Mama Says

I prefer to think of myself as optimistic rather than naïve.

A naïf, upon hanging a basketball hoop in her inner city driveway, would assume that any neighbors who stopped by to shoot hoops would always remember to pick up their own trash, stay off the rim, and keep a civil tongue in their heads.

In contrast, an optimist — though aware of the negative reputation that basketball hoops have often earned in residential neighborhoods — feels confident that the benefits can outweigh the risks.

This past Christmas, we hung a basketball hoop on the front of our garage, and waited to see what would happen. What we were hoping was that our two house-bound children would get inspired to get off their duffs and go outside and play. That happened, I’m happy to say, and it continues to happen with some pleasing regularity three months later, which is a pretty good record for a toy of any kind. In spite of Cleveland’s snowiest winter on record, they’ve been out there playing several times a week.

Other good things also happened.

Our entire family has gone outdoors to play an active game together. This is not typical of us. Our response to the fact that playing flag football burns five times as many calories as reading is usually, “Then we shall read five times as long.”

Also, we have attracted some very nice neighbors who we had never met before. They come and knock politely on our door and ask if my son can come out and play. That’s the way I had always hoped it would be, living in a neighborhood. But up until now, I’d more often experienced the ritual of telephoning around to every known child within a five-mile radius, scheduling a play date with his or her parent, and then hopping in the car to either go pick a kid up or drop a kid off or both.

We have even had our entire driveway shoveled for free, by high school boys that wanted to play on an ice-free court.

But all has not been good, and now I fear that I’m evolving from an optimist to a realist.

The first problem was the slam-dunking. As kids came to ask if they could play, we decided to start with only one rule: no hanging on the rim. We have one of those adjustable-height backboards that can be lowered to accommodate our petite daughter or raised for the 6-footers who come by to play. When lowered to Audrey-height, any 12-year old on the block can pretend he’s LeBron.

For the first few weeks, I simply watched the hoop carefully, and went out to nicely remind players of the One Rule, often while offering ice water or Kool-Aid. I received polite affirmation that they would abide by the One Rule henceforth and for all time, and immediately upon returning to the house, could turn to watch kid after kid hanging from the rim like Candace Parker. This became irksome.

By contrast, the trash was somewhat less of an issue. On this one, I decided to adopt the passive aggressive approach. I simply took my plastic bag out and casually picked up wrappers and plastic cups while the group I suspected of dropping the litter was playing. To my surprise, this actually seems to have helped, at least temporarily.

But the part that concerns us the most is the impact the hoop might have on the neighbors, especially when we aren’t home. My friend, Shorty, shakes his head and tells us we’re attracting bad people who will rob our homes. I’ve heard faint grumblings about noise and bad language. I’ve seen random bits of board that someone has used to adjust the height of the rim, and have gone out looking for fences missing pickets. We’ve begun looking into ways to control use when we aren’t here to supervise.

Our city suffers disproportionately from the effects of obesity and a sedentary lifestyle. Our public safety experts constantly advise parents to keep young children within sight and shouting distance at all times. Our school district de-emphasizes outside recess. Our municipal park doesn’t even have swings for most of the year. Our community’s YMCA was closed last August.

Our street needs a basketball hoop. But it also needs harmony. I hope it’s not naïve to think it could have both.

“When I woke up this morning, I thought, ‘Hooray! It’s Tuesday!’ But then I asked myself, ‘Why would I be happy that it’s Tuesday?’” — Ned Fratus, March 8, 2005

Our friend Sarah once wore a silky blue skirt on her head every day for several months. I never asked her why. She was about five years old at the time, and if I had to guess, I’d say it was either a bold fashion statement, or an attempt to simulate the affect of having long hair, since sometimes I would see her with the skirt pulled back in a sporty pony tail or a sleek chignon. Her skirt/hair was obviously something that pleased Sarah while harming no one at all, and that was really all the explanation required.

At the time, I found it reassuring how many of the adults in Sarah’s world were able to confine their commentary on the blue skirt to a smile or a compliment about how pretty she looked. I must admit, I sometimes found it challenging. In my own youth, such variations on the expected style were referred to as “get-ups,” as in, “Where’d you come up with that get-up?” Unusual enthusiasms, we assume, require some sort of explanation, and almost anyone — parents, friends, police officers, total strangers — may demand that we explain ourselves, even when the object of our delight is patently innocuous. It is considered normal to love attending concerts, for example, but if you love singing aloud while walking down the street, observers will assume a cause: you are either drunk or mentally challenged. If you really love watching sports on television, that’s okay, but if your hobby is trigonometry, the only explanation must be that you are either showing off or trying to make others feel inferior. And if you, as an adult, chose to wear a blue skirt on your head, how many of your co-workers would be able to suppress the urge to ask why?

But if, as a culture, we haven’t evolved to the point where we can really allow other adults to love what and who they choose without being accountable to us, then maybe we are at least heading that direction with our kids. There must have been some positive outcome of the now thoroughly-discredited self-esteem movement, and perhaps this is it: we’re getting better at allowing them to like what they like without needing to apologize or explain.

Here’s an interesting coincidence:

Yesterday, my daughter Audrey’s eye was caught by an ad for Chuck E. Cheese’s school fundraising nights. She listened to the ad and commented, “That’s a good idea. Maybe we could raise money to fix our girl’s restroom.”

Then, in today’s email, I got a note from a friend who has been considering transferring her children to our elementary school. She had some nice things to say, but also some concerns. One significant issue she raised was the deteriorated condition of the restroom she had used while visiting the school. Her daughter described it as “the bathroom from hell.”

Ordinarily, I probably wouldn’t give the matter of school restrooms a whole lot of thought. I tend to think that as a culture we Americans are a bit overly-fastidious in this department.

But to have had both a current student and a mother of a potential student cite the restrooms as one of the school’s big drawbacks does give some food for thought.

My daughter has on several occasions arrived home on the verge of having an “accident” because she has avoided using the bathroom all day. She hates how the toilets sometimes don’t flush, she doesn’t like using a stall without a door, she spends hours in some discomfort when her britches get wet because the floor is flooding. I have a lot of confidence in our school’s administration, and I know that they do what they can to correct these problems. But still — could my daughter’s performance in school be negatively affected by trying to “hold it” for six hours? I guess it’s possible.

The Cleveland Municipal Schools launched a campaign several years ago to bring all facilities up to a minimum standard of “Warm, Safe & Dry.” I suspect that — compared to other urban public schools — ours is above average in all three areas. And even if the restroom is rather nasty, I feel confident that overall, my daughter’s getting a good education.

But I worry that I am in the minority of middle class parents, for whom a nasty restroom could be a tiebreaker between two schools. A persuasive body of evidence demonstrates that schools improve when they are socioeconomically diverse. Urban public schools need all the middle class families they can get. But if you have the motivation and the means to make a choice, and other strengths and weaknesses balance out, why not choose to send your child to the school with the better facilities?

My answer is that I’m hoping Audrey’s attitude will be contagious. Maybe she will foment among her fellow students an outrage against flooded floors, a demand for adequate supplies, and an expectation that they all deserve better than what they’re getting. Or, if the conditions of the bathroom stem from abuse more than from neglect, maybe she can provide an example of how to take better care of the school’s limited resources. In either case, it seems like we’re putting her in a position to make a truly positive impact on a problem that is immediately at hand. Maybe that’s a lot to ask of a seven-year-old. But then again, we have a lot of confidence in this particular seven-year-old.

Back in the day, when my husband and I were in our East Coast urban professional/academic stage, we enjoyed getting away from it all by backpacking. At the time, we didn’t realize that we were building mental and emotional muscles that we would need in our later work as parents. I believe we just found our normal lives too easy, so we had to go looking for ways to enhance the challenge.

Coddled by the luxury of microwaveable TV dinners, Starbucks, and the Safeway salad bar, we felt the need to enter a parallel universe where even the water had to be cooked on a folding white gas stove that took 30 minutes to assemble and light. Finding that sleeping on our apartment’s rock-hard futon wasn’t challenging enough, we would trudge six miles into the backwoods of Virginia to sleep on tree roots and gravel. I suppose it was essentially an ascetic experience, from which I’m sure we would have benefited spiritually had we not approached each backpacking excursion as something to be checked off a task list.

But then there came pregnancy, birth and infancy, and suddenly, we no longer needed to add artificial difficulty to our lives. Moreover, any dreamy notions we might have harbored of introducing our offspring to the beauties of nature through backpacking swiftly faded. We last attempted a wilderness weekend in the summer of 1996, with our ten-month-old son who was at that point still creeping along on his belly like a snake. Left more or less to his own devices for the five minutes it took us to pop up the tent, we fetched him back out of the dirt, clutching in both small, damp fists rusty bottle caps and cigarette butts, and with a filthy tummy that smelled vaguely of the stale beer-tinged urine of rowdy woodsmen. After 24 hours during which the baby, like some tow-headed manifestation of the infant Dalai Lama, was never again allowed to set foot on the ground, we concluded that parenting was plenty arduous enough with all the modern conveniences.

It was, therefore, a sure sign that our parenting challenge was in an ebb tide when I recently found myself waxing nostalgic over the REI spring catalog. Suddenly, I was picturing John and me boiling twice the water for four cups of reconstituted chicken teriyaki, and fantasizing about lying under the starry sky on our Thermarests, pointing out the constellations to two awe-struck campers.

Granted, I could also imagine the whining, arguing and protesting of our unwilling trail buddies as they were forced to trudge through the woods carrying their luggage on their feeble little backs. But by now, coping with griping is old hat. Maybe this spring is the right time to increase the level of difficulty.

While we were getting into the car to head for swimming lessons this weekend, my daughter, Audrey, asked me, “When did you start doing Mama Says?” I explained to her that I’d sent out playgroup schedules with notes on them beginning about the time she was born, but hadn’t actually given the project a name and a regular format until she was almost two, in 1999.

“By that time,” she observed, “you were a full-throttle mama.”

Now, if I had been the one to coin this analogy, I probably would have said that on the parenting highway, I tend to drive defensively, and to avoid the passing lane. So how thrilling was this, to have my own daughter conjure up an image of a joyful risk-taker — a rebel, even — barreling down the open road of life with my man riding shotgun and our two happy co-adventurers strapped into the sidecar? If James Dean were a mother, I would be he.

Eventually, she explained to me that what she’d meant by this expression was simply that, by 1999, I had all the children I was planning to have and had pretty much figured out “how to be a mom” so that I could write about it. Maybe “journeyman mother” or “board certified parent” would have expressed more accurately her intended meaning.

Still, like many of the pearls of wisdom that fall so frequently and gracefully from her lips, I accept her clarification but choose not to discard the first impression which was, to me, almost like found poetry. To be a full-throttle mama — what would that mean? To qualify, would such a woman need to pop out of bed before the alarm goes off, instead of engaging in a daily, silent competition with her spouse to see who can tolerate the clock radio’s relentless beeping the longest? Must she be prepared to teach her children to rollerblade, kayak, and do a somersault off the high dive? Given a choice between cleaning the oven and cutting out paper dolls, would she always pick the latter? After all, it’s not a full-throttle housekeeper that she’s trying to be.

And there, of course, is the rub. None of us is permitted to be “just a mom,” even those of us who are willing and able to forego a paycheck of our own in order to stay home with our kids. We’re not — and can’t be — James Dean on a Triumph T-110, tearing up the asphalt as we teach, play with, discipline, amuse, exercise, feed and love our children, because to be so would also mean to forsake our other obligations as spouse, sister, daughter, bill-payer, dish-washer, citizen, and self.

This isn’t to say that we can never give mothering all we’ve got. Audrey’s image just needs to be adjusted a little. Life is really — as the gospel song says — more like a railroad: we’re the engineers of a train, and all of the roles we play are the box cars streaming out behind us. There’s a lot of stopping and starting, getting sent off to wait on sidings, switching around, adding and dropping cars. But when we have an open stretch of track and a downhill slope, what happiness to throw the throttle wide open, and to feel the whole train moving together, and gathering speed behind us.