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Saving the Best for Last

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It’s hard to believe I’ve been married almost twenty-two years, but as anyone in middle age can attest, time is sneaky, creeping past you undetected until something draws your attention to it—like when you’re talking to another adult about how when you were in college, Windows operating systems hadn’t been invented yet, and he’s like, “I know what you mean. When I was in college, Facebook was only for students, not the whole population,” and you realize that this ‘peer’ you’re talking to is fifteen years younger than you.

But nothing highlights the passage of time more than being asked to officiate a wedding, for who else but an old dowager would be given that honor? Last year, I had to decline such a request because I learned that being ordained, even online, might compromise my standing in my own church. Yesterday, however, I had another opportunity to perform a wedding, as the couple had already gotten legally married, so my participation was purely symbolic.

It was a joy to participate in such a beautiful, relaxed, yet momentous occasion (in Maui, no less!), and although I was the one standing there doing all the talking, I felt that all of us attending were playing the crucial role of bearing witness to an act of courage. Because that’s what marriage is these days. It takes a lot of faith to stand there and proclaim your assertion that things will work out, especially when they haven’t in the past. When you’ve got kids involved it’s even more audacious an act. But the great thing about getting older is that you have the perspective to look back and see that everything that has happened in the past has brought you exactly where you are now—in this case, standing on Haleakala, looking out on the glorious Pacific, surrounded by loved ones.

Marriage is so brave because it is essentially a creative act. It says, “I won’t just react; I will create. I will create this new entity, this new space, where our lives come together. A space big enough and flexible enough to encompass us and our families, able to expand and bend along with changing circumstances and goals. As Kahlil Gibran put it so beautifully, “Let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.”

I like to think of this new space as a sandbox where we come together with our chosen playmate to work together and build our castles. I didn’t truly understand this when I got married at age 24. I knew I was in love and that I was committed, and most of all, I had been through enough to know that when something truly good came along, you cherished it. I didn’t think about the sandbox, and I’ve certainly thrown my fair share of sand, but somehow I knew intrinsically not to get out of the box. Because what was beyond it was just another box, and more sand.

Our wedding was a traditional Greek ceremony, and it couldn’t have been more different than the simple gathering that I just officiated. If you’ve ever been to a Greek wedding, you know they are full of joy and dancing and eating and drinking and enthusiastic proclamations of life and love. But the ceremony itself is long, made even longer by the incomprehensible (to me, at least) recitations in Greek, as well as the fact that everything is done three times in order to symbolize the holy trinity: the flower crowns are crossed three times over the heads, the couple walks three times around the altar and drinks three times from the holy cup.

Some parts are sung in English, however, and those are my favorite. Not because I can understand the words, but because the canter usually chants these sections in monotone, with the only variation in melody taking place at the end of the line, when the final syllable dips down. It can give an unintentionally comic overtone to a serious subject, like the story of Jesus turning water into wine, which is chanted near the end of the ceremony. According to the gospel, Jesus attended a wedding where they tragically ran out of alcohol. So he asked that jugs be filled with water, and when the host poured the water, it became wine. The man turned to the bridegroom and said, “Most men serve the good wine fi–irst, and when men have drunk freely they serve the poor wine. You have saved the best wine for la—ast. It is truly a mir—acle.”

Whenever it’s time for that part I always snicker a little, but that tale is especially significant in context of two people getting married in middle age, as my friends did yesterday. For they have saved the best wine for last, and that truly is a miracle.

Signpost #1: Teens are not Mini Adults

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My older daughter is thirteen, so I’ve only recently moved into this new terrain of adolescent parenting, and whether it’s an enchanted forest, a primieval jungle or a nightmarish Dali-esque moonscape is still hard to see from here. Mostly, there are a whole bunch of trees and an inexact path made by those who have stumbled through before me. There’s one sign I can make out, though, scrawled onto wooden board by some helpful predecessor. It says: Teens Are Not Mini Adults!

Like I said, I’m new at this, but I think I have a sense of what the sign means because I’ve been reading The Teenage Brain, By Frances Jensen. She’s a neuroscientist—and a parent—who explains the physiology behind the baffling behavior we all hear about: kids who crash their cars then leave the scene of the accident, others who see their friends lose consciousness from drinking yet don’t seek help because they don’t want to get in trouble. Whenever I’m stunned by certain teenage behavior, I try to remind myself about the dumb shit I used to do or the intense moods I used to inflict on the entire household. But the problem is that such behavior is impossible to understand if we think of teens as being simply younger versions of adults. Because teens are profoundly different in the way their brains are working at this stage. Brains develop from the back—at the brain stem—to the front. According to Jensen, “the connectivity to and from the frontal lobes is the most complex and is the last to fully mature. . . when we think of ourselves as civilized, intelligent adults, we really have the frontal and prefontal parts of the cortext to thank.”

Yet the overriding message today is that teens are just like adults. The trend in books, films and TV shows—from The Hunger Games, to iCarly, and Pretty Little Liars, is to portray kids who have to take care of themselves. Whether the parents are absent or impaired by drugs or depression, the fate of the family, and often the world, rests on the teen. The kid fending for herself motif has been around forever, but add to it the media’s highly sexualized and slick marketing of products to teens that has become the norm and the result is the notion of teens as decision makers on par with adults—dressing like them, spending money like them, taking on the fate of the human race.

I love The Hunger Games; I’m working on a young adult novel myself, and my protagonist is an orphan, no less. But it’s important to be aware of the trends so we make conscious choices. Right now the message being broadcast from all directions is that teens have a lot of power. Though I certainly don’t want to go back to the ‘children should be seen and not heard’ philosophy many of us grew up with, I also think the pendulum has swung a bit too far the opposite way. Now children are not only heard—but their opinions are sometimes sacred. We take our kids so seriously that we give them too much power. And power is scary.

Kids often have amazing things to say, and ‘being heard’ is vital to healthy emotional development. I know it’s difficult to strike a balance between acknowledging and indulging. Society as a whole is more permissive, and there’s a great deal of good that comes of shedding the oppressive rules and structures of the past. But we have to be mindful of the environment we’re in. With the spread of information and the staggering speed of social change that the internet provides, we need some guidance. A signpost or two is helpful.

Understanding the physiological differences of the teen brain is giving me a little direction on the path. Just as importantly, it helps me explain my reasons for certain rules to my kids. One of the toughest things to do as a parent is to know your child’s limitations, but also treat them with respect. Though they might sometimes act like toddlers, it never seems to help when I point that out. Describing the mechanisms of the brain and the fact that “the teen brain is only 80 per cent to maturity,” according to Jensen, can help everyone make sense of the contradictions in a kid who seems at one moment to be so smart and another so dumb. “Even though their brains are learning at peak efficiency,” Jensen says, “much else is inefficient, including attention, self-discipline, task completion and emotions.”

I also find that understanding how teen brains are different helps me be more consistent with discipline. For instance, I know that teens have fewer areas of the brain that process negative information, so they literally can’t retain the concept of a bad decision with dangerous results. I can, hopefully, use this information to educate my daughters and gain their cooperation. When they were younger it was enough to say my way or the highway, but that doesn’t work for teens. At least it didn’t work on me. I know from my own adolescence that if you’re too rigid in the way you manage and discipline, a teen will always find a ‘workaround’. It’s as if the flow of a teen’s desire for independence is water that will relentlessly obey the laws of gravity down the mountainside. We can route the water into certain paths, perhaps, but we can’t stop it, for the water will find it’s way through the cracks between rocks and maybe even create a landslide.

It’s a difficult balance, to say the least. Like water, a teen is a force of nature. Beautiful, and more than a little scary. We are wise to guide and harness it as best we can, not let if flow recklessly nor dam it up. What makes it even more difficult is that teens are rapidly changing as their brains grow and their hormones surge. The the water’s flow fluctuates depending on things as random as the weather—if it rains we may find ourselves bailing madly with our buckets. At other times there’s nothing but a gentle brook that we admire as we watch it glisten in the sun, congratulating ourselves on what a great job we’ve done.

But as we enter the mysterious landscape ahead, whatever we encounter, we must always remember to respect nature, not underestimate it. And it doesn’t hurt to heed a signpost or two.

 

 

 

 

Fume and Forget

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I skipped posting last month because I was rushing to get ready for a trip and didn’t have time to sort out my thoughts regarding what I wanted to write about: the Sony Hack. Now tragedy provides renewed reason to address the issue of freedom of speech. The terrorist attack at the Charlie Hebdo office and kosher market that killed 17 people is horrific for France and all those connected to the victims, but it also has grave implications for us here, in the country that puts freedom of speech at the top of its list of civil rights. A country which, shamefully, did not send one high-level representative to march with forty other world leaders in Paris on Sunday.

The attack in Paris isn’t, of course, going to stifle free speech. Magazines all over the world are reposting controversial cartoons from Charlie Hebdo covers. This week, surviving staffers will publish a million copies of the magazine, as opposed to its normal circulation of fewer than 50,000. I am most in awe of the tens of thousands of people who immediately took to the cold, wet streets of Paris to show support for the victims and for free speech itself—even as the killers were still at large. I couldn’t help but notice the difference between that and the way many in Hollywood initially cowered at threats by the Guardians of Peace if the movie “The Interview” was shown. Fortunately, courage prevailed in the form of independent theater owners who were at the forefront of a shift in attitude, and eventually Sony (and major theater chains) released the movie in all its silliness.

I am not minimizing the real concerns that one must have over public and personal safety, such as potential violence at a movie theater. One of the worst massacres in this country happened at a movie theater in Colorado in 2012. As a mother I have to work daily to not be ruled by fear that something will happen to my children. I wrote about such fears in a previous post. But ultimately we have to move forward and decide how we’re going to live our lives. Are we going to be ruled by fear? And just as importantly, are we going to be ruled by anger and hatred?  Anger and outrage is essential in the wake of a brutal and heinous act, but what do we do with it then? Do we just ‘fume and forget’ as we do every time a tragedy like this happens?

When I looked up what had been done about gun violence since the theater shooting in Aurora, I was shocked to learn the answer: Nothing. At least nothing of substance. CNN reports there has been a Newtown-like shooting every five weeks since the Sandy Hook massacre (a conservative estimate). Everyone’s afraid to even touch the issue of gun violence. I’ve tried to talk about it with friends from time to time and gotten meek responses, or none at all. I brought up the issue as benignly as possible to one prominent local politician, and he ducked away the moment he could, taking cover behind a confused caterer.

Why is there such little constructive dialogue in this country? The NRA repeatedly takes a hardline stance—even about talking about guns—for example by backing Florida laws like Docs vs. Glocks, which forbids doctors from asking patients about whether they own firearms. This, in spite of the fact that The New England Journal of Medicine reports that when doctors, like pediatricians, talk to parents about the risk of keeping firearms in a home, it leads to a significant increase in safe storage practices. According to the NEJM, keeping guns locked and unloaded reduces the risk of gun injury by 70%. Pediatricians routinely ask about car seats and bicycle helmets—why not guns?

A female police officer I spoke to said that when her middle school daughter has friends over, the parents routinely drop their kids off without even coming to the door and meeting her—and only one person has ever asked how guns are kept in the house, in spite of the fact that both parents are cops. Why can’t we talk about guns? We’re not arguing gun freedom or no gun freedom. It’s not either or—the fact is, we already limit guns. The question is whether or not society would benefit from further restrictions. No one is talking about taking guns away completely, along with our Second Amendment. But as with driving, another instance where a powerful tool can be potentially destructive, we have regulations that serve the greater good. Let’s have some productive and constructive discussions about where to draw the line.

The reason we can’t talk is because everyone is caught up in demonizing the other side, something that happens often with Islam, especially on the freewheeling Internet. When Nicholas Kristof suggested in the New York Times that not all 1.6 billion Muslims in the world are complicit in the violence perpetrated by extremists like the ones who committed the Charlie Hebdo atrocity, the message boards were full of thrashings for his liberal apologism. One person posted, “When a Pew poll in Egypt finds that a majority of Muslims there think death is an appropriate punishment for “blasphemy”, there is something radically, unalterably wrong with that religion and culture.” On BusinessWeek message boards, posts were more vulgar, with a number of people constructively suggesting we “just nuke ’em all.”

Words aren’t inherently bad. Neither are guns. They are both tools. But we have to be responsible with our tools. We can’t throw them around carelessly. As a writer, I am a staunch defender of free speech. But with freedom comes responsibility. That means considering our intentions and checking facts. I realize we don’t always have time to look up research about Islam before making a comment, but let’s be responsible consumers and users of social media and not assume that everything we read is true. There’s far too much drive-by posting, which is more akin to ‘pigeon chess’ than actual debate.

The problem with lingering too long in our anger over injustice is that it can allow us to feel like we’ve done something about it—when all we’ve done is fume. Doing something doesn’t have to be tackling the entire issue of gun control. It can be as simple as reading an article and discussing it at book club. It can be a conversation with that neighbor who you know loves hunting on weekends. It’s simply about engaging the topic, engaging the other side. Because no matter how much we might wish it to be different, the ‘other side’ isn’t going anywhere. We all have to be on this journey together. As John F. Kennedy said, “Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.” The irony is that so many of the criticisms I’ve heard about Islam focus on how intolerant a religion it is. I just can’t tolerate how intolerant they are! Demonizing the other side doesn’t make us stronger; it only ensures there is no constructive dialogue. If we shut down communication, we only ensure things stay exactly as they are.

Believe me, I don’t like to add to my list of things to do, mental or physical. After reading for hours about the Paris shooting, I wanted nothing more than to have a glass of wine (you know, in solidarity with the French) and play Candy Crush Saga. But if I want there to be increased understanding in the world, don’t I have to try to understand? Who else is going to do it? So I decided to take a moment to check the Pew website that some of the posts mentioned to see if there was indeed information about large numbers of Muslims condoning death for the crime of blasphemy. What I found was an extensive report indicating that the majority of Muslims are, in fact, moderate and reasonable. In the matter of extremist violence the report was very clear: “Muslims around the world strongly reject violence in the name of Islam. . . in most countries, the prevailing view is that such acts are never justified as a means of defending Islam from its enemies.” I was glad I took a moment to look that up before tweeting idiotically like Rupert Murdoch, who said that all Muslims are responsible for not destroying the jihadists among them. By that logic, all Christians are responsible for the KKK.

I don’t yet know what can be done about Islamic extremists, or about mass shootings, but I do know the rest of us are weaker if we waste our energy fuming. With the stakes so high, I think it’s crucial that we ask ourselves what we really want. Do we want things to change? Or do we spend all our time telling tales like Shakespeare’s idiot, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?”