Parenthood: Week 298 - All I Want For Christmas?

Christmas is confusing.

Well, honestly all American holidays are confusing (and problematic). Most of them have been infused with enough capitalistic influence to cloud the origins and original meanings to the point where, people often don’t understand the “point.” Every American holiday has issues. Halloween continues to be celebrated with racist stereotypes, Thanksgiving romanticizes colonization, Columbus Day (oh boy) honors Columbus as “discovering” America, Valentine’s Day propagates heteronormative ideas about romance, 4th Of July takes pride in America romanticizing the violence of our country, and St. Patrick’s Day, well, I don’t understand how turning Chicago into a sea of throw-up, and making police officers waste their time dealing with drunk partiers honors the Irish.

Then there’s Christmas. A holiday to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, timed near the winter solstice, (not Christ’s actually birthdate), full of appropriations of pagan traditions, influenced heavily by advertisers (e.g. modern mythology of Santa Claus that  is 100% secular). It’s the one “religious” holiday that is a federal holiday (separation of church vs. state anyone?), and even within single Christian denominations the way to celebrate this holiday varies greatly.

This makes it even more confusing as parents trying to figure out what to do with this holiday. Take the mythology of Santa Claus. If you want to keep the myth of Santa going for your kids, that’s fine. But if you live in a diverse community like we do, where there are many kids who are Christians who do not believe in Santa Claus, it’s much harder to keep this going. Ollie already asked me about another kid who told him that Santa wasn’t real, and somehow, I explained to him plurality. Being in pluralistic society makes a lot of thing about Christmas difficult as a parent.

From what I gather (keep in mind that my families first Christmas traditions were created by my parents), the way that families celebrate Christmas is largely based on family traditions more than anything else. We kind of got that going with Diana’s experiences growing up, but she like myself constantly reexamines traditions and is mindful of having an experience around this holiday that works for me and our kids, all of us who are not baptized and do not go to church regularly.

We’ve created some of our own traditions around this holiday and of course, like Christmas itself, borrowed many things from the various traditions we see in our own history and of others. We get a tree, we do presents, we read some Christmas books, watch Christmas movies and see family. I see through Ollie’s excitement that this is working for him, and that he is getting the right kind of joy out of these experiences.

Diana asks me every year what I want out of the Christmas Holiday seasons, and with great patience she has dealt with my non-specific answers. But I think I finally have an answer. Gifts are fun, and family time together is important. More than that I want Christmas to be a time that as family we stop and think about what the Christmas story tells us about ourselves and our own family. The women in our family like Mary who prove the strength of women, the history on both sides of our family on fleeing from countries for something better, and in Diana’s father’s side, not being able to get away from danger in Poland during WWII.  And knowing that the Christmas story is about people who in our modern-day society would be grouped with my son as people of color. This is a story about others as much as it is about ourselves.

I'm not quite sure how we're going to get there, and that's okay.  There's more good in Christmas than bad and like the way we define our marriage we have the freedom to define this holiday in a way that works for us. I'm not sure what that means, but it's a journey, one more thing to figure out as parents.

At least there's cute pajamas to keep us smiling along the way.

Year 9: Week 16 – Matter Of Time

I’ve had great highs in my teaching career. I’ve been a part of phenomenal concerts, I’ve facilitated amazing discussions, I’ve organized really great assemblies, and I’ve had great accomplishments as a department chair. In the moments of these things happenings, I intellectually know that they are great, and meaningful, but they don’t always feel that way. Sometimes it’s because I’m too concerned about making something work in the moment or skipping ahead to thinking how it can better in the future even before it’s done.

When things go well, it sets a higher standard, a way of working and a new norm. The reality is that not everything I do, can hit those highs. When things don’t repeat at that level as they didn’t for me this week, even though things can go very well, they don’t always feel that way. This is difficult for me to fully understand about my work as a teacher.

My 3rd graders and 5th graders performed this week at our Winter Program. Was it a bad performance? Not by any means. However, there were things that I could have done to better prepare them which would have raised it the level of past performance I’ve had with children of these age groups. This isn’t really about the children’s efforts, talent or dedication. This is about me. One of the major limits of students’ musical performance is the teacher’s ability to teach, and their practice as a teacher.

I’ll get specific. Usually for the rehearsals for this performance I have a seating chart and for how they stand on stage and how they sit in their auditorium seats. I didn’t have one ready for their first rehearsal. This meant that I had to do some of this arranging during the rehearsal, which meant that there was less time to work on musical factors. Why didn’t I have a seating chart done? Because my weekend before full of taking care of my children (actually biological kids, not my students), and family obligations. Once upon a time, like most teachers I’d spend a couple hours a weekend doing prep work for school. That’s not something that is as realistic for me at this point, and that’s really hard to accept.

Being a teacher means accepting that you will never be as prepared as you would like for your students, and that your to do list will never be done. Being a parent means that you can’t get all of the stuff done that you want in life, and you will always feel behind and ill-prepared for being an adult. Combine being a teacher and a parent, and it can be really a tough pill to swallow. 

This is really hard, especially when I know how I was able to work before and how that got me to these highs. I can’t do it the same way right now. I have to figure out another way.

At some point this will change. My two sons will need less intense supervision. I’ll have more time to my own and for my work as teacher. Even with the limitations I have in my life, I will hit some highs this year, I already have, but it’s hard to process times when I can’t do what I wish, and I can’t be the teacher fully that I see in myself.

I knew that this was part of being a parent, but I didn't know how all of this would feel.  As much as the smiles of my baby makes me happy, seeing my students perform lacking some things because of choices I made creates complicated feelings.  I don't regret my decisions, but it doesn't feel like that all of the time.

This is what makes teaching and parenting so hard.  Teachers success relies so much on outside time to work made available by the support of friends, partners and spouses.  Parenting success relies heavily on dedicating all non-working time on children.  These roles are at odds.  They are on two sides of a scale and all you can do it stand in the middle as it tips back and forth trying to keep it balanced.

Winter break came just at the right time.  I've got some processing to do.  I don't think I've let anyone down, it just feels that way.  I'm proud of how my students performed this past week.  Some really amazing things happened, and I know I did the best I could for them with the time that I had, I just wish I had more time.

It's just a matter of time.

Parenthood: Week 297 - 12/17/18

Ethan is falling asleep as I type this, his body nestled in the baby carrier. Firmly pressed against my chest, his head is leaning to the side on the shoulder strap. His left hand is curled underneath his head like a pillow while his right hand clutches onto the string of my necklace. Ethan doesn’t have a security blanket or a lovee, he has this necklace, or my shirt collar. In the nighttime when I wear tank tops he grip the shoulder strap firmly as he sleeps and sometimes pulls it to himself.

The scratches on my chest are finally healing. Two weeks ago, as he walked towards me he fell and two of his fingers scratched my upper chest as he lunged forward. Ethan has scratched me many times before in an effort to find my collar, but these scratches were the worst he has ever given me. I was worried they would get infected as they hurt a lot and were not healing, but this injury is finally fading. It’s amazing how something that can make you feel so much, so intensely, can leave your memory so quickly.

Diana is away at her exercise class. She is recovering from being sick, and is now going back to class. Some kind of sick bug has been traveling through my family, and it has manifested different in all of us. This is an inconvenience, but none of us have had any symptoms that were that serious. Also, none of us have suffered significantly for more than a day. While being sick is an inconvenience and having sick children is sad, the kind of sick we are dealing with is no big deal, and not worth really complaining about. So many, too many children are in the hospital right now. With this knowledge I can’t feel too sad about what we are have gone through in the last week. It’s really not that bad.

Ollie is really into a collection of nursery rhymes and fairy tales as his bedtime story with me. It’s an improvement from his desire for me to read pop-up books to him, that really didn’t have anything meaningful to read. I’ve been jealous of the fact that Diana has been reading Roald Dahl’s books with him and that Ollie simply doesn’t seem to be into me reading these types of books to him. Ollie has been studying fairy tales at school, so when I suggested this book on a whim, he was really into it. It’s been fun reading him real stories, but I’m worried. These stories reinforce gender stereotypes. While I want him to be exposed to these stories, I want him to not just accept them as representations of what is, and what should be.

At school, Ollie has a spirit week. The practice of dressing up in certain clothing never made much sense to me as somehow expressing “spirit,” but whatever. Today’s theme was “sports.” Diana and I have always found it annoying that boy’s clothing from birth mostly has graphics are car or sport related. We have been very deliberate to have Ollie’s clothing not be these things. He has shirts that have science related image, animals, robots, and one that has a Hamilton quote. We did in fact do a good job with this because the only two options for sports related clothing for Ollie was a Northwestern University shirt, and a shirt that featured a turkey attempting to play football.

I think we are doing alright.

Year 9: Week 15 - Taking A Day

About halfway through the day on Tuesday, I wasn’t feeling very well. I figured maybe it was because I hadn’t eaten lunch or drunk enough fluids, which sometimes happens at work. I get into the swing of things and if I don’t deliberately set time for me to eat or drink, I can go through a whole day without eating or drinking enough. It’s not good at all, I know, but it happens and it’s one of those things I need to work on self-care wise.

Anyways, so I’m feeling horrible, it’s a struggle to stay awake, and then I made the call at the end of the school day to go home.  I had an afternoon meeting followed by an orchestra concert I was helping out with, but it just wasn’t happening. And while I figured in my head I could power through feeling the way I did, I’m glad I didn’t. Because when I got home and immediately fell asleep with the feeling of a severe hang-over, it was clear that there was no way that I could have made it through the evening.

Teachers sometimes develop a hero-complex: we are essential to our students’ learning, the school is not going to survive without us, and because we are working with children, if we don’t sacrifice our time, energy, resources, and health then we aren’t doing our all for our students. It’s a nice feeling knowing that we are heroes, that we are important and that we can have a life-changing impact of the people and influence the course of history. That last part is not an overstatement. Teachers are that powerful.

It is not illogical with the importance of what we are doing to want to give it our all and make the moments, each class, each interaction, as meaningful as possible. The start of this is simply by being there.

The fundamental flaw is that teachers are more often limited not by their efforts and sacrifices, they should never be asked or pressured to make, but by systemic structures that exploit the good intentions of teachers. When teachers have to fight for their kids it feels like a war, and being involved in a fight is satisfying.  It's appealing to the activists in many teachers, but if we are doing this right, teachers should not have to be advocates at all. 

Add in the fact that music teachers unlike other teachers have less access to substitutes who can teach their subject, and the fact that often our work is publicly displayed in concerts unlike most other subjects, and you have a very stressful situation.

I had all of this in my head through a decade of being a teacher in America as I’m trying to figure out whether I should go home when I’m sick. And I’m in a uniquely privileged positions as teacher with plenty of resources and administrative support to go home sick, but it’s still a difficult decision.

To do the best for our children, we need to do the best for those charged to serve them. No one should consider putting their health second for their students, but it happens, and far too often. Some of it is a need for perspective on teachers’ part but more of it is how teachers are under paid, not-supported and put out there to solve problems the rest of society fails to address and sometimes even recognize.

I'm glad I went home sick.  It was the right thing to do, and it's a sad state of affairs when so many teachers are pressured to do what's wrong. 

Parenthood: Week 296 - Two dads?

Before Ollie was born, I told myself that I would nurture his natural childhood curiosity and foster his communication skills by always finding time to answer his questions thoughtfully and thoroughly. This was clearly the thinking of someone who has never lived with a five-year old.

The questions are non-stop. Part of the issues is that Ollie doesn’t have a fully developed internal dialog so he will think out loud. This combined with the fact that he doesn’t know the difference between declarative and interrogative statements leads to many statements framed as questions that aren’t actually meant to be questions. For example, he might say “why is Batman’s cape black?” when he is simply making an observation about the color of Batman’s costume.

Then there’s questions I can't answer clearly. The reality, I don’t always time to answer his questions thoughtfully, and many of his questions don’t have meaningful answer. There’s not always a reason that someone does something, and many stories don’t have explanations for plot devices or events besides “magic.” This is frustrating for Ollie to understand, but I don’t hide the fact that I don’t always have the answers, because I don’t feel a need to be an all-knowing dad.  Sometimes there are things in life that we simply don’t know, and that’s okay.

Ollie's timing isn’t great. He’ll ask me a question while I’m trying to cook dinner or in the bathroom, so I will not answer his questions. Part of learning how to talk is also learning when it’s okay to ask question. There’s definitely work to be done in this arena. And I don’t like telling him that I don’t have time to answer his question, but it’s life. While I want Ollie to know that I will always have time for him, it may not be during the moment he wants it. That can be frustrated for him to deal with, and frustrating for me as the pressures of life pulls me away from my son.

Then there’s the questions that matter. I’m not talking about the color of lightsabers, or the how a Transformer talks. It’s like earlier tonight when Ollie, after brushing his teeth, asked me “how do two dads have a baby?” I explained to him that there are different ways that people can have babies, sometimes friends help, and I introduced the word and concept of adoption to him. Then he asked “how do two moms have a baby?” I answered it in a similar way that I did the previous questions and I also told him that sometimes a mom or a dad, have a baby by themselves.

Then Ollie asked, “if two moms have a baby, don’t they need the dad to get the baby’s name? Doesn’t the dad need to help with the baby?” I’m carefully explained that no, you don’t need a dad for the baby’s name and no, the dad doesn’t always help, sometimes two moms don’t need a dad to help. Ollie seemed satisfied with the answer and we continued our bedtime routine.

Ollie asks a lot of questions. There are times when it gets annoying. And no, I don’t always find the time to answer his questions fully and thoughtfully. But for the questions that matter, I’m always going to try my best. That I can promise to Ollie.

Year 9: Week 14 - "Tala al Badru Alayna"

An idea: include music from Muslim culture in our Winter Jk-5 Presentation.

This was not a new idea, but one that we had not figured out how to do, until this year. We strive to make our Winter Program be inclusive of different cultures and traditions to provide mirrors for students to see themselves in our curriculum and windows for students to learn about others’ traditions. With seven grades, there was limits to what we can include, and while it was important to be mindful it have a variety of music, it was never including culture. That’s just no going to happen. Add in the priority of students performing appropriate music skill-wise and it can be hard to be Inclusive of some cultures, but that’s not an excuse.

I’ve always been interested in including music from Muslim culture in this presentation. Americans who identify as Muslim continue to face oppression and prejudice. In addition, non-Muslim Americans’ ignorance of Muslims’ role in the modern world and the history of this culture are important reasons for us to do the essential work of bringing knowledge of Islam to all.

Cultural authenticity is essential and it is better to not include a culture in a presentation than to do it without respect. I’ve asked around and researched Muslim music, but never found anything that would work, until two weeks ago. The other general music teacher had asked one of our 3rd grade teachers who is Muslim about song ideas, and she forwarded me her response.

In the email was a link to Yusuf Islam’s version of "Tala al Badru Alayna."



The melody is wonderful, and musically appropriate for my 3rd graders. When I talked about it the 3rd grade teacher she told me the story of the song in which children sing to welcome the Prophet Muhammad. It’s a beautiful story and my brain already was figuring out to teach this song. The problem was I didn’t feel comfortable teaching this story, and I had already started teaching my 3rd graders “Ma’oz Tzur,” a Hebrew song.

The 3rd grade teacher agreed to help me teach the cultural information of the song, so it was up to me to figure out the music part. Two weeks to teach a song to perform in three different languages, Arabic, English and Hebrew? Connect themes between a Jewish song and a Muslim song?

I could have chosen to wait until next year, but this work was so needed for all of us that I decided to push myself to teach material with little prep, and to push my students to learn music faster with the same amount of care so that we could bring "Tala al Badru Alayna” to our community.

In the past week I’ve had a lot of new experiences teaching this song. I’ve taught about how Muslim live all over the world and that there is no language that is called, “Muslim.” I’ve talked about some of the incredible Muslims in our America culture and beyond, and I’ve taught my students how to sing in Arabic.

I told my students that learning this song would make them feel uncomfortable because most of them would not understand this song because of the Arabic and the style of the music. This is a feeling that would go away, but it was important they remember this feeling. These are feelings that others who come to America who aren’t familiar with our culture and language feel and we need to remember this, so we can help these people feel more comfortable and welcome.

I'm feeling pressure to get these songs prepared in time, and a responsibility to teach this song well, but that's okay.  I can handle it for my students.  Understanding Islam through music is a lesson that is too important to not teach.  And I can't wait any longer because my students are too important to not learn this song and Muslim culture.

Parenthood: Week 295 - The Sounds Of Steps

In a house, the sound of footsteps is a tell, like a set of fingerprints. Growing up I knew from the sound of footsteps who was walking down the hall and approaching my bedroom. My dad walked slower than my mom, and my brother had a heavier step.

In our house, Diana has a calmer sound to her steps, deliberate but not ever running. Buffy moves with a soft pitter-patter, with the slight clicking of her toenails (especially if we are behind in her grooming routine). Ollie on the other hand, especially first thing in the morning, moves with the sound of thunder. It’s an energetic spurt of pounding that echoes through the house, sometimes accompanied by the slamming of a door. The funny thing is that usually when I see him walking around the house, he is doing just that, walking. However, for some reason, when I listen for his steps when he is in other places of the house, there’s thunder.

The sound of Ethan crawling changes. If he has nothing in his hand, you can hear the slaps of his palms on the floor. If he has something he is carrying (which he often does in one hand), like a peg-leg pirate, there can be the clicking of a wooden block hitting the floor followed by his palm. More than anything else, the sound of his locomotion is produced by his mouth. Sometimes it’s him blowing raspberries while he moves. Other times, he’s vocalizing gentle signs, and other times it’s high-pitched excited screams. The worst times are when it’s a panicked cry, and the urgency of his crawl creates a tragic duet with his cries.

The newest sound of steps in our house is Ethan walking. In the past week he has started walking. The sound of his steps is usually covered by his own squeals of excitement, and our encouragement. However when you do listen for his steps, it’s really special. He wears these soft leather shoes called Robeez (they are wonderful, I highly recommend them). The sound of the leather on the hardwood floor is gentle, slow, and uneven. Sometimes barely audible, and at other times they speed up almost becoming a steady rhythm until he falls forward or back, with a soft “plop” coming to rest on his bottom.

Only in the quiet moments do you hear these movements around the house. It’s when the technology is quiet, the chores are done, and the mind is calm that the movements around the house are noticed. Like feeling the breath of Ethan in his crib, or feeling Buffy’s presence in the corner of the room, these movements and these steps are a reminder of the love in my life, and family.

I share these celebration of knowing acknowledging the privilege my whole family shares of being able to move freely around the house. To walk, to step, and to run, is not something everyone shares. And this depth of knowing is not limited to how we move through space, and for one who does not in the ways describe, is no less valued or able to be known. A sound of steps is just one way to be feel home, but not more important.  It’s important to think about this privilege because it helps us think deeper, appreciate further, and understand our responsibility and our relationship to others.

Theses sounds will change and evolve leaving impressions and feelings.  They are a reminder of presence, and our own existence.  It is a unique feelings of something so close to our heart moving towards us in space, closing the gap between those we love and ourselves.