Snapshots: Obama and 1967

Obama and Netanyahu will be discussing return policies. 

1. It's been a long time since I wrote anything about Israel. I think it was the missiles that bothered me then, the ones aimed at Jewish towns not far from my family's homestead, just across the border from the Gaza strip.

Two heads of state, Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu will meet this afternoon. In his speech yesterday Mr. Obama supported an imminent Palestinian state and a divided Jerusalem. States, as you may know, have the right to bear arms, to aim missiles, to aim them wherever they want.

Thus Mr. Netanyahu reportedly wasn't happy with the speech, and neither am I.

Forget the rock throwing.  It will be missile launches over the Western Wall.

Mr. Obama, people might remember, ran on a platform of an undivided Jerusalem.  Israelis didn't trust him, not from what I read during that crucial election year, and the people in my velt didn't vote for him because they didn't trust him, either.  And yesterday, as if to confirm their fears, he declared that Israel should return to the 1967 borders, return land that serves as a buffer, protects Israel from terrorist aggressors.

Return land!  What is the return policy on most things? 

How about returning 6 million lives?

Some of us remember the Six Day War, the one that secured what we think of as Israel today.  In May of 1967, one hundred thousand Egyptians threatened Israel from the south and Iraqis poured into Jordan to the east.  The Syrians, up north, did what they could to amass an army. Rather than wait for the inevitable, Israel began an offensive that lasted only six days.

We know who won.  And now Mr. Obama wants Mr. Netanyahu to give it back, that land.

My suggestion is that Mr. Obama spend some time in Israel in a town near Gaza. Then talk about it some more.

2.  Remembering the Holocaust

I don't usually post videos, don't even watch too many, but FD forwarded me this one and he tends to be right about this sort of thing. It's a touching kids story, an award-winning short.  A little over three minutes.  No regrets.





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Moms Don't Have to Be Sherpas-- Or Do They?

A Sherpa

Versus Lenore Skenazy

Oh how I wish I hadn't taken down that post on skipping school. 

What's a Sherpa?  A Himalayan navigator, a guide, one who leads, checks the path ahead.

What are Sherpa parents?  Those who shepherd children, protect, probably don't push strollers lest their children think they are being pushed away.

I'm out of town, Los Angeles, and some people are telling me the story of the disappearance of their two year old. This two year old is my grandson.

The little guy follows the dog outside, isn't missed until someone's Spidey sense tingles. All hell breaks loose, but they find him down the street. He's in a very good mood and can't understand what the big fuss is all about.

His point of view is well-taken.  Why the fuss? He's two.
He can handle a walk.

His attitude proves what we say about healthy kids needing space to grow, room to operate independently. If parents hover, children miss golden opportunities to stretch their limits, to gain confidence. They never feel the thrill of I can! in a thousand different ways.

When she's there, mommy, she kisses the boo-boos. When she isn't, the boo-boos are minor annoyances, interruptions in healthy play.  Lacking watchful attention, kids find independent, alternative solutions. We hold them back when we are the only thing they see.

The self is truly the self when tested alone.

This is my argument against the family bed, by the way, something I've wanted to rant about for a long time.  Allowing a child in the sack sabotages his confidence, if protects from competition, not unlike the  menopause of breast-feeding.  Kids need to be alone at dawn, the sun shining through the window, the birds chirping outside, to truly sense that life is beautiful and good, all alone, no large human buffers to buff against ghosts and invisible boogie men.

In the same way, we shouldn't be shielding our progeny from life's many disappointments in the name of love.  Children need disappointment, they need to fail, need to do badly in school, mess up an art project.  At least once.  Failure keeps us humble.

And running to Mommy for help reinforces . . .  running to Mommy for help.  There is a fine line between healthy help-seeking and dependency.  Let them call their friends to figure it out.  Mom won't be there forever.

But parents panic, worry that their kids won't get into college or kindergarten.  It's a cruel, competitive world, hence the help with papers, math, making sure they get to school on time. The consequence is a generation of pampered little people who don’t need to learn how to use a GPS because they have a chauffeur.  I have patients who drive their teenagers to schools less than a mile away.  The kids are lucky if they see a rabbit or a squirrel in their lifetimes. 

Somewhere in this Bible of True Parental Love it apparently says that we're not supposed to let our kids get bored, either.  The idle mind, devil's playground, heroin addiction, surely.  But kids are electronically drugged until they fall bleary-eyed from their chairs, three screens blazing with G-chat, Facebook and lastly, homework.  Still time for teev.   It's a miracle they learn anything.

The good news is that there is a resistance movement to quash helicopter parenting.  Hovering soccer moms come to therapy announcing that they are no longer cursing referees, throwing tomatoes, purses.  They are finding this embarrasses their children. 

Fifty years ago mothers like mine either went to work or made dinner.  Either way, children played hide and seek-- outside-- and baseball, unsupervised, in the park  Can you imagine letting little kids do that now, have free reign over an entire block, the whole neighborhood?  

Lenore Skenazy, author of Free Range Kids, can. She's made a well-deserved splash joking about the redefinition of motherhood.  Her family executive committee made a conscious decision to let their nine-year old son take the train alone because he wanted to be a big boy.  Well, all right then!  The world is yours to explore, dear.  Just be safe.

And the committee taught him how to do just that.

According to Skenazy, what fuels the mishigas is the media (mishigas is Yiddish for craziness, my word not hers, rhymes with dish-wig-floss).  News anchors seize upon missing-persons stories, encourage responsible parents to buy tracking devices.

She has a point about the industry.  But just because people make money off of fear doesn't mean that there is nothing to fear.  Crime is down, as she points out, but some crimes are up, namely child pornography.  States Attorneys offices, the people who train people like me, don't think that the fear of child abduction is an inordinately irrational fear at all.

Sherpa parents knew it all along!

Over-protective, but not blind. They are out there, sorry, the no-good-niks, although they are usually people we know.  But there is stranger danger, it does happen (watch the CNN show  Issues with Jane Velez Mitchell).  Last year a teenager in my neighborhood fought off a man outside the library who tried to throw her into the trunk of his car, and little kids walking home from the bus corner were approached by a man in a car offering candy.

Candy!

So Sherpa parents aren't over-protective, necessarily.  And they're the ones who attend relationship safety workshops, who worry about the school-yard creeps without knowing that the real threats are working inside.

In schools, working for day camps, and online.  Predators and "business people"* troll for unhappy kids who make themselves vulnerable on the Internet. They are the ones whose Facebook settings are set to Friends with Everyone. Problems at home, needing to vent, lonely, kids write and blog bout their depression. A predator, usually a pornographer, finds it, comments, slowly grooms the child.  

You're so pretty, didn't you know that? Ever think about modeling? 

No hurry to meet.  The cameras are in our homes.

These are not good people.  They are people who have seized upon a billion dollar industry-- the child pornography industry-- and they are looking for their fair share of the pie.

So being the your child's friend (and knowing the babysitter) is the true prime directive, not being a sherpa, and not being too cavalier on the subject, either.  The traditional relationship-violence protection methods are still relevant: teaching kids that not everyone is a friend, that people who tell them to keep secrets might be concealing illegal acts.  Maybe sending them to akido will help, but talking with them about our very different world, one more dangerous than the world that their parents and grandparents reined, is more to the point.

If they worry too much, we can treat that.

And as long as I'm ranting, sorry, one more thing.  You people in Los Angeles?  My first degrees, the ones with the confident baby?  Would you kindly keep an eye on him? Or do I have to move out there?

therapydoc

Mother's Day

My friends and I are about to start watching a movie (Country Strong, Gwyneth is fantastic, and the faces of these actors, so gorgeous, and I am such a sucker for a good country song) when the phone interrupts.

So I pick up.  Everyone else seems to be on the phone, too. There should be a rule, but okay.

It's my daughter-in-law asking me to come for a Mother's Day brunch.  This takes me by surprise, because usually it's my generation making the brunches, the dinners for Hallmark holidays.  And Mother's Day is a bear because so many people, believe it or not, want to see their therapist on Mother's Day.  My people.

I'll do Father's Day, is my reaction, and will knock off by 10:30 on Sunday morning to make it to the lox and bagels, hopefully there will be quiche.  What can I bring, has to be a part of that conversation, but I forget, in a hurry to watch the movie.

Later on I begin to think about the gifts, because there have to be gifts, and it occurs to me that the better you know someone, the easier this is. And if you don't know someone very well, it's almost impossible to get the right gift.  But your mother-- you know her.  How hard can this be?

This is why it's so funny that we buy for our mothers-in-law, too, because really, their first degrees should be doing that, they know them better.  But okay.  Over the years, we know them, too.

Sometimes there's a theme of the week in therapy, to change the subject for a minute.  Like last week the song, I Will Always Love You, popped up twice.  The Whitney Houston song!  Different reasons, different people, same concept.  People become separate, move in different directions, but that attachment isn't going anywhere, or so says the song.  The song is wrong, though.  If you wait long enough, actually, it does dissipate, even for mothers. That can be good or bad, depending.

The theme this week, not by coincidence, seems to be about giving, and how that's so easy for some people, and yet these same people can't take a gift graciously. This is communicated with clarity:

Don't spend money!
Don't waste your money!
Please, I don't need anything!
Please, I'll just return it!
I won't like it. Whatever it is, I won't like it.  Not my taste.

I had to beat more than one person up over this, not wanting to take gifts, not giving someone else the opportunity even to do anything for them.  Why is this so bad?  Independence is a good thing!

Because the joy in life, for many people, and you don't know who these people are, is in the verbs, the action.  Giving is an emotional exercise for them.   They need to give.  And they're not co-dependent, they're just nice.   People who don't let them do this are denying the use of that muscle, the one that feels really good when it gets a giving-doing work out. 

It's a feel-good workout for everyone, imho.  For a few moments, under the influence of giving, a person feels selfless.  At least in those moments we're not engaged in our everyday selfish behavior.  And we know, come on, how far that can go.

Don't forget, whether giving or receiving, that the gift itself is symbolic, it will be remembered.  If you're the one giving, this is you, this gift.  Be it a vacuum cleaner or a Swarovski figurine, this thing has your name all over it.  He gave it to me.  She gave it to me. His taste.  Her taste.  The gift has fingerprints-- touch, attention --all wrapped up in a little box.

Little gifts, little boxes are a good idea, if you're unsure about what to give.  (My kids give me winder toys-- why didn't I ever mention Swarovsky!-- just kidding, kids, don't you dare spend the money)  Little is good in case the gift misses the mark.  Some of us won't throw a single gift away, even if they have long outlived their usefulness or we never like them.  How hard that is, throwing gifts away, even cards.  Those boxes in the basement!  We pray for a flood.  I've started sticking a post-it in my cards to other people, writing on it:

I love you, please reuse this card.

So it's a crazy day, full of emotion for a lot of people, and probably if you get invited to brunch, you should totally go.  Check out the whole gestalt of the gift giving thing.

And when it comes to a gift for mom, if you still have one, I know it can be hard sometimes.  Not everyone can, not everyone even wants to give a gift, or even a card, certainly not a call. That's how it can be when people don't treat us right.  We avoid them.  It's not being selfish, either, believe it or not, rather it is what it is.  Staying disengaged can preserve sanity for certain sensitive souls.  And somebody has to stay sane.

Those of us lucky enough to know that we have to get something for Mom, whether we want to or not, had better get going on it.  Brunch is coming right up, and it's going to be good.

Just one last thing.  Moms, when you open them up, those cards, those presents--  smile and say thank you.

therapydoc

Technorati

Technorati is a site that features technology writers, bloggers of all sorts, and the news. When I started blogging back in 2006 my daughter suggested I toss a Technorati cookie into one of my posts, let them monitor my traffic. Let me know how cool I am.

So for awhile, like some of you, maybe, I checked once a week to see how Everyone Needs Therapy ranked. And over time, like most of my fancies, my attention diminished.  My numbers did, too, probably because these depend upon posting often, at least a few times a week.

Anyway, they wrote to me last week, the folks at Technorati, asked if I wanted to write for them! Maybe everyone gets an invitation, I don't know, they do have hundreds of writers.  But it's so easy to flatter me, seriously, pathetically easy. (You do know why some of us are more prone to that, right? Something to do with veiled narcissism.)

So I shot off an opinion piece about a favorite topic, Kids and Sex, a response to a Yahoo story about second-graders performing sex acts in class -- they're wearing their birthday suits in class, learning about things definitely not in the curriculum.  

I pray it isn't true.  And if it is true, you have to wonder:  How does such a thing happen?

The teacher is suspended, if that makes anyone feel any better.  Somehow I don't.

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Authority

The skirt I’m wearing on the return trip from LAX isn’t a pencil skirt. It hits just over the knee in white-grey cotton denim, a sequence pattern at the hem.  Not a straight A-line, but there’s room, should it be my fancy, to hide a bomb.  Or so they say.

My shoes are in the white plastic bin, as is my computer and Iphone; my purse, sweater and short navy wool jacket are in another. Hand cream and toothpaste are bagged, visible on the tray, in one ounce ziplocks.

Tame as a sheltie in the San Fernando Valley one might think, but no, not to the team at American.

“We have to pat you down. It’s the skirt.”

“Of course.”

Huh?

Then she explains.

Everyone with a skirt like mine is clearly suspect.

To their credit, the good people at American Airlines are pleasant, the agent smiles as she directs me to a lunge, maybe it's an Akido or a yoga pose, first the left foot forward, then the right, so that she can check for explosives. It is hysterical and another passenger, the gentleman behind me in line, who clearly isn't wearing a skirt, is amused. "You did that well," he smiles. "Good stretch."

Indeed. Another woman might have been embarrassed. Actually, I am that other woman.

This is a security risk worthy of two full minutes of everyone's time.  How many people are waiting in line?

I finally reach the gate to find that phone signals are scrambled. Perhaps this is a security measure, too, for our benefit, of course. But we'll be arriving a 5 a.m. CST, and I have yet to send my son a text with flight information and it is 1 a.m. his time. So I leave FD to find coverage, have to scramble alone to board when I get back.

My carry-on does not pass. It is too full, too fat, apparently, like I feel after eight days of matzah (I said No thank you on the last day).  The bag is roughly tagged.  It will be sent to baggage, a not-so-friendly agent tells me, handing me a claim slip.  Nobody's smiling here at the gate.  I say goodbye to my newly purchased carry-on, for this is a red-eye, and the ground personnel at Ohare will likely oversleep.

Such is life. I don’t care. It's late.

But oh. FD cares. Why didn’t I argue? The same bag fit on the way to Los Angeles. Why wouldn’t it fit on the way home?

 “I don’t fight City Hall, it isn't worth the time."

He thinks I’m a wimp.

It isn't my nature to confront authority, I remind him, although No has to be the beginning of the negotiations in many situations.  All I want is to get home, not be detained as a terrorist.

The folks at American haven't read the Daniel Silva novels, obviously.  The novelist estimates 16,000 terrorists in Britain alone, three thousand trained by al-Qaeda, as many, perhaps more in the USA? But this is fiction.  I have one of these thrillers in my purse right now.

And because of the novel, because maybe it really isn't fiction, when I look at the world, at the crowds, at people in the airport, even in the park, at the mall, on the bus, nothing is the same.

therapydoc

Therapeutic

Let's keep this one short.

Late summer, 2010
FD returns home with a brown paper bag in hand. He hands it to me. “I bought you a present.”

It is a book, a hard-covered basement bargain book from Barnes and Noble with a glossy red jacket, a female detective mystery. “Thanks!” I exclaim, never one to turn down a present. “What’s the occasion?”

He sheepishly admits that he feels that reading Infinite Jest has been bad for me, is making my depression worse.

The 1079-page David Foster Wallace tome does nothing of the sort, I tell him, rather the problem is my relationship with my father (one can do only so much) and his death. Everyone knows this, certainly him, but FD sees me reading this book, and since I don’t see what he sees seeing me, I have to respect that.

I never should have told him that David Foster Wallace killed himself.

A sucker for detective novels, I put down Infinite Jest and lose myself in a book I can't find to recommend.  But I liked it well enough and succumbed to tossing Jest to the pile on the bedroom floor, put it away for the time being.

Then today James Campbell's review,  A Cure for Head-Exploding Brilliance, about David Foster Wallace’s last novel, The Pale King, comes out, and it's all coming back to me now-- that Foster Wallace jones.  Mr. Campbell captures the author's manic writing style, that head-exploding brilliance, with writer-eze that real writers understand.  He uses words like maximalist. 

Campbell tells us that Claud Sylvanshine, central character of The Pale King, is an aspiring accountant for the IRS (timely), and he has a gift. Sylvanshine can count the number of words in any speech or conversation. Confiding his talent he explains, “I’ve said 2,742 words right now since I started. Meaning 2,742 words as of just before I said, 'I've said,' versus . . .' ”

This is a hint to Hal, Hal Incandenza of Infinite Jest, a teenager who knows words, all words, for he has memorized dictionaries, all of them, and can cite their differences. Harold Incandenza, boy word genius, is addicted to marijuana, plays tennis, and loves his mom. His father, a brilliant filmmaker has taken up with Hal’s brother’s girl friend who will wear a mask half-way through the book to hide facial disfigurement suffered in an attempted suicide.  The "accident" is masked as a crack cocaine overdose. Hal's father is also a casualty of suicide, which is perhaps one reason our young hero smokes so much pot.  The method, not for the feint of heart.

Which is why, perhaps, FD told me to put down Infinite Jest.  I was on page 795.  Almost there!

Mr. Campbell on David Foster Wallace (italics mine):

“Admirers know that to open his books— not just the fiction but the essays, too— is to release a great wave of anecdote, detail, narrative teasing, and character congestion and to encounter the enjoyable facility for direct address. Wallace was committed to the entertainment value of fiction. Without it, he told Mr. Lipsky (of the Rolling Stone) the writer risked losing his main partner: the reader. Those prepared to wade through what could seem like massive amounts of information-heavy detritus would eventually reach the bliss of open seas.”

Which is why I read as much as I did.  Those open seas.  That and the 12-Step die-hards and their meetings.  For realism you don't get any better.  

I bring this to your attention, because of that word, maximalist-- for nothing goes to the cutting board  (no dropped claims here).

See what I just did there in the parentheses?  No dropped claims here has absolutely nothing to do with this story, except that those of you who still send paper claims to third party payers know exactly what it means and find the line hugely entertaining.  Maybe not.  A dropped claim is a bill to an insurer that "falls" to the floor, is never processed, and is swept away by maintenance personnel at midnight.  The provider of service is never paid. (That would be your therapist).  Now, if no dropped claims here had anything remotely to do with a story line, a maximalist would keep it.

That’s what it is to be a maximalist-- no editing because the road, the process, the way-to, at least to the author, and clearly to millions of literary fans, is worth the trip.

This flies in the face of everything FD has taught me about how to write, for he taught me, and he learned from the best English teacher in the country, Helen Kuentsler, native to that blue-collar Illinois town with the better education across the Mississippi. Ms. Kuentsler taught The Elements of Style (EB White's reprise of the William Strunk's 1918 original) and FD memorized the book.

Editing one's words is what a good therapist does, by the way.

So I assumed that those of us who refused to edit enough, who wrote ad nauseum without a care in the world, were just stupid. Nobody wants to read so much blather, honestly, and few of us are as entertaining as David Foster Wallace, and probably nobody knows as many words.  But it isn't about anyone else, let's talk, when we write, which is exactly why a maximalist is a maximalist, and there is nothing, really, to judge.  It is why in therapy the therapist doesn't have to say all that much and usually shouldn't.

Campbell alludes to Mr. Foster-Wallace's therapy, that he changed there-after and became obsessed with boring as an antidote for his condition, that exploding brain, which is why his last novel is replete with very short sentences.  He quotes  from The Pale King.

"Irrelevant" Chris Fogle turns a page.  Howard Cardwell turns a page.  Ken Wax turns a page.  Matt Redgate turns a page.  "Groovy" Bruce Channing attaches a form to a file.  Ann Williams turns page.  Anand Singh turns two pages at once by mistake and turns on back which makes slightly different sound.  David Cusk turns a page.  Sandra Pounder turns a page.

Another exerpt reveals that most paragraphs are not like this.  He doesn't, actually, omit needless words.  

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, same newspaper, same day, reiterates EB White's message.  He doesn't even waste words with an honorable mention to the The Elements of Style.  In  How to Get a Real Education Adams advises us how to get ahead, even if we are only B students.  Among his tips:  Write Simply.

This has everything to do with therapy, I feel. For there are minimalists and there are maximalists, and the therapist must read them both, respect all manners of communication.  The minimalists get the max for the minimum, and the maximalists gets the floor, as they should.  More therapy, and who knows?  Maybe David Wallace Foster would still be with us today.

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The Post Script:

It is early spring here in Chicago, sunny and warm, and as I ride my bike to the office at 8:00 a.m. on a  bright Sunday morning, it occurs to me that I really want to read The Pale King, whether the sentences are long or short. It might be therapeutic.  For even if I'm not depressed anymore, I can always switch to something, change something for a kick.   What I really want is for my landlord to paint the walls of my office Robin Egg Blue.  Hello?  You out there?  S?


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Angry Birds

 The fractured fairy tale of The Three Little Pigs

Second night in a row, rather than read myself to sleep (The Queen's Fool) I stare at my Iphone, play a silly game, tell myself it's an adult thing, trying to master physics.

This cannot be me!  This is unbelievable, wasting time, repeatedly pulling the sling shot, lifting the bird to the sky, determining the precise arc, angry that it takes so long between turns.  But it is denial; it is me. And it's hard to admit it, although I'm looking for a 12-Step program.

I'm powerless when it comes to Angry Birds.              

The next morning I hold the phone in my hands and glare. "I have a headache," I kvetch to FD. "A hangover from Angry Birds. I'm going to delete it."

"Delete it!" he cries, "and don't even let me see it. You know how easy it is for me to succumb to this sort of thing."

But I don't.  I don't delete it. I think, I'll control this. I can control this. No more headaches. I'll get in bed and read, lose myself in Elizabethan England, and fall asleep unless something very worrisome comes to mind.

Oh, that worrisome part!  We're nearing the spring holiday season, and because I like to enjoy the time with my visitors, most of the cooking is prepared ahead of time, in an ersatz Passover kitchen in the basement. After a few hours of work at the stove, and sorting through dishes, straightening, organizing, doing what a woman does while watching what's in the oven, I am exhausted, but wired. It won't be easy, falling asleep, especially since I've heard some news about a sick family member.

The right thing to do, for someone like me, would be to pray awhile, then go to bed, read, fall asleep. But no. We have Angry Birds.

 I wake up angry at myself, remembering last night, beating the third level of the second tier on the free game, the subtle joy associated with that.  There is an endpoint to this insanity, for never would I shell out money for the ap, the enhanced electronic game, no matter how angry the birds.  And we will run out of free levels to the game.

What is the appeal?  I ask myself, because it's not my thing, not usually, electronic games.  Is it their anger? Does smashing walls to pop pigs unleash some sort of sublimated hostility lurking within me? That's what we say, right?  The game is on my phone because on my last visit, my five-year old granddaughter acted out and nobody had time for her and it was too late to take her outside. I had no idea how far she made it on the game, didn't supervise, but she made it all the way to the second tier. We're talking about a game for five-year olds.

Maybe it's subliminal anger.  Or maybe it's that fairy tale about the wolf and the three pigs. It has to be. Remember? The pigs. launched into the world by kindly Mama Pig, are living peaceably in three different houses, one made of straw, one of sticks, the last of bricks.  Along comes a wolf who cries,

"Let me in or I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down."

I can't remember the rest of the story, but it seems the wolf does manage to eat up the pigs, except for the last, perhaps, because he has made more of an effort at architecture.

Do the best you can and you'll survive

is the lesson for the kiddies.

It's hard to hear a story like this when you're five, especially with pictures. Very violent, traumatic. Then you grow up, and some fifty years later, you have the chance, the opportunity.

And you identify with the aggressor on an electronic game.

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