The Truant Mom
I remember rambling along in a long yellow bus filled with 60 second and third graders heading to the La Brea Tar Pits. Another month, another trip to see and touch the history, social science and life we’d been learning about in school. I saw tide pools, art exhibits at LACMA, Olvera Street and more. Learning used to include a vital tactile element. Today, my kids learn to test, not learn to learn. And certainly with the sad, sorry state of California schools, we are not teaching or learning for the benefit of building a whole child.
I refuse to allow my children’s education to be reduced to filling in bubble exams. Call me truant. I’m not going to stand for a lesser education for my kids because the California economy has held our schools hostage, reducing their education to test taking frenzies.
So. I’m a truant mom, taking my kids’ education into my own hands and taking advantage monthly to support their public school education with what used to be best practices: Shark “hunting” at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Fleet Week tour of military ships in San Francisco, a hands-on experience of planets and space at the Academy of Sciences, building claymation videos at Zeum to demonstrate art and computer science, and, the Impressionists exhibit at the DeYoung museum yesterday.
I’m not a home schooling type. It’s not my thing; it’s not the kids’ thing. But yesterday… yesterday was magic. We named our day: GO-GONE (in nod to Gauguin). Here’s how we spent the day:
8 a.m. — Spell out Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Gauguin for kids and have them research the artists they will see today. We used Yahoo! Kids to do the research.
9 a.m. — Draw and paint. Kids used Impressionist book to gain inspiration on drawing. We made paper airplanes and banners using colors of the artists. We talked about cubism — how a cone can be a tree and a circle its fruit. We drew what we thought was cubist in style.
10 a.m. — Meeting! We ate French crepes at a patisserie nearby in honor of the Muse d’Orsay (where the Impressionist collection is on loan from), and discussed one thing about each artist we knew. We cut out pictures of our favorite things we wanted to see. Van Gogh was the most popular: Sunflowers, Starry Night, the Artist’s Room. The kids knew that Cezanne had two sisters: Maria and Rose (my aunt and mother’s names, respectively). These tiny tidbits of information excited them.
11 a.m. — We head to the bookstore to find kid-friendly books on impressionist artists. Two books of Van Gogh led the kids to be bounding around the store talking about the Sunflowers and can’t wait to get to see them later today.
2 p.m. — The De Young exhibit is packed. The kids get their own maps, their own audio tour head sets (Thing 1 called it the “Mini DJ”). They hit the exhibit with excitement. One piece by another Impressionist featured a straw hat. My kid told me, “This is by Van Gogh.” When I told him it wasn’t, he told me, “Then why is Van Gogh’s hat in the bottom right corner of the painting?” A man standing nearby tapped me on the shoulder, “You have got to be kidding!,” he told me. I beamed — beamed! — with pride.
4 p.m. — We write stories on our Un Dia del Museo — an essay in Spanish on our day at the museum. Words come flowing from the kids — writing pouring from their minds to the page.
My babies fell into bed last night, exhausted and filled-up with colors and images and textures drifting them to sleep quickly. I am reminded again that parenthood cannot afford to be a complacent role. I literally saw my children learning by observance, growing from experience and applying their in-school learnings to real world beauty. I’m a truant mom. And I’m okay with that.
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Mama Bear Pounces on Unsuspecting Teacher
I can see the headline now, “Mama Bear Pounces on Unsuspecting Teacher” with a horrific tale of a mother at wits-end with her child’s teacher. It’s not pretty. Trust me, because you’re looking at Mama Bear. Rowr.
I’ve been wondering what’s going on with my Thing 1, a normally fun-loving, silly, smart, smartass, school-loving kid. About a week after school started he began to refer to himself as “bad,” started lying, getting in trouble at school almost every day and yelling at his friends. At home, his regular excitement for school was replaced with silence. Something was wrong. I asked the doctor, talked to friends and to my Thing. Why the seismic shift? Somehow for all my investigation into what could be bothering my child, it never occurred to me that it was his new teacher that would be the cause. And when it hit me — it hit me. Hard.
In a fit of frustration, I pounced on the poor woman. I screamed and pointed and cried. I smashed my hand into my fist and went off on her, “YOU are the reason my child is unhappy. You know what’s wrong with him? YOU! YOU!” Oh, that was just the beginning. I went completely off-the-deep-end. After 10 minutes, I left, exhausted and frustrated. She had said nothing.
Somehow, the mystery had clicked for me and I was mad as hell. I — who writes strategic marketing plans for school programs for fun, who worships my kids’ teachers and promotes their school and their programs like it’s a full-time job — completely let-loose. Never mind that this woman is a seasoned, highly regarded teacher with a stellar reputation. I was the mama bear protecting her baby and there was nothing that was going to stop me from letting this woman know how I felt.
I went home and was sorry. Not sorry that I’d finally gotten to the bottom of what was going on with my kid, but sorry that I’d spoken to someone with such passion. I wrote an apology note immediately, but you and I both know, an apology at that point is worthless, I caused more damage than she could have ever done to my kid. I am now going to be known as the crazy mom that went off on her kid’s teacher.
The next day I read about the father who had boarded a school bus to defend his daughter being bullied. The normally upstanding guy with a nice family and good home simply lost it. He told CNN the next day: ”She finally opened up and told me what was going on,” Jones said. “And from there, you know, being a dad just loving my daughter … and just loving all my kids, you know. … [At] that point, my heart broke when I [saw] her standing there … [she] wasn’t going to get on the bus crying. And a dad is a dad. And I was going to be her protector that day.”
I can relate. Truly. My feelings as a mom overruled any logical, reasonable behavior I could have mustered. I truly feel for James Jones as a parent and as a dad who was overcome by the need to protect his child. I feel for him as a parent who must apologize, like I did, for behavior unbecoming to any upstanding person. I feel for him as a man who made a bad situation worse, because that’s just what I did. I made it about me, not about the issue.
There is something carnal about parents and their children. Maybe it’s instinct to protect or an overwhelming sense of responsibility to make their lives as happy and peaceful as they can possibly be. Maybe it’s a chemical reaction that bears have to their cubs — keeping danger at bay with all the ferociousness they can muster. Maybe I’m just a mom.
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Confessions of a Non-Reading Mom
Before I had children, I had a notion about what a mom should be — cuddly and kind, strict and forgiving, lenient and understanding. I visualized myself teaching my children to walk and talk and count and, of course, read. I saw myself working with pride in the children’s classrooms teaching other kids to read as well as my own were sure to. My children, of course, would be voracious readers, and I, at the helm, leading them through the aisles of Hicklebee’s famed children’s book store.
As we all know by now, all of our fantasies of parenthood don’t come true. I turned out to be a mom that didn’t read much with her kids. Sigh. Blame it on the exhaustion of being the mother of twins, push it off on being too worn down, cast the responsibility on the babysitter… Somehow, after all my visions of what kind of parent I’d be, I wasn’t the one to foster reading in my children.
Reading to my children somehow became a burden. It annoyed me that they pushed the pages to get to the next one, interrupted me with question after question, went on tangents unrelated to what I was reading. I tried in vain to imitate Mr Toad’s deep throaty voice and Ms. Spider’s high-pitched tone. It flat-out annoyed me to read with my kids. I felt horrible about it. Awful, actually. I felt like a mommy failure. I needed help.
I went to the library and spoke with a woman at the Biblioteca Latinoamericana in San Jose, a library with one of the foremost bilingual collections in California. She told me to read the newspaper outloud to the kids. She told me to read Time magazine, read People magazine, read anything to the kids. She gave me permission to not read Dr. Seuss. I stood in front of this stranger and cried. Just read, she said. Read for my own joy and the kids will absorb the magic of words and reading. The angst I had over reading children’s books that were not enjoyable to me was coming through to my kids. What they needed, she taught me, was the feeling that mommy enjoyed reading — they needed to see me value reading and how reading envelops every part of society. That woman, that precious librarian, changed my life.
The first thing I did was start reading signs and headlines in the car to the kids. I read recipes outloud and my kids loved every second of it. I read the Yahoo! front page headlines outloud. And in Spanish, I read anything I could find. Most books were children’s books, but that’s about my reading level in Spanish. I started to see my children engage me in reading and from that I gained inspiration to read further.
Step two was to find children’s books that worked for the whole family. The problem was that I had a slew of Disney-esque books or See Jane Run boardbooks (or rather: bored-books) — each of them less inspiring than the next. I needed to fix this ASAP. My sister-in-law had bought books from a little company called Chinaberry and I thought I might be able to find interest in some of those books. I spent hours pouring through their website finding alternative books that I found interesting. There were stories of native American children, of world cultures. There were books of children’s poetry that I found simply incredible and sweet. I found Goodnight Moon in Spanish, which was super fun for me to read with the kids. I bought Heather Has Two Mommies but it made me feel uncomfortable, so I ditched it. I found a book about Amelia Earheart and a wonderful book about buildings called Iggy Peck Architect. In finding books that interested me, I found that my kids were more interested in reading with me. That was a huge relief.
My third step was to acquiesce my mommy responsibilities in reading with the children. My partner @La_gringa took over the role of reading to the kids before bed. It turned out beautifully — the kids and @La_Gringa love this ritual. My stepdad took it upon himself to buy a series of books he had enjoyed reading to his kids 30 years ago (the great Ferdinand was one) and the kids know that Granddad will read to them whenever they visit. My mom sat with the kids while they learned to read in preschool and then kindergarten. Unlike me, her patience for sounding out syllables was unwavering. The village had stepped in to raise up my children where I lacked.
The kids are now in first grade, are biliterate in Spanish and English, reading fluently in two languages above grade level. Most of their reading is non-fiction, which I find fascinating, and all of their exams are solely in Spanish. This week they both received Accelerated Reader awards for earning over 90 percent on their tests — they were two of only 10 first-graders in their school honored. Despite me, these children have a passion for reading.
Teaching my children to read was so much harder than I ever dreamed. We had to adapt: Dr. Seuss was out, Thomas the Tank was replaced with a how-to-build-a-train type books, written by people a lot less famous. I wasn’t the one that taught my children to read, but I did find a way to show them a respect and love for language. Last night my children listened as I read them a recipe — Sea Bass, olive oil, teaspoon of sea salt — while they retold a story from a Magic Treehouse book. The smells of the kitchen and conversation mutually engulfed us in the beauty of words.
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Side Gigs
