Priscilla Gilman

Last year, I wrote a rhapsodic review in the New York Times Book Review of the first novel in a new children’s book series by Caroline Lawrence, author of the best-selling Roman Mysteries series. Here’s my NYT review of THE TALE OF THE DEADLY DESPERADOS:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/books/review/the-case-of-the-deadly-desperados-by-caroline-lawrence.html?_r=0

The second book in the Western Mysteries series, P. K. PINKERTON AND THE PETRIFIED MAN, has just been published in the US, and my boys and I love it as much as the first one. Caroline and I recently connected via Twitter, she read my memoir, The Anti-Romantic Child, and we decided to do a mutual interview about autism and our respective books.

PRISCILLA INTERVIEWS CAROLINE

PG: What inspired you to create a children’s book series with an autistic protagonist?

CL: Even as a child I felt slightly apart from other children. It helped me to think of myself as an “observer”, watching people’s behavior. For this reason I was – and am – passionate about stories, because they help me figure out the world. When I started teaching art and Latin at my son’s primary school, I became obsessed with the mechanics of learning, especially memory techniques involving the left vs. right brain. Later, I tutored a brilliant but non-verbal autistic boy for a few months. I became captivated by the idea that he might have an incredibly rich interior world.

I love detective stories. I also love misfits (like me) who are skilled in one way but handicapped in another. So I thought I would give my young Western detective aspects of Asperger’s.

PG: What do you hope the series can accomplish as far as educating people about autism?

CL: I don’t really expect to educate people about autism as much as give hope to kids who think of themselves as “misfits”. They didn’t have the words “autism” or “Asperger’s” in the 1860s, when my books are set, and this is good, because I don’t necessarily want to saddle Pinky with a label.

PG: What kind of research did you do in order to develop the character of Pinky? Did you read books, speak to autistic people, therapists, etc?

CL: I’ve been reading books by Oliver Sacks and Temple Grandin for over two decades, so apart from a few new books like Born on a Blue Day and films like Adam (2009) and The Horse Boy (2009), I didn’t do much new research. Essentially, I just took my own foibles and “turned up the volume to eleven”. Then I added a few savant characteristics like skill in mathematics and a photographic memory. My hero also suffers from Post Traumatic Stress, prosopagnosia and gender confusion. So the mix is quite complicated. Essentially, P.K. “Pinky” Pinkerton is a misfit who learns he has a very necessary place in the world. But he has to figure out where it is, and with whom!

PG: What were some of the literary and cinematic influences on the Western Mysteries?

After Nancy Drew, Sherlock Holmes and the historical novels of Mary Renault, my main literary influence on these books is Charles Portis’ masterpiece True Grit. I also adore Western movies like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Eagle’s Wing (1979), The Tin Star (1957) and Little Big Man (1970). Another motive for me writing in this period was to explore the sublime tragedy that was the American Civil War.

PG: What do you make of my 10 year old action-loving son James’ review of your books? (He spontaneously dictated to me tonight.)

The Western Mysteries featuring P.K. Pinkerton is a funny, exciting, and enjoyable series. PK Pinkerton is a boy detective who has what we would today call autism. Because of that, he has strengths in some categories and weaknesses in others. Some of his weaknesses are: he’s not very good at reading people, he’s not very good at detecting whether people are lying, and he’s not good at lying himself. But his strengths are: he has a very watchful eye, he pays attention to the details, he has an excellent memory, and he is able to determine from a large list of suspects which one is the actual criminal.

I highly recommend the series because the books teach you about reading people, detective skills, autism, and the Wild West. Finally, the books are valuable to me because my brother, Benji, is autistic like Pinky, and like Pinky he doesn’t like surprises or being touched but he has a great memory and a good eye for detail. I understand my brother better and appreciate his strengths more after reading these books.

James P., Age 10

CL: I love it! I am especially thrilled that my books help James understand his brother Benj a little better.

CAROLINE INTERVIEWS PRISCILLA

CL: How do you hope your book The Anti-Romantic Child helps readers understand and care for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder?

PG: I hope that my book will help readers appreciate both the marvelous strengths of the autistic mind and the profound individuality of children on the autism spectrum. I hope that my portrait of ardent, imaginative, tender little Benj explodes some of the more damaging stereotypes about autistic children: that they are not interested in relationships, that they are incapable of connection and love, that they lack empathy, that they are not creative. Finally, I hope that the book encourages its readers to approach children with respect for their uniqueness and with a sense of wonder.

CL: I was so moved to read that you and Benj sing duets almost every evening. It’s a beautiful example of how people with autism can connect and collaborate with others, albeit not always in the most obvious ways. Has this habit changed as he’s grown older?

PG: Sadly now that Benj is in 8th grade and has loads of homework and music practicing to do, we don’t have as much time for our musical excursions on school nights. We do try to sing together every night during the holiday season (Benj has a special affinity for Christmas carols), and on weekend afternoons and evenings. And now that I’m married to a music teacher/guitarist/songwriter, we will often have family sing-alongs!

CL: You tell how your first born son, Benj, took you out of the dry world of academia and into the equally demanding but much more satisfying “real world” of parenthood. Do you miss any aspect of academia?

PG: I miss classroom teaching very much indeed. I always considered myself primarily a teacher, and a scholar or writer second. After leaving academia in 2006, working as a literary agent for five years, and then publishing my own book, I now teach in a more free-lance way, offering seminars on poetry to high school students and non-profits throughout the state of New York via a grant from the New York Council for the Humanities, teaching a class on Growing and Aging to Mt Sinai medical students, working 1:1 with adult learners interested in reading books they never got around to as students, and even teaching poems and novels to groups for parties and gatherings. But I would love to have a regular classroom teaching gig too.

CL: Your book is permeated with the poetry and presence of William Wordsworth. How did your view of this poet change after the birth of your sons?

PG: I think a bit from THE ANTI-ROMANTIC CHILD best summarizes this:

Measuring the space or distance between Wordsworth’s radiant visions of childhood and the reality of my experience with Benjamin initially heightened my “sense of wrong” and my feelings of betrayal and disillusionment . . .But while on the one hand, I felt the loss of what I’d dreamed and hoped for more strongly because of Wordsworth, on the other, I found in Wordsworth a language with which to express both the depth and breadth of my loss and the possibility of its recompense. Wordsworth gave me the thought and the words for the lump in my throat . . . So while my heartbreak may have been greater because of my attachment to the “splendor in the grass,” the romantic dream, my consolation was also stronger because I had Wordsworth to help me recognize and celebrate “what remained behind.”

CL: We often think of Wordsworth as a poet of the “romantic child” (blessed infants and carefree children full of imaginative play) but you show that he occasionally depicts a child with strange obsessions who sees the world in a unique way: an “anti-romantic child”! Can you give us an example from his poetry?

PG: In poem after poem, Wordsworth presents children like Benj: odd children, with strange obsessions, who frustrate adult expectations, who see the world in a unique and uncanny way, who exist in many ways at odds with their culture, who are unusual, vulnerable, and solitary, and who long to escape from the confines of conventional society. I’d point especially to “We Are Seven,” “The Idiot Boy,” the Lucy poems, and passages from Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem, The Prelude. Wordsworth’s poetry argues passionately for the worth and value of society’s forgotten, excluded, or less powerful ones, eccentrics and outcasts, beggars, radicals, old people, butterflies, and children.

FOR MORE ON PRISCILLA GILMAN:
www.facebook.com/priscillagilmanauthor
www.priscillagilman.com
www.twitter.com/priscillagilman

FOR MORE ON CAROLINE LAWRENCE:

www.carolinelawrence.com
www.twitter.com/carolinelawrenc

I have two copies of Caroline’s latest, PK PINKERTON AND THE PETRIFIED MAN, to give away! Comment on this interview to be entered into a random drawing; winners will be selected and announced on Friday June 7th!

I recently taught this poem to medical students at Mt Sinai as part of a mini-class on the literature of aging. It seems especially appropriate to share it on the day of the late May Sarton’s birthday.

On a Winter Night
May Sarton

On a winter night
I sat alone
In a cold room,
Feeling old, strange
At the year’s change,
In fire light.

Last fire of youth,
All brilliance burning,
And my year turning –
One dazzling rush,
Like a wild wish
Or a blaze of truth.

First fire of age,
And the soft snow
Of ash below –
For the clean wood
The end was good;
For me, an image

For then I saw
That the fires, not I
Burn down and die;
That fire of gold
Turns old, turns cold.
Not I. I grow.

Nor old, nor young,
The burning sprite
Of my delight,
A salamander
In fires of wonder,
Gives tongue, gives tongue!

May we all cultivate this optimistic attitude towards our own aging process!

So sad to hear of Richie Haven’s passing today. My ex-husband introduced me to Richie during the first weeks of our courtship; he made me a cassette of Richie’s album MIXED BAG, and “Follow” was the song of our love.

Richie, thank you for your textured, soulful, uplifting, mysterious voice, and in the words of that song,

“Let the river rock you like a cradle . . .
Come and touch the things you cannot feel.
And close your fingertips and fly where I can’t hold you
Let the sun-rain fall and let the dewy clouds enfold you.”

A few months ago, I received a galley in the mail with a note from a lovely editor I’d had lunch with a few years ago. Andrea Walker said that she loved this book dearly and thought I would too. That galley was Emily Rapp’s memoir The Still Point of The Turning World. Here’s how the publisher described Emily’s book:

Like all mothers, Emily Rapp had ambitious plans for her first and only child, Ronan. He would be smart, loyal, physically fearless, and level-headed, but fun. He would be good at crossword puzzles like his father. He would be an avid skier like his mother. Rapp would speak to him in foreign languages and give him the best education.

But all of these plans changed when Ronan was diagnosed at nine months old with Tay-Sachs disease, a rare and always-fatal degenerative disorder. Ronan was not expected to live beyond the age of three; he would be permanently stalled at a developmental level of six months. Rapp and her husband were forced to re-evaluate everything they thought they knew about parenting. They would have to learn to live with their child in the moment; to find happiness in the midst of sorrow; to parent without a future.

The Still Point of the Turning World is the story of a mother’s journey through grief and beyond it. Rapp’s response to her son’s diagnosis was a belief that she needed to “make my world big”—to make sense of her family’s situation through art, literature, philosophy, theology and myth.

Andrea’s impulse to send the book to me was a good one. Here’s an excerpt from the email I sent Emily, whom I’ve never met, minutes after finishing her book:

I just finished your book and am feeling totally electrified. WOWEE. You- and it- are simply extraordinary- I am humming and radiating with, shaken and transported by the fierce energy and lambent brilliance of you and your writing. And what a kindred spirit you are . . . Please know that you have rocked my world, blown my mind, broken open my heart, and performed every other cliche of wowing you can think of on this receptive and grateful reader.

with the utmost admiration and in solidarity,
Priscilla

The Still Point of the Turning World now sits on my “favorite books of all time” shelf and I channeled my feelings about and reactions to it into a series of questions I emailed Emily. Below you’ll find our conversation about parenting, literature, disability, grief, illness, marriage and divorce, religion, quotations, gratitude, resilience, and joy.

1) One of the most striking arguments of your book is your claim that joy resides within sorrow- that there can be a special intensity and numinous quality to the experiences of loss and grief:

“Tucked inside the moments of this great sadness — this feeling of being punctured, scrambling and stricken — were also moments of the brightest, most swollen and logic-shattering happiness I’ve ever experienced

This sentence perfectly describes my experience with my terminally ill mother-in-law and my terminally ill father, both of whom died too soon of cancer. In fact, if I ever write a book about losing those beloved parental figures, I would quote this line from you! What are some of the brightest, most expansive and luminous moments you experienced even as you were enveloped in the great sadness of Ronan’s physical decline and impending death?

I loved being outside with Ronan — he was a little guy, so I could walk with him in the front pack on trails around Santa Fe until he was nearly two years old. I loved watching the light in his hair, in his eyes, and sometimes, when we were in the stroller or walking, he would sigh and coo, and you could tell he was enjoying the wind on his face, or a smell dusted up in the wind. I loved that. I liked sleeping with him, too — having him close, holding his hand while we watched Law and Order at night (true story!), and all the snuggling. He was a sweet, adorable baby with a wonderful presence. Everyone who met him felt it. Sometimes I would see toddlers having a tantrum and I’d think, “well, no terrible twos for Ronan!” in a kind of darkly humorous way. I also have great memories of traveling with him in the back of the car while I drove to my parents’ house in Wyoming. When I stopped to get gas or food, I’d take him out and carry him in the front pack, and for some reason, whenever we walked into a gas station, he giggled. Thought it was the funniest thing in the world. Later, as he became more withdrawn, it was just the quiet moments of holding his little body.

2) At one point, you write of your realizations about the relationship between love and loss, happiness and risk: “I realized you could not have one without the other, that this great capacity to love and be happy can only be experienced with this great risk of having happiness taken from you — to tremble, always on the edge of loss.” How can one hold onto the positives of the kind of awareness your book seeks to cultivate in us- gratitude, living in the moment, knowing what matters- without being overcome by the negatives- anxiety, fear, existential despair? How can we hold onto a sense of possibility and optimism when confronted with the reality of our extreme vulnerability? How, to use your turn of phrase, can one tremble in the sense of vibrate or quiver or shake with intense awareness and appreciation and love rather than shudder or quake with terror on the edge or in the face of loss?

I don’t have an easy answer for this, but I do think an acknowledgment of the precariousness of life can be liberating. The flip side, of course, is terror, but I think it makes you notice the world around you in a more specific and deliberate way. It makes you think, wonder, risk. For me, it made me change almost every aspect of my life, which was difficult but necessary. And I don’t think you can ALWAYS be so “hey, being at risk is liberating.” I think, in the management of any duality, you are going to have freak out moments. I think that’s the point, in fact, to understand that the cultivation of gratitude and optimism and peace is going to be punctured occasionally with panic, terror, etc. That IS the human condition. What’s different about holding the duality in this way is that eliminates the myth that we can control much about our lives. And that’s something worth revisiting on an hourly basis, or every minute, if you can. It changes your outlook, or it changed mine, and it made me much more fearless in almost every respect — artistically, personally, psychologically.

3) The first sentence of your book- “This is a love story, which, like all great love stories, is ultimately a story of loss”- struck a deep chord in me. My literary memoir of motherhood, The Anti-Romantic Child, told the story of my experience parenting a child with autism via the poetry of William Wordsworth, who is both the great poet of childhood and the great poet of loss: he is the poet who declares that “nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.” Yours is a story of love and of great loss, but it is also a Wordsworthian story of finding “strength in what remains behind.” Where did you find strength in the face of loss? And what remains behind?

I loved Ronan, and I loved being his mother. I know that you can relate to this as a mother of a special needs child — if people knew the reality, they wouldn’t say condescending things about our children being “special” or “gifts from God,” they would just say that they are PEOPLE. That helped me. And loving Ronan, and the love of my friends and later, near the end of his life, the love of my new partner, gave me strength, even though I often felt helpless and of course, horrible sometimes at the very primary task of protecting Ronan from harm. I made a conscious (and to some, I think, a somewhat controversial decision), to build a life that I could climb into when Ronan was gone. I think many mothers struggle with this, as it’s an issue of identity — I’m a mother, but I’m also a person with other pursuits. I didn’t have the option of quitting work to throw myself on any funeral pyres. I had to make a living, keep my health insurance, and also have a hook in a world post-Ronan so that when I died I would want to go on living. So what remains is a sad and beautiful life, a rich, full life that is full of both grace and terror — in short, the life I was living before WITH Ronan, only now his suffering has ended. Life with Ronan was never a tragic horror full of every-moment despair. It was like any life — with ups and downs, confusions and triumphs, terror and glory.

4) Another point of connection between our books is the way we use, refer to, rely on literature to make sense of the parenting and life challenges we were faced with. Your book is not only an ardent celebration of Ronan’s beauty, truth, value, it is also a tribute to literature and a testament to its explanatory, consolatory power. The books and poems and authors you read and refer to are eclectic: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Myths from Mesopotamia, the poetry of Louise Gluck, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, and your good friend Phil Pardi. What are some of your favorite books and poems and who are some of your favorite authors that you didn’t mention in The Still Point of the Turning World?

Yes, yay literature! I love that you do that in your book as well. I love Jane Kenyon’s poetry, and found that incredibly comforting, and also the poem “Wild Iris” by Louise Gluck with that opening line “at the end of my suffering there was a door.” Karen Armstrong’s work on myth figures prominently in the book as well, and there were individual poems (that were epigraphs – I LOVE epigraphs) that didn’t make it into the final book — poems by Denise Duhamel, whose poetry books were at an artist’s residency I attended in Spain. I read her entire canon in one night. Margaret Atwood, Frances Sherwood, even Tolstoy, Michael Ondaatje — all of my old favorites came back to haunt me in the best ways when I was working on this book.

5) Like me, you are a quotation nut, and I especially loved this aspect of your book: the epigraphs (I adore epigraphs!), the excerpts and lines braided into your own prose, the poetry that often pops into your head as you’re going through experiences with Ronan (at one point you say it was “as if the ghost of Emily Dickinson were speaking directly into my ear”). The ghosts of dead poets speak directly into my ear all the time! If you could use one literary passage or poetic excerpt to summarize your experience as Ronan’s mother, what would it be?

Ha! I am SUCH a quotation nut. My students tease me by recommending that I write a book called “Emily’s Epigraphs.” I would say this line from Pablo Neruda: “I don’t have enough time to celebrate your hair.” Time was the enemy, in Ronan’s case, as it is for all of us, but the sense of that was escalated in my experience with him.

6) Speaking of quotations, the title of your book is a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. How did you settle on this as the title of your memoir? Did you consider other titles? What did you hope to evoke with this phrase? I’m working on a project about stillness, so I’m especially interested in your answer!

My original title was Dear Dr. Frankenstein, because I liked the implication of the grotesque and the beautiful, both of which are held in beautiful tension in Shelley’s book. In the end, though, it was a concern that many people confuse the Doctor (the actual Frankenstein) with the monster, who is never named. All those bad black and white movies have confused things! In any case, I talked with my editor and my agent and the publisher, and we agreed that a sense of stillness was the one thing that permeated this book from start to finish. This is why conversations around theme and purpose are important for authors to have with other people, because it’s difficult to have that perspective on your own work. I’m very happy with the title.

7) In the book’s opening pages, you emphasize the utter grimness of Ronan’s prognosis: there is “no treatment and no cure”‘ for Tay-Sachs and there is no possibility of progress for Ronan. Although my own son has made considerable progress since being diagnosed with a type of high-functioning autism called hyperlexia at age 3, in my talks and visits to schools, I encounter many parents whose children will never speak, certainly never go to college, live independently, marry, or have children. What would you say to parents whose children will never “make progress” or family members of people with a terminal diagnosis?

I would say, “that totally sucks, how do you feel or what is it like for you, or what I can do to help? or I’ll be thinking about you,” or just, especially in the case of a child, “tell me what he or she is like.” People are people. We don’t have to rocket into some weird sense of other people’s notions of potential. We don’t have to be “slotted” anywhere or categorized in any specific way to matter in this world. That’s why I think stories are important – - telling stories makes the actors and players MATTER, and all of us matter, no matter how long we live, and no matter what we look like or what we DO with ourselves. Period. In both of these cases, the time for bromides and magical thinking is officially OVER, at least it was for me. I can’t claim to speak for everyone facing these situations, but I know that in talking with others that people feel the way that I do. Honesty, please, and a recognition that there is NO normative experience whatsoever.

8) Even though the consensus on Tay-Sachs is that “there was nothing to do” and even though you had no conventional goals to set for your child or your parenting, no typical milestones to shoot for , you did have high aspirations for your parenting and you did succeed in doing so much! You made Ronan’s life playful, peaceful, characterized by “dignity and minimal discomfort,” and your efforts reminded me so much of what my extraordinary stepmother did for my father when four years after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer, he began to “gradually regress into a vegetative state.” For the last two years of his life he did not speak, was fed through tubes, and breathed with the help of a tracheotomy and tubes suctioning his lungs. “Determined to make each remaining moment of his life one touched by love,” my stepmother did for him what you did for Ronan- she cared for him at home with the help of nurses (Japanese insurance is excellent), she covered him with colorful blankets knitted by his mother as gifts to her grandchildren, surrounded him with photos of his children and grandchildren, his son’s paintings, plants, flowers, and stuffed animals, she read to him and sang to him and talked to him. Can you tell those readers who may not have followed you on your blog what you did for Ronan to make him comfortable, to bring him pleasure and fun and elation and transport? (I’m thinking of the stuffed animals, the harp, the therapeutic work, the friends cuddling him, the walks etc). What can your experience show others about how to make a seemingly intolerable situation not only tolerable but positively beautiful?

What a beautiful story of your father and stepmother. Ronan had a magic shelf, a place where visitors would place objects that mattered to him. He had a sweet little room and a comfortable bed. He had a million soft blankets and soft toys. He had a gigantic stuffed sheep that he liked to sleep and lie in. He went outside a LOT and he was held by many, many people. He went to parties. He heard music. He had a physical therapist and an acupuncturist. He was held by so many people. People talked to him, said his name. He watched the recent Obama election stretched out and snoring across the laps of my two friends Amy and Nouf. And he LOVED to eat — cheesecake was his favorite.

9) As the parent of two children with special needs (my younger son has dyslexia and dysgraphia, my older son has autism), I am especially interested in the points you make about normalcy and difference. How did your experience of your own disability affect the way you cared for Ronan? How did you like others to approach you and him?

As you know, there is no normative experience, no normative embodiment, although we are pressured to think that there is. We are, all of us, going to be disabled at some point in our lives, and we are all going to die. I think some of the preoccupations I had about my own body (hating it, wishing it to be different, etc.) disappeared gradually (and I hope forever, although they occasionally rear up) in caring for Ronan. He was beautiful and perfect IN HIS WAY. This was a huge lesson for me, although one I would have preferred to learn in just about any other way, obviously. I liked people to walk up to him, say his name, say hello, and take his hand. To treat him like a person, not a sick baby. My biggest peeve about my own disability is when people say “I’m sorry,” as if my artificial leg completely defines my life in a negative way. Disability truly lacks a frame in this country. Now, in a strange twist of fate, I find myself being mistaken for a war veteran, since now women are going to war and losing their limbs. Strange. I wanted Ronan out in the world, even if he occasionally made people uncomfortable, because my parents hauled me everywhere with my wooden leg as a kid. And I’m grateful for that.

10) I often tell people that an upside to being a special needs parent is the wealth of extraordinary people we encounter in our journeys with our vulnerable children, who need so much help, support, and special care in order to do things most children do effortlessly, whether it be feeding themselves, or being able to breathe at all. Can you share some anecdotes about the therapists, babysitters, doctors, and other caregivers who helped you and Ronan navigate the terrain of his illness?

We had a babysitter who was training as a nurse, Ashleigh, who was also a jazz singer. She sang to him. Elana, our occupational therapist, would sit with Ronan and massage him and sing to him and make him comfortable. Dawn and Janet gave him acupuncture treatments at home and in the office. Our hospice nurses, Liz and Cynthia, were amazing, from first to last, they were there with in-the-moment advice about how to practice comfort care and make Ronan’s quality of life as positive as possible.

11) What do you think health care providers can learn from your and Ronan’s experience? How can we as individuals and as a country and culture make what the writer Katrina Kenison has called “the bustling, overpopulated country of illness [and] affliction” a less harried and sterile, more humane and compassionate place?

I think we need to have real discussion about quality of life. I think the medical community has too long been trained to think “prolong and save,” without a real understanding of what that might mean for the person being “saved.” I think hospice needs more airtime in the health debate — we talk constantly about how to be healthy, but we don’t talk about how to die. It’s such a taboo in the culture, and I truly believe that needs to change. People — and children — are dying all over this country, they need care and compassion, and they are very rarely a part of the health care debate unless it’s pitched as a “tragic” story. It’s the story of life; we need to face it and figure out how to help people spend their last moments in dignity and peace, as much as that’s possible.

12) As the daughter of a writer who wrote an acclaimed memoir about his conversion to Catholicism from Judaism and subsequent falling away from the Catholic church and as a writer who despite being not conventionally religious draws inspiration from religious authors like Henri Nouwen, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Frederick Buechner (and like you a passionate admirer of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead), I was fascinated by the role that religion and spirituality have played in your life and in your writing. What was it like growing up as the daughter of a pastor? Why did you go to divinity school? How and why did you begin to doubt some of the conventional pieties? How did your divinity school training help you through this experience with Ronan? How has literature provided a kind of secular and idiosyncratic scripture that replaced the more traditional scriptures you were raised on and studied?

I also love Heschel, and sometime I’ll tell you about my flirtation with conversion to Judaism. I almost did it! But then did not (again, long story). Growing up in a religious household was fun, in fact. The church I grew up in was a community of immigrants, people of all different ages and vocational pursuits and political affiliations. What united us was story — the great Christian story, of course (which I don’t believe, but was taught nonetheless, the promise of salvation through faith); also, the stories in the Bible are the precursors to modern stories — they’re about love and loss, about sacrifice and unfairness, about living and dying. I loved to read, and I loved to read the Bible (yep), because the stories seemed relevant to human experience in a direct and immediate way. Although I’m not religious, you can learn a lot about plot and dialogue from a New Testament story. I went to divinity school because I had been a religion major, and I did and still do relish the intellectual study of these religious stories. My divinity school training wiped away any faith or piety, but it gave me an appreciation for grappling with questions involving the meaning of life, the pursuit of happiness, all of that, and so those old books became a great resource for me during Ronan’s illness. I still like to read philosophy of religion and other theological works, so I suppose literature and theology have an equal standing for me in terms of inspiration and as a source of intellectual interest.

13) Do you want to have more children one day?

I do!

14) Your marriage fell apart in the wake of the discovery of Ronan’s fatal condition as mine did in the aftermath of our grappling with our son’s autism. I so identified with this moment in your book: “With Rick . . I felt as if I were shouting through a tidal wave of water and fire to connect with him, or trying to have a conversation in the middle of a tornado. You have to stick together, our friends and family told us. How, when we could hardly hear each other?” Our families and friends told us exactly the same thing, and yet eventually they came to see that we could be better parents and people apart. Can you speak to the special challenges facing parents of children with special needs or chronic illnesses and also to the benefits of separation and divorce if couples are not able to hear each other anymore?

I think it’s an issue of grief, and its many permutations and manifestations. When you’re grieving — really grieving intensely — it feels like that is the ONLY way to grieve, and it’s hard to imagine anyone choosing a different path. I think it goes one of two ways: you either become closely bonded by the struggle and the experience, or you grow apart. And I don’t think there’s any way to predict how that will go, and I don’t think it’s an issue of two people not “trying” hard enough or being weak or bad people. Grief is annihilating, and we do what we have to do to survive it; everyone is going to manifest that pain in different ways. Rick was an amazing father, and I think we did a great job as co-parents of Ronan. But I think this idea that you MUST stick together just adds another level of pain and guilt to an already difficult situation. Issues and problems are never so clear cut, and neither are the solutions.

15) One of my favorite lines from your book is: “Ronan taught me that children do not exist to honor their parents . . . their parents exist to honor them.” So then the question becomes: how can we best honor our children? How can we shift our focus and our efforts from changing, fixing, and improving our children to accepting, celebrating, and honoring them?

Children are people, not projects. I believe this. If I ever have the opportunity to be a mother again, I’m going to let my kid be whatever he or she wants to be, even if I don’t agree, or it seems strange to me. I think the challenge for parents should be this and only this: how can I create an environment where the unique nature of my child is honored and supported and nurtured. This means that it doesn’t matter what other people are doing, other kids, but only what feels good and healthy to your child. No one-upmanship. No pressure to be better or smarter than this or that other kid. No rankings, no charts.

16) What one piece of advice would you give every new parent? And what one book or poem would you recommend that every parent read?

I would say enjoy every moment because you never know what will happen in the future. I would hand them a copy of A Grief Observed, by CS Lewis, although I doubt new parents would want to read it! And also Pablo Neruda’s beautiful love sonnets, because it’s such a pure and specific analysis of love, applicable to many different kinds of relationships.

17) What is the first word that springs to your mind to describe your son?

Beautiful. Soft.

18) How would you like Ronan to be remembered?

As a sweet, darling, beautiful, perfectly made boy who was loved from the moment of his birth until his final moment, and is still loved and remembered.

Emily Rapp was born in Nebraska and grew up in Wyoming and Colorado. Born with a congenital defect, her left foot was amputated at age four, and she has worn a prosthetic limb ever since. A former Fulbright scholarship recipient, she was educated at Harvard University, Saint Olaf College, Trinity College-Dublin, and the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a James A. Michener Fellow. Emily has taught writing in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles, The Taos Writers’ Workshop, University of California – Palm Desert, and the Gotham Writers’ Workshops. She is currently professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the Santa Fe University of Art & Design in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the author of two memoirs, Poster Child (Bloomsbury, 2006), and The Still Point of the Turning World (Penguin Press, 2013).

Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

William Blake, from Auguries of Innocence

You Ask About Poetry

You ask from an island so far away
it remains unspoiled. To walk quietly
till the miracle in everything speaks
is poetry. You want to look for poetry
in your soul and in everyday life, as you
search for stones on the beach. Four
thousand miles away, as the sun ices
the snow, I smile. For in this moment,
you are the poem. After years of looking,
I can only say that searching for
small things worn by the deep is
the art of poetry, But listening
to what they say is the poem.

Mark Nepo

Happy National Poetry Month!

Readers of my work and followers of my Facebook Author page know that Fred Rogers is one of my greatest heroes. I loved watching Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood as a child, and Mr Rogers himself profoundly shaped me as a person, parent, teacher, and artist. Watching the show helped my autistic son Benj learn how to be more expressive, empathetic, and creative and my fiery, impulsive second son, James, how to be both more patient (he so loves Mr Rogers’ song “It’s Very Very Very Hard To Wait”) and more compassionate towards his big brother.

I must confess that I was a bit apprehensive when I first heard about a new animated TV show featuring Daniel Tiger from Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood. But as soon as I read that Angela Santomero of Blues Clues was working together with The Fred Rogers Company on Daniel, I was confident that it would retain the whimsical charm and sensitive respect for children that characterized Mr Roger’s Neighborhood while carrying Mr Rogers’ sensibility and vision forward for a new generation of viewers. I watched the first episode of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood with my now 13 and 10 year old boys and my 10 year old stepdaughter, and we were all enchanted, delighted, and touched. It’s an adorable, sweet, smart show that uses the latest research on how children learn and grow in the least heavy-handed way. If I had very young children, I’d have them watching Daniel Tiger every single day. As it is, my teen and tween kids insist on DVRing it and we sometimes have Daniel Tiger marathons on weekends!

A few months ago, I reached out to Angela Santomero on Facebook to tell her how much we loved the show, and she wrote back in such a lovely, warm way. After reading my book, The Anti-Romantic Child, she asked for a phone conversation with me, and that hour passed in a flash as the two of us discovered numerous points of connection and found ourselves in a mutual admiration society. I am delighted to share with you a Q &A I did with Angela via email; in the upcoming weeks, look for me to reciprocate by answering questions on her blog, Angela’s Clues!

Angela Santomero has been changing the way children watch television for over fifteen years. She is a Founding Partner and Chief Creative Officer of Out of the Blue Enterprises LLC, overseeing the creative development and research of all of the company’s projects, with a mission and vision to bring educational entertainment to a whole new level.

Angela is the lead creator, executive producer, and head writer for Nick Jr.’s landmark preschool show Blue’s Clues. Currently, Angela is the Creator, Executive Producer and Head Writer of the Emmy-nominated and #1 ranked show, Super Why, which helps build preschool literacy skills through fractured fairytales and interactive games.

Angela’s vast accomplishments include leading the production and development of numerous Emmy nominated episodes for Blue’s Clues, Super Why! & Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood; a full-length feature called Blue’s Big Musical Movie; educational Blue’s Clues CD-ROMs and twenty+ books for Simon & Schuster. She is a Peabody Award Winner for Outstanding Children’s Programming and a Gold and Silver Parents Choice Awards recipient. She received a B.A. from The Catholic University of America and a Master’s degree in Child Developmental Psychology from Columbia University’s Teachers College where she was the recipient of the 1999 Early Career Award.

Angela presently hosts PBS’ The Parent Show at PBSparents.org. Her personal blog, AngelasClues.com, approaches parenting from her vantage point as a childrens’ media creator.

Angela grew up in New Jersey and currently lives in New York with her husband Greg, her two adorable daughters, and their energetic dog Oreo. Angela derives inspiration, laughter, and sometimes even notes on her scripts from her girls. Angela’s family is her priority. Some of their favorite activities include: roasting vegetables, singing, reading, skiing, and asking questions about the way the world works.

1) Tell us about your experience of Mister Rogers and his show as a young child- what did he mean to you?

I was that 4 year old who couldn’t sit any closer to the television set when my friend Mister Rogers was on. I talked to him and believed him when he told me that he liked me just the way I was….

2) How and why did you decide to do a new Mister Rogers-inspired show?

The Fred Rogers Company wanted to promote Fred’s legacy in a new show so they spoke to me since Fred and I got to know each other and he was a fan of my first show, Blue’s Clues. I was honored and deeply touched!

3) What were some of the challenges you encountered on the way to putting the show together and getting it on the air?

I think that they had to pry the first script from my hands! The idea that I was writing a show for my mentor and friend was a bit overwhelming. The challenges were really about making sure we honored Fred Rogers, stayed true to what his adult fans would like, and also to write a story and characters that preschoolers, today, would fall in love with. Oh, and not tarnish a 40 year old brand. Phew, no tall order!

4) What are some of the most gratifying responses you’ve received to Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood?

The way the show has been embraced by children has been wonderful! The adults fans of the original show appreciate the little “nods of love” in Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood that we have put in just for them. My favorite stories are the ones where parents are telling us that their kids are using our strategies every day! One little boy was singing “Grownups come back” while he was being dropped off at school, another little girl was telling her mom, “You know, when you feel so mad you want to roar, take a deep breath and count to four!”

5) Why do you think Mister Rogers is so important to children and families?

The 40+ year old curriculum is a strong child centered pro social curriculum that children and families need today. We all need to be reminded that “Making something is one way to say I love you” or that “I like you just the way you are” or “When something seems bad, turn it around and find something good.” I just love that we are giving parents research based, tried and true strategies that they can keep in their back pocket to use as needed.

6) Do you have any tips or advice for other busy working moms about achieving work/life integration?

Multi task! Have a husband who is actively involved! Sleep!
Really, I just try my best every single day and spend a lot of time hugging my kids and talking with them.

7) What one piece of advice would you give every new parent?

Take the time to stop, play, and try to remember that childhood is so fleeting. I sound so old saying that but I truly can’t believe my own girls are 12 and 9 already. Where did time to go?

8) What gifts do you like to give new parents?

I like to give my favorite books, depending on age of course. We love picture books Ish and The Dot by Peter Reynolds, Elephant and Piggie by Mo Willams. We love chapter books Mandy by Julie Andrews, Time Traveling Fashionista series by Bianca Turtsky. We write a little note in a the books so that kids will see them everytime they read and remember that we were thinking of them when we picked it out.

9) What are some of your family’s favorite movies, books, and television shows?

We love watching our own home movies! Ha ha, we really do! We also love reading a book together, listening to music and then watching the movie or going to see the Broadway show. We just went to Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella and loved comparing it to the Disney version, and talking about the direction the director took. We like Good Luck, Charlie on Disney and re runs of The Brady Bunch!

10) Who inspires you (public figures, creative artists, people in your personal life)?

YOU! Truly, I’m inspired by your book and all of your writing. Fred Rogers inspired me to study child development and integrate education with me to elevate television to another level for kids. My daughters inspire me every day with how confident, insightful, empathetic and thoughtful they are. My husband inspires me with his patience and creativity. Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, inspired me to write. Gerry Laybourne, first president of Nickelodeon, inspired me to embrace my research side in media. Oprah inspires me….

Follow Angela’s fantastic blog!

http://angelasclues.com/

About a week after my first book, THE ANTI-ROMANTIC CHILD, was published, I traveled to Long Island to give a reading at a Women’s Group’s Annual Luncheon. Looking around at the 300+ plus women milling about in the grand ballroom of a swanky hotel, my gaze finally alighted on the kind, understanding face of the other author invited to speak at the lunch. Randy Susan Meyers could not have been more warm, supportive, and gracious. She took this neophyte author under her wing and advised me on everything from social media to carrying bookmarks “advertising” my book to blocking out the din of a book’s reception in the world in order to focus on what really matters: sharing our stories and messages with others in order to help, console, or uplift them. Randy’s two novels, THE MURDERER’S DAUGHTERS and THE COMFORT OF LIES, are gritty, honest, suspenseful, and moving. And in the writing world, Randy is known not only for her propulsive plots and endearing characters but also for her generosity and support of other writers. I’m delighted to share with you an extensive Q &A I did with Randy- her long road to authorial success is an exemplary story of patience, determination, and good winning out in the end, and her thoughts on parenting, grand-parenting, and arranging one’s life are reassuring and inspiring. Please comment on our interview and you’ll be entered for a chance to win a free copy of Randy’s wonderful new novel, THE COMFORT OF LIES (I’ll pick the name of a commenter at random on Saturday, March 2nd).

Here’s Randy’s bio in her own words:

I was born in Brooklyn, New York, where I quickly moved from playing with dolls to incessantly reading, spending most of my time at the Kensington Branch Library. Early on I developed a penchant for books rooted in social issues, my early favorites being “Karen” and “The Family Nobody Wanted.” Shortly I moved onto Jubilee and The Diary of Anne Frank.

My dreams of justice simmered at the fantastically broadminded Camp Mikan, where I went from camper to counselor, culminating in a high point when (with the help of my strongly Brooklyn-accented singing voice), I landed the role of Adelaide in the staff production of “Guys and Dolls.”

Soon I was ready to change the world, starting with my protests at Tilden High and City College of New York, until I left to pursue the dream in Berkeley, California, where I supported myself by selling candy, nuts, and ice cream in Bartons of San Francisco. Then, world-weary at too-tender an age, I returned to New York, married, and traded demonstrations for diapers.

While raising two daughters, I tended bar, co-authored a nonfiction book on parenting, ran a summer camp, and (in my all-time favorite job, other than writing) helped resurrect and run a community center.

Once my girls left for college, I threw myself deeper into social service and education by working with batterers and victims of domestic violence. I’m certain my novels are imbued with all the above, as well as my journey from obsessing over bad boys to loving a good man.

Many things can save your life–children who warm your heart, the love of a good man, a circle of wonderful friends, and a great sister. After a tumultuous start in life, I’m lucky enough to now have all these things. I live in Boston with my husband, and I’m now a grandmother!

The dark drama of my debut novel, THE MURDERER’S DAUGHTERS, is informed by my years of work with batterers, domestic violence victims, and at-risk youth impacted by family violence.

My new novel, THE COMFORT OF LIES has just been published by Atria/Simon & Shuster. It’s a novel about an affair and the three very different women whose lives become intertwined in its aftermath: Tia, the woman who fell in love with a married man, got pregnant and gave the baby up for adoption; Juliet whose husband had the relationship with Tia; and Caroline, the woman who adopted the child that Tia couldn’t bear to raise alone. These are three women who should never have met–and when they do, their lives collide in ways that none of them could have predicted.

THE MURDERER’S DAUGHTERS was chosen as a Target Book Club Pick, Massachusetts “Must Read” Fiction, and was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award,

1) Was writing a second novel more or less challenging than writing the first one? What was different about the experience?

I was lucky, because I began my second novel (in a very early draft form) before my first book sold. That was the fortunate part. Plus, with each subsequent book (because this really wasn’t my second book—my practice books were deep in the drawer) I learned from the mistakes I’d previously made. Structuring (making many iterations of outlines, in-depth organizational plans, etc.) my book and building foundations that would make huge differences when revising my novel were paramount. One thinks about so many ideas along the road to a final book, flashes come at one constantly. You think you’ll remember them when you finish your draft, but unless you write them down in a ‘findable’ fashion, you simply won’t.

So, the writing was easier. However, the time and emotions involved while revising my second book were more taxing by far than the first time around. I was now promoting The Murderer’s Daughters, so much of the energy formerly spent on writing and imagination was now spent writing essays and posts, obsessing over reviews, hourly Googling, Facebooking, Tweeting—the chattering of the online world does not mix with writing. If I hadn’t discovered a program called “Freedom” I’d have been lost.

2) You are a relatively “late bloomer” as a successful novelist. What can your career tell us about the path to becoming an artist?

It was a long path, and it’s a long answer, Priscilla. If anyone out there feels the misery of trying to get it done before you turn 100, I can provide company:

It began with my published-too-young book: In my twenties, I co-wrote a nonfiction book (under my former—married—name, Randy Meyers Wolfson) Couples With Children. Co-author Virginia DeLuca (Ginny) and I, in our work with pregnant and post-partum women, saw that suddenly-shaky marriages were of more concern than diapers. And we wanted to write. We bought How to Get Happily Published by Judith Applebaum, wrote a proposal and a sample chapter, sent it off and shortly thereafter had a contract. I won’t go into the many mistakes we made after that (the only thing we did right was writing and selling the book) but this ‘easy’ sell offered (extraordinarily) undeserved confidence.

Soon after, I got divorced. Now I was a single mother and talking about marriage and children seemed, um… embarrassing to say the least. And fiction was really my love. The nonfiction Couples With Children was left to languish.

In between raising kids, badly-chosen men, working in human services by day, and bartending by night, I co-wrote Novels 1 & 2 with Ginny: Two mysteries. Got an agent. We thought we had a series. Didn’t get a publisher.

Moving on, still submerged in bad men and fantasy, still not applying myself to learning the deeper tenets of writing fiction, and skating on sheer want, I wrote Novel 3, which should have been titled: The Book That Helped Me Pretend I Wasn’t Screwing Up My Life, By Mythologizing It.

No agent. No sale. No memory if I wrote a query. Probably not, as a friend insisted on sending it to his wife’s cousin-the-writer, who called it… execrable? Deplorable? Tripe? He didn’t soften the slam by deeming it poetic or lyrical.

Because it wasn’t.

Got depressed.

Had a drink or ten.

Thank goodness I had yet another totally inappropriate guy to lean on!

Fast forward: Sent kids through college. Lost bad guy/s. Found a good one. Got serious about writing. Embarked on my homemade MFA and wrote my trilogy:

Novel 4: Dove in. Joined a writer’s group. Finished. Got an agent. As soon as she put it out for submission, I began writing:

Novel 5: Showed it to said agent. She liked it so much that she replaced the now limping and ten-times rejected # 4 (are you still with me) with newly minted # 5. And I began writing the next one.

Novel 6. Showed a bit to agent. She loved it. Said keep going! Meanwhile, she kept trotting out #5 to a few editors.

Then my agent turned more attention to representing a different genre and it seemed right for us to part ways. Leaving this agent was wrenching. The ‘bird in the hand’ theory pulled, but I felt a sweet spot with # novel 6, and felt that I needed the right person to represent it (aware many would find it dark.)

No hard feelings, a virtual handshake, and agent and I said goodbye.

Back out on the agent-hunting circuit, feeling like a confused divorcee. (Do I talk about the ex? Pretend it never happened?)

Six months later I signed with new (wonderful and current) agent. She read. She edited. I revised. She sold #6 (The Murderer’s Daughters) in 8 days.

How long did it take to sell my debut novel from when I began writing fiction?

20+ years
Six novels
Three agents

What I learned:

a) To take heart from positive words embedded in rejections and believe the good things they said about my writing. Believe when they said ‘the work just wasn’t for them.’ To take criticisms seriously and pay attention to ideas generously passed on. (Well, not the one that said, “she was so over domestic violence.)

b) To believe that writing, like any craft, requires honing, and not to beat myself up over unsold books. They weren’t wasted time—they were my education. I doubt Georgia O’Keefe sold her first paintings. Or Grandma Moses, who I feared I might pass in ‘firsts.’

c) To surround myself with supportive writer friends and take heart from their success (even when I felt green and evil.)

d) To learn when to fold them.

e) To know when to hold on.

3) Tell us about your parenting and grand-parenting experiences. How do they compare?

Here I can be succinct. Parenting is intense gut-wrenching love that careens from glitter and roses to pain greater than you ever thought possible. From scrapes to serious problems, one is only as happy as one’s unhappiest child much of the time. Grandparenting is a deep pure love, which rather than scorching everything in its path (as parenting can) fills one with light. Of course you worry—I took care of my granddaughter once a week, from early morning through suppertime, until last year—so you don’t get to miss out on the terror. But the fear is leavened with experience and the awareness that each moment passes. You don’t feel stuck, just grateful for the wonder of this child.

4) What wisdom can you share with other women struggling to balance career aspirations and the exigencies of motherhood?

This too shall pass. Honestly, that is the very best thing I can say. Something, someone, was always being shortchanged. I guess I slept, but I don’t really remember.

When my children were young (and I was usually working two jobs as well as being a mom—and trying to cram in writing) life was a constant round of undone and nothing-ever-enough. Whichever part of my life was for-the-moment well tended (children, work, romance, friends, helping out family) the other was less so. Certain parts of my life just slid away–making good regular meals, keeping up with the laundry, the house, decent haircuts, my eyebrows—you name it.

Our society is hard on parents. Having it all is a crock. Loving your children ferociously, while still going easy on yourself and getting sleep, is far more important than baking cookies, getting them to every museum, and building piñatas. Cuddle up and eat pizza with them. Watch television, rather than being so tense as you cook a homemade supper that you want to strangle them.

5) Who inspires you? These can be public figures, historical personages, and people from your personal life, even fictional characters!

Those who give of themselves, who broke barriers, people who fought what must have been fear and sometimes loathing and did the right thing, inspire me. Raoul Wallenberg. Gloria Steinem. Betty Friedan. Margaret Sanger. Oskar Schindler. Marie Curie. Rosa Parks. I could go on forever.

6) What are your favorite ways to unwind, relax, and replenish yourself?

Read. Read. Read. Preferably in a clean house (makes all the difference.) Bonus points for being by the water.

7) What are some of your favorite novels? Did any particular novels or novelists inspire you in your own fiction-writing?

I have been deeply inspired by Rosellen Brown’s novels. All of them.

8) What is the one piece of advice you would give every aspiring writer?

Read a vast array of writing books, because before you break the rules you really should know them. Plus, there is no reason to reinvent wheels that others have made smooth and wonderfully round.

Be patient. Make your work the best it can be (don’t rush to get approbation by looking for an agent or publisher too soon!)

9) What is the one piece of advice you would give every new parent? Every new grandparent?

For parents, the truest most useful advice is probably the oldest advice: sleep whenever you can. Ask for help. Go easy on yourself. Loving, feeding, (and cleaning) your baby is the only thing you must do. Grandparents? Enjoy, love, and keep your mouth shut unless your children seek your advice. Always tell your children what wonderful parents they are.

10) Do you have a go-to quotation that never fails to inspire, calm, or motivate you?

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”— Gustave Flaubert.

 

One of my all-time favorite parenting experts is the magnificently wise and compassionate psychologist and author Madeline Levine, whose books have pride of place on my shelves and are my go-to resource as a Mom of three very different children.  I recently got the opportunity to speak with Madeline by phone about her new book, TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL.  I would advise every parent and educator, indeed anyone who cares about a child’s well-being, to buy Madeline’s book and soak up her insights, advice, and reassurance.  Talking with her was even better than reading her, as she is so warm, funny, and forthright, and such a spirited and responsive conversationalist.  I’m delighted to present a transcript of our conversation for your edification and pleasure!

Anyone who comments on this post will be entered to win a free copy of TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL- I will draw the name of a commenter at random on Tuesday Feb 12th and then he or she will be mailed a copy of this amazing book!

You emphasize the importance of both supporting our children in free play and unfettered exploration and as parents taking the time to explore and play ourselves.  This struck a deep chord in me, as I am a passionate believer in the value of unstructured time for children, in the importance of helping children learn to develop their own interests and passions rather than relying on parents to entertain them, choose their interests for them, or ferry them around to an endless array of activities, and of parents nurturing themselves as well as their children.  What are some ways that parents can help their children become less dependent on parents (or screens!) for amusement and more able to cultivate their own sense of direction and purpose?  How can parents and schools help foster what you call the “protective factors that have traditionally accompanied childhood- limited performance pressure, unstructured play, encouragement to explore, and time to reflect” that are increasingly in short supply in families, in schools, and in our culture more generally? How can we encourage not only children but also parents to play?

It’s funny; I just got off the phone with someone at the Chicago Tribune about a group of parents in Glen Cove who are little by little allowing their kids the kind of freedom that is in short supply in the suburbs.  In 4^th grade, the kids are first allowed to walk down the block, then around the corner, then within a 4 block area.

In general, parents have overwhelming anxiety about this: how do you know when you should let your child take the next step?  Why is there so much anxiety about this, so much uncertainty?  Well for one, the relationship among mothers and a larger family unit has changed so much.  The people who used to tell you “why don’t you let your kids take the train?”, now they’re competing with you or absent.

My best answer is: take a look at the stage right before the task or activity you’re contemplating allowing them to perform or undertake.  Ask yourself: what was the previous stage they had to have mastered, in other words, can they ride a bike?, do they come home when they’re supposed to?  If they have, that’s the green light to go to the next step.

The most common line I hear in my office from kids is: “Could you please help my mother get a hobby besides me?  No one likes to have someone breathing down their neck all the time.  Having that kind of oversight is disturbing to kids in the first place.  And also it gets in the way of kids’ exploration and creativity and confidence. We think it’s helpful, but it actually isn’t.

Of course, it’s easier in retrospect.  I had 3 boys, 2 were very athletic, and for a while, on weekends, I was going to one part of California and my husband to another to attend the games.  I would never do that again.  Knowing what I know now, I would have taken half of those mornings to have breakfast with a friend, go out with my husband, read a book.  I know what went in my life during my boys’ childhoods- it was my friendships.  I went through those years basically without friends.  And things I thought were important for my kids turned out to be of no consequence to them- whether I went to every single game or not.

When your kids are really little, of course, it’s physically hard to spend much time away from them or go out and do adult things.  But it is important to make time for ourselves, to do things we like to do.   When my children were little, my intimacy  was with my kids- there were a whole bunch of adult things that went by the wayside.

It’s become absolutely normal to spend every minute thinking about your children.  And this gives children a very narrow view of adulthood.  We ask often: why aren’t kids growing up?  Well, one reason is that we have done absolutely nothing to make adulthood attractive. They see their parents work their butts off all week long and then get up at 7:30 am on the weekends to take them to sports practice.  This is an unappealing vision.  Kids will say to me: who wants to join that party?  As parents, we’ve gotten so good at putting our own needs on hold.  I think we need to convince people again that the best insurance for your child is having a happy mother, and it’s hard to be happy and not resentful when all your time is spent attending to your kids needs.

A little story about what you just brought up- about helping adults feel comfortable playing and how if you’re not busy there’s something wrong with you.  In a talk I gave recently, I told a story about times when my husband comes home at the end of a long day and I’ll have just sat down on the sofa to read a fun magazine, I see him coming, and I’ll drop the magazine and go look like I’m doing something productive or work-related.  To my husband!

Our culture emphasizes that the best way to look is busy and the best people are the busiest.  It’s become competitive- you work 10 hours a day?  I work 12 hour days, you’ve flown 10 places this year, I’ve flown 20 places.  We put such cultural value on busyness.  We think the busiest person wins.  That’s probably not true, of course, but even if it were, the cost is too great.

In a pithy and devastating indictment both of our current educational system’s emphasis on standardized tests and its competitive fervor and of parents’ obsession with their children’s academic success, their relentless pushing of their children towards ever more dazzling accomplishments, you write “that school is “the single greatest source of stress in kids’ lives.”  How can we make school a less stressful experience while still maintaining academic rigor?  How can we help both schools and parents focus more on character and less on performance, or, to put it another way, more on goodness and less on greatness?

I was recently on a panel with a guy who was the chief engineer at NASA, and he was asked: what does NASA look for in its engineers?  His answer?  A basic solid foundation in sciences and math, the ability to conceive new ideas, innovate, communicate, and work on a team, diligence, hands-on problem solving skills, confidence, and respect.  Fascinating isn’t it?  His answer wasn’t about what school or what tier of school you have to come from, what grades you have to get.  It’s a whole bunch of character skills!

I think we get into problems when we try to “raise performance” or “increase rigor” because that kind of emphasis is out of line with child development.  It’s a given that your kid needs to know content.  None of this is about turning them loose to wander naked through the fields.  The question is: what is the best way to help them learn content and the whole skill set going forward?  We don’t know what content is going to look like in 5, 10 years.   I’m fascinated by recent research using scanning- in motion we can follow children and track them as they actually learn-, and what they’re finding is that kids learn better when they’re moving around.  We’re going to learn a lot more about development from this.  Why does play-based preschool work better than academic preschool?  Well, one reason is that 4 year olds learn through their bodies.

And let’s take homework as another example.  Research shows that after 2 ½ hours of homework in high school, and after one hour of homework in junior high school, there is no benefit.  Caveat is if the child has a learning disorder.  The big paper on this, the meta analysis, was by Harris Cooper.  Research also shows that as far as academics and cognitive development go, there is no benefit to homework in elementary school.  10 minutes per grade is ok.  So much of what they’re finding is common sense.  Kids need to play and run around!

Take my youngest son.  He’s an ordinary student, dead-center of his class, total hands-on learner.  Fast forward through a series of things that had to do with getting him into environments that actually valued hands-on learning, and he’s unrecognizable to his mother.  This was a kid who struggled struggled struggled- multiple things at play- he’s a late bloomer-kids develop at different paces- he just grew up.  The problem with homogenous classrooms is that everyone’s judged by the same narrow criteria.

Sometimes I hear from parents of kids I’ve seen 10 and 15 years ago and it’s shocking to me.  A kid I had to put out in a wilderness program is now a doctor or a lawyer.  When all is said and done, if you come from a loving and accepting family who is responsive things will turn out the best that they can.

In your book, you emphasize repeatedly that we are all average at many things.  At one point, you make a brilliant distinction: “we need to distinguish between the inherent uniqueness of our children, and the unrealistic specialness we insist on when we argue with teachers or coaches or push our children past their limits.  The former moves our children forward, the latter only hinders their progress.”  What would you say to a parent who insists that without this intervention or pushing, his or her child would “fall behind,” “get lost,” or “not fulfill his or her potential”? 

Also, I wholeheartedly agree that learning how to accept our weaknesses or challenges as well as our strengths and talents is crucial to “developing a comfortable and robust sense of self.”  How can we help children to see, understand, and be comfortable with not only their own strengths but also their own weaknesses?   How does recognizing and being honest about one’s areas of challenge help children- and all of us!- to be more productive and truly successful people?

The issue with that just fascinates me.  How do people get to be successful?  Research shows us that the most successful people work really hard, that they have qualities of persistence, resilience, determination, and flexibility.  They have to be bright, but they don’t have to be brilliant.  For example, I went to state university.  This idealization of the Ivy League is misplaced, and I think it’s a defense against the fact that here’s the reality: there’s a bell curve in terms of general intelligence, and most of our kids are going to be average, even if we’re smart ourselves.  We tend to marry people with very similar IQs- IQ is not additive – for example- 130 plus 135.  As a matter of fact it’s more likely that the kid will be a regression to the mean; it’s more likely that the child will be average.

When I give talks, I tell people what I’m good at-I am a good mom, writer, and psychologist- and then I list the things that I suck at and then list the things that I’m average at.

I think we are spending way too much time and energy correcting deficits and not enough helping strengths.  I recently met the amazing Andrew Solomon-what a rare combination of high IQ and compassion that guy has!– and I found fascinating his discussion of the deaf community- all the time spent on teaching the deaf to learn words and not going to their strengths- they weren’t able to develop.

I could not agree more that it’s “easy to romanticize childhood . . . but childhood is not easy.”  At one point in THE ANTI-ROMANTIC CHILD, I recall a moment where after a meeting with my four year old son’s teachers who lamented his inability to tie his shoes quickly and his unwillingness to participate in art projects, I think to myself:  “Kids are expected to be generalists, but grown-ups are allowed to specialize and not have to do every last kind of activity.  It is so hard to be a kid!”  How can recognizing the inherent difficulty of childhood help us to be better educators and parents?

As a student at top schools and then a professor at Yale and Vassar, I know all too well how the relentless pursuit of “the best” school leads to burn-out, a sense of emptiness, and a lack of true ownership of one’s experience.  At one point you write: “If you keep the effort bar high then good school choices make themselves reasonably clear.  For one student that might be Princeton, and for another it might be a community college.  Both of these options carry the possibility of success and neither guarantees it.“  Later, you put it more succinctly and dramatically: “College placement is about making a good match, not about winning a prize.”  For parents who see their children as exceptional and want them to win, surpass, excel, how can we help them shift their focus from winning, accomplishing, and dazzling to becoming their best, most fulfilled and content selves?

The heart of this is the absolute refusal to acknowledge one’s own ordinariness.  This has to do with the boomer generation—we were going to do great things, and being ordinary is absolutely anathema.  I came from this working class background where being ordinary was good- people helped each other out.  You want your kid to be good at a couple of things but no-one is good at everything.  The top top CEOs –research shows that out of 32 characteristics that are associated with strong leadership potential, you need 5 to be a big success.  Straight A students are a very thin narrow group of kids- it’s a tiny group of people!

Many parents would agree with your contention that schools often scant or neglect valuable components of education like music, art, dance, cooking; these parents will often sign their children up for after-school or weekend activities and classes in a well-intentioned effort to provide “enrichment.”  But how, why, and when does enrichment actually become depletion as children are pushed to and beyond their limits, exhausted and drained by what you call “over-programming” and “over-scheduling”?  How can parents decide what counts as worthy and what is just too much?  Moreover, how can we choose the “right” or “best” extras for our individual child?

If you look at a bunch of 4 year olds they’re dancing around, laughing, playing, pushing.  The energy is so good in a good K class and high school students are falling asleep!  You’ve got to ask: what happened to learning in between the exuberance of K and the exhaustion of 11^th grade?  David Elkind has a helpful rule of thumb about activities for your child: you should pick one social, one physical, one artistic.

In terms of when is a kid overloaded: you look for psychosomatic symptoms in young kids and you let them lead.  Young kids need a pot, pan, spoon and a back yard to run around in.  They’re such natural scientists.  There’s just as much to be learned from that as more structured activities.  For every hour of structure, a child needs two hours of unstructured free time.  If you have a young kid in school till 3 and then sign him or her up for ANY activities after school, that is way too much structure.  People need time to craft a sense of self.  The most protective thing you can have in life is a robust internal sense of self.  One activity is more than enough.

There are only 24 hours in a day.  Cross out the amount of time kids should spend sleeping (9 hrs 15 minutes in high school, 11 hours in elementary school is ideal), and you’ve got very few hours left!  And we must remember that sleep is crucial.  We used to think fatigue was a symptom of depression and now we know it’s a major cause of depression.  I’ve just read some new research- it’s looking like chronic sleep deprivation is a primary trigger for depression.  If you don’t sleep enough, you can’t process or retain information.  The way to tell if your kids are getting enough sleep?  If they get up by themselves and they’re not tired.

Who inspires you?  These can be public figures, authors, historical figures, people from your personal life.

 The simple answer is: my family that came from Russia when they were 15 and worked laying bricks and cutting glass and didn’t know the language and lived lives of thoughtfulness and integrity.  In my heart of hearts, I liked that culture a lot better than the one I’m in now.  Now, that life was not easy.  It was really hard- my dad died young, we were on welfare.  But this culture is where I got to see that people do best when they lend a hand rather than compete with each other.  Kids do better as well.  My grandmother who had nothing used to keep the pushke- a jar that you put money in- she’d put a penny or a nickel in, and when she got enough money she’d send a washcloth to her sister in Michigan.  Her sister really needed a washcloth. This kind of thoughtfulness and generosity, emphasis on hard work and taking responsibility for one’s actions- that a great model for the way to live your life.

 

 

Madeline Levine, Ph.D. is a psychologist with close to 30 years of experience as a clinician, consultant and educator. Her New York Times bestseller, The Price of Privilege, explores the reasons why teenagers from affluent families are experiencing epidemic rates of emotional problems.  Her new book, Teach Your Children Well,to be released July 31, 2012, outlines how our current narrow definition of success unnecessarily stresses academically talented kids and marginalizes many more whose talents and interests are less amenable to measurement. The development of skills needed to be successful in the 21^st century- creativity, collaboration, innovation – are not easily developed in our competitive, fast-paced, high pressure world. Teach Your Children Well gives practical, research- based solutions to help parents return their families to healthier and saner versions of themselves.

Dr. Levine is also a co-founder of Challenge Success, a project born at the Stanford School of Education. Challenge Success believes that our increasingly competitive world has led to tremendous anxiety about our childrens’ futures and has resulted in a high pressure, myopic focus on grades, test scores and performance. This kind of pressure and narrow focus isn’t helping our kids become the resilient, capable, meaningful contributors we need in the 21st century. So every day, Challenge Success provides families and schools with the practical research-based tools they need to raise healthy, motivated kids, capable of reaching their full potential. We know that success is measured over the course of a lifetime, not at the end of the grading period.

Dr. Levine began her career as an elementary and junior high school teacher in the South Bronx of New York before moving to California and earning her degrees in psychology. She has had a large clinical practice with an emphasis on child and adolescent problems and parenting issues. Currently however, she spends most of her time crisscrossing the country speaking to parents, educators, students, and business leaders. Dr. Levine has taught Child Development classes to graduate students at the University of California Medical Center/ San Francisco.  For many years, Dr. Levine has been a consultant to various schools, from preschool through High School, public as well as private, throughout the country. She has been featured on television programs from the Early Show to the Lehrer report, on NPR stations such as Diane Rheems in Washington and positively reviewed in publications from Scientific American to the Washington Post. She is sought out both nationally and internationally as an expert and keynote speaker.

Dr. Levine and her husband of 35 years, Lee Schwartz, M.D. are the incredibly proud (and slightly relieved) parents of three newly minted and thriving sons.

 

www.madelinelevine.com

A few months ago, I did something I almost never do: I wrote a fan letter to an author I greatly admire.  I sent a message to Katrina Kenison, author of the much-loved parenting memoirs Mitten Strings for God and The Gift of An Ordinary Day, via her website, and to my astonishment, she responded almost immediately.  Her warmth, thoughtfulness, and generosity of spirit were evident in this first letter, and we’ve since become great email friends, discovering numerous points of connection between us from our mutual love of the Betsy-Tacy series to our predilection for Steely Dan.  I’m honored that Katrina agreed to answer questions I posed to her and share her hard-won wisdom, compassion, and luminous spirit with my readers here.  This interview appears the same week that Katrina’s new book arrives in bookstores.  Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment is my favorite of Katrina’s three books.  It’s a remarkably honest, searching, poignant, and impassioned meditation on the challenges of mid-life and a testament to the subtlety and grace of its radiant author.

1) Tell me about the title of your new book: Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment.  How did you arrive at this title and subtitle?  Why call the story “an apprenticeship”?

I kept running across quotes by Joseph Campbell about “the hero’s journey.” Campbell suggests that all the world’s great stories and myths are essentially tales of transformation. The hero is called to change, to undertake some kind of journey which requires him to leave what he knows behind and venture into new territory.  He resists, but eventually must summon his courage, accept the challenge and go, or else risk a kind of spiritual death.  As soon as the hero commits to the quest, magical helpers or guides appear to assist him.  There are numerous stages to the journey, hard lessons along the way, and eventually a return to the starting place, older and wiser, and now with some gift to share with others.

All of this resonated with me.  I wanted my life to continue as it had always been, yet the more I tried to hold on, the more it seemed that everything I cherished was slipping away.  My children grew up and left home, one of my dearest friends died, my marriage was shifting, I doubted my work, even my face in the mirror startled me:  how could I look so old on the outside, when inside I still felt like a young me?

I wondered if there was a way to absorb all these changes with grace, to see them not as losses but perhaps as necessary challenges on the path.  Campbell’s work, especially his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces, seemed to point the way.  But Campbell is writing about male heroes, male archetypes, male journeys.  It seemed to me that women at midlife are called to embark on journeys too, and that perhaps by accepting rather than resisting the call to change, we have an opportunity to discover unknown parts of ourselves, to let go of what is outlived and explore new roles in our lives, reach toward new dreams.  Not all journeys require suitcases and tickets.  Sometimes the most significant journeys are the ones that lead us inward, to our own true selves.

I struggled for a long time with a subtitle.  Anything that suggested that this was a book of answers, or that I had things all figured out, made me very uncomfortable! Anything that invoked age or, God forbid, menopause, made my publisher uncomfortable (seems there are still taboos, especially among marketing folk, about admitting that yes, we all do grow old).  And then, like a gift from one of those magical helpers, the subtitle came to me and I knew it was exactly right.  Every day we are lucky enough to be alive is an apprenticeship; the lesson, always, is contentment.  Does anyone ever nail it, once and for all?  I doubt it.  I hope not.  I aspire to nothing more than a good, long apprenticeship in contentment.

2) Your book begins with an initially sunny but ultimately difficult, painful, wrenching scene about the fragile peace and tenuous intimacy between you and your son as you drive him to look at boarding schools following his dreadfully difficult sophomore year in high school.  What advice would you give to parents of a child who, like yours, is at an especially “vulnerable moment in his [or her] young life”?

Such a good, hard question. I hesitate to give advice to anyone about parenting.  I can say I’ve come to believe that the greatest gift I can give my own children is my faith in them and in their journeys, difficult as those paths may be.  I want my sons to know that I believe in them, in their resilience and their ability to create their own good lives.

Yet as the parents of a teenager who was clearly struggling, my husband and I also had to acknowledge that despite our best efforts, what we were doing wasn’t working, and that we needed help.  Sometimes the most loving thing we can do for our children is to widen the circle, bring others in close, explore paths we’ve never considered walking before.  To do that openly and without shame or recrimination is in itself a gift; it’s an acknowledgment that to be human is to struggle.  Humility, vulnerability, compassion – it seems to me that this is the AP Curriculum for life, lessons as essential as any taught in a high school classroom.   Lessons parents and children are sometimes assigned to learn hand in hand, as we move together into uncharted territory.

3) I still have three kids at home (two boys, ages 13 and 10, and a new stepdaughter, also 10), but I felt so keenly your anguish at being ” a mother without a child” as you became an empty nester three years before you were expecting to.   I, like you, love being at the center of a bustling and loving family and sometimes wonder “if I will ever again experience the passionate aliveness I felt as the center of the universe for two little boys.”  How did your apprenticeship in contentment involve not only discovering new interests and forging new relationships but also finding new outlets for your maternal energies and instincts, skills and passions?  In other words, it seems that it wasn’t just about turning your attention away from motherhood or about shutting down the maternal force in you but rather about tapping into that maternal energy and redirecting it.

That’s absolutely right.  For years, I felt certain that my calling was right at hand, the work of balancing career and family life and making choices that supported my primary commitment to my children.  As a mother, writer, and editor working from home, I was happily rooted in one place, fulfilled and challenged without ever having to leave the house.  But when the house was suddenly empty, and I could sit at my desk all day long, or not at all, and no one cared, I felt unmoored.  For the first time in my life, I was lost and a little lonely, without purpose or even a shape to my days.

My first impulse was to throw myself into whatever activity presented itself, to get out of the house and stay busy and keep all my uncomfortable emotions at bay.  The apprenticeship really began when I decided to stop moving.  To sit still, and actually feel my feelings – discomfort, sadness, fear, and pain –and see what happened next.

4)  My memoir, The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy, is, as you describe yours, about “letting go of my own cherished vision of the way our family life ought to be”.   How do you think parents can learn to let go, in small ways and large? 

Accepting that things as they are is the way they are meant to be is an enormous spiritual challenge.  Somehow we must find the faith to let go.  Instead of our white-knuckled grip and our belief that if we just work hard enough we can shape life to our specifications, we are asked to surrender. To accept that perhaps there are forces at work in our lives that are larger than we are.  For me, this seems to be the assignment of a lifetime.  Surrender doesn’t come naturally to a nose-to-the-grindstone girl like me.  One thing that helps is to pause and ask myself the question, “What is the loving thing to do here?”  And usually the answer I come up with is not about bearing down harder.  Usually it is about finding a way to let go a little more.

5) A large part of the book describes your month-long stay at Kripalu in order to become a certified yoga teacher; towards the end of the book, you also get certified in Reiki!  I must confess that I’m not a yoga person, but I have a daily meditation practice, was a certified aerobics instructor in my early 20s (in part to get out of my head and teach/heal people via their bodies), and I’m a passionate believer in the healing power of touch.   I love your courage, grit, and pliancy of spirit (not just body!) in becoming a certified yoga teacher and a Reiki master in your 50s!  What emboldened you to try?  What appeals to you about teaching yoga or doing bodywork?  What can you do, achieve, enact via these modalities that you can’t via the written word?  And how can your story inspire other women at mid-life to stretch beyond what they thought their profession, career, or life path would be and find new roles for themselves that not only nourish them but also contribute mightily to the well-being of others?

Going to Kripalu for a month was, first and foremost, about honoring a small voice inside me that I was more accustomed to ignoring.  Yoga makes me happy, it is really that simple.  And yet, because I’m not very athletic or flexible, and because I came to yoga very late in life and I’m not in any way a “natural” at it, I’d never allowed myself to really “go all the way,” to take it seriously.

The truth was, there was nothing I could think of that I wanted more than a chance to completely immerse myself in yoga, to be a student and study what I loved. Every time I’d ever entertained the notion, my inner critic had always been quick to say, “You don’t deserve this, you aren’t good enough.”  The courage was really about listening, for once, to the other voice, the voice that said, “This is what I want.”

I am an introvert, very inclined and content to spend all day alone.  Being in front of a group, working on a committee, speaking in public – these are huge challenges for me.  I would rather be curled up on the couch, in front of my computer. But as I get older, and especially now that my children are no longer within arms’ reach, I am increasingly aware of the importance of physical touch.  Connection that happens face to face and body to body to body and heart to heart, rather than through the ether.  Reiki is a way to step out of the “thinking” brain and into the universal life force.  I don’t “do” it; rather, I clear a quiet space and simply allow the energy to flow.  Putting my hands on another human being, or even doing absent Reiki, which is kind of like praying, is a gift both to myself and to the other person, a way of opening to compassion and connection.

What I’m learning is that there are many ways to heal, many ways to touch, many ways to bring more love into the world.  If my story inspires another woman to simply listen to her own quiet inner voice and pay it heed — whether that voice is urging her to write or to paint or to run for town office or to climb a mountain — than another worthy connection will have been made.  Of course, we are all connected.  And my story is your story, and vice versa.  As we begin to recognize that, things get simpler:  we see that our work, whatever it is, is love made manifest.  And we begin to understand that anything, anything at all, done from the heart, makes the world a better place.

6) You describe conceiving of and teaching a memoir-writing workshop for local women in your home.  For those of us not fortunate enough to be able to actually study with you, what words of wisdom can you share about how to “attempt the soul-searching work of transforming the stuff of [our] . . .  lives into narrative”?

I think the first step is invisible, and perhaps the hardest of all.  We must take that step even before the pen hits the page.  And it’s really where the soul-searching begins – with the work of coming to believe, “My story matters.”  I wrestled with these words for a long time, wondering if they were true.  For months, I didn’t write anything.  Then I finally went to a friend’s cabin in the woods, where there was no internet connection and nothing to do but sit with myself.  I realized that finding a way to honor my friend who had died, by writing about what she’d taught me, did matter to me, very much.  So I started there, by writing about her.  And so it was that she gave me yet another gift: a doorway into the rest of the story.

7) Your account of your beloved friend’s struggle with and death from cancer is so poignant and powerful, as is your account of your and your father’s treatments for skin cancer.   As someone who’s lost numerous loved ones to and has two close family members currently battling this insidious disease, I have a passionate interest in improving treatments and support for both patients and care-givers.  What advice would you give to the family members or friends of someone who’s been diagnosed with cancer about how best to support their loved one?  What do you think health care providers can learn from your and your friend’s experience?  How can we as individuals and as a culture make what you call “the bustling, overpopulated country of illness, affliction, and surgical repair” a less harried, sterile, and tragic place?

My own brief day in the hospital for out-patient surgery was nothing, a mere blip on the screen.  What it gave me though, as a visitor, was a fleeting glimpse of the territory that my friend, with her devastating illness, had inhabited without complaint for years.  And what touched me, of course, even during my limited experience, were the moments of pure human kindness extended toward me in that busy, subterranean operating facility.   Even there, with hundreds of patients being moved in and out, there were nurses and doctors who took the time to look into my eyes, to connect, to see me as a human being rather than as a patient in the 9 a.m. time slot.  And still, it was a humbling, difficult day.  It was also a reminder that we are all mortal, we are all vulnerable, and we need one another.

The best thing we can offer a loved one?  Presence.  Our own pure, compassionate, fearless BEING.  There’s a difference between compassion and pity.  Pity is all tangled up with fear and separation, the unspoken idea that “I’m just glad it’s not me.” As Stephen Levine says, “When your fear touches someone’s pain it becomes pity; when your love touches someone’s pain, it becomes compassion.”

When the diagnosis is not good, fear is our first, most human response.  Our challenge, then, is to begin transforming that fear into compassion –  both for ourselves and for our loved one.  And as we grow in compassion, we find that our ability to stay, to be with what is, deepens.  And that’s what anyone who is ill needs from us: to know there’s no place on earth we’d rather be than right there with them; that we choose to stay, come what may.

8) With remarkable honesty, you describe the challenges your marriage faced when the children had moved out of the family home and you and your husband were compelled to reinvent your home life and to confront the ways you both had changed in the years since becoming parents.  What is the best thing your husband did for you or said to you during this difficult period of readjustment and rediscovery.  Why do you think your marriage survived when so many others founder?

It took a while for me to understand that I wasn’t the only one grieving what was over, not the only one who felt an emptiness after our sons were gone.  My husband had lost something, too.  And while I was looking outward, toward my own personal new horizon, he was assuming that finally the two of us would have more time for each other.

It should have been obvious, then, why we ran into some trouble:  we were seeing two completely different movies.  But it actually took a good bit of untangling.  The best thing Steve did for me was let me leave home for a month with his blessing, even though he didn’t really understand why it was so important for me to go.  And even though I also knew he was a little bit afraid – worried I’d go off and have some transformative experience that he wasn’t part of, and that it would change me, and create even more space between us.  What happened was the opposite.  Knowing he loved me enough to let me go made me more eager to come home and embrace what I already had.  I think we both became more fearless, more willing to explore ways we can be together even when we’re apart.

9) At various points in the book, you mention favorite books and poets and thinkers, but rarely by name.  Who are some of your favorite authors and thinkers?  What are some of your favorite books?  and can you name a few poems that especially speak to you?

In the early draft of the manuscript, I had many more quotes from authors I love and consider my guides.  My friend Maude, who is in the book and also one of my most trusted early readers, said, “Take them out.”  She was right; I thought I needed to include the words of everyone who’s helped me along the way, when in fact all I really needed to do was tell a story.

The work of Thomas Moore (who I do quote in the book) has been the single biggest influence on me.  I don’t think I would ever have written a book at all if not for reading The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life when my sons were very young.  Moore suggests that, in order to “re-enchant” our ordinary, mundane adult lives, we need to reconnect with the magical, enchanted world of childhood: secret places, nature, rituals, stories, the night sky, spirits and ghosts, silliness, wonder.  It all made sense to me.  But I suddenly wondered if my own sons, reading this book at age 40, would have any idea what he was talking about.  It seemed possible that, without some clear intention on my part, and a willingness to move against the cultural current, my children would grow up with no enchantment in their lives whatsoever.

Suddenly I had a mission:  to nurture my children’s inner lives as well as their physical beings.  And then, I realized, I also had something to say:  that we don’t have to be swept along by the pressure to do more, have more, achieve more; that early competence is not an insurance policy for happiness, that there are lots of different ways to define success.

I began to write, and we began to explore different ways of living, and the writing and the living fed one another.  I wanted to ensure that our sons had time to just be children, to play and explore and get bored with themselves, to star-gaze and wool-gather, to wander and wonder.  That meant taking some drastic steps and being somewhat counter-cultural – slowing down, saying no to organized soccer and birthday parties and TV and video games, creating rituals, preserving empty time, stretching myself, trusting myself, changing my priorities about what was important in our family life.  Today, if you were to ask my sons what they cherish about their childhoods, I think they would talk about sleeping outside in the back yard on a blow up mattress with their dad under the stars, listening to Red Sox games on the radio, playing baseball in the back yard, exploring the creek in the woods.

And oddly enough, they have Thomas Moore to thank for that.  He made me see that my real work as a mother was to care for the souls of my children, and that in order to do that, I’d need to care for my own as well.

Other guides: Mary Oliver, Joseph Campbell, Pema Chodron, and Ann Hillman, whose book Awakening the Energies of Love is something of a bible to me, a profound, demanding, multi-faceted book that I will never be finished with.

10) What quotation would you use to summarize you and/or your approach to life?

“The purpose of the journey is compassion.”  Joseph Campbell

Learn More About Magical Journey by watching this video:

KATRINA KENISON is a wife, the mother of two, a life-long reader, wanderer, and daydreamer. She is the author of The Gift of an Ordinary Day: A Mother’s Memoir, and Mitten Strings for God: Reflections for Mothers in a Hurry.

A former editor at Houghton Mifflin Company in New Haven, New York, and Boston, Katrina became the series editor for The Best American Short Stories in 1990, a post she held for sixteen years. She also co-edited, with John Updike, The Best American Short Stories of the Century. With her yoga teacher, Rolf Gates, she wrote Meditations from the Mat: Reflections on the Path of Yoga. Katrina has been a featured guest on Oprah and her essays have appeared in O The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Family Circle, Woman’s Day, and many other publications.

Katrina lives in the New Hampshire countryside with her husband and sons and their border collie, Gracie.