Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings

Judge Sonia Sotomayor hearings began this morning. I’ve watched most, but not all, of the senator’s opening remarks. With that caveat, I will say that the two standouts this morning were Sen. Lindsay Graham from South Carolina and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island. The first is a Republican and the second a Democrat, but that is only a coincidence in my choice. Both were thoughtful, gracious, and politically spot-on with their comments.

Graham noted that he strongly supported McCain in the presidential election last year, and that he would not have chosen Sotomayor as the current nominee, that in fact, he expected he would probably dislike the decisions she will make on the supreme court, but Obama won the election and his choice deserved the respect of the Senate. So, noting that unless Sotomayor had "a complete meltdown" during the hearings, he signalled that he expected to vote for her confirmation.

Face-to-Face Social Networking

My daughter #2 starts high school in the fall, and she's been at an orientaiton camp this week. yesterday she came home in tears, because she wasn't having any luck making friends. She said all the kids at the camp already know each other (most kids come from a different middle school than the one my daughter attended) and they just want to talk to each other about what everyone is doing over the summer.

We talked about the difference between not liking a person, and just not having anything yet to talk to them about. We also talked about how friends are made - first you meet someone, then you get to know them, then you become friends. This seemed to be a revelation to her, as she expected to meet people and immediately become the circle of friends. Why she expected this, I'm not sure.

Social networking is the number one most important activity of teenagers, and even though much is in the air lately about online social networking, in-person social lives still matter.

Not All Self-Defense is Equal

One of the things we most feared happening with son #2 came true this weekend. He got big enough and aggressive enough that he can overpower me.

Son #2 has fairly severe autism. He is non-verbal, and smack in the middle of puberty. This is a bad combination. For years we've been able to control his occassional aggression, although control involved physical restraint at times and exhausting battles that could go on for an hour or two. But this weekend, he moved past the invisible line we had been able to maintain, and accomplished what, in plain terms, was a beating. Of me. Even though his dad was in the room and reached us within seconds, he was not able to get son#2 off me for about a minute. Although I recieved no specific injury, and was not in bad shape on the scale of how things could be, I was still left with enough physical trauma to cause several days of depression, stiffness, soreness, and general unwellness. I have been told that beatings, even with little to no outward physical signs, is traumatic to the body and requires recovery. I have now experienced this first hand.

The problem now is what to do. Clearly I would be in big trouble if this happened when no other adult (preferably a big strong one) was around. I have found a real gap in advice and training for parents in this area - it is difficult to find information on physical restraints, and when you do it is all aimed at using containment first and the least possible amount of physcial force. I think that is good - but no training seems willing to talk about what to do at the next level. When containment and low physical force doesn't work.

On the other hand, self-defense training is all about incapacitating your assailant. And while I am confident I could still do that to son #2 if necessary, I want to find something in the middle. I want to find self-defense that seeks first to stop or avoid the force being rained down upon you. I feel like I the tools to handle both lesser and greater attacks, but the serious attack by someone whom you want to avoid hurting as much as possible just isn't addressed by training or literature that I can find.

Book Review: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith

Francie Nolan, the heroine of this book in the way heroine was meant to be used, is a delightful tour guide through the rough and hardscrabble life of turn of the century New York. My mother describes this as her favorite book of all time, and she desperately wanted to share it with me when I was young. I was a devotee of fantasy, devouring Dune, Lord of the Rings, and anything to do with King Arthur, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn seemed far to ordinary to me to gift it with more than a few pages of reading.

Reading it now, however, from the vantage point of my forty-something life, I see fantasy in it - the vastness of the future that Francie sees for herself as she goes on a mythic quest for education, hungry for the rich details of life seen as pieces of a whole, and not as dead ends as so many in her neighborhood saw them.

The book is also a delighfully vivid picture of life in the 1910's, showing us the human, struggling side of America that is difficult to find in most history books, preoccupied as they are with the overarching themes of our nations growth. But Francie shows us these same themes embodied in the day to day life and actions of our citizens. She allows us to eavesdrop on the very citizens for which the ideals of this country were made - the ideal that through hard work and perseverance, anyone can better themselves and achieve a dream, no matter how far removed form reality the dream may seem when it begins.

This book is gentle, raw, and unflinching in it's look at how life and people were at that time and place. Morality is a goal, but life is lived as it needs to be. The people in Francie's world are just as varied, flawed, complex, and real as the people in my own life today. This book is a wonder, and left me inspired to live my own life in a bigger and better way.

Rich Lives

Obama's nominee to the US Supreme Court is taking heat for a comment made during a speech some years ago. In a paraphrase of a famous quote on the value (or not) of diversity on the bench, Sotomayor said that she felt a wise latina woman could make a better decision than a wise white man who had not live the same rich life.

The implication of the statement for republicans desperate to find a politically safe way to challenge her nomination, was that Sotomayor was steeped in the racism that comes of believing your own way/culture/beliefs/religion/life is the "best."

I don't believe she meant that at all - her record is otherwise clean of potentially racist comments as far as we know, and it is certainly free of racist actions and court decisions. Traditionally undervalued groups of people like to talk among themselves not about how they could do as well as "the man," as 60's counterculture folks called the in-power group, but about how they could do better, if only they could get the chance. It's an aspirational and angry reaction to being dismissed as a valuable human being.

Sotomayor's comment was extremely mild, as those sorts of comments go.

The truth as I know it is that the only type of person who is likely to make a better decision than other types of people, is one who values the beliefs and thoughts of all groups. People who are like that are found among all ethnic and racial groups.

My only real beef with Sotomayor's comment is that she sacrificed, for the sake of an emotional affirmation, an acknowldegment that every life has the potential to be rich in experience, even that of a white man. Rich in different experiences than most latina women, but isn't that the point of diversity? White men are not bland, they have simply been the majority view. So let's acknowledge that the goal here is not to eradicate the white male point of view, but simply to provide an accompaniment of other points of view.

The violin is a beautiful instrument. It reaches it's full orchestral potential only when surrounded by all the other instruments of a symphony. Let's strive for a full orchestra of sound in our own political life, as well.

A Collection of Ghosts

I opened up my MSNBC news page today and found this brief blurb in the entertainment section: Travolta Still Struggling with Son's Death.

My first thought was, "well, duh." It's only been six months. My second thought was that the story was brief, tasteful, and obviously a way for the site to get a mention in of the tragedy, because people want to know how they're doing, even though we all know they're struggling without having to be told. I guess we want to know that the Travolta's, while struggling, are able to cope with life while they grieve. We want them to be on the right track, not the track that leads off into endless despair and the ditch.

The death of a family member, or the death even of a close friend, is one that none of us ever "get over." But we do learn to incorporate that death into our life and carry on. Death is, as they say, part of life. None of us will escape an ancounter with it. And the older we get, the greater our personal collection of ghosts grows, travelling with us and enriching our own life by reminding us how fleeting it all is.

What good is education now?

The backbone of our country is and always has been its education system. Free education for all, the chance for higher education for most, a huge push to make even the highest levels of education available to anyone who wants it through grants and government initiatives. We BELIEVE that in this country anyone can better themselves, and it has mostly been true due to our committment to providing education to all. We are the beacon and the light in the world in that respect.

Not withstanding that politicians love to rag on how bad they think our education system is, there is never any doubt in anyone's mind that education is the key to a successful life.

So it's not surprising that Obama's rescue package contains items aimed at education. We always include education - either more education, or vocational retraining for workers who lose their jobs.

But what is surprising to me is that no one seems to be talking about the fact that more and better education will do absolutely nothing to help anyone when there are simply not enough jobs to go around. And rising to the professional ranks, which has always been a significant goal of those who believe in education, is no longer a guarantee of a good salary - or even financial security - or even a JOB, of any kind, in the chosen professional field.

Because in the midst of the mass movement of manufacturing jobs overseas, many porfessional jobs have also been quietly migrating, too. Not just customer service jobs ad technical assistance jobs. No, I'm talking about legal and medical jobs. The holy grail of professional aspirations - doctors and lawyers. Although there are still local doctors and local law firms in control of the matter, many many aspects of true professional work are now shipped overseas - your medical test results may interpreted by doctors in India. Your legal documents may be drafted by lawyers in India.

So my question is this: How can we continue to say, in good faith, to our children that it is important to study and do well in school, and to get as much education as you can, when at the end of it the only we can guarantee they'll get for their effort is a scramble to find a food bank with enough food left in it to feed their family for the next week?

Cooperation

Yesterday daughter number two spent a few hours at the mall hanging out with her friends. It's a great junior high school kid activity, although the perfect junior high school age activity is Friday and Saturday night at the roller rink. Daughter number two spent Friday night att he roller rink. She told me she "LOVE LOVE LOVES it." She is an exuberant child. She was there with five of her girlfriends, a very attractive bunch. I don't know what was wrong with the boy contingent that night, but no one even approached them, which they failed to notice and I was baffled by.

Daughter number one spent Friday evening at hime listening to her ipod. She spent most of yesterday with her earbuds in, pacing in the yard and watching the ground while she ran some kind of imaginary scene in her head. I have told her that to get more involved in the world, she needs to be more involved with the world. But she spent the day in her own world, then expressed great resentment about "perfect" daughter number two getting to go places while she she was always locked up at home.

I don't think she's cooperating with her therapy.

Perfectly Normal People Can Be Crazy

Daughter number one has bi-polar, we think. Personally, I think it is something else. But whatever it may be called, it causes problems for her, interferes with her life, and requires medication. We frequently have small crises and calls to schools. But she has changed, because now when we have these crises she is able to identify where she went off track and to profess a sincere intent to try and avoid the problem behavior in the future. Her therapy is successful in that she mostly understands what is going on and where she needs to change her behavior, even if she’s not yet able to successfully do those things all the time.

Daughter number two has no diagnosable mental illness, although she is a teenager. She is able to handle all of her many activities, her heavy school load, and always be on time without any prompting from me. She gets good grades and puts lots of effort into her chosen after school activities. She is mostly a happy, cheerful, talkative young lady. But every now and then, without any warning, the wind changes and suddenly everything I do annoys her, and request I make results in protests and deliberate indifference ( and I’m not talking about heavy duty requests here. I mean things like “go get your coat so we can leave” kinds of things). This morning I wanted her to brush her teeth before we left for school. “Momma!” she wailed. I stopped, unable to think of a good response, since she always brushes her teeth and she knew she was about to leave for school, so there wasn’t anything about the circumstances that tipped me off to the coming weirdness. After that, everything I did or said elicited a huff, eye roll, or contradiction. Even my statement in the car that it was cold today got a snippy response as to how it wasn’t really cold because it was above freezing.

So, daughter number one and daughter number two both have “issues” as we like to say. Is it better to have big issues by know you have them, or to have little issues that you completely deny? At this point, I’m not at all sure.

January blue sky

January has been hard on the depressed people in my household. I find it difficult to comprehend, because we live in a part of the country where the sky stays blue all winter long, unlike where I grew up, where it really is gray all the time for months at a stretch. So when my depressed people tell me that the lack of "light" is why they are struggling, I find it hard to understand, since we already live where other people come in the winter to get light.

My incomprehension aside, this has been a tough winter for my family. My husband finally got so lost in his depression that he could no longer cope with it by himself, so I spent several days last week hunting down low-cost mental health services. My husband and I have no health insurance (our kids do, though), and while we could swing a visit to the doctor and even some medication, treatment for depression is certainly going to require multiple visits and we won't be able to swing that. So I did finally find a source that will allow us quite a few visits to both a doctor and therapist at significantly reduced cost. The earliest appointments were about a week out, so we won't start visiting providers until the end of this week.

The interesting thing, though, is that as soon as my husband learned that help was coming, even though it was a week away, he started to feel better. It's almost like once he committed to leaning on someone else, the pain began to lessen. I'm mighty glad, and can't wait to get him to the help he needs so that he can relax even more. It was painful for me to watch him.

It was also painful to be the one on the other side. All the household responsibility falls to me when he sinks so low, and although he can still get up and do certain tasks, he can only do them if I specifically assign him to do them and there are only certain ones that he can do. And he cannot handle any real life problems, like our rapidly dwindling funds. I avoid talking to him about my own stresses, because so often it exacerbates the problem for me rather than helps, as he is likely to have a major anxiety, self-hating epsiode if I tell him we're having problems. When he is not depressed he is a wonderful partner. When he is depressed, he's not only not a help, he's an additional problem. So on behalf of myself, I am also glad he is going to see professional personnel this week.

Money is Tight

Being self employed is tough at times. My business is one of the few that does not live for the holidays. In fact, my business came to a dead stop this past December, as everyone decided to put off seeking what I have until "after the holidays."

Which means that I am seriously behind in my income, and delaying every expense I can possibly delay. I do not want to tell my kids because I am afraid that they will worry unnecesarily. We literally do not have any money for anything right now, but that will change in the very near future. In the past, though, my kids have proven to be most excellent at worrying needlessly. While I need them to economize and delay purchases, I do not need them to fret about whether we will have food tomorrow (we will). So I decided to just not tell them. But that means they are mystified when I keep not getting things they've asked for or told me they need. Like, buying lunch at school instead of taking one from home. Or not replacing the game boy cord right away.

It's not that my kids are spoiled, they just don't know why I'm saying no, and since they're not really asking for "stuff," I think they believe I'm either incredibly absent-minded or that something is wrong and I just haven't told them.

I am expecting income any day. I just don't know which day that will be.

What Obama Said

Here's what I heard President Obama say in his first speech as president:

Many people made huge sacrifices to come to this country.
Many people took huge leaps of faith to settle this nation.
Many people worked long and hard and fought with their lives to make this nation better.

And all these people said they did it so their family, their children, could have a better life.

And WE are those children for whom the sacrifices were made. We are the children and descendants for whom the better life was sought.

So we should stop whining, we should stop waiting, we should get up off our butts and enjoy what we have and work to keep it good for all.

The Kids are Normal Today

The sixteen year old slept all night and got up at 11am, now is glued to the computer.
The two girls are PLAYING HAPPILY with each other.
The autistic one is sitting motionless on the couch watching a movie.

Now, just so you can see why I am freaked out, here's what would ordinarily be going on:
The sixteen year old would have been up since about three am, and would now be picking on his brother.
One girl would be pacing mindlessly in the yard with her earbids and ipod, oblivious to everyone and declining (monosylabically) to do anything with anyone.
The other girl would be twirling neurotically and chirping at me to do one thing after another and whining when I set limits.
The autistic one would be pacing, filling a diaper every 20 minutes, and periodically letting out a squeal of such suddenness and volume that everyone jumps.

I don't know what's going on, but I like it.

Depression Hurts Everyone

"Who does depression hurt? Everyone."
That's the tag line on a recent commercial for some anti-depressant medication. The gist of the message is that family and friends of a person with depression suffer about as much as the person who actually has depression. The most poignant scene in the commercial for me is the dog who doesn't understand why he and his person can't go out and take a walk.

That may be the most truthful commercial made in quite a while. This past weekend I read a book on borderline personality disorder, but written for people who do not have the disorder, but are connected to someone who does. BPD is often marked by frequent, major crises of the huge-can't-be-easily-ignored variety.

Depression, by contrast, is usually much quieter and it is, at least on the surface, much easier for those around a person with depression to simply go on about their lives as usual, albeit without the ful participation of the person with depression.

That is not the reality, though. Depending on how close the relationship is between you and the person with depression, it can make you act just as depressed if you are not vigilant about taking care. The worry and concern for the person with depression is only one small part of the problem. Simply being around someone who charges the air with negativity and despair - however unintentionally - can cause your own psyche to respond by depressing your usual energy and momentum.

It's a bit like when a person close to you dies. There is a period of time where you feel guilty about enjoying anything because the loved one cannot, and you feel it would be a betrayal to go on laughing and planning for the future when they cannot. The period of mourning is natural and expected for most people.

Living with a person who is severely depressed can have the same effect. If you are used to sharing a worldview with someone - like a spouse - who suddenly has a wildly depressed worldview, it is hard not to fall into the same view. It is harder still to avoid it without feeling guilty, and the feeling of guilt can ultimately result in the same outcome for the non-depressed spouse: a mimicking of the symptoms of fatigue, inability to complete tasks, and so on.

I work at home most of the time. It took a long time for me to realize that my periodic epsiodes of non-productivity, sometimes leading to tragically close calls with our family finances, were directly related to the periods of severe depression my husband goes through. Now, I simply leave the house and work from libraries, coffee shops, parks, or even my car parked in a store lot rather than stay in the house and do nothing because of the hopeless feeling that pervades everything when my husband is going through a bad period.