Tag: parents

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Rules of the Game

Look out, world. Your next dangerous mastermind has arrived.

My 8-year-old niece Ivy has discovered chess.

In case James Bond’s descendants need the data later, some family photos have captured this historic global turning point. In one, Ivy and my dad have squared off across the board in the midst of a carefully thought-out match. In another, my grinning niece is throwing herself into a solo game, complete with self-generated commentary that my mom called “a mix between a roller derby match and the Hunger Games.” (“Let’s get out there and take chances, but play smart!”)

I had to smile. And not just at the thought of the next Bobby Fischer also being the next Howard Cosell.

After all, it hasn’t been that long since I was in the same chair.

Dad taught me to play chess. He taught all of us to play, really, but I was his most frequent opponent, carefully internalizing the values of rooks and queens, the surprises that knights could pull, and why you never, ever touched a piece until you were ready to make a play.

It was absorbing. Mind you, I was grown before I finally won a game against him – Dad believed in treating us with respect by not holding back on the chessboard – but it didn’t matter. It was the game that mattered, the time together, the fun.

And just maybe, the tools I was picking up without realizing it.

From an early age, I had petit mal epilepsy. After a couple of years, it was readily controlled with medication, but there were still some related neurological issues that needed to be addressed, ranging from physical coordination and balance to simple concentration. Among other things, this meant spending some time in the “resource room” at school each week, playing games.

That always sounded cool to my friends – and to me, come to think of it – but it was only later that I thought about what the teacher and I were doing. Sometimes it was card games like Concentration, building up memory. A few times, it was a noisy parachute game called Bombs Away, helping me with my timing and hand-eye coordination. And a lot of times, maybe most times, it was chess.

Chess requires planning. Memory. The ability to weigh choices. And most of all, situational awareness – the ability to be in the moment, thoroughly aware of what’s coming at you and what you have available to meet it.

Invaluable skills. Then and now.

I’ve thought a lot about those unspoken lessons. But it’s only recently that I started thinking about the other lessons that were being taught – by that teacher, by family, by the other professionals that worked with me. Not by a game or exercise, but by example.

Things like patience. Persistence. Taking the time with someone who needs it, no matter how small, no matter how much time they may need. Learning to value each person you encounter, to see not just what they are but what they could be someday … and to help encourage that, if you can.

Invaluable skills. Then and now.

For all of us.

It starts with pieces on a board. Then grows to people in a life. None of it comes easy. (Thanks, Dad.) But if we learn the real rules of the game, all of us can win. Not by storming our way to checkmate, but by being willing to sit down with the other players in the first place.

So good luck, Ivy. Take chances. Play smart.

And have fun storming the castles.

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A Mother by Any Other Name

The siren call takes many forms. But the intent is unmistakable.

“Moooooooommmmmmm!”

“Mo-mo-mo-mo-mo-mom!”

“Mommy?”

And when the call goes up, so does Heather. To get Missy some more tea. To hunt up some art supplies. To listen to a question, or unlace a pair of shoes, or smile at how Missy has dressed herself with two odd socks and an inside-out shirt.

It’s all in the job description. Even if it’s not necessarily the traditional job.

For our developmentally disabled ward Missy, “Mom” has always been more of a job description than a literal relationship. Her own birth mother, Heather’s grandma, died 10 years ago, three years before Heather and I became Missy’s guardians and caregivers. Missy has certainly never forgotten her, something we’re reminded of each April when she becomes a little sad and quiet around the time Grandma Val passed.

But Missy – who sometimes seems to be 4, sometimes 14, and sometimes 44, depending on the situation – takes a very practical approach to life. If you are living with her, loving her, and providing her with the care she needs, you are “Mom.” Sometimes regardless of gender – I’ve been “Mom” a few times in the grocery store (along with “Daddy,” “He,” and many times “Frank,” the name of her late father).

The more I think about it, the more I figure Missy has it exactly right. If you are taking on Mom’s role, you are Mom. Never mind the genes. Never mind the spot on the family tree. Never mind how a dozen dictionaries define the word.

Wil Wheaton once said that being a nerd isn’t about what you love, it’s about how you love it. I think you could say something similar about being a mom – it’s not who you care for, it’s about how you care for them.

And so, mothers everywhere, by any name and description – each year, Mother’s Day is for you, too.

You may be raising the children you brought into this world yourself.

You may be raising a family that’s more blended than a Dairy Queen blizzard, with “halfs” and “steps” and other prefixes that only matter to a genealogist.

You may be the guardian to someone who needs your care and attention to get through the day, whatever their age.

You may be the grown child who has suddenly had to become the parent to a parent, keeping a heart-wrenching watch that could never be fully described to another.

For you, and for the many others besides – you have claimed the name. You have taken up the mantle. You have assumed the duty with all its care, pain, and sudden crises at 3 o’clock in the morning.

You are Mom. And Mother’s Day belongs to you. (Heck, every day belongs to you. But Hallmark and FTD have to make their money somewhere.)

So this day and every day, thank you.

It’s not enough. Somewhere between “Stop yelling at the dog!” and “Why are you being so quiet?”, you get taken for granted. That’s the way of most good things in life – we assume they’re just there, invisible and vital as oxygen, until the moment reminds us how vital, how essential.

And in that moment, we don’t care what anyone calls you.

You are Mom.

And that’s enough.

Thank you, Heather my love.

Thank you, all.

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Unfinished Tales

It’s barely even March and I am already looking ahead to summer.

This is not normal for me. I’m the person who, when given a choice between the blazing hot and the freezing cold, will take the weather that requires a coat, a scarf, and a chorus of “Walking In a Winter Wonderland.” After all, you can bundle up, but there’s only so far you can peel down. And when you’re looking at the chores ahead, snow melts, but grass grows. Right?

I’m not saying I’m a complete polar bear. Spring is when life wakes up, especially life that wears baseball gloves and purple uniforms and has one chance in a hundred of seeing the World Series this year. Fall is the time of great-smelling grills and gorgeous trees that no rake can ever keep up with.

But summer? Really?

As usual, you can blame my addiction to theater. On March 16, the Longmont Theatre Company opens a two-weekend run of “Leaving Iowa,” a show about the iconic Summer Vacation Family Road Trip. And this time around, I’m playing Dad, which means I get to invoke the Ritual Repeated Parental Warning: “Now settle down back there, or I’m pulling this car over!”

But it’s more than that, really. It’s also a story about family ties over the years. About how your perspective changes when you move from child to adult (and not just by moving into the driver’s seat). And especially about how you always think there’s more time to know someone until there suddenly isn’t.

That last one hits home. No matter what the time of year. But for me, maybe especially now.

***

A few weeks ago, many of you saw my column about the recent passing of our 21-year-old cousin Melanie. I know, because so many of you chose to respond and send your sympathies, whether through the mail, online, or in the newspaper itself. It was gratifying, healing, and even a little overwhelming to see how many people cared.

I appreciate it and I thank all of you. It brought a lot of love and warmth to a season that had suddenly become too cold even for me.

As much as I love winter, it’s become a little haunted for us. Mel left us in January. Last year, so did our long-time canine queen, Duchess the Wonder Dog. Four years ago in February, we said goodbye to Grandma Elsie. A few years before that, it was Melanie’s dad Andy – January again. Story upon story, soul upon soul.

Sometimes we had a lot of warning before the final chapter. Sometimes none at all. Always, afterward, there are the feelings of questions not asked, things not done, stories not told. It happens even when you’re close, and if there’s been any distance at all, it only magnifies the lost opportunities.

I once wrote about a folk song called “Kilkelly, Ireland,” where an Irish father and an immigrant son exchange letters across the Atlantic for 30 years. The father is always asking the son to come home to visit, the son never seems to – and by the time he finally is ready to, Dad has already passed on.

There will always be a Kilkelly moment. There will always be one last thing you meant to do or say, because as people, we never go into moments thinking they’ll be the last one. There will always be something more you wanted them to experience, whether it’s to see a great-grandchild arrive or to enter college and begin life.

Living stories don’t end neatly.

At the same time, as a kind person reminded me, they also don’t truly end.

We are all more than just ourselves. We carry pieces of every person we’ve ever loved, every story that ever intersected with our own. They shaped us, influenced us, colored the way we see the world.

And when they leave, that touch remains. We carry a little of their flame.

Their story goes on.

And so, when I mount the stage in a couple of weeks, I won’t do so alone. In fact, I’ll be carrying quite a crowd.

I just hope there’s room for all of us in the station wagon.

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First Gifts

Every year, you could count on it. The Rochat Family Christmas Eve Parade of Nightwear was the most exclusive ticket in town.

You could tell simply by looking at the invited audience, a bustling throng of three people, max, plus assorted pets. The models were not under contract anywhere else. Heck, for much of its existence, the models hadn’t even entered secondary school.

No runway in New York or Paris could touch it. Not when it was Dec. 24, the first packages had been opened, and my two sisters and I were modeling our brand-new pajamas.

“Oooh! Aaah!”

My parents, reinforced by Grandma Elsie, were most appreciative. And well they should have been. After all, they had once again completed an amazing double act: they had gotten young children excited about receiving clothes for Christmas AND ensured that said children would look presentable in family pictures the next morning.

Amazing, did I say? They made it look easy. And maybe it was. After all, they had just harnessed the most primal forces of the universe:

 

1) The desire of a child to open a gift, any gift, before Christmas morning actually arrived. Pajamas and out-of-town presents were always the exception for us, and thus eagerly torn into.

2) The desire of these children – especially my sisters – to put on a show for their parents.

3) The raw power of accumulated tradition, where something becomes exciting and anticipated simply because it’s always been.

 

With those forces on their side, even the most mundane items could become something magical. Even wonderful.

That’s a power I think the holidays still hold, though sometimes I think we’re in danger of inverting it. At a time that can be so special, we risk turning the magical into the ordinary.

It’s easy to do. We hurry and we hustle, weighed down with stress and worry and the accumulated cares of the world. December can all too easily become an obstacle course, one more list of things to do and accomplishments to check off before breathing a sigh of relief and packing it all off into the attic for another year.

We don’t stop. And look. And marvel.

Each night, someone somewhere has put out lights. They might be a soft gleam or a Disneyland glare, but it’s a moment of beauty free to any passerby. So routine we don’t think of it anymore.

Each day, you hear music you hear at no other time. And yes, some of it is silly or annoying or cringe-inducing. But some of it touches hearts and memories, different strains for different people. With me, “Good King Wenceslas” and “Here We Come A Wassailing” still bring back my English grandma; “Silent Night” still evokes my family decorating the tree while the vinyl-aided voice of John Denver explained the song’s origins.

Somewhere, always, small acts of decency and kindness and hospitality are offered and accepted, just because that’s what you do. It may not always be visible in a crowded parking lot (all things have their limits) but even if the practice sometimes falls short, the ideal is known and at least attempted. A training ground, maybe, for something quiet but vital.

Before the first bits of paper are torn and the first ribbons cut, these things and a hundred other ordinary things like them are the first gifts of the season. And if we can see the gift, if we can anticipate the gift and even desire to share it, we can re-awaken the magic all over again.

Christmas is coming. Check your gifts. The ones without labels and bows.

If you’re really lucky, there might even be some pajamas waiting for you.

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Fantastic Tales

Beware the dragons. Watch out for the trolls. And always remember that heroes may be hazardous to your health.

Not your usual prescription, I grant you. But it’s apparently second nature to Graeme Whiting, an English headmaster who made international headlines when he declared that fantasy fiction would rot your child’s mind.

No, I’m not overstating it. Kind of hard to, really.

“Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and Terry Pratchett, to mention only a few of the modern world’s ‘must-haves’, contain deeply insensitive and addictive material which I am certain encourages difficult behaviour in children,” Whiting wrote as part of a lengthy blog post on his school’s website, “yet they can be bought without a special licence, and can damage the sensitive subconscious brains of young children, many of whom may be added to the current statistics of mentally ill young children.”

You might be surprised to learn that he and I agree on exactly one thing: Parents should pay attention to what their children read. Books do indeed open doors onto many places, and every parent should know where their child is spending their time, whether it’s in the park or in the Shire.

But fantasy can open some wonderful doors indeed.

I’m not writing to disparage the more classic works that Mr. Whiting himself loves and encourages for a growing mind, such as Shakespeare or Dickens, which were also part of my reading. Enough so that I’m a bit amused. After all, Dickens was long considered popular trash by lovers of “proper literature” and as for Master Shakespeare – well, whose life couldn’t use a dose of teen marriage and suicide (Romeo and Juliet), eye-gouging (King Lear), witchcraft (Macbeth), and rape and mutilation (Titus Andronicus), with just a sprinkling of cross-dressing and humiliation of authority (Twelfth Night)?

Sure, they’re wonderful – dare I say magical? – stories. But safe? C.S. Lewis once warned visitors to Narnia that the great Aslan was “not a tame lion” and if a story has any power to it at all, it can never be considered a “safe story.” When books meet brains, anything can happen. Anything at all.

Stories have a power that the great authors of fantasy knew quite well.

“Not the Gandalf who was responsible for so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the Blue for mad adventures?” the hobbit Bilbo Baggins declares in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Tolkien has been my own Gandalf since about third grade, leading my imagination into places both terrifying and wonderful – as have many of the fantasy authors who followed in his wake. My family and I have cheered on Harry Potter, wandered with Taran and Eilonwy, leaped through wrinkles in time, and stumbled through wardrobes into unexpected worlds.

You acquire many things on a quest like that. Beautiful language. Heartbreak and hope. A decidedly quirky strain of humor. And most of all, the realization that evils can not only be survived, they can be overcome.

“Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey,” G.K. Chesterton famously wrote in 1909. “What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”

No, stories aren’t safe. Few things worth having are. But they can be priceless.

So yes, have a hand in your child’s reading. Be careful. Be aware. But be open to wonder as well. And don’t fear the dragons.

After all, that is where the treasure is to be found.

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Gee, What a Treat

It doesn’t take long for a kid to spot the dangerous houses on Halloween. Like the ones who give out raisins. Or pennies. Or candy that exists only to fill out a bargain bin. (Bit O’Honey, I’m looking at you.)

But notes home? That’s got to be a new low.

You’ve probably heard the story by now. For the 17 people who missed it, we take you now to North Dakota, where a radio caller said she planned to give notes to some trick-or-treaters that read “My, your parents raised a fat one, didn’t they?”

OK, it’s not quite that crass. But close. According to valleynewslive.com in Fargo, the letter home to Mom and Dad begins “(Your) child is, in my opinion, moderately obese and should not be consuming sugar treats to the extent of some children this Halloween season.”

Brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it? And they say neighbors don’t care anymore.

Let me call a time-out for one second. Yes, a lot of kids are becoming overweight in this country. Yes, even those without weight issues tend to inhale enough Halloween candy to light up three seasons of an anime series.

But even assuming that the woman had the best of intentions and an unerring eye for the children whose weight gain was due solely to eating habits, is there anyone out there who thinks this would actually work? Or would we get to watch a Halloween movie where Mom shapeshifts into a man-eating Bengal tiger?

I vote for tiger.

I speak from experience.

Oh, not on the trick-or-treat note circuit. Rather, from my college days working in a bookstore, the late, great City News, home of the greatest popcorn in Longmont. Like many a bookstore, we drew a lot of kids. Pretty good kids at that. But sometimes a little too … energetic, let’s say.

One boy in particular had decided to amuse himself by turning the bookstore into his personal Indy 500, doing laps at a pretty good rate of speed. It was cute, but a little dangerous; even if he didn’t run into a customer, much of the floor was hardwood and would hurt like the dickens if he wiped out.

So I came over as he made his next pass and  said with a smile, “Hey, slow down a little, tiger.”

That’s when I met Mom.

And met Mom.

And met Mom some more.

The words escape me now. The tone never will. Especially the anger that someone had trespassed on her prerogative as a parent by telling her son what to do.

I still don’t regret saying what I said to him. But I’ll never forget the lesson on how quickly confrontation can blow up, even from mild beginnings, when the subject is a child.

“Fat notes,” however well-meant, are unlikely to do more than begin a fight.

I’m not saying neighbors can’t be concerned or parents can’t be neglectful. But picking battles is always a wise idea. This particular one is for the parents, the doctor, maybe the child’s teachers. People who see the boy or girl more than just once a year in a bizarre costume. People with some idea of the child’s life and health, and what their real needs are.

People whose commitment goes beyond an envelope in a trick-or-treat bag.

I hope, after Halloween, that this worried neighbor turns her eagle eye to more than just weight. That she can keep an eye out for kids who seem to be bullied, or abused, or who just need even one friend. Those are the ones who can use a neighbor who’s unafraid of confrontation, who’s willing to stick her neck out to help one child who needs it.

They’re also the situations that require more than a short letter home, of course. They require a real investment of time and energy and love. That’s risky. And it’s not guaranteed to succeed. But it’s a battle worth fighting.

And it can always use one more person.

I hope she takes note.

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The Heart of a Bear

It was Mama Bear who gave me my first inkling of how this thing called pregnancy worked.

Papa Bear gave me some of my earliest woodland survival lessons – usually by spectacularly screwing up his own efforts.

And Brother and Sister Bear were a constant reminder that you didn’t have to always get along to love each other.

Good lessons, for a few generations. And they’re going to have to stick now. Because the teacher has left the classroom.

For those who missed it, Jan Berenstain died last week. She and her husband Stan (who died in 2005) wrote and drew the Berenstain Bears books, which became part of the go-to bookshelf for childhood. Their work was sometimes silly, sometimes touching, but always reassuring and never cruel.

As I look back from yet another birthday (Mom made me promise not to put the number in print this year), I realize why the Berenstains have worn so well. Or why they did with me, anyway.

They didn’t write down to their audience.

I don’t mean that they didn’t use simple words or tried to employ complex, multi-layered plots. But they also didn’t assume that being young meant being stupid. All it meant was that there were things you didn’t know yet – and they were ready to help fill a little of the gap.

I lived for writers like that.

As I got older, I met still more of them. Madeleine L’Engle assumed I could handle a story of hidden angels and baroque time travel. J.R.R. Tolkien pushed my third-grade vocabulary to places it hadn’t gone yet and brought it back richer for the journey. Ellen Raskin (The Westing Game) dared to dazzle me with intricate puzzles; Norton Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth) made me laugh as I learned, sometimes slipping in subtle moral lessons that wouldn’t be recognized overtly until I was older.

I count all of them, and more besides, among my teachers, friends and well-met companions.

They’re still out there – children’s writers who shape the mind instead of pacifying it, who wake it up instead of numbing it down. They may have more to compete with these days. But maybe not so much more at that; my generation was supposed to be hopelessly distracted by junk TV and Atari video games, after all.

All they need is the chance to make the acquaintance.

And maybe a little encouragement.

It’s a tricky balance; how to give a child enough guidance to learn without smothering their childhood. In his own way, Papa Bear may have been the best example, showing the idea of how to rub two sticks together, but letting his Bear Scouts light the blaze.

Granted, that was because Papa couldn’t light a fire to save his life. But still.

Yes, you have to provide the tools. Maybe even make clear how they work. And then you step back and watch. Maybe ready to help, but always ready to cheer.

And good books by good writers may be some of the best, longest-lasting tools of all.

So thank you, Stan and Jan. Thank you for getting us started down the road. You may have been simple, but you were always worthwhile.

Because of you, we’ve all got something to bear in mind.