Garden Darwinism

It's that time of year when I long for the desert - when the lush, overwhelming greenness of New England threatens to overwhelm the senses, choke off paths and driveways when untended for a week. When I'm reminded how any bare patch of dirt in these parts, left untended, will be covered in a month with scrappy Queen Anne's lace, sumac trees, bright weedy wildflowers.

When my local walking trails seems sultry and overgrown, with a steamy, closed in feeling, that would render me unsurprised should a brontosaurus poke its head around the corner.

My vegetable garden goes through the same wild process every year around this time, and I am too weary to intervene. I go away or get busy for a week or so and return to find that the tomatoes are overtaking the squash, the oregano is totally out of control, and the sweet peas are staging an invasion again the neighboring asparagus with apparent success.

Garden Darwinism, I call it.

This year's vegetables have been haphazard. I planted all my tomatoes at once and am sure they will all come ripe at EXACTLY the same moment, when my car crosses the state line on my way out to vacation.

In the back row I whimsically planted come climbing moonflowers right in front of some lovely tall sunflower seeds. Unfortunately I did not also then install string for the moonflowers to climb, so as they came of age they lurched inexorably forward and established a mutually lethal stranglehold on the sunflowers. I finally ran some string and coaxed the resultant moonflower-sunflower conglomeration up the ropes, feeling vaguely like I was violating the Prime Directive.

If they survive, I thought, it'll be lovely, if odd. The moonflowers so far seem okay.

Who would think that the fragile, tapering leaves of the moonflower - blossoming only at night, slender trumpet blooms - would overpower the thicker and sturdy trunk of the sunflower? Yet that seems to be the case.

Sometimes at this time of year I feel sympathy for the Pilgrims, who, starving, must have looked around at all of this lush, fantastic growth - not much of which, occurring on its own, seems to have the nutrients to sustain human life...yet how accommodating the land, with just a little knowledge.

I am descended from some actual Pilgrims. Growing more and more allergic every year to poison ivy, I now think of it as nature's way of saving to my ancestors: get back on the boat and keep looking.

Like a Mole

Yesterday, standing the in the parking lot of the elementary school where my daughter and some other kids were sledding, I started to examine the growing rust spot above the wheel well of my car with a sense of detached fascination and dread. It was something like looking at a little noticed mole on your body. You only have to worry when it changes, right? I thought, peering at the growing dark center , the widening area of raised metal, what appeared to be layering near the center edge. I became afraid to poke it for fear of going right through.

My car is a 1994 Accord, making it older than my children. It was bought by me about three years ago in a period of financial distress, for $4,000 in cash, from a repair shop small enough and marginal enough that my car's true history and origins have always seemed vaguely murky to me. The title said one previous owner, but a series of random systems malfunctions (too expensive to correct, only intermittently inconvenient to live with) suggest otherwise: antenna doesn't work, gas gauge broken, odd leak into back seat area. On my frequent trips to the repair shop, I think I have a Katrina car. Otherwise I try to revel in not having a car payment.

I was standing next to my friend and neighbor, having just been admiring his new Toyota truck that seats six and had spaces for DVD players. We were chatting, leaving just enough free brain space for my eyes to return again and again to my small Rorschach test of rust. It looked definitely bigger than the last time.

I was a little on edge anyway. I was there with my older daughter, and my neighbor and his three kids. My younger daughter had been all set to go with us, but was home now, due to her soaking herself to the waist minutes before we were due to leave. I'd given her a hot bath, and some tea, and was anxious to get back to her.

How big can a rust spot get before your bumper will fall off driving over a bump, I wondered.

What are your views on television?

Here is a request for input from other parents.

What are your views on television?

The topic is becoming a battleground lately in our home. For a long time we had a no-TV-during-the-week rule, which has grown relaxed of late around others who like TV during the week. (And I must confess, the girls and I would often watch the Daily Show together even before then.) My 12-year-old has a seemingly insatiable apatite for all Disney Channel programming. Even as she is saying she realizes how inane it is, she is drawn to it like a moth to flame.

Some advocate letting her regulate her own TV as long as her chores and homework have been done. I resist this, not wanting her brain filled with the crap I know she will watch.

Disney and other shows seem to me to promote a wise- assed tween world where all adults are idiots, kids walk through life leaving a trail of soda cans that the maid picks up, and the prevailing attitude among kids is cliquey, know-it-all, preternaturally adult, snooty and condescending. When my kids spend hours sitting and consuming that carefully branded and marketed lifestyle, yeah, it rubs off. Don't tell me Disney and Diet Coke don't spend millions on the country's top child psychologists t figure out exactly how to motivate and sell to these kids, I told my husband. There are only 24 hours in every day, and I don't want to spend my time and my kids' s childhood fighting this.

I've always advocated watching TV with my kids. Early on we started talking about commercials, asking, What are they trying to sell us? I've always kept an eye on what they see (although lately they are trying to watch South Park with their cousins...not sure I am ready for that.) But now it just seems like trying to find the right balance of freedom and rules is like grasping a slippery pig.

I know every generation says this, but here it is for us: I remember going out and roaming the neighborhood for hours or days without adult supervision or knowledge. Now we live on a busy state road, and even if we didn't I'd hesitate to let my kids out entirely untended for that much time. More time outside would certainly be good for everyone. But it's not the panacea.

I also know I can't control their every wish or action. What I want is to teach them the habits and controls that will give them persistence and creativity. I am pretty sure that four hours a day of the Disney channel are not the way to go.

Has anyone else struggled with this?

Identifying the moment

They happen every day, these little moments where a spark of insight goes off in your head and you realize that this was a turning point: a marker has been passed, a shift has occurred.

Yesterday I was sitting at my desk working while my younger daughter puttered around, fulfilling the maternal mandate that she spend a half hour playing the violin and piano (to balance the hours of television she'd ingested over the holiday weekend.) She's had a great spurt of enthusiasm this year for violin this year, fueled I think by an energetic young teacher at school who's found the right way to motivate her. She also takes piano, and seems to delight in trying to stump her teacher with detailed questions about music theory: what happens if this or that occurs? Why is this like this, what would happen if that...? I secretly love it.

She was going back and forth between her instruments when she suddenly fixated on the violin and how to play different scales. She wanted to show me the fingering and how you had to turn the neck to play various notes. I turned to give her my full attention. (I am so happy at these moments to be home.)

As I was listening and watching, it occurred suddenly to me, with the force and clarity of absolute truth: She is so far ahead of me now in all her musical knowledge and abilities! She is 11 years old and she is miles and miles ahead of me and I will never catch up. There was an undertone of feeling just a little old within this realization - but also there was the certainty that she had diverted from me in this area, in this one fork of the many many roads of life. I could study music full time for years and likely never achieve the mastery she is beginning to show. And to think, I'll now spend consistent or even increasing energy to make sure that she continues to practice and learn.

I took piano lesson myself as a kid, but don't even remember how old I was or how far I got when my parents decided I didn't practice enough and the lessons were summarily discontinued. Not that I was a prodigy suddenly deprived of my passion; probably I was happy to have more time to watch television uninterrupted.

But I was very happy for my daughter yesterday. Even the distance I sensed opening up between us was a good thing, a natural thing, and the right thing. Hopefully she will continue to grow and surpass me in many ways. And I guess I'll also be grateful when she keeps coming back and wanting to show me what she's up to!

Sometimes anger is the only right response

Yesterday's front page story in my local paper was about Nataline Sarkesian, a 17-year-old girl who died last week after a long bout with cancer and her insurance company's refusal to cover a liver transplant. I read on line that the hospital had found a donor in mid-December but needed $75,000 in cash from the family to proceed. The insurance company reversed itself only after bloggers prompted hundreds of outraged calls and the family staged a rally late last week outside the company headquarters. Hours after the insurance company's decision she was dead.

Here is one of those times where I struggle with the Buddhist admonition to feel compassion even for those you don't like. Here is one of those times I feel that anger is the only appropriate response. I get limited satisfaction from saying to the Democratic presidential candidates, when they call asking for money: Talk to me when you support single-payer universal health care. I get limited satisfaction from talking to people individually as much as I can about the structural defects of our health care system.

Are these slow and small actions enough?

The bottom line is that our health care is driven by the profit motive. Individual and even collective care will always suffer in comparison, and it will be justified by corporate statements such as "people just don't want to pay for experimental care," as if they were to be faulted for that -- as if the could of course afford it if they wanted to and instead were off at the blackjack tables.

When I mentally plot the lines of each of these factors - the profit motive and entrenched corporate power on one axis, the growing outrage and ill health of the voting public on the other- it seems the intersection that will prompt change is just impossibly far away.

I'm not advocating pipe bombs or personal violence against anyone. But I'm afraid simply showing compassion and waiting for people to come around to your example simply doesn't work in the face of systemic greed and power. Of course mindfulness is always needed, to determine compassionate and effective action. But action is also needed.

Working Parent's Dilemma

Mornings for working parents are a tightrope walk at best. I have to say that this year is about the best it's ever been: both kids are in middle school, I am no longer scrambling to assemble healthy lunches and snacks before 8 am, and am even in the nice habit of making a hot breakfast and sitting down for a minute before the bus comes. On the perfect morning, we all sit together and look at the paper to see what's happening in the world.

But I was reminded this week how quickly family life can slide, any time, into stress that wants to break out of the nice little walls we try to build. Waking my oldest at 6:30 or so, she looked up at me sleepily, and with real and not manufactured pain, uttered the dreaded words: Mommy, I'm sick.

I am always vaguely ashamed of the first thought in my mind at this moment. Even as my hand reaches to feel the forehead, and one part of my mind inventories the kitchen to see what I have on hand for comfort foods, the rest of me is immediately thinking, What meetings do I have today? And when? And who with? Can they be cancelled? Postponed? Can she come with me? In the space of a minute my mental space goes from calm to

Within 5 minutes or so the parameters of the day had been established. Little response to the declaration that anyone staying home sick gets no tv or internet for the day. Slight fever. No meetings. A day of rest.

Fortunately, I was able to work from home the whole day. Actually I got to enjoy making her Ramen noodles and spending time together.

And I realize how lucky I am. I've got a good job that lets me be a mom. Parents who drive a bus or punch a clock face the same demands as parents and lose a day's pay or even their jobs. The way the US economy is going, more and more jobs are service jobs, and don't offer vacation or sick time.

A Modest Proposal

I've always has a love-hate relationship with work and parenting. I can put a knot in my stomach any time by just thinking about the inherent conflicts -- the expanding hours Americans are expected to put in, the need to balance professional and personal creativity and productivity with the time and work involved in the feeding and care and enjoyment of offspring.

First there's the anti-parent faction at work - you know, the ones who look at you sideways or make snide remarks when you leave at 4:30 or 5 on a regular basis, to beat, as I used to call them, the Day Care Police.

On one hand, I believe that all workers should have, simply, a life - something other than the job that drives them and gives them joy. To that end, everyone ought to have a reason, and the ability, to spend reasonable amounts of time at home and at pursuits other than work.

On the other, I have personally suffered financially through the babyhood and elementary-school-hood of two American citizens-in-training, who will someday (God willing) be productive and engaged workers and taxpayers. Although their father and I cobbled together weekend and off-hour work that required no more than part-time day care, the resulting bill still approached and sometimes topped our mortgage payment. After-school and summer care continued to drain thousands of dollars each year from our family budget - money not spent on home repair, savings, new car, vacations - all the way through middle school.

The tax credit for day care seems like an afterthought and an insult when you consider the enormity of the expense - an expense the state does not see fit to help with at all.

Given the complete lack of interest and support my government has shown in helping with the care and well-being of my children in these extremely formative years, I've sometimes wanted to run for office on the Modest Proposal that MY two little future wage earners should therefore have their future Social Security taxes earmarked entirely to ..... ME. (Much the same way that Al Franken talked about running for office on the platform of eliminating ATM fees.)

Sure, there would be a little bookkeeping and earmarking involved at the IRS. But surely it'd be possible to track my little wage earners' income and make sure I got my slice! Imagine some of the eventual consequences... Childless people would have to put aside extra money in their early-earning years to compensate for the later lack of income! Exactly the inverse of now, where the child-bearing are sucked dry.

I'm just kidding, of course....Mostly. After all, I'd think the goal should be a society where the young and old are cared for by a community of people with ample resources. We've stripped so many supports from families now that parent's weekly schedules and bank accounts are both worn down to the nub. I think I know why there is no universal child care in the US: the parents of very young children, the ones who would have to lobby and advocate to make it happen, are simply too freaking tired.