Saturday, June 17, 2006
Happy Father’s Day – to my wife
By Russell King
Being an American dad ain’t for sissies. To do this parenthood thing the right way, for you and for them, you have to bring your "A" game day after day after day for at least 25 years from the birth of your youngest child, even if you have only one. Parenting is a contact sport requiring speed, flexibility, strength and endurance. All of which is why I am grateful, without pause, for my wife, Rhonda. Because she plays on my team, I’m a better dad.
I’m grateful for her friendship. In those moments when life gets hard, it means everything to know there is someone who is fighting beside you. No matter what. Sure, I still get that "romance rush" from nothing more than the scent of her hair, but our friendship came before our love, probably even nurtured it, and it’s our friendship that forms the foundation of this thing called "us."
I’m grateful for her strength. She delivered (without C-sections or spinal blocks) one baby butt-first, another baby upside-down and a 10-pounder with such broad shoulders he got stuck getting through the portal of life. That redefine’s tough. We all need someone strong, from time to time. I’m glad she’s the one who chooses to be here for me.
Her strength is on display every day, because she is the "general" of the King battalion. She’s a natural planner with a gift for creativity, sensitivity to individuals within groups, a phenomenal memory for detail and an unwavering drive to do better than before. Not better than anyone else, just better than before. Most of the times this family train bogs down or jumps track, it’s the fire in her engine that gets it going again and heading in the right direction.
I’m grateful for her wisdom. While she’s sure of herself, she has the wisdom to question herself, to keep her mind open and to learn. No one I know is quicker to admit mistakes, make amends and search for alternatives. No one I know is less pretentious or more honest, nor more gentle with the feelings of others.
I’m grateful for her forgiveness and belief in me. To make this team work, she has to forgive me for those human moments when I fail to be my best self. Knowing how my psyche works, she follows up forgiveness be evoking that best self – then one we both want me to be. (This is, I think, an essential service we mutually provide.)
Finally, I am grateful for what can only be called "The Rhonda Power." I can’t explain it, I can only observe and report. There is a light that radiates from her face that connects her with the rest of us. Complete strangers are immediately at ease with her and drawn to her, will confide in her and will happily do for her what they will do for no one else. People turn to her in their moments of most dire need and greatest joy. She’s involved in an intense love affair with life and it shows. Even when I’m so mad a her I can barely speak, I know I’m in the presence of something I sense as divine. Beyond that, I have no explanation.
Yes, there are days when none of this is too apparent – days when she can’t, and probably shouldn’t, stand me, and days when those tables are turned. There are days when it feels like someone has stuck a straw in both of us and sucked out all the life. But they are few. Nothing in life is absolute and unchangeable, so you have to play the game on a percentage basis. I figure our average is Hall of Fame material. That’s how it feels, anyway.
Only some of what we now have was present when first we married, and I take that as a good sign. We’re growing, we’re learning, we’re adapting and we’re doing it together. You let go of some of the old to embrace some of the new; you forsake the imagined and adore the real. And all the while it gets stronger, richer and better. I can’t imagine to what else we might aspire.
Whether I am any good as an American dad has yet to be determined – the jury of six is still out – but whatever the verdict, I know it’ll be infinitely better than it would have been had I not had this particular partner in crime. So this Father’s Day, I’d like to say to my wife: Thank you, honey.
By Russell King
Being an American dad ain’t for sissies. To do this parenthood thing the right way, for you and for them, you have to bring your "A" game day after day after day for at least 25 years from the birth of your youngest child, even if you have only one. Parenting is a contact sport requiring speed, flexibility, strength and endurance. All of which is why I am grateful, without pause, for my wife, Rhonda. Because she plays on my team, I’m a better dad.
I’m grateful for her friendship. In those moments when life gets hard, it means everything to know there is someone who is fighting beside you. No matter what. Sure, I still get that "romance rush" from nothing more than the scent of her hair, but our friendship came before our love, probably even nurtured it, and it’s our friendship that forms the foundation of this thing called "us."
I’m grateful for her strength. She delivered (without C-sections or spinal blocks) one baby butt-first, another baby upside-down and a 10-pounder with such broad shoulders he got stuck getting through the portal of life. That redefine’s tough. We all need someone strong, from time to time. I’m glad she’s the one who chooses to be here for me.
Her strength is on display every day, because she is the "general" of the King battalion. She’s a natural planner with a gift for creativity, sensitivity to individuals within groups, a phenomenal memory for detail and an unwavering drive to do better than before. Not better than anyone else, just better than before. Most of the times this family train bogs down or jumps track, it’s the fire in her engine that gets it going again and heading in the right direction.
I’m grateful for her wisdom. While she’s sure of herself, she has the wisdom to question herself, to keep her mind open and to learn. No one I know is quicker to admit mistakes, make amends and search for alternatives. No one I know is less pretentious or more honest, nor more gentle with the feelings of others.
I’m grateful for her forgiveness and belief in me. To make this team work, she has to forgive me for those human moments when I fail to be my best self. Knowing how my psyche works, she follows up forgiveness be evoking that best self – then one we both want me to be. (This is, I think, an essential service we mutually provide.)
Finally, I am grateful for what can only be called "The Rhonda Power." I can’t explain it, I can only observe and report. There is a light that radiates from her face that connects her with the rest of us. Complete strangers are immediately at ease with her and drawn to her, will confide in her and will happily do for her what they will do for no one else. People turn to her in their moments of most dire need and greatest joy. She’s involved in an intense love affair with life and it shows. Even when I’m so mad a her I can barely speak, I know I’m in the presence of something I sense as divine. Beyond that, I have no explanation.
Yes, there are days when none of this is too apparent – days when she can’t, and probably shouldn’t, stand me, and days when those tables are turned. There are days when it feels like someone has stuck a straw in both of us and sucked out all the life. But they are few. Nothing in life is absolute and unchangeable, so you have to play the game on a percentage basis. I figure our average is Hall of Fame material. That’s how it feels, anyway.
Only some of what we now have was present when first we married, and I take that as a good sign. We’re growing, we’re learning, we’re adapting and we’re doing it together. You let go of some of the old to embrace some of the new; you forsake the imagined and adore the real. And all the while it gets stronger, richer and better. I can’t imagine to what else we might aspire.
Whether I am any good as an American dad has yet to be determined – the jury of six is still out – but whatever the verdict, I know it’ll be infinitely better than it would have been had I not had this particular partner in crime. So this Father’s Day, I’d like to say to my wife: Thank you, honey.
Monday, June 05, 2006
The Big Lie we're telling our kids
By Russell King
As I watch Hannah try to make sense of the demands of middle school, H.L. Mencken seems more and more right: The main thing children learn in school, he said, is how to lie. The Big Lie is the message we give our kids about what’s important and what’s not.
Hannah’s word for it is "boring." She can do the work very well when she has a mind to, when it engages her, but otherwise why bother? It’s boring. What she’s really saying is that there’s no connection between her "real" life and what she’s being taught.
Part of why she’s bored with school work is that she’s 14 and more interested in her social life. It comes with being human and, although it’s tough to accept, it’s darn good thing. Our relationships will always be the most important thing. Always. There’s wisdom in our hard-wiring (and not so much in our culture). That doesn’t mean she can or should get by without learning, it just means that her intuitive priorities are right on.
But another part of her boredom reminds me of how Perry Mason used to object to questions posed by his adversary: "incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial." School is immaterial because it’s too often sanitized, cut off completely from the icky stuff of the kids’ feelings. Unless learning has enough of an emotional base – unless there’s a reason for the learner to care -- education will fail. (Plato taught us that, but I guess when you’re busy learning to be cogs in the industrial machine you just skip reading him.) It’s irrelevant because it’s cut off from the messy goo of everyday life. I’ve never understood why people get so stuck-up about "everyday life," since it’s the only one we have. Little wonder, though, that Hannah finds school incompetent.
We grownups lie to ourselves about what will help: get tough (whatever that means), get back to basics, give ‘em tests, make the tests harder to pass, and reward or punish them all (students and teachers) with the money they need to do their jobs.
We can’t learn if we believe we can’t. We can’t learn if we think the stuff we’re supposed to learn is unimportant or unrelated to our real lives. We can’t learn if we feel threatened.
The best thing we can do for our kids, for our schools and for our future is to make learning have something to do with real life. Right now, our schools and the people who control their purse strings (and, thereby, their policies) are focused on little that the kids can see as having to do with real life, and almost never on how school work can be related to real life. The ugly secret is that we’re now teaching to get test scores rather than teaching what kids need to know, because test scores bring money.
The kids look around them and they see grownups who run our most powerful institutions or hold positions of highest public recognition happily wallowing in their own filth of open, sneering corruption, dishonesty and greed. They see religion being used as a justification for, if not a tool of, bigotry, hatred and violence. From priests to teachers, from athletes to actors, from music to marketing, from comics to commercials, they see love making degraded to where we find it more "offensive" than casual, mass killing. They see entire nations dying from disease, famine, genocide and war, while the rest of the world stands by, muttering "how terrible," but doing nothing. They see corporate heads justify bad behavior, without even blushing, with the claim that higher profits supercedes all. They see unjustifiable war sold with a series of cynical lies. They see sadistic, sexual and deadly torture passed off as a college prank. And they see the split-second exposure of a nipple cause greater outrage and action than anything else.
They look at this world that we are about to hand over to them and they see with certainty that knowing the square root of pi or how many allomorphs are in a plural morpheme just ain’t where it’s at. And anybody who pretends otherwise is immediately and accurately branded a liar.
And in a final twist of perversion, they see that to earn respect and rewards they must join us in the Big Lie, they must at least pretend to believe.
What do you suppose we’re doing to them? Do you think we can ever be forgiven?
By Russell King
As I watch Hannah try to make sense of the demands of middle school, H.L. Mencken seems more and more right: The main thing children learn in school, he said, is how to lie. The Big Lie is the message we give our kids about what’s important and what’s not.
Hannah’s word for it is "boring." She can do the work very well when she has a mind to, when it engages her, but otherwise why bother? It’s boring. What she’s really saying is that there’s no connection between her "real" life and what she’s being taught.
Part of why she’s bored with school work is that she’s 14 and more interested in her social life. It comes with being human and, although it’s tough to accept, it’s darn good thing. Our relationships will always be the most important thing. Always. There’s wisdom in our hard-wiring (and not so much in our culture). That doesn’t mean she can or should get by without learning, it just means that her intuitive priorities are right on.
But another part of her boredom reminds me of how Perry Mason used to object to questions posed by his adversary: "incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial." School is immaterial because it’s too often sanitized, cut off completely from the icky stuff of the kids’ feelings. Unless learning has enough of an emotional base – unless there’s a reason for the learner to care -- education will fail. (Plato taught us that, but I guess when you’re busy learning to be cogs in the industrial machine you just skip reading him.) It’s irrelevant because it’s cut off from the messy goo of everyday life. I’ve never understood why people get so stuck-up about "everyday life," since it’s the only one we have. Little wonder, though, that Hannah finds school incompetent.
We grownups lie to ourselves about what will help: get tough (whatever that means), get back to basics, give ‘em tests, make the tests harder to pass, and reward or punish them all (students and teachers) with the money they need to do their jobs.
We can’t learn if we believe we can’t. We can’t learn if we think the stuff we’re supposed to learn is unimportant or unrelated to our real lives. We can’t learn if we feel threatened.
The best thing we can do for our kids, for our schools and for our future is to make learning have something to do with real life. Right now, our schools and the people who control their purse strings (and, thereby, their policies) are focused on little that the kids can see as having to do with real life, and almost never on how school work can be related to real life. The ugly secret is that we’re now teaching to get test scores rather than teaching what kids need to know, because test scores bring money.
The kids look around them and they see grownups who run our most powerful institutions or hold positions of highest public recognition happily wallowing in their own filth of open, sneering corruption, dishonesty and greed. They see religion being used as a justification for, if not a tool of, bigotry, hatred and violence. From priests to teachers, from athletes to actors, from music to marketing, from comics to commercials, they see love making degraded to where we find it more "offensive" than casual, mass killing. They see entire nations dying from disease, famine, genocide and war, while the rest of the world stands by, muttering "how terrible," but doing nothing. They see corporate heads justify bad behavior, without even blushing, with the claim that higher profits supercedes all. They see unjustifiable war sold with a series of cynical lies. They see sadistic, sexual and deadly torture passed off as a college prank. And they see the split-second exposure of a nipple cause greater outrage and action than anything else.
They look at this world that we are about to hand over to them and they see with certainty that knowing the square root of pi or how many allomorphs are in a plural morpheme just ain’t where it’s at. And anybody who pretends otherwise is immediately and accurately branded a liar.
And in a final twist of perversion, they see that to earn respect and rewards they must join us in the Big Lie, they must at least pretend to believe.
What do you suppose we’re doing to them? Do you think we can ever be forgiven?
