April 14, 2012

Dear E-,

Today is your last day of work before you go out on maternity leave, and I would say a few words to you about parenting as you prepare to embark on a new era in your life.

We have parking spots right next to each other and each morning I look at the infant seat already installed in your car, awaiting a baby that will arrive soon enough. So each morning I walk by your car on the way to my classroom and think to myself, “What would you say to her, if you could?”

A month or two earlier I would have told you I had no advice whatsoever to give on parenting. If asked, I would have made some Socrates-esque statement that parenting had forced me to admit the only thing I knew was that I knew nothing about parenting. Five years into parenting, I have done nothing so humbling and exhausting. The job is so overwhelming and all-encompassing that where would one start in terms of advice? And what might work for me and my family might be totally wrong for you and yours.

Still, I would repeat this one piece of infamous advice from Dr. Spock: "Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do."

Now, let me be clear. I remember reading that as a nervous parent-to-be and wondering incredulously, “Easy for you to say! I don’t even know enough to trust what I think I might know!” And in thinking this, I was not far from the truth.

I really did know next to nothing about babies and parenting.

You probably find yourself in much the same situation. But you will learn. With time you will learn. Painfully, you will learn.

My wife and I read dozens of books in preparing for parenthood. This was our way to prepare emotionally for what we knew would a life-changing event: we read about it. We would invest our nervous energy into thinking we were preparing by devouring book after book about pregnancy, infants, and parenting. I learned about a thousand things that did not help me at all when I became a parent. I look back and reflect that I learned next to nothing from all those books that really helped.

We had a very difficult baby who endured never-ending series of painful ear infections and suffered from a severe case of colic. After hour after hour of crying and then more crying, I read this book and then that book by experts. They gave me almost opposite advice on what to do to stop or reduce the crying. Who to believe? What to do? Then I went online and read secondary comments --

http://parents.berkeley.edu/advice/babies/colic.html
http://parents.berkeley.edu/advice/babies/crying.html

-- by parents on the primary sources, and my head hurt and I was more confused than before. “They might cry for hours and hours and that can be normal,” the authorities said, “and they might hardly cry at all and that can be normal, too.” Well, thank you for the help! Each child is different and there are so few fast and hard rules anyone can offer a parent. And then just when you think you have the little bugger or their behavior figured out, they enter a new developmental phase and you are back to square one.

But over the months you will learn. Despite the fact your daughter lived and grew inside of you for nine months, after she emerges and nests in your arms you are basically strangers to one another. But over months and then an entire year, and then two and three years of close acquaintance, that will change. You will come to know your child’s temperament, and will be even be able to shape it, to an extent. You will come to have your “sea legs,” so to speak, and the ground underneath you will seem more solid. Please keep this in mind in these panicky first months. Have faith – people have been doing this for a long time.

But clearly to be a parent means to suffer. It may mean many other things, too, but there is no getting around the suffering. Recently I asked my father (a parent for 45 years) what was his definition of "patience" as a father. He replied grimly, "Patience means biting down on your lip until it bleeds to keep from saying what you really think." He tries to respect the sovereignty of his adult children's choices, even when he vehemently disagrees. But you can never really know if your parental choices -- and you make thousands of them large and small on a routine basis -- are really the right ones. And there are plenty out there who will second guess a parent.

I have noticed nowadays American women engage in “mommy wars.” They clash loudly and aggressively over whether breast feeding or using a bottle is better – or to “co-sleep” with baby or to use a crib? And is it better to be a stay at home mother or to go back to work? Then there is the “attachment” versus the “free-range” parenting philosophies. Similarly, I have read with detached interest mothers argue over the “Tiger Mom” Asian (re. Amy Chua) and “Baby to Bebé” French parenting styles re. (Pamela Druckerman), and whether they produce superior children when compared to “American” parenting.” A child will thrive if loved consistently and give structure and support, whether she be breast or bottle fed. A child will do just fine if he is disciplined by “time out” or the occasional spanking, if the other more important factors (love, security, consistency) are present. I have personally seen mothers tear themselves up over the question of whether they're doing a good enough job, and I suspect little good comes from this. Parenting is hard enough without we making it even harder for ourselves.

As you have learned to have classroom management and develop lesson plans and curriculum in a way that reflects who you are as a teacher, so that will happen in your parenting. “Trust thyself: Every heart vibrates to that iron string," says Ralph Waldo Emerson. Trust that with time parenting will come to feel more natural – that with experience you will gain confidence. Parenting is as much an art as a science. Nobody, least of all your child, is expecting perfection. I suspect strongly that in 18 years your daughter, if she could, would reach back in time and say to you, “Relax, Mom! You were a wonderful mother!”

Easy for her to say! She is not laying there with a screaming infant in her arms, scared shitless. (Although one day she might be!) I would not attempt to downplay the effects of stress and sleep-deprivation on a new parent. Perhaps we do nothing as stressful, demanding, and unremitting in our lives. Again, to be a parent is to suffer.

But the flip side is equally true: we might do nothing as beautiful and fulfilling. In the sturm und drang of coping with your new arrival, in all the wondering whether to do this or that, even when she throws up on you or ruins a Thanksgiving dinner with her willfulness, don’t lose sight of the minor miracle of the whole thing. Don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees. Don’t let overthinking and second-guessing turn a healthy desire to learn and be a good parent into neuroticism and incessant, unproductive worry. Don’t lose sight even in the worst most sleep-deprived moments that you are lucky to be a parent. Do not be so absorbed in the minutiae of never-ending feeding, diapering, bathing, and wiping up after that you fail to appreciate the magic that is this intense but relatively brief period of time.

The days are long with young children, but the months they fly by. Blink too long, and you might miss it.

Very Truly Yours,

Richard

P.S. If you have not already noticed, I write this letter as much for myself as for you.

A baby seat awaits the arrival of baby.

April 14, 2012

Dear Julia,

Happy birthday, my love!

Today you turn five years of age. How well I remember the fear and excitement I felt around dawn of the day of your birth as your mother prepared for the final stage of delivery – the “calm before the storm.” That morning of April 14, 2007, as well as the weeks and months that followed, were so full of adrenaline, anxiety, fear, love, wonder, and exhaustion. We were all very new at this, you and I and your mother. We were just beginning to get to know each other.

It is now five years later. We know each other much better now. And you have already passed through many developmental stages – infancy, toddlerhood, pre-school. You learned how to talk, and then you learned how to read. You are potty-trained. You can swim. This coming August you will start kindergarten.

Let me say this bluntly: it has been a long five years for me, daughter Julia. Maybe you will only understand this when and if you become a parent someday. Five long years of sleep deprivation and financial strain. In extreme moments I have been as frustrated and angry with you (and your baby sister) as I have been with anyone in my life.

Don’t misunderstand me: I never lost sight of the great luck I have had in two healthy daughters, and I always delight in tussling your hair or carrying you on my shoulders. But if parenting can be enriching, fulfilling, and life-giving on a spiritual level, on a day-to-day basis it often proves to be not much “fun.” As an adult, I can only play blocks for so long. Playgrounds are boring for middle-aged men, beyond any delight they might give their children. Often I count the hours until bedtime when I can finally have some time to myself. I see much less of my friends; interests and hobbies have languished. In the 80 or so years a person is alive, it seems 10 or so of these are given to us to take care of babies and young children – and in those years we have not much life of our own. We change diapers and pay the mortgage; we parent and we work. Our time is much less our own. And so it has been much more “you” than “me” since April 14, 2007, daughter Julia.

Since I became a father I have thought often of my mother in a similar stage of her life when she was a full-time housekeeper with three young children taking almost all her time and energy. At the time she lived in the frigid snow and cold of Milwaukee, Wisconsin far from family and friends. Although my case is not so severe, I can see she was simultaneously thrilled by the physical presence of her children while stretched by the demands placed on her, and depressed at being so isolated from the adult world. My dad enjoyed this stage of parenting much more than did my mother, but even he now freely admits that he looked forwarded to going back to the office on Monday morning. He could get a break from the unremitting demands of young children in the relatively stress-free job of a lawyer. I find myself in the same position now.

Again, Julia, it has been a hard five years.

I have always been a believer in giving full attention to something new at the beginning – especially difficult things. “What is well begun is half done,” goes the saying. Julia, you (and your sister) have had my best hours and my full attention these past five years, and I feel like I can see you clearly – when you are just a bit off, when you are sullen and wanting to fight, or happy and dancing and full of smiles – I can sense when the mood changes, and I can sometimes know what will happen next. This understanding has come from five intense years of watching and listening to you closely. In fact, Julia, I look at you today on your fifth birthday and I strongly suspect I can already see your strengths and weaknesses in high school – I might be wrong, but I doubt it. I will not rule out formative influences from your mother, myself (or other caregivers), but you were born with a temperament all your own that will change only so much and no further. That is how I see it now, at least. I could be wrong, but I don’t think so. You have changed as you have grown and matured, but your core personality remains the same. Or so I seem to see it.

And I am so excited to move forward! I have a whole closet full of famous children’s and young adult literature for us to explore together. This summer you start tennis lessons, and I foresee hundred or even thousands of hours of tennis between us. (I have so many happy memories of time spent at the tennis club with my father!) I imagine listening to you opine on the characters of Elizabeth Bennett and Jo March. We shall journey through the Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Lord of the Rings, and Little House on the Prairie series. How exciting to look upon these stories with fresh eyes, eh? I shall live in literature vicariously through you.

In some ways you have already grown so much easier as a child than in earlier days. You put your own clothes on now unassisted. I open your door at bedtime, you get under your sheets, and I then I turn on a Harry Potter audiobook for you to fall asleep to. Then I kiss you goodnight (“I love you, my darling! Sleep well, and I will outside watching out for you all night! Relax, relax, relax! Go to sleep! Night, night!”) I walk out, close the door to your room, and that is that. This is so different from the bedtime battles we used to have when you were an infant and toddler. You can occupy yourself at home with your invented games and toys; we don’t have to watch you every minute, as used to be the case (and still is with your younger sister, Elizabeth Anne).

Historians talk easily of “change” and “continuity” over time. So it will be with our family, too. Stages of development will start and end; things will always change, yet remain unchanged. Elementary school, middle school, high school. Adolescence and then young adulthood. “Little children, little problems; big kids, big problems,” veteran parents remind me. They ominously warn the following: “Enjoy their childhoods, for it will go quickly!” So far the days have passed slowly and sometimes even painfully – but the months have flown by. In baseball as in tennis, they warn you to never take your eyes off the ball – to watch the tennis ball even before you take it out of the can.

And so, daughter Julia, for five years I have not really taken my eyes off the ball. I have watched you – I have come every time you cried in the night (or cried more than a few minutes, at least). I put you in timeout when you had your tantrums. (“I need to get some peace of mind!” you sometimes proclaimed through tears, showing masterful self-awareness, I thought.) I taught you how to swim. I taught you how to hold a tennis racket. I laid there in the dark next to you until you fell asleep at night for two full years (you would howl in outrage if I tried to leave before you were fully asleep). I taught you the alphabet and how to read. I wiped your behind and changed your diaper. I left work to make surprise visits to your preschool class just to watch you in action (and you glowed with happiness when I did).

I would argue this is what it means to be a “father” – not the mere biological fact of impregnating a woman.

And when you act out in adolescence, when you become willful or test the boundaries of family rules, this is why I will have the authority to say “no” and mean it.

But we can deal with these challenges as they arise in the future. You sometimes overwhelm me by wanting my time and attention so often – you put your arms up to be held by me and proclaim, “Daddy time! I want daddy time!” After a long day of work, sometimes I just want some peace and quiet. But I have never told you to go away and leave me be – never told you I had to grade papers or pay bills. (I would do that after you were asleep.) I remind myself that in future days when you are a teenager and I have become the epitome of “uncool” I might look back fondly on these early days – the times when you actually wanted to spend time with me…

But let us not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s enjoy the days of your childhood as they are upon us.

Happy birthday, daughter Julia!

Love,
Your Father

February 25, 2012

Dear Elizabeth Anne,

Hello, my love! Today I sit down a week late to write you a letter on your birthday.

You just turned two years of age, and I want you to know how much you are already such an integral part of our family. We are the following: Mommy, Daddy, Julia, and yourself, our Elizabeth Anne. We don’t call you Liz, Lizzy, Elizabeth, Betsy, or any such thing – we call you fully “Elizabeth Anne.” All of us (your big sister not the least of which) can hardly imagine life without you, and it gives me so much happiness to see you greet your sister by stumbling towards her in your toddler-gait with arms outstretched. “Julia! Julia!” You call for your sister in your toddler-English and then hug her. You both are smiling.

I have often thought with thankfulness how amiable a child you have been so far. Not fully asleep before I leave you for the night? That’s OK, Daddy, you leave and I will not scream in protest as you walk out. (Your older sister never let me get away with that!) No book tonight before bed? You might complain a bit and then let it go. Not really tired when it is time to take a nap? Most often you will go to sleep anyway after I urge it. Parenting is hard enough, and you have made it less hard with your easygoing nature.

Sure, you can be cranky, tired – full of plaintive tears. But much more often you are full of smiles and laughs. You are a superb hugger and shower us with kisses. And you are so athletic! Your mother especially likes to tell stories of your fearless attempts at scaling rock walls at the park, or jumping from chair to couch without fear in the living room. “She pulls herself up on the jungle gym; she is so strong!” your mother brags. You love to climb onto my back and then onto my shoulders, hanging on for dear life. “Hee haw!” you exclaim, as I walk around with you on back as if I were your horse. It is widely predicted that one day you will become quite the athlete. At the park we come to a set of exercise bars, and you climb up to the very top and hang like a daredevil. (Your sister, on the other hand, decorates the bars with flowers.)

We have well entrenched daily routines and rituals, Elizabeth Anne. For example, almost every evening of your life I have bathed and put you down to sleep. I pay careful attention to your sleeping gear. In winter I was so worried about you getting cold in the middle of the night after you kick off your covers, as you seem unable still to get a blanket over yourself. So I make sure you have long pajamas and a shirt underneath, in addition to your heavy overnight diaper. I come to check on you in the middle of the night, as the thought of my little Elizabeth Anne helpless and shivering in the cold torments me. At bedtime I read a book or two with you and then turn out the light and place you on my chest. With your head lying on my chest you move gently up and down with my breathing, probably listening to my heartbeat. I kiss your hair and slowly rub your back until you have completely given in to sleep. Then I place you in your toddler bed. I can get you to fall asleep just about anywhere anytime, Elizabeth Anne, and your mother looks to me to do it. I am the “closer” at night. I will sit in the dark and pat your back gently as long as it takes – until you let go and sleep overtakes you.

I insist you sleep in your room at night (despite your occasional loud protestations) and have a gate and lock to ensure this. But around 5:30 a.m. each morning I come in and carry you asleep to our room and bed. The 45 minutes of semi-awake cuddling makes for a wonderful transition from night to day. What a nice way to wake up!

All this highlights one of the most enjoyable aspects of being a father: the physical joy of hugging your child – or just the reaching out and touching the solid flesh and bone of their arm or tussling their hair. There are all the higher connections between parent and child formed through language and reason, and then there is the primal link of physical touch – a baby daughter deep asleep on her father’s chest – comfortable, protected, not a care in the world, completely relaxed. You have not yet learned to complicate (poison?) your life with overthinking.

So it has been for two years, my daughter. You have kept me up all night before long days of work that next day. You have thrown up on me. You have pooped on me. You have gotten me sick. You routinely dump things all over the floor. You write all over your face with a pen. Last month you dropped my glasses on the floor and then stepped right on them. There have been many sacrifices large and small, but that is par for the course and, overall, you have been an “easy baby.” You are our "Elizabeth Anne" and that has meant more good times than bad.

I have enjoyed these past two years, and you have enriched our lives so much. I think of you and smile. And the future (mine, yours; ours) I look forward to.

Happy belated second birthday, daughter mine!

I love you,
Dad

An operating system will degrade over a few years, and there exists the unpleasant but necessary duty every three years or so of getting a clean start: the upgrade to the computer system. And so after almost a week of tedious and stressful work, my computer system at home is upgraded. Everything is finally working (from OS down to all drivers and every software application installed and operational.

Actually, it was more of a OS upgrade with existing system transferred into a much better computer case. New lineup: Windows 7 (operating system on a 160 gb RAID), quad core cpu, eight internal hard disks (one 1tb RAID media disk), Logitec 9000 webcam (for Skype for Julia with Grandpa), nine external hard drives, Epson scanner, blue tooth hands-free Motorola headset, two HP 19” monitors for lots of space (Ultramon dual monitor), and a rockin’ new Antec 1200 Tower computer case. Basically, I migrated most of my last system into a new and bigger computer case and moved from XP to Windows 7. I had to re-install every last software application and setting. Exhausting.

Yes, I know: terabytes of hd space in one computer? The answer: they are already almost all filled! All extended family video going back to 1939, immediate family video from 2003 on up, all family pics (I guess I am the family archivist); every school paper and personal letter written since high school, every webpage and related document for my 8 domains, every email since 1996 (in addition to 13 email addresses and all their settings and folders); 210 gb of media for iTunes (every major work in the classical repertoire in iPod video format [me], plus most of the Disney oeuvre [daughter], all for my almost filled 160gb AppleTV downstairs); and everything from work over 17 years. Yes, lots and lots of audio and video, and thousands of pages of my typing in one format or another.

Yet I pause and wonder. I have so much media on all these hard disks from so many different aspects of my life over decades. A part of me wonders if, like a snake, I should shed my past skin and make way for the new one. Just throw all these digital archives in the trash and start fresh; no past at my back, only a future to embrace. Perhaps forgetting is important in life. But so is remembering, and my past also gives meaning to my present: as the cliché goes, who we are today depends on is what we were yesterday. Furthermore, so much of this digital media is so incredibly important to me: love letters and past resumes, video of my mother before she died, snap shots into my psyche in 1987 through my MS Word diary of the time. All my audio and video for iTunes (long ago I stopped doing disks). Then there is almost all my professional output and that which makes me able to make a living for myself and my family. The video and photos of the first minutes of my daughter’s life. All my financial and online banking through Quicken for a decade. Wedding photos and video. It is all organized and all backed up. It is complicated

A part of me is jealous of my peers who just start a new computer system with almost nothing to put on it. Everything old is new again and – fresh! – like a newborn baby they dive into the future. (Or, more accurately, like Athena they burst from the forehead of father Zeus full grown!) But it is not like that with me. And I have just a little less than contempt for full-grown adults who do not back up their data, suffer some hardware problem, and lose decades of digital artifacts forever. What could they have been thinking?

So I scrupulously back everything up to external hard drives using Acronis True Image 11, and I thank God hard disk prices drop reliably year after year. As they say, one can never be too thin, have too much money -- or have too much hard disk space or monitor display area!

And now that I gotten out of the way this onerous duty of upgrading the family computer system, I almost feel ready to hunker down and get ready for the arrival of daughter Elizabeth Anne Geib, expected to arrive in about two and a half months.

Time to return to zombie-land, sodden with fatigue. I am ready.

COMPUTER CASE FOR "SERIOUS GAMERS"

I don't play computer games, but I need the space and the fans for so many hard drives and video crunching.

I found myself, on a rare morning with not much planned, reading that the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” opened today. A big fan of the novel, I attended the first possible showing today at 10:10 a.m. in the company of approximately six senior citizens. The film was not as good as the book -- but it was far, far from a failure. Kenneth Turan’s review, which I read today at breakfast, claimed the following: “An honorable, yet unfulfilling, attempt at filming Cormac McCarthy's unfilmable book.”

To the contrary, the film is very fulfilling. It is the magic and mystery of imaginative literature that it refracts reality and thereby sets in stark relief “truths” about human nature. Great fiction creates stories that are more “real” than real life, as it tells lies to get at truth. Cormac McCarthy paints a post-apocalyptic story that could not be more bleak, but that is only the setting of the story, not the story itself. Much more than destruction, desperation, wastage, cannibalism -- the world ending not in a “bang but a whimper” – the story is more about a father and a son and their bond. And, amazingly, by the end this life-giving, tenacious connection between parent and child redeems all the dark.

In my memory, I will remember this story less for the “unfilmable” vicissitudes that take place on “the road” and more for the savage, primal connection of blood to blood – that desire to do anything to protect one’s child. It is more a story of love and connection than of apocalypse and barbarism. It is a very “human” story, set amidst great inhumanity. But it is the inhumanity and “darkness of man’s heart” in the gray and black hue of the story that makes the white standout all the more.

It is brilliant art – perhaps the highest manifestation of our “humanness.” Creatures from other worlds should look to art such as this if they want to learn about this messy, contradictory species called homo sapiens. So horrible and so wonderful at the same time!

To the contrary, Mr. Turan. I found “On the Road” to be very fulfilling.

KENNETH TURAN OPINION:

"An honorable, yet unfulfilling, attempt at filming Cormac McCarthy's unfilmable book."

In the late morning of November 15, 2009 I drove to the Malibu canyons to ride along the Santa Monica Mountains. It has been a long time since I had been here.

Before marriage and larger life responsibilities, I used to escape to these canyons above Malibu for looong bike rides just about every weekend! Even as they physically exhausted – and even traumatized – me, they were spiritually relaxing and restorative. Here again for the first time in a year or two, the effect is the same.

Above is a view of Malibu Lake from Mulholland Highway.

Just hills and sage brush and trees and sun: the way Southern California should be. And it is oh so quiet here...

The desert landscape here goes more horizontal than vertical.

A few miles or so straight ahead and then the Santa Monica Mountains plunge straight down into the Pacific Ocean and the beach. I have ridden pretty all these canyons with much exertion and pleasure.

Groups of portly, hirsute Harley Davidson motorcyclists come blowing by me at high speed on these lonely roads: I look them and think, "Get off your motorcycle and get some exercise, you beer-sodden lazybones!" and they look at me and think, "What the hell is this guy doing out here in the middle of nowhere on a bicycle?" -- and after a moment's recognition, we blow by each other going in opposite directions.

Strange how even as I cannot make it out to these canyons to ride so much anymore, my body has a very accurate memory of the various hills: pain is an effective and enduring teacher to one's muscles.

I apologize for the low quality of this picture, as by necessity I am using my cell phone camera.

Some dozen miles beyond this mountain range lies Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica, California.

A verdant view of Lake Malibu.

Around this corner a clump of young men riding their high-performance "rice rocket" motorcycles passed by me going waaaay too fast. These canyons often witness a cat-and-mouse game between motorcyclists and police, and numerous times I have ridden by accident scenes with ambulance on scene where some motorcyclist took a turn too fast and went off the road.

A few luxury homes ring Malibu Lake for those who can afford them. A beautiful place to live, but for everyday life does one want to live so far removed from civilization -- reminds me of the year I lived near Thatcher School in Ojai!

Light from the sun gives this photo an appropriate aura of rays of lights permeating the valley.

Yes, there is all sort of trees and brush, but this desert terrain is almost always bone-dry -- which makes this area very susceptible to "fire storms" that can cover mile after miles of canyon and threaten homes and inhabitants.

If one travels about five miles in that direction, one will arrive at Leo Carrillo State Beach in Northern Malibu -- approaching the Ventura County border.

Off Kanan Road near Agoura Hills, the older brother of Jim Glantz lives not far from here...

Much to my surprise, towards the end of my bike ride there were hundreds and hundreds of cars lined up for almost a mile to get a Swine Flu H1N1 vaccine shot in Calabasas. Wow!

From what I could tell, there were all trying to get to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Dept. Malibu/Lost Hills Station which is just beyond the top of this hill on Agoura Road.

Finally, I arrived to see the above scene.

Finally, back to my car on the edge of the Malibu Creek State Park!

The intersection of Las Virgenes Road and Mulholland Highway: very crowded with cars, mostly of day hikers taking off into the state park beyond.

Bike safely secured to my car, I take off for a big lunch in Woodland Hills. I sit there in the warmth of the San Fernando Valley and leisurely read for three hours 200 pages of David Walker Howe's "What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848." All stress has left me.

After a great workout, beautiful scenes of nature, a hearty meal, and a relaxing read (all done in perfect solitude), I am ready to return to my regular life and responsibilities.

A RELAXED BODY, FULL STOMACH, AND ENGAGED MIND

David Walker Howe's "What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848"

I wrote the following letter to the editor for our local newspaper but was persuaded not to send it. It was considered impolitic. Alas, I resort to posting it here:

I would say a few words about the candidacy of Monique Dollone for the Ventura Unified School Board.

My wife, Maria Geib, was hired as a long-term substitute teacher at Montalvo Elementary School and eventually became a full-time teacher there. It was while Monique Dollone’s daughter was in Maria’s 4th grade class that Monique was arrested for violating a restraining order. I heard all year long from her about the stress and dissension. Monique Dollone brought to Maria’s classroom and school. The emotions were intense for everyone involved. Enormous amounts of energy were expended.

In running for the school board in the November 3rd election, Dollone claims to want to shake up the “status quo” in a “complacent” Ventura Unified School District. She hopes, in the words on her website, to ensure a “Quality Education for All Children all the time.” Both Maria and myself, teachers ourselves, would admit that this goal is nowhere close to being realized. There are too many mediocre instructors with tenure and too many clumsy, unimaginative administrators in the Ventura Unified School District. Too many students are far from ideal in their academic performance. And in our opinion, a few superstars and a few real stinkers punctuate this main of mediocrity. Monique Dollone would paint herself as a reformer of a public school system in need of reform.

But this is false. If the system needs improving, Monique is not the person for that job. Monique would bring her “burn down the barn to save it” philosophy that would lead to further dissension. It would, in our opinion, not lead to forward progress. It is much harder to build a barn than to burn it down. Escorted by police off the Montalvo Elementary School campus in steel bracelets, let this simple fact speak for itself against Monique Dollone’s campaign rhetoric.

Happy I was to see Monique Dollone lose in yesterday's election. But she plans to run again. Alas, the vagaries of local elections and city politics...

It was explained to me that with this letter I would offend both the putative "reformers" and the status quo "powers that be," leaving me between enemies with no allies. On the other hand, the letter says pretty much what I feel to be the truth, even if it be "impolitic." But I was reminded that even if the whole truth is a good thing, saying it out loud isn't.

How strange it is in adult life that we so rarely say exactly what we think. So little candor, so much posturing! Ah, democracy!

"RUNNING FOR SCHOOL BOARD..."

"But this is false. If the system needs improving, Monique is not the person for that job.".

My Dearest Elizabeth Anne,

Elizabeth!

Finally, I can call you by name! My second daughter, Elizabeth Anne Geib.

It is now some two months since we were informed that we were to have another girl. As the doctor told me this I felt a bit dazed, immediately having a vision of myself in fifteen years: a household with two teenaged daughters, a wife, with myself retreating to my “man cave” in the garage to life weights. “Death by estrogen!” one friend joked with me. I also had a moment’s sadness when I realized I would most likely never have a son. My family name will probably end with me.

But it was only for a moment. It will be “Richard and his girls” from now on, and that trips off the tongue just fine for me. But I hesitate to call myself qualified to advise or parent girls, especially as they get older. Despite decades of experience, the female sex in many important ways remains a mystery to me. I know boys, having been one myself. I would father a son with confidence. I understand the male sex. It is entirely the opposite with the female sex.

So I feel some trepidation.

On the other hand, there is a sweetness that is unique between parents and an opposite sex child -- a father and daughter, mother and son. On the same day we discovered your sex I stood in front of a young mother holding and kissing her young son in line at the post office. I felt sadness for your mother, that she would never have a son to dote over. I myself have learned the special place a daughter has in a father’s heart.

So it has been with Julia, so it will be with you, my Elizabeth.

Moreover, I fear that in focusing so much on your gender I will overlook the immense diversity among women. No doubt there will be commonalities particular to all women you will share with your big sister and mother, but there will me more ways in which you will be special and unique unto yourself. What kind of baby and little girl will you be, Elizabeth? What shall be the slant of your mind? The temper of your temperament? Only time will reveal.

But here we are at the twenty-one weeks gestation, and you are half way until your grand debut out into our oxygen-filled world. Compared to your big sister at this time, you seem to be more physically active. Your mother reports you “kick like a horse” and earlier than Julia.

Maybe you will be the athlete of the family?

So much about you will be so peculiar to yourself and nobody else. Upon reflection, I suspect that your gender is less important than your unique character traits. Less important it is that you will be a woman, and much more important it will be what kind of woman you become. Part of this equation will be the job your mother and I do raising you and the choices you yourself make, part of it will be genetic and is already inscribed in your DNA.

Yet I know so little about you as of now!

Even with your big sister, Julia, it took a year or two for the color of her personality to start to shine forth. Only in the last two months have I come to feel some traction in being able to communicate and reason with her.

But rest assured, my little Elizabeth, that you are very much in your family’s thoughts! Your mother and I talk of you often, and you are included in our conversations with Julia. You right under your mother’s heart and commune with her in that mother-child connection that is beyond words.

And rest assured that when you finally emerge into our world of oxygen that mine will be just about the first face you encounter. I will cut your umbilical chord. Along with your mother, we will finally greet you face to face. I will follow you to the nurse’s station where they will clean you, weigh you, etc.

And in those early weeks we will make sure you are fed and warm and clean and safe. You will feel your mother’s and my skin and know our smells. We will shower you with kisses and surround you with love. You will come to know your older sister, and she will become your lifelong ally. In short, you will join our family.

Until then, we await you expectantly.

Love,

Your Father,
Richard James Geib

ELIZABETH ANNE GEIB

Finally, I can call you by name! My second daughter, Elizabeth Anne Geib.

Oh, second child of mine! Three weeks until your mother and I can discover your sex.

You are now some three months old, and I for one am impatient to meet and start to get to know you. Your mother has had a different pregnancy than that of your older sister; hormonal surges, nausea followed by hunger and then nausea again – exultation and then crankiness. Whew! But now with your second trimester these discomforts have moderated and we look for calmer seas ahead. There will soon be the “quickening” stage, then viability, felt movement in the womb, and then childbirth. Time will move slowly until finally the last week pass quickly – your mother heavy, swollen, uncomfortable, and ready for it all to be over.

Yes, your parents have done this before; you will not be born to rank, rookie parents, as occurred with your big sister, Julia. We know a thing or two about parenting, and pain and effort have been the price of admittance. But every child is different and difficult, on one way or another, and we are sensitive to perceiving your unique needs and meeting them – but all that will come soon enough.

For now you have just been re-classified from “embryo” to “foetus.” This pregnancy I feel more or less confident in what to do when you are born and our family still possesses the detritus of infancy: bassinets, high chairs, breast pumps, one-sies, etc. So I have hardly opened that hoary classic, What To Expect When You Are Expecting.” (I poured over it the first time.) This pregnancy I have instead read consistently from “The Pregnancy Journal: A Day-to-Day Guide to a Healthy and Happy Pregnancy” by A. Christine Harris which explains on a daily and weekly basis what is happening physically to your body. For example, I read this entry today for your day 101 of pregnancy (165 to go!) that told us the following about you currently:

With the help of the placenta and the umbilical cord, your baby’s system is operating as it will after it’s born. The baby has its own circulation, pumped by the heart, which at this developmental stage pumps the equivalent of 25 quarts of blood (27.5 liters) a day. The placenta helps with protection, digestion, respiration, waste removal, and hormone production. Most bacteria are unable to pass through the placental membrane, but most drugs and medications cross the placenta freely.

I read this last thing in the evening and then let my imagination and subconscious digest the information as I sleep. Laying there late at night I talk to you through your mother’s abdomen: “Good night, little one – grow those little arm buds!” “We can’t wait to meet you!” In reality, parent and child do not start their relationship at birth when they see each other for the first time; rather, they start to get to know each other in a hundred different complicated ways in the months before labor commences.

You will no doubt notice this in the context of this letter, written to you by me on a vacation day – September 7, 2009 – Labor Day – when I find myself free from my students.

I will continue to give your mother loving hugs, rubbing her swelling belly, talking to you at night, reading up on your physical development, reminding Mommy to take her prenatal vitamins at bedtime.

I look forward enormously to that day in early 2010 when you will make your grand arrival. Mommy and I shall bring you forth from the labor and delivery room to present you to your grandparents, Liz, and to your big sister, Julia. It will be a moment of high drama!

And our family will be complete. We can then get onto the business of happily growing and maturing and loving and fighting which is the work of all families.

I cannot wait!

But I will wait, and I will wait patiently.

Love,
Richard James Geib

"Oh, second child of mine!"

11 weeks, Five Days

Dear Second-Born Child,

Hello! Welcome to the world!

We have not yet met, and, indeed, as I write this you are gestating in your mother’s womb: a quick online search describes you as the “size of a sesame seed” and “resembling more a tadpole than a baby.” (It also tells me next week you will start developing your heart and circulatory system! Hurrah!) But even though you are still in an incipient stage, your DNA is as complete as ever it will be: you are yourself, though less so than in the future. Your mother and I expectantly await you.

In fact, I have been thinking about you often over this past year or so. I was not thinking about some vague child to come – no, I was thinking about you specifically. You did not exist yet, but I could sense your presence – in my imagination, I could “feel” you in the same way I “feel” the presence of my mother, dead now 12 ½ years. My father claimed he “felt” the same way about me (his first-born) as he sat around the campfire at night in the jungles of Vietnam, and then I was conceived in August 1966 on almost the exact day he returned home from overseas to the embraces of his wife. “Dad, it was a happy homecoming, eh?” I joke with him. He smiles in the affirmative. And so some 8 months from, child of mine, you will emerge into our world in a hospital delivery room -- breathing oxygen into your lungs, objecting loudly to being manhandled, and greeting not only your parents but your big sister, Julia, for the first time. The time will pass quickly and (we hope) without problems.

I start to write to you on the Web for much the same reason as I did with your sister: as a gift to you in later life. Some fifteen years from now I will show you these words and deliver to you sovereignty of your Internet domain. In the way Jews have a Bar or Mat Mizhvah, the Mexicans give their daughters a Quinceañera celebration, or the Spartans sent their teenaged sons alone into the wilderness to kill a wolf, this will be a rite of initiation into “adulthood.” When you turn 15 or 16 I will give to you all the passwords, files, photos, videos that I have collected of you and you can manage them as you please – they will be yours, and you can create and manage your online persona. You will also be able to read many of the intimate thoughts and recollections of your father about your earliest days, and you will be mature enough to understand them. I have little idea how my parents felt when I was an infant or how they reacted at the time, and my father cannot discern much detail about events from forty years ago – and my mother took her experiences to the grave, leaving almost no written record. What I would not give to sit down and ask my mother what it was like to be a new mother with me in her arms! This will be different.

What you – and your sister – will have here are my recollections set down in writing about this intense, demanding, and absolutely critical time of our family life. The writing will be raw and real, and hopefully you will be able to gain a glimpse in the words here through my eyes of an era of your life you were too young to remember. As you get older and can remember more, I will write less and let you write more. Eventually, you will be able to do all I can do and then the job falls on you. The only way any of us can make much sense of our lives is through the hard, rewarding discipline of seeking to set down in words what has happened to us as cleanly and clearly as possible. You will notice this, this, and this I have up on the wall of my classroom, and this give you insight into your father and his value system – and into the larger family you are born into. In many critical ways I am not dissimilar to my father as blood calls out to blood, and you inherit so much in your DNA and family culture that will only become apparent with time and experience. As I am a “Geib,” for better or for worse, so you are. You shall see.

So, to start with, you were conceived on Sunday June 5th, 2009 with much love and passion. After two year’s negotiation, your mother and I decided it was time: she went off the birth control pill and you were created almost immediately – literally on the first try (the same as with your big sister!). Your mother and I knew she was pregnant well before the tests came back “positive.”

and we were elated, as were friends and family. Your birthday and your big sister’s birthday will come at the end of February and beginning of April, but the more important days I will remember will be the buoyant, blissful end of the school year in early June when you were both conceived. Summer is right around the corner, the work year is almost over, and everybody is happy. Every June should always be remembered this way.

You will be just a tad under three years younger than your big sister and that is exactly as we have tried to plan it: distant enough in age not to be too competitive, yet close enough to be in same stage of life. We did not want Julia to be in high school with you in elementary, but we also did not want you competing in the same academic classes and sports teams. We wanted three years difference. And it would appear we have it. Almost exactly.

I have – and have had – this vision of our family in five years: two children nicely clothed, carefully groomed, and (relatively) well-behaved sitting at a table in a restaurant for Sunday brunch. All is in order. The scene is harmonious. Everyone is loved, valued, and secure in that knowledge. We are well on our way to realizing that vision, my second child! You will almost surely be our last child. I shall have two children, and those two will have my very best efforts to get the best possible start in life – and I shall do everything in my power to make it so. Then in later you and your sister shall be allies in life and a support to each other as your mother and I fade. As I explained over and over to your mother (who was an only child), “Let’s give Julia the gift of a sibling!” And so we are.

It is ironic that I can feel your presence so manifestly but don’t yet know your sex and hence cannot call you by name. Much talk has revolved around whether you will be a girl or a boy, and although that has already been determined we will have to wait two more months to find out. Frankly, I would prefer to go the old-fashioned route and not know until you are born. But your mother wants to know and she gets the final say, as she is carrying you under her heart. So in a few months I will stand next to your mother, hold her hand, and look into her eyes before we both look at the ultrasound monitor and look for telltale signs of your sex through the ghostly gray imagery. Many have opined that, since you already have an older sister, a boy would be ideal in this pregnancy. My first overwhelming hope is for a healthy child – male or female. A healthy child! Especially since so much is beyond our control, we are sensitive to your healthy and successful gestation over the next eight months. We hope to greet a healthy child when it comes time for delivery in late February 2009 – all else is of secondary concern.

That being said, we hope for a boy. In such a case, we shall name you “Richard David Geib.” You will be the third in a line of “Richards” without adding that burdensome, pretentious appellation of “Jr.” There was Richard John and then Richard James and now Richard David. You will be like father, grandfather – but your own self. You will shame most our name but will always be your own “Richard.” Your grandfather Geib takes much note of this possibility. Your mother asked me to call your grandfather when she found out she was pregnant and to tell him the good news. He hopes for a boy (a “Richard,” in particular.

But if you turn out to be female, I will only be the slightest bit disappointed. One has so little control of such things, and I am honored and privileged to have the luck to become a parent again and be the best father I can be – the sex of the child is of relatively little concern in this context.

Even in early pregnancy, I have placed my head to your mother’s belly and spoken to you. I offered you a hearty “welcome” when we found out about you, and a “good night” before we slept each night. (Your big sister has often joined us in talking to you by placing her mouth to mommy’s stomach and speaking.) I will continue to talk with you all throughout pregnancy as I did with your sister. Also, I will have the same week-by-week pregnancy calendar and study the development of organs, start of a heart-beat, “quickening”, viability, etc. as you undergo them. I will write to you and develop your Internet presence, as I did with your sister. Partly I will do this to keep relatives in the loop of photos and news, but mostly I will write, photograph, and shoot video for you. From where do I come? How did I get here? What happened? What did people think and feel at the time? All these important questions will have partial answers in this historical record.

After I told him of my online plans with Julia my good friend Francisco told me I would never find the time to complete such an ambitious task. The seemingly unending demands of parenthood would overtake and consume me, he warned. I have proved him wrong. A huge fear of mine is that I would devote more time and energy to a firstborn than to later children. I recently read this quote by Ayelet Waldman from her book, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace:

I produced six complete, beautifully organized photo albums of Sophie’s first year, the kind with the individual photo corners and the tissue-paper dividers. Stored on my computer are hundreds of files of digital images of her every smile, step, and bowel movement. Hanging on our walls are not one but two series of framed black and whites taken by professional photographers whose services cost more than my first car. I have a plastic storage bin full of videotapes with hour upon hour of Sophie playing with her toes or spinning the beads on her ExerSaucer or sleeping. We videotaped her sleeping, because, my God, no baby has ever looked so beautiful when she slept.

There are exactly twelve decent photographs of Abe’s first year (and a bunch of digital images I will someday get around to downloading). The twelve photographs were taken only because we started this thing when Sophie was a baby of taking a picture every month with a sign that said, “1 month,” “2 months,” and so on and then at the end of the year framing all twelve of them together and hanging the poster-sized picture on the wall. We did it joyfully with Sophie, absentmindedly with Zeke, grudgingly with Rosie, and finally with Abe, only because not doing it would have given him too much to talk about in therapy.

My hope is to have two children and to give them equal parts love and attention. No favoritism. No having so many kids I don’t have the time to give them the best fathering I can. Two kids -- and do that well. That is “doable.” As I concluded when Julia was in her mother’s womb, “There are no second chances, there is only failed parenting.”

Two healthy kids conceived easily and born healthy into the world – I would pretty much consider life and myself even at that point. I would not ask much more from it.

So I will keep my finger’s crossed.

And I will see you in late February!

As with your big sister, mine will be just about the first face you see. God willing, I will hold you up and welcome you to the world and cut your umbilical chord! So much wanted by your parents, we will accept you with the utmost care and thanks into our loving family.

Until Then,
Your Loving Father,

Richard James

THE BIG NEWS!

Maria and I are pregnant!

When digital technology in the form of CD ripping and file sharing ravaged the music industry, I did not mourn. I would see all my high school students take their music collection out of their backpacks and all the CDs were copied, and I would just cheer inwardly. “Yeah, America! Pirate away!” When album sales plunged and the record companies lost billions, I applauded. “Couldn’t happen to nicer people!” I thought to myself. I had always figured there was a level of hell reserved for greedy, exploitative music executives.

A few years later it happened to the movie business. High quality flat screen TVs and surround sound home theater systems coupled with DVD rentals inaugurated a new era in entertainment viewing. Why go to a crowded theater and sit near loud obnoxious teenagers with nothing better to do on Friday night than go to the movies just to be with their friends to escape the ‘rents? Why not stay home and enjoy a quality movie experience in the privacy of your house? Why not avoid getting ripped off at the concession stand for popcorn and a drink and make your own at home almost for free? Once you have invested in a home theater for your living room, all you have to do is rent the DVD -- it will only set you back a couple of dollars. In contrast, nobody goes to the movie theater with their family without dropping at least 30-40 bucks. I think I have seen maybe three movies in the theaters in the past two years.

Is anyone surprised that movie ticket sales are way down?

And I could care less if the movie studios and entertainment industry lose money. (In fact, I hope they lose money.) I look at 90% of the movies released on any given Friday and can hardly take them seriously. Americans used to go to the circus to see the bearded woman and be amazed and stupefied. Now we have the blockbuster movie release. Will we really be worse off if it goes the way of the messenger pigeon and dinosaur?

But a similar change has arrived to journalism and it hits much closer to home. For years I have been reading how newspaper circulation has declined precipitously and newsrooms have shrunk as reporters have been laid off. Print media has struggled to compete with online information sources, and young people supposedly just don’t read the newspaper anymore; advertisers have taken their business elsewhere, and media organizations large and small have struggled to remain profitable. The financial resources seem just not to be available to media organizations like in the past. The inability of journalists to cover thoroughly politics and current trends because of budget cuts and dwindling resources is dangerous for a free society, and I worried about changes in journalism without directly seeing or feeling them.

But that changed last month. The Ventura County Star shrunk their paper, combining business and technology news on Monday and thereby producing less inches of print every week; they save much money by reducing their paper outlay. And then the Los Angeles Times got rid of the Book Review and Opinion section, simply assigning them in reduced form to other sections of the paper. Consequently, there is simply less “there” there in these newspapers. But if they might be shrunken newspapers the owners have not correspondingly shrunken their prices: the newspaper subscriber gets less for the same price. The newspaper owners would probably respond that they are just trying to stay in business at all.

Frankly, I no longer see the LA Times as the world-class newspaper it had been all my life. Thankfully, the New York Times, to which I also subscribe, has not shrunk its paper. It still has full-blown Book Review and Op-Ed sections, and to read it cover to cover on Sunday occupies two blissful hours. The NYT has so far not succumbed to the USA Today shorthand version of newspapers that seems to be the trend. (“Read it all in your car while stopped at a red light on your way to work in the morning!”) But the NYT is hemorrhaging money, too. How long until the famous "Gray Lady" of American journalism also begins to shrink? How long until the NYT becomes a pale shade of what it once was?

Change is often threatening and always hard. If the fall of once mighty and capable news reporting means something important and valuable is lost, what of value might arise in its place?

JOURNALISM IN CRISIS

This crisis in print journalism has hit home in a way that the entertainment industy did not.

I read an article in the newspaper this morning about "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep", an organization that helps parents to grieve the deaths of their infants by taking high-quality photographs of them. The article and photographs left me in tears in the booth of the restaurant where I habitually sprawl out and read my three Sunday newspapers.

It has been like this for some time, and I don’t completely understand it. Whenever I read about a stillborn child or see a couple pushing a Down’s Syndrome baby in a stroller, my eyes threaten to well up and I am almost speechless. Perhaps as a father I am more sensitive to this, but it is more than that, I think. Maybe it has do with a scare I once had that shook me to the core. But I see such misfortunes and my heart sinks to my feet. I could not feel more vulnerable.

What matter riches and fame and “success” as it is conventionally known in the face of the death of one's child? Especially one's baby?

If I might have the good fortune to have one more healthy child, then I would ask nothing more from life. I wouldn’t care if it were a boy or a girl, or if it were fussy or “difficult” baby (as has been my firstborn daughter), as long as it were healthy. I listen to parents complain about the stress of parenting and say to them – as I say it to myself – the following: “If you want to see real stress, imagine yourself with a baby that has leukemia! Now that is stress!” It keep developments in perspective.

If my wife and I might conceive and bring into the world one more child, and that his child be born healthy, and perhaps that I could live at least ten years more to give him a good start – then I would consider life and I square in our accounts.

It is all I would ask. All else is secondary.

THE CHILD IS HEALTHY; A FATHER SO THANKFUL

Baby number one born full of vigor and in good health!

The first Star Wars films were iconic, meaningful presences in my childhood. The sage of the Skywalker family, the Empire, the Rebellion, and the Jedi captivated my pre-teen imagination. Star Wars, the first of these films, opened in theaters in 1977. I was 10 years old.

Some twenty years later the second slew of Star Wars movies were released, and I hoped to enjoy them as much. But I was a different person by then. In fact, I was 32 years old when “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace” appeared in 1999 and I hoped that the movies would have grown up with me. On this count, I was sorely disappointed. Lucas made cheesey movies designed for 13-year old boys. But I was no longer 13 and looked for more mature fare. I looked in vain. Seeing these new movies made me understand why my father never had any time for the original Star Wars movies in the late 1970s.

But I have found that which Star Wars should have been, and it is in a TV series called “Battlestar Galactica.” The name itself sounds silly and it strains credulity to say the title out loud in the same sentence as “great art” – it sounds like more B-movie Science Fiction. But in its best moments, and there are many, BSG is great art. It is set in space in some other universe but is firmly seated in our human experience in dealing with ultimate themes of good and evil, humans trying to govern themselves, loyalty and betrayal, love and hate. I generally ignore TV and have watched very little of it in the last twenty years. But I heard so much good word-of-mouth reviews of BSG that I decided to get the opening miniseries on Netflix and try it. I was transfixed. I watched all four seasons in the next three months. Not all segments are of the same quality, but I was mesmerized in front of the screen as I had not been in years (decades?).

George Lucas is lionized as a master filmmaker who delves into archetype and myth. Because of Star Wars he is richer than Croesus. But he is a mediocre filmmaker stuck in creating films for adolescent boys. The reality is that Ronald D. Moore, creator of the BSG series, is the real thing. That he makes great art that takes place mostly in space in another universe but holds up a mirror to our experience. Great art tells lies to get at greater truths, and Commander Odama’s and President Roslin’s flight through space “in a universe far, far away” teaches us humans much about ourselves. It is Star Wars all grown up.

The best literature has always asked, “What does it mean to be human?” BSG brings up for our inspection the “foul rag and bone shop of the [human] heart” that is our goodness and our evil, our nobility and baseness – we human beings – we messy, contradictory creatures who will walk our moment on the stage and then disappear –

“What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!”

THEM HOLDING UP A MIRROR FOR US TO SEE OURSELVES

Battlestar Galactica saga: great art on TV (of all places!)

It grieves me to my core to hear my daughter cry.

I look at her tears and hear her plaintive sobs as she struggles to catch her breath amidst waves of wails, and it wrenches my very soul - I can describe it in no lesser terms. I would do almost anything to sooth her - to ease her anxiety and to take away the pain.

It seems I can do little, if anything. Standing there helplessly I want to cry with her but don't. Her late night crying fits leave my nerves raw and exposed. The worst is that, despite my desire to be a good father, I feel so helpless in the face of this crying.

I can hear the advice of family and friends: "Rich, babies cry - that's what they do! Don't take it personally! And if you come to them whenever they cry, they never will learn to self-sooth and go to sleep by themselves. Let Julia cry it out; she will fall asleep eventually. It hurts her less to cry than it does for you to hear it. She will be fine! And she will grow out of this!"? So they tell me.

Maybe all this is true. But I cannot do it.

I tried to prepare myself for fatherhood in the way which has worked for me in other endeavors: I read a whole slew of books on the subject. But to my consternation the "experts" often contradicted themselves in offering advice. "The Happiest Baby on the Block" offered a special trick on how to sooth a baby's cries, and Dr. Sears advises to go to your baby whenever it cries at night for whatever reason in the name of "attachment parenting." On the other hand, "Babywise" by Gary Ezzo advises that babies learn to "cry it out," similar to the "Ferber process" where children learn progressively to fall asleep without parental help. Not only did I read these books but I went online and read various critics and supporters of these approaches explain their case, and then I read the bulletin boards and blogs where parents shared their own experiences. If my students ever needed a real life example of where learning how to read closely and evaluate and filter information and arguments, this was it. By the time I was done, my head hurt. It was crystal clear to me that how one raises a child is grounded in complex and fundamental ideas about authority, independence and what should be the ideal child-parent bond. The "baby experts" were as divided as the rest of us on that.

It was enough to give me a splitting headache. The books have been almost no help at all, frankly. "Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children, and no theories," claimed John Wilmot. Maybe the books gave a certain theoretical underpinning to parenthood, but real life is a hard teacher and a child is too complicated and changeable a creature to apply some sort of equation to. The only sure thing I read in these books is that some babies are more difficult than others, and that huge variations in baby behavior are all pretty normal. "Thanks for the help, Doc!"

Like many American on most subjects, I tried to tread a middle ground. I sought to split the difference between the "crying it out" of Dr. Ferber and the "always soothe your child" of Dr. Sears. As a young infant, Julia got constant care and attention to her crying. As she matured, we tried to help her become more independent and self-sooth when she wakes up at night.

And it has not been without success. Weeks will go by when Julia sleeps long in mostly uneventful nights; and truth be told, Julia has as many hours of smiling and laughing as sobbing and screaming. Nothing makes my heart sing more than to hear my daughter giggle or laugh, as she does often. But then, like an angry storm descending suddenly from the skies, there arrives nights saturated with tears with Julia's bedroom walls resounding with screaming and sobbing and more sobbing. I begin to dread the evenings and bedtime.

We try to let Julia get it out of her system and then fall asleep by herself. The textbook advice is this:

"Let the child cry for 5 minutes (or 1, or 3, if you prefer); go in, comfort the child in the crib (without removing them from the bed), and leave; wait twice as long, and do it again; wait twice as long, and do it again; and continue thus many times as needed."

A half hour of Julia sobbing bitterly while standing in her crib, stomping her feet on the mattress and waiting for daddy to come, seems like an hour or more. From the darkness of her room Julia now calls me by name, "Dadda! Dadda! Dadda!" It is as if she is asking me to rescue her from some imminent danger, and every instinct tells me to go to her aid. As I read one parent write:

"Doesn't it just seem like children should sleep with their parents? There are always so many posts about children wanting to sleep with their parents that it just seems obvious to me that that is a natural inclination. Our children slept with us until they felt ready to sleep alone and I think it's only natural and that parents should allow this to happen. Other mammals stay with their young at night. Why don't we?"

Does this not make sense? But I can hear a voice reminding me, "If you ignore the screaming, it will stop. She screams because she knows it will get her what she wants -- you! She needs to learn that screaming gets her nowhere. She needs her sleep and you need yours. Close Julia's door and open it only the next morning." The problem is that my intense, stubborn daughter will scream for an hour or more in the darkness vehemently, and I picture my little one so upset in the darkness and I wrench my hands and gnash my teeth. "If you go to her, she will continue to scream; she will learn it works." I compromise. Every fifteen minutes or so I go in and kiss and soothe her without taking her out of the crib or turning on the light.

"This crying hurts you more than it does her!" But how do we know that? What is it like as a toddler to sob for your parents in the dark for an hour straight? Sometimes I try to console myself by thinking maybe this is how babies shake off excess energy and re-set their temperaments at an even keel - they sob and sob and then sleep soundly and wake up refreshed. Julia never seems the worse for wear or hold a grudge the next morning after a night of crying; in fact, she seems the same as ever. Maybe child crying is fundamentally different than adult crying. But I saw a lonely toddler last week, crying in the corner by himself, and I could not stop the note of pathos from piercing my heart.

I have read many of the books by experts, talked to dozens of friends and family, and pored over hundreds of testimonies by other parents and yet I feel as if I know no more than when I started. One can never know exactly what to do. I want to reach for my revolver whenever someone asks me, "Have you read this or that book?" "Have you tried this?" "Have you tried that?" Yes, I did all of those things! But in the sliding kaleidoscope of Julia's behavior now and as she matures there is nothing clear-cut - nothing that is always true or untrue. Babies and toddlers are most unpredictable, or at least such is Julia. This much experience has taught me: Just when you think you have a behavior figured out, the kid will humble you and show you that you don't.

Can I ever know my daughter and understand why she acts like she does? How about when she is five or fifteen years old? Will she even understand herself, half the time? Will she blunder forward in the semi-darkness, like the rest of us? Will it be thus even in adult life? How much does any of us know about ourselves? How much can any of us know about one another?

Julia is just beginning to grapple with the challenges life presents. I am just learning to be a father.

Maybe I am learning that being a father to a daughter is less about daddy "fixing a problem" and more about "being present" to her feelings and trying to see the world through her eyes.

Maybe the best fathering is to set limits and enforce rules. Maybe it is to love your daughter and foster her talents and give advice and listen well. Maybe it is simply to go next to her crib in the darkness and cry along with her.

I do know this: after one solid hour of letting Julia "cry it out" and go to sleep on her own, I opened her door and went to her. I picked Julia up, kissed her tears, and sat down with her in the rocking chair nearby. Exhausted, she immediately stopped crying, stretched out on my chest, put her head on my shoulder, and went to sleep. It was done within thirty seconds. It was as if all she needed to fall asleep was for me to hold her. "She was missing us!" my wife exclaimed. With Julia sleeping soundly on my chest, I berated myself bitterly for not having done this earlier.

Fifty years ago Dr. Spock wrote the following to parents: "Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do." He was warning against relying too much on "expert advice" from outsiders.

Fair enough.

But you can never know. Not for sure - one gropes in the darkness and does as best one can - this incredibly humbling job of "parent."

DAUGHTER JULIA

"Can I ever know my daughter and understand why she acts like she does?"

The first week of this year 2008 I gnashed my teeth at trying to take care of a child with pneumonia at the same time as write no less than 20 college letters of recommendation. What an ugly blur of a week that was! I felt I had to choose between taking care of my sick daughter struggling to breathe clearly and taking care of my students and their college needs (taking care of myself was not on the agenda). It was dark and rainy; I didn’t sleep much; all I felt was pressure and stress. It was much more “crisis control” than considered action.

It seemed dark all the time, and that particular week passed in an anguished blur. The rest of the winter passed much the same.

But spring is upon us and last Sunday we all set our clocks one hour ahead. The bad? Waking up bleary in the dark at 6:00 a.m. and stumbling to the shower? The good? Leaving work, reading the newspaper, and still getting home in time for a bike ride before the sun goes down. I did just that yesterday, and it felt wonderful – as if the claustrophobic, horrible winter is waning with the summer lying carefree and happy in front of me. The sun is shining again and we can exit the “cabin fever” of winter.

We can go outdoors again.

As a teacher I enjoy/suffer the “all or nothing” academic lifestyle where I hardly have one moment to spare for a few months, and then I have the entire summer off. I am overwhelmed and stressed to the point of dysfunction, and then I have nothing to do for longer than I need. This winter was a blur of sickness, stress, and nonstop work. This Farch snapshot captures it succinctly:

Click to enlarge picture

Overwhelmed by work and family obligations, I got on my bike a total of two times in the past three months. I did not take care of my health; in fact, I hardly thought about my health or a healthy lifestyle at all. The results were predictable.

Nevertheless, last Saturday I rode a 50 mile bike race in a tad over three hours – not bad, considering my lack of training and that I still suffered a touch of a sinus infection and blew my nose constantly during the race. I did not feel strong in the least, but I consoled myself with the following: “You have to get back in the saddle, and now is as good a time as any.” Next week and the week after that the bike rides will come easier, as my legs and heart adapt to new demands and I get back in shape. I begin to see the outlines of the upcoming summer.

With my students I refer to the February and March of the academic year as “Farch”: it is the time of the year when everyone is exhausted and tempers grow short. If anything unfortunate were to take place, it will take place in Farch. Year after year I get no better at being less exhausted during Farch, but I know better how to adapt and endure. (Not that it is easy…). But the world looks like a different place the other side of Spring Break, and then the stress does not really build again until October. As I prepare to enjoy my spring and summer and to recover physically and emotionally from twelve hard months.

I even bought a new road bike for my wife, helping her to emerge from intense, almost constant motherhood back into the realm of looking out for one’s own health, as well as that of baby. In a perhaps tiny but important adjustment, we can get a bit of our own lives back. As all the veteran nurses in the delivery room claimed: “Healthy and happy mother equals healthy, happy baby.”

Julia at one year of age

One final note: this Friday marks one year that we have been parents! And in my four long weeks of recent sickness – in rolling in bed with feverish dreams, among other flu and cold symptoms – I came to the conclusion that I need to relax and take it easier as a parent. A person can operate on adrenaline for three months with no problems, but after eight or nine months the body will break down: and such was my case, I am convinced. My conclusion: being a parent of an infant is hard enough, so why add to the hard work by stressing over that which cannot be controlled? Roll with the punches; don’t lean into and fight them. Live in harmony with the rhythm of events, and don’t gnash your teeth and wring your hands. Have faith.

This in no way means I will be less attentive as a parent. The responsibility for a baby is on myself and my wife, and that responsibility does not go away. Nonetheless, I will take it easier from now on and trust in the process – having faith. As a parent, my feet are firmly on the ground now. I move forward confidently, not fretfully. I can exit “crisis mode” and become again the person I have always been. I can “come up for air” and reconnect with friends I have not seen since baby arrived. It is time.

Is this why they so often say “the first child is the hardest”? Is this what it means to be a “veteran parent”? Do I have my “sea legs” underneath me?

I almost think it not hyperbole to say that surviving the pregnancy and “break-in” period as a new parent one of the larger challenges in life. The enormous responsibility, the lack of sleep, the disruption in family life – it has taken, and will continue to take, a good chunk of my life’s energy, and I will never be the same (nor will my wife).

But still parenthood is not the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. That honor belongs to being an inner-city schoolteacher – the most depressing, difficult, and dispiriting thing I have ever done. It is one thing to pour one's soul into a project where success and growth take place. It is another to put your all into something where failure and frustration are the overwhelming result -- where it seems as if you are part of a train wreck in progress, and there is nothing you can do to stop the disaster taking place right in front of you in slow motion.

At any rate, the sun is shining here in California and the good times they lie just ahead. I intend to heal myself physically and emotionally over the next few months.

Let it begin!

Maria and her new road bike.