dark one, readers who accompany Beck on her healing journey will be rewarded with her account of her strengthened connection to God’s love and her own inner truth.

Best New Theoretical Framework for My Life (tie):

Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (1992, updated 1997)
This groundbreaking book shows the common patterns underlying private and public trauma, from domestic violence and child abuse to war and genocide, as well as the cultural conditions that determine whether such stories are shared or repressed. The Amazon blurb says it best: “The book puts individual experience in a broader political frame, arguing that psychological trauma can be understood only in a social context.”

Sylvia Brinton Perera, The Scapegoat Complex: Toward a Mythology of Shadow and Guilt (1985)
Jungian analyst interprets scapegoat themes in the family and society. As in Johnny Cash’s song “The Man in Black”, the scapegoat is a priestly yet despised figure who takes on the burden of others’ psychological dark side (or has it thrust upon them) in order to heal the social system. But this role, formerly expressed through public ritual, can be too much for mere individuals to bear. This brief but dense book discusses how to appreciate but also break free from one’s scapegoat characteristics.

Blogs You Should Know About:

Be the Change (Dianna Anderson)
Christian feminist critiques rape-enabling myths and other harmful beliefs about gender and sexuality. She has a good sense of humor.

Sarah Over the Moon
Another Christian feminist and survivor of evangelical purity culture who lived to tell the tale.

Ana Mardoll’s Ramblings
Ana wittily deconstructs pop culture for classism, disability prejudice, fat-shaming, and other forms of oppression. Some idols are toppled (C.S. Lewis) and some unexpected tales are championed (Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”).
 

George Korolog: “Our Adoption”

Winning Writers subscriber George Korolog kindly shares with us a poem from his new collection, Collapsing Outside the Box, which was recently released by Aldrich Press. It was inspired by George’s oldest son, now a college student, who joined their family through open adoption. This poem rings true for me as a depiction of the joy and mystery of meeting your child for the first time, and the complex emotions that arise in a family formed by loss as well as gain.

Our Adoption

It never occurred to me that a strange new
smell would electrify your supple nose hairs,
singe your newborn heart, brand your reptilian
brain with images of smoldering panic that would
mark the watershed of life in your first few seconds.
It never occurred to me that sliding into new being,
slipping from the swathing sac, slapping air in severance
from everything in which your senses had settled were
the questions, Who am I? Why are you here? It never
occurred to me that after nine months of reckoning
her hovering heartbeat to fractions of a second, that
you were already seeding tomorrow with querulous
roots, tendrils that would twist inward upon themselves,
mistakenly embedding the future with layers of suspicion
and doubt even as we yelled, over and over, “I love you.
I love you.” It never occurred to me that you were
beginning to spin the web of one great tear, muddle and
mesh, the blame and longing that awaited us, love dangling,
the snare quivering with the promise of welcoming.