When All Else Fails...Snark

I am a professional writer.  Well, let me amend that.  I write all the time.  In my job. School reports.  Recommendations for students.  School publications.  And for fun. Poetry. (see:www.1daypoems.blogspot.com)  This blog.  Most recently, work on a short story based at a bar called "County Line."  I have also taught English for nearly twenty years - high school and middle school. Over the past few years, I have attended the Iowa Summer Writers' Festival.  I teach creative writing and advanced creative writing.  I briefly joined a short-lived Augusta writers' group. I've read my work publicly in Iowa and Georgia. I've been around the block, using writing for various purposes: on the job, in service of others, for personal enjoyments, as gifts, and for publication.

In all of these settings, I have found those who read or heard my work generous and thoughtful.  My work is certainly not perfect, but I am doing the work.  In talking with others who write professionally and personally, I have found that the vast majority of them are encouraging and interested.  Then, I found the group.  You may recall the old saying: "There's one in every crowd."  Well, this is a crowd of them.

I joined a group on Face Book which purports to support writers in a particular endeavor. Imagine my surprise when I came to realize that the group has deteriorated into a group designed to sap the confidence out of its members. Judging from the posts in this group, the idea is to snark at and belittle the other group members because we all know that if you denigrate others then you automatically become more valuable.  And, you will be more successful if others are less successful, right? Of course not. That’s silly, to say the least. However, that’s how these individuals are conducting themselves. There were several moderators of the group who were conspicuously quiet.

"If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." I don't know that this applies in every circumstance.  Sometimes encouragement can take the form of something being said that isn't very nice.  I used to have a sign that read "Diplomacy is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that he actually looks forward to the trip." Even in the high school classroom when a student was curiously off-topic or misunderstanding a text, I would say, “Well, that’s one interpretation,” and then ask the student to support or elucidate his idea. Most often, he came to his own conclusions, “What I said earlier was kind of off-base, wasn’t it?” 

I attended a summer writing workshop where the instructor told us that really the only rule in the session was that you cannot be negative about your work, and if you are thusly tempted, you are to say, “This smacks of brilliance.”  Likewise, at the start of my creative writing course every year, I find a time to give a little talk to my writers about the fact that the world is more than willing to judge and berate them, they don’t need to do it to themselves.  High schoolers being high schoolers, are apt to run themselves down as a protective measure.  For example, “if I note that this poem is weird then it will hurt less than if someone else says it’s weird because I know that it’s not really weird and it’s really about my grandma but I can’t let anyone know that.”  But, if I can get them to be kind to themselves about their own work, we are one step closer to being happier and more thoughtful people.  Plus, if you act like you know what you’re doing, you will find that you often do; you were just letting your inner critic run you down.

In addition to those pesky inner critics, we can stumble and fall on those outer critics as well.  We all know them – the ones who stop mid-sentence the minute you walk into a room.  Or, as a friend recounted earlier this week, “I returned to the table, and I overheard [my mother-in-law] say, ‘She just smothers me.’”  Never mind that my friend was there caring for mother-in-law after a surgery.  There’s one in every crowd.  In teaching there’s a joke that we tell each other when nothing seems to go right in the classroom: 

You know what the headline would be if teachers could walk on water? 

No. What?

Teachers refuse to swim.

So, for today, whatever it is that you are doing – writing, swimming, teaching, gardening, cooking, leading a book club, managing a multi-billion dollar deal, organizing a shoe drive for the homeless, do it well and enjoy it. And, don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.  Don’t let the bastards (or your Face Book groups) get you down.

Apache

"It is essentially a flying tank -- 

a helicopter designed to survive heavy attack 

and inflict massive damage.

 It can zero in on specific targets, day or night, even in terrible weather."

I am evidently stupid.  Or so suggests my 12 year-old.  No, the boy doesn’t say it in so many words, but telling me his homework is done when it isn’t does seem to suggest a certain lack of confidence in my ability to check his homework.  He told me his planner was stolen.  He told me he lost his vocabulary book.  He told me he hates English.   Now, these are all things that any rational semi-involved parent would instruct the child to sort out or report or get over. 

The thing is – this is a killer – I work at my kids’ school.  A short walk across the carpool lane will reveal to me a planner in the bottom of a locker that was “clean yesterday,” a vocabulary book under said planner, and an English teacher who – brace yourselves – wants the child to do his homework and then – gasp – bring it to class.  Yes, this child needs to sort things out, but the thing that kills him is that I know what’s happening.  I’m there.

I have worked at my children’s school since the year after we moved south.  Let’s just say that the public education system in our fair state is not up to snuff.  Being in education in the independent school setting has some advantages.  However, helicoptering has never been one of them. Although I have worked at the school my children attend for the past 13 years, I have gone to parent-teacher conferences only when required by the teacher.  I have looked in my older two sons’ lockers a total of maybe three times, and only then when bidden to do so by them.  I went to high school back to school night because I had to: I'm on faculty.  I haven’t checked up on the older two at all.  They have done their work, requested supplies when needed, and gone about their merry way.  My mantra has always been, “I’ve already been in (fill in the child’s current grade), and I don’t want to do it again.”  I’m willing to admit that they probably missed some homework and fell down here and there.  But, overall, they did pretty well left to (mostly) their own devices.

My youngest child is going to be the death of me.  And him.

He inspires helicoptering.  And I hate it.  I love him.  I hate what is happening.  He is near failing nearly every aspect of fifth grade: getting homework done, keeping track of homework, bringing home PE clothes to be laundered – you name it, and he’s struggling.  Or he wants me to think he is.  Before anyone pulls out the oh-but-he’s-in-his-last-year-of-elementary-school pity, let me tell you that fifth grade is middle school for us.

This is the downside of having a parent-teacher: I’m always on the teacher’s side.  Work detail for missed homework?  Dandy.  Lonely lunch for missed work detail?  Sure.  Need him to come in after school for extra help?  No problem.  Before school for organization counseling?  He’ll be there.

I will always side with the teacher.

I will always support my son.

These two things are not mutually exclusive.

So, dearest, youngest child please understand that I didn’t helicopter-parent either of your brothers, and if you insist on driving me to it this year, I’m going to be an Apache helicopter.  With one target.  You.  

Arts and Crafts: Or, Why Not to Go Greek

         People who know me now are infinitely surprised to learn that I was in a sorority in college.  Furthermore, when I go on to tell them that indeed, I was not only in a sorority, but was also pledge class president, scholarship chairman, ritual chairman, and chapter president, they nearly fall over in a faint.  Obviously, I do not have sororitiness to my present demeanor.  In fact, whenever an about-to-go-to-college-and-I’m-a-little-intimidated-about-leaving-home-and-high school friends-age person asks me for my thoughts on or recommendation for the Greek system, I have to say I discourage it with all my being.  However, it was an odd requirement of being in a Greek chapter that led to my actually being able to teach my mother something.

            In our sorority, we had family systems, as I suspect many sororities used to, and perhaps still do.  As a new pledge, you got a pledge mom.  Ostensibly, this person would show you the ropes, much like a professional mentor in the workplace.  Upon being initiated, which was after a semester of pledgedom, your mom had cross-stitched you a pledge pillow.  A remembrance, of sorts, of your childhood within the bonds of sisterhood.  After receiving your pledge pillow and full membership status, you were expected to adopt a child immediately or at the next rush, whichever came first.  I did, in fact, get a pledge daughter from the next fall rush and commenced to helping her navigate the intricacies of sorority life: 

            “Yeah, the party is Friday from 8-11.”

            “Umm, the kitchen quits serving breakfast before 2 pm.”

            In addition to such overwhelming complexities of living in a sorority, I had to figure out what cross-stitching was and find a way to make a pillow from it.  Now, one might think that someone who had taken some amount of Girl Scouts and 4-H in her earlier life, as well as having a mother who sewed and mended probably everything I wore in childhood, and who owned – well, I’m not sure, but more than three sewing machines – would have some kind of aptitude for such a mundane task as creating a token of sorority life.  Well, cross-stitching , it turned out, is not complex needlework.  Putting the pillow together properly, turning it inside out, stuffing it, and sewing the suture firmly shut actually required a PhD in civil engineering.  Nevertheless, Lisa received her pillow in due course.  I have the sense that it wasn’t until the following school year that she got it, but I can’t be sure.  I mean, between the parties, chapter meetings, schoolwork, and parties, who has time to sew?  Once I got it down, though, I realized there was potential here. 

            I stitched something for my mom for some holiday – I don’t know what it was or what holiday it commemorated.  I do know that she loved it.  (Since becoming a mother myself, I happen to know that loving any handmade craft from your child is part and parcel of the mom contract one signs upon giving birth – page three, paragraph 8.  “Mommy, I made this out of mud, dog poo, and grass – it’s sculpture of you!!”  “I love it!  I’m putting it on the kitchen window sill right next to the painted rock and remains of last year’s dandelion bouquet!”)   That I had discovered a craft that was beautiful, well, at least attractive, probably stunned my own mother.  I had never exhibited even the slightest artistic ability.  Well, I had taken ballet and performed adequately enough to garner an occasional solo at a showcase or two – but really, art and I are oil and watercolor.             

            Not long after this initial gifting, Mom asked me to show her how it was done.  Now, anyone who knows anything about crafting knows that basic cross-stitch can be done quite successfully by blind monkeys.  And, just now, I have realized that I am sure that my mother - who graduated high school at the age of 16 and went on to college, a teaching job and raising three daughters (the list could go on for pages) -  did not need my instruction in order to figure out how to cross-stitch.  Nevertheless, I showed my mom how it was done and – for the sake of my dignity -  I am going to maintain that I taught my mom how to cross-stitch. 

            I went on to make one more pledge daughter pillow, employing the help of a few engineering majors when it came to stuffing the cursed thing.  Mom, however, has gone on to create literal works of art with cross-stitch.  All seven of her grandchildren have an intricately woven framed picture commemorating the day of their birth.  I would venture to guess that anyone who knows my mother or whose mother or grandmother knows my mother has one of her works of art somewhere in their home.  I know I have at least ten of mom’s needle-art in my home. 

            So, it is with some pride that I take partial credit for the hundreds of pieces of art that my mom has created, as a result of my teaching Mom to cross-stitch.  And, if that’s too much of stretch for you, well, just remember – you can learn cross-stitch without joining the Greek system.  Just come see me.