Parenthood

Accidental Polytheist


The Birth of Venus.

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Began reading the Percy Jackson and the Olympians novels to Dee this past spring. They are a bit old for her, but she adores mythology and I figure, it can’t hurt, right?

But it seems that her 8-year-old world view is still grounded enough in fairies and Santa and magic to latch onto the idea of gods, satyrs and demigods and add them to the moral base Rob and I are instilling in her.

Long ago I toyed with the idea of raising her in a creed, thinking that everyone benefits from having a theology to test the world against and use as a springboard to spiritual openness and independent thinking and analysis; the latter, I believe, is critical if one is to avoid being swept up in dubious (and sometimes blatantly self-serving) dogma.  But my experiences with Catholicism as it is practiced by more than a few and with the stench of hypocrisy that overwhelms whatever good there is about most religions, led me to discard the idea and allow Dee to question and come to her own decisions.

For the moment, she has decided to believe in gods and goddesses. Though she assures us that she knows they are make-believe, she seems to be forming her ideas of right and wrong moral behavior with a decidedly Greek Myth Meets Druidism perspective.

I am not sure if I am a complete failure as a moral guardian or a success beyond belief.

We ventured over to the arena today for the Country Craft Fair. The last Saturday in November, all the little rural communities around here hold craft fairs and there is a tree lighting and fireworks at the Firehall at the end of the day. The fair is decidedly crafty and bakey.

As we wandered, an older gentleman blocked our path and began that sort of grandpa-ish banter with Dee. Her curls, big blue-gray eyes and too serious for a child demeanor attract attention, and older folk in particular can’t help but try to engage her.

“Why aren’t you in school?” he demanded.

She backed away and frowned. Dee isn’t a child one should joke with. She has inherited my literal take and doesn’t always recognize “teasing”.

“It’s not a school day,” she finally replied.

“Well, do you go to school on Monday?”

She nodded.

“And Tuesday?”

Affirmative.

And the gent proceeded to tick off the other days of the week.

“What about Sunday?” he ended with.

“There’s no school on Sunday,” Dee said.

“You haven’t heard of Sunday school?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“Well, Mom, ” he addressed me, “what do you have to say for yourself?”

If I’d had time to think, or even see this coming – though I should have because the community is quite religious – I might have retorted with something that could have cost me a bit in terms of acceptance in the rural society I find myself on the edges of, but I didn’t.

“Um, nothing,” I said. “No.”

It probably wasn’t what I said. I said literally “nothing”, but I’ve been told that my face is rather open and telling. And my eyes do this flat, squinty thing that served me well as a middle-school teacher and, apparently, frightens old men too.

He backed away and we passed.

Polytheism? Judgemental Christianity? Really not much to weigh, in my opinion.

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Poor Spelling Isn’t Fatal


Eye death

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The child brought her first term report card home today. Nothing surprised me save the A equivalent she got in math.

She did not inherit that from me.

But she is blessed with my slightly dyslexic view of all things written – letters, numbers, whole words, sentences, paragraphs – what I see and hear doesn’t always translate properly. I never thought this was abnormal growing up. I thought I was just selectively stupid.

It wasn’t until a tutor at the U of I’s math lab suggested that my inability to perform simple Algebra, despite the fact that I appeared to be of normal intelligence, was due to a learning disability.

The guy’s girlfriend was an education major and she’d suggested this to him after he’d described the difficulty he was having in getting me to recognize formulas.

Regardless, this light bulb moment did me no good in the reality of needing a math credit, but it stuck with me. Years later, I team taught with a number of special ed teachers and managed to glean enough information to semi-pinpoint my particular issues. Again, a barn door after the horse is long gone kind of thing but good to know at any rate.

Anyway, the same brain hiccup that makes it difficult for me to recognize number patterns without some kind of external cue (like the tones on the phone keypad and the pattern my finger makes helps me remember phone numbers for example) makes spelling … challenging.

Yes. Yes. There are spelling “rules”. I taught middle school English for 17 years. I am well aware. But the English language evolved haphazardly in its written form.  Spellings were all over the place in the early days of the printed language and it was printers – not linguists or grammarians – who invented spellings. They were not always well-educated, or schooled at all, and they pulled words together from the recesses of their assholes at times.

English is a mongrel language, which is why those who learn it as a second language in the various grammar school systems around the globe always sound like automatons to native speakers. It’s also why even those who grow up with it as their mother tongue can’t necessarily communicate with each other if they grew up in different parts of the same country.

But that was a digression. I couldn’t spell. Couldn’t even learn to spell with all that much success in grade school.

Do you remember those leveled spelling lists of the 70’s? They were grouped together using the alphabet. Every year we took a pretest at the beginning of the year using the level the teacher assumed we should be at given our age and every year, I had to start at J or K.

Never once made it to M. Grade 3, 4, 5 and 6. Never passed L. It was so demoralizing that I eventually didn’t bother to try at all.

I was the kid who couldn’t punctuate, spell or use capitals all that consistently, but I was the best reader in my class and passed out of all my grammar without so much as glance in the direction of my teachers for assistance.

Spelling, I decided early, was not a very good indicator of who was smart and who was retarded.

But for some reason, it mattered a lot and I suffered the frowney faces of teachers all the way through university for my haphazard spelling.

And then came Word. And spell check. And it was awesome. God rested. The seventh day.

Spell check changed everything. Computers freed me.

Doomed all of you though.

So, Dee can’t spell. Her punctuation is “creative” though she has an ear for structure.

Her reading issues caused me anguish. Her dad lost the ability to read and write as his illness progressed. Whenever she can’t do something or master something where letters and words are concerned, my heart catches.

Is she getting sick? Theoretically she shouldn’t. She’s a girl. Her double X protects her from the disease that killed her dad, but I still fly there. Don’t ask me why.

But not with spelling. I couldn’t spell and but for spell check (which doesn’t catch everything – for that I have Rob), I would be mute still or at the very least making you wonder if I wasn’t “special”.

In my early years of teaching, I did as little with spelling formally as I could get away with. I knew from experience that it was better to teach kids how to spot errors and tricks to get around any shortcomings than it was to force them to memorize a random list of words. Later on, all spelling was based on relevancy. I cribbed spelling lists from their subject area teachers. My students never had a spelling list that wasn’t related to another class they were taking and I always allowed points for using the word correctly somehow. They defined or used them in sentences. They could write synonyms instead of the spelling word. When they had math terms, I let them draw and diagram. Spelling a word is useless if one can’t use it properly in the first place.

Dee’s only mediocre mark was spelling and picky grammar. She’s just eight. A year younger than I was in the same grade. Her teacher isn’t worried. I’m not either. This is something I know she gets from me, and I turned out alright.

I never won a spelling bee. They are overrated anyway.

Tonight, I helped her create a blog. Showed her the spell check. Lights began to flicker like fireflies across her freckled brow. She clearly never imagined such a thing.

It’s like finding out there really is magic.

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Bigotry is Easier Than Honest Introspection


Lesbian wedding.

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Brian Brown is a name you may, or may not, know depending on the depth of your interest and/or passion about marriage as a civil right. Putting aside the fact that the State’s only interest in marriage is from a contract and licensing point of view, and that marriage as a social or religious issue is purely fabricated to push whatever agenda is deemed necessary, Brown is the brainy brawn behind the National Organization of Marriage (NOM), which believes that marriage is a man/woman thing.

Brown’s group has been instrumental in interfering in states where same-sex marriage is/was/or is liable to become legal. NOM’s most recent victory was the appallingly disingenuous campaign waged during Iowa’s midterm retention vote for three State Supreme justices who happened to be presiding over the court when it unanimously ruled that Iowa’s own constitution forbids discrimination against gays when it came to obtaining marriage licenses. Brown’s group, instead of pointing out that the justices ruled according to existing law, lied to Iowans, telling them that the justices imposed their own personal agendas in place of the law to create a right where one didn’t exist.

It’s fine to campaign against politicians who are responsible for the creation of policy and law, but to attack non-partisan judges who simply clarify existing law is out of bounds. The retention vote – though most people don’t appear to understand this – is about the judge’s qualifications to read and enforce existing statute. Brown knows this. He is a Harvard grad after all and I am sure that makes him intelligent enough to know what the vote was actually about. It unfortunately also makes him smarter than most of the Iowans he needed to trick into helping him push his personal agenda of making sure that same-sex marriage is never legal in the United States. Ever.

Personal agenda?

Brown would not agree. He is quoted in a recent Newsweek article, quite artfully really, giving his reasons for taking up arms against the formation of couples and families with the following statement:

“Marriage is a public good. If you change the definition of marriage, you don’t just change it for the gay married couple down the street, you change it for everyone,” he says. If gay marriage is allowed, “then the state is essentially saying that my views on marriage, and the majority of Americans’ views on marriage, are equivalent to discrimination…It profoundly affects me if my children are taught in the schools that my views on marriage are bigoted. It profoundly affects me if the church that I’m part of is treated in the law as bigoted. And, ultimately, same-sex marriage is not true.”

And he is not wrong. Equality in marriage regardless of orientation would make him look like a bigot. It would call into question his Catholic faith. It would brand tens of millions of Americans as prejudiced.

Why is that wrong? He is a bigot. The Catholic Church is so riddled with hypocrisy that one more glaring affront to the call of Christ’s “love thy neighbor” hardly breaks its bigoted straw back.  And the American people, generally speaking, have always needed to be legally compelled to promote marginalized and discriminated against groups (like blacks and women for example) to equal footing.

They are all bigots, and apparently, not okay with owning it.

So not okay, that they are willing to campaign and protest and promote the idea of laws that are discriminatory.

All because people like Brian Brown can’t personally come to grips with that real fact that he is wrong, his religion is wrong and that the American people prefer inequality to equality, a peculiar flaw in a people so devoted to the idea of personal liberty and so very much about fairness (as it applies to them specifically – they don’t do abstract well at all).

Having taught public school at the middle school level for a couple of decades, I can assure Mr. Brown that his children will one day come to their own conclusions about his bigotry, regardless of the outcome of his efforts to save face at the expense of other people’s liberties. I was raised strict Catholic myself, and I am under no illusions about the stance of some of my countrymen or my former faith.

Waging war against same-sex marriage because it forces you to look at the truth is not a good reason to take up arms.  Society has weathered all sorts of enlightenment and coming to grips with the injustices that gays and lesbians have endured will not permanently scar anyone’s psyche.

America gave up slavery and then Jim Crow. It has, superficially at least, given up sexism.  Lady Liberty didn’t drop her torch and the Declaration of Independence didn’t burst into flames.

Change is life. Life doesn’t stand still and that’s a good thing.

Having to own your bigotry and admit that you are wrong is called “growth”. It’s actually quite good for your children to see. It’s a “teachable moment” that will catapult you in their esteem just as surely as their discovery of your clinging to outdated social injustice will damn you to irrelevance.

Brian Brown is not the only person to wake up one day and realize that the world was evolving when he would rather not, but he is someone with power enough to force the rest of us to cling to our bigoted past – and that’s not right. It shouldn’t be up to him or churches that many of us don’t belong to or hate groups that revel in the adrenaline surge of pointless and anger-filled discrimination.

Brown’s justification for his actions could have easily been spouted in the early 1960’s by segregationists or in the early 20th century by those who felt women should be denied the vote or by slave owners before the Civil War. It’s the refuge of the spiritually lazy to deny the right of society to grow up because it asks too much of them personally.

Brian Brown is a bigot and he’s fighting to keep his children from finding out.