Silicon Valley Moms Blog

Graduate Student Again?

In my mid-forties, mid-life, mid-way, not full or empty, not young or old, just mid, middle, half there, I find myself a student again. I drive to a big university and nose my whale of a mini-van into parking spots wide enough for a generous sized motorcycle. I wait in line to pay tuition fees, mug myself for an ID card and stake out the black market for used books. I squeeze my mother friendly hips into tiny desks with fold-down tops that force anyone with a BMI over 20 to become play dough flattened by a hammer. I contemplate posters hung on campus that invite young coed females to donate their eggs to needy couples. This last one catches my breath.

How did a minor mid-life crisis following the birth of my second child land me back in graduate school? I ask that question after everyone in our house is in bed and I’m still studying. I ask that question when I watch moms sip lattes and push swings or saunter into Google headquarters.  Did everyone make the right choice but me?  And is this choice the right one, finally?  I put a lot of thought into going back to school for my teaching credential, but what I didn’t anticipate was how much I would feel, gut level, about being on a college campus again.

Who among us doesn’t have rousing memories of college? So maybe I was a late bloomer, but some major things happened for me in college, not the least of which involved resources from Planned Parenthood, a first true love relationship and minor rants against Ronald Reagan. Then there were the friends, cram sessions, midnight runs, dorms, freak professors and every other lofty memory that comes with being twenty years old and full of yourself. College, to my self-absorbed mind, was made for people just like me, young people on the brink. The brink of what I had no idea. But college was a place to get your start, find your niche, become your own person. Brink into something.

Going Green from a Sicko Healthcare System

I am green today.  Not green with envy, ecological awareness or holiday greetings. I am green with sickness, the nauseating disease that is now called our health care system.  Note the "care" in the compound word health care.  Note the hypocrisy of this word in the United States of Sick America.  How many are not cared for where we live?  Millions?  How many are denied care because they actually need it?  Millions more.  You've heard the speeches.  You know the political health care babble.  So let me cut to the sick thick of my family drama.

I was laid off from my job two months ago.  Our company then filed for bankruptcy, so Cobra was not an option.

The Price of Disadvantage

Privilege is called Chapin. Disadvantage is called Jackson. You know Chapin well. He’s a ninth grader at one of our local high schools. His lacrosse team travels around the state; he’s enrolled in all honors classes and lately feels pressure to decide whether he’ll go to the Sorbonne summer program or the gifted camp at Amherst. Chapin feels he must decide about his future. He could be a lawyer, like his dad, but he enjoys the idea of running a business, too. Either way, his imprinting points him toward a position of leadership, since he has been deeply schooled in synthesizing and manipulating symbols, systems and people to his advantage.

You probably don’t know Jackson. He’s also a ninth grader and goes to the same school as Chapin, but the two never talk, don’t even share the same spaces or classes on the campus. But that’s the least of Jackson’s concerns. Right now, he doesn’t know where he’ll sleep tonight. Maybe at his grandma’s, maybe his girlfriend’s, maybe there’s a plan C he hasn’t thought of yet. His mom kicked him out last month and life has been a constant sleepover ever since. Jackson lives in East Menlo Park. He enjoys listening to rap music and hanging with friends. He also yawns constantly and falls asleep in most of his classes. He reads below grade level and stands a strong chance of dropping out of high school. His dad is dead and his mom dropped out of high school, too.

These two students are fictional, amalgams of my mind as I observe high school students as part of my teaching credential program. They are composites of a school, a society that increasingly endows it’s cultural capital on those born to inherit it.

Privilege is called Chapin. Disadvantage is called Jackson. And Chapin gets all of our attention. He’s the reason Madeline Levine, author of The Price of Privilege will fill up the auditorium at Palo Alto’s Gunn High School next month. He’s the focal point of our obsession with privilege: getting it, holding on to it, and then analyzing how to best parent in spite of it. By it’s very definition privilege is a reserved club…available only to the few hovering near the top of the socio-economic class pyramid. Yet we’re a society and parenting culture of climbers, so the notion of privilege not only appeals to those who already have it, but to those desperately trying to join them.

Pint Size Lessons in Forgiveness

“She tends to sulk when she’s angry.” That sentence about my almost five-year-old daughter pierced like a sharp toy in a foot’s arch. Was our preschool teacher describing me or my child? . I figured my future involved two females in hormonal upheaval who would find co-habitation a tad challenging.  I expected years of puberty sulking torment... but did we have to start the process so early?

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As I listened to our caring, wise preschool teacher describe how my daughter child holds on to her anger, I almost had to laugh. Was silent scorn a well-known component of our gene pool? Couldn’t they have warned me during our genetic counseling sessions? And how come my well endowed Y chromosome son (and husband) could throw a terrorizing fit and be over it five minutes later?

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I remember attending “Forgiveness Guru” Fred Luskin’s seminar a few years ago. in Silicon Valley. When it came down to gender differences, he said, women had the anger-holding game down.  The guys play hard and move on.  Us women?  Let's just say we wear resentment like an old brown cashmere sweater, so comfortable, so familiar, trashing it feels terrifying on some level.

Duck and Cover!

The house starting the shaking, the windows rattling, buzzing, my husband hunkered down in his chair to continue watching the Democratic debate and I went to the doorway in the hall.  And the kids?  Both were wound up like little balls in "duck and cover" mode.  No direction from me.  No "get down, it's an earthquake!"  No "Everyone out of the house!"  Our little hump backs knew just what to do.

And I all I could think was they have been practicing their entire California life for this moment!  Thanks to our wonderful preschool, my kids have been duck and covering long before they could handle drop-off play dates, full sentences or snacks with olives.  The sight of them both in our hallway, heads tucked under, a few toes peeking out, would make the department of Disaster Preparedness run for the microphone. 

Why I Love School Uniforms

The first time someone accused me of "voting like a Democrat but parenting like a Republican," I wanted to slug 'em.  Such a label, such a line of bul_.   But then I had to look at how I dressed my daughter for preschool.  Cute as a tart in her navy blue dress with matching navy blue sweater, she was the picture of preppy.  As a law abiding, tax doling citizen of Palo Alto, we have no intention of paying for private schools for our kids.  But I'll take the liberty of dressing them in private school-type uniforms as much as I can.  The uniform section of Target's has cuter clothes than anything else in the store.  Land's End is worth getting just so I can look at the jackets, sweaters and adorable skirts.

Cow Eyes

They say before we humans became automatons of technology and modern-day efficiency, we conducted our lives by the seasons. The two-legged animals that we are, we followed the sun, moon, and seasonal rotations like the rest of the beasts around us. We sowed in Fall, nestled in Winter, blossomed in Spring and reaped in Summer. If you want a zen experience, just look into the eyes of a cow. Patient, centered, milk-producing, they follow the patterns of nature.

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And why am I thinking about this right now? It’s getting cold outside, I actually heated up soup for lunch and am watching the leaves start flutter. Fragile, seasonal gifts, those leaves are about finished. But they’ll go out with their lights shining, giving us reds, crimsons, every color I love to wear. And they’ll come back again next Spring.

Changing Places

Those parents smiling glibly on Tuesday morning as they drive, bike or latte their way down the road?  It's called Free At Last; or why the first day of school feels like a National Holiday.  Not very sympathetic of us, is it?  Our kids must adapt to a new class, teacher, curriculum, desk, path to the bathroom every year.  We expect them to accept change.  It's part of growing up.

Then we become adults and change feels like a root canal and giving birth at the same time.  Except that sometimes, many times, life forces us to change and, despite ourselves, we join our kids and have to grow up.  I am experiencing this reality just now.

So Long Status

Today I read about an old guy with a new idea...or rather an idea we all know but may not want to accept.  There is life beyond brand-name, Ivy slick colleges.  Loren Pope's my kind of guy.  Lauded today in the NY Times for his unconventional approach to recommending colleges, I am ready to ask him over for coffee. Not that I even need to worry about college right now.  But his support for small, unknown colleges that could be like extended families for kids is so appealing.  I got absolutely lost at my college, a huge university that is now virtually impossible to get into.  I remember lectures with 300+ kids, sitting on damp, gum-mucked floors.  I really only got to know two professors the entire time I went there.  And I don't miss it one bit.

Last week I wrote a column on Mary Pipher who will be the keynote speaker at the Palo Alto Mother's Symposium in a few weeks. She had similar things to say about how we chase brand name colleges, lifestyles, etc. in a quest to prove our worth.  It made me sad.  And it made me mad.

So what am I doing to change?  For starters, I'll try tune-out the media onslaught out there that is telling me how to parent, achieve status for myself and my kids and continue to live in this insanely expensive place called Palo Alto.  It's too much.  I need shelter!  And I will follow the advice of Loren Pope, my new guru, and think small.  He says small colleges, but I'll take it a step farther and say small number of activities, small, but meaningful accomplishments, small, but important contributions to this world.  Small but real expectations.  Small house (we already have that one!) I'm opting out of the status game.

New Year's Resolutions for Women on the Verge

10. Resolve to put swollen feet up on couch, and read Oprah; pishes to dirty dishes
9.  Resolve to close door on child’s tsunami room; you don’t have to sleep there
8.  Resolve to accept wrinkles both in cloth and skin; you’ll suddenly notice you’re more approachable
7.  Resolve to embrace padded hips and padded bras; changing bodies house evolving souls
6.  Resolve to laugh louder than you yell; your blood pressure will decrease while your lovability skyrockets
5.  Resolve to let husband talk for 5 minutes daily and not say one word; we have two ears and one mouth for a reason
4.  Resolve to say no; this may be harder than you think!
3.  Resolve to stop envying that one friend; she needs a comrade, not another sycophant
2.  Resolve to do something, anything, for your planet; doesn’t our collective house deserve as much attention as your own?
1.  And finally…..resolve to be the tree, not the ornaments; you are not the child, job, husband, net worth. These are merely ornaments, some fall, some fade away.  Be the tree planted solidly in the ground that holds up what is dear and beloved…

Happy 2007!