Escape

We've been absolutely blasted by heat this past week; today, Sunday, wasn't nearly so bad, and the coming week should be fantastic--mid to upper seventies.  The thermostat goes up again next Sunday, however...my son has Monday the 21st off for a "teacher learning day," and I'm taking advantage of that to head out of town with him next Sunday, just the two of us, for a quick trip to Monterey.  We'll keep cool and visit the beach, and also see various sea mammals on a tour of the bay.

Any mom knows how important it is to program little moments of escape into every day, every week, every month, every year.  Both for the mom's sanity, and for the sake of the children, who (usually) thrive on adventure.  My son, however, escapes into his iPad on an all-too-regular basis.  His reaction to the Monterey trip was lukewarm at best; I suspect he was wondering "Will I still have access to the iPad?"  

His iPad is becoming the thing from which we must escape.

Missiles and iPads

I would like my son to experience being in the wild for days on end...I would also like him to learn to exert himself, in whatever activity he strives to do well; exert himself to the point where he loses track of himself and of time.  I've gotten there sometimes when playing the piano, sometimes when writing.  That's what "wild" means to me, in any pursuit.  You lose track of yourself, yet you're in perfect control; you are the activity, at least for a short span of time.

I was going to write about missiles and iPads...

Today we visited the old Nike missile launch site, SF-88, out in the Marin Headlands.  It's the only restored Nike missile site in the country...and we stumbled upon the guided tour, purely by accident, and so were able to descend into the concrete bunker where the missiles are still stored.  It was a remarkable experience for my son, for each of us, in fact, to walk down that steep metal staircase and see those four white missiles, about twenty-five feet long and five feet wide.  Because he was one of only three children on the tour, our son was selected by the volunteer, a former missile site worker and Air Force veteran, to come forward and push one of the missiles a few feet down a track; then the crowd of about 40 tourists went back upstairs to see one of them hoisted up out of the ground and positioned so it was pointing about 85 degrees, almost straight up into the sky.

It was a strange site for me, as a participant in many anti-first-strike demonstrations in the 80s and early 90s, to see this old missile base.  They were planning to launch these Nike Hercules missiles, carrying a payload of about 1.2 kilotons of nuclear material, to blow up incoming Soviet bombers.  A remarkably crude Cold War defense tactic that, according to the Air Force veteran, worked, in the sense that World War III never occurred...it's chilling, however, when you read about how many false warnings and near-launches did occur during the Cold War.  Operating under the MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) strategy can only succeed if each player is completely sane and never makes a single mistake.

The Air Force veteran and tour guide argued that MAD would not work today, because of ISIS and other terrorist groups...I would argue that we should not assume it would have continued to work indefinitely under the old system of the two superpowers...nor that it will continue to work today (we still have a simplified MAD system in place after all).  Also, the conflict between those superpowers helped give rise to some of the most corrupt, authoritarian political systems in the Middle East in the sixties and seventies.  I'm not saying that the MAD regime led directly to ISIS; it's obviously not as simple as that. My central point here is that we should never assume, in any situation, that all players will act rationally.  People go off the rails all the time.

What to do then?  First, be aware of what's happening...which brings me to iPads.

My son didn't want to go to the Nike Missile site.  We had just toured the Marine Mammal Center, about a mile away, and he thought it was time to go home.  "I hate Nike Missile sites," he announced. I told him we were going to the missile site anyway.  Once we were in the car (I'd wanted to hike over to the missile site from the Marine Mammal Center, but he would not) he asked for the iPad; I told him I didn't bring it.  "Could I have the iPhone?"

I understand the lure of the i-devices.  They create perfect worlds, where missiles and tanks blow up people but no one is injured.  I detest the amount of violence and fantasy available at the App Store, much of it free of charge.  Then--we go to a real missile site...where the fantasy, in some ways, is even more intense.  Sending nuclear bombs to blow up incoming Soviet bombers; and if even one of those bombers gets through, that's probably enough firepower to destroy one-third of the United States...it all makes sense?

I don't know if my son will remember this visit to the missile site; and, was the sight of that one 30-foot missile pointing almost straight upward, with the cloudy Marin sky as a backdrop, enough of a dose of reality to counteract the painless, flowery explosions of all the missiles on his iPad?  I doubt it very much.

Wild Part 2

I need to nurture the "wild" in me, if any still exists, because let's face it, my life is pretty tame at the moment.  I'm a stay-at-home mom.  I raise a child and keep house.  And I do it in the San Francisco Bay Area, in Silicon Valley, where the majority of the population eats three squares and goes on fancy vacations on a regular basis.

Participating in a triathlon is one small way to experience--for an hour and a half?--some sort of inner wildness. But Nathalie Goldberg and Hemingway both got it right--nothing captures the wild in us like the activity of writing, when it's done right.  More on this tomorrow--oh, it's "tomorrow," I see; but I'll pretend that it's still Friday.

Wild

I completed another short-short story today, which brings the total to 104.

I've more or less accomplished what I set out to accomplish with these stories, though as usual I'm wondering, "How many of them are really any good?"

My plan is to complete six more, then weed out the worst 10 of them, the ones which will make me cringe in ten years, the ones that stray furthest from the core idea of this collection (which I won't talk about here.

For my next one hundred stories...

Yes, I do plan to continue with the short-short story or "flash fiction" form.  I suits me; I think I can do something interesting (possibly even unique?) with it.

For the next one hundred stories I'd like to shake up the prose a bit...how, exactly, I don't know...but something a little more wild, maybe.

Balance

Mostly what I've been talking about and joking about with the "Cheetah Mom" idea, is balance--helping your child achieve a balanced, healthy and rewarding life.  We all want our children to try hard, but not to the point of depression or mental illness.  We all want them to maintain their self-esteem, but not become self-absorbed.  We all want them to excel at a certain number of activities--hopefully some of them school-related--but not cut off all social ties in order to do so.

One way to achieve this elusive thing called balance is to resist piling on the after-school activities--at the tender age of five or six, especially.

Today when I dropped off my boy at the start of school, I was chatting with the dad of a classmate, an adorable boy with one of the sweetest natures I've ever seen.  He is almost always smiling to himself; and he seems to have a social awareness well beyond the norm for his age.  He came up to my shy son the other day at a birthday party--my son was sitting on the sidelines while the other kids were eagerly playing pin the tail--and held out a donkey tail to him, encouraging him to join in the fun.   Some other moms had mentioned that this boy was already on a swim team, so I asked the dad about it.  "Yeah; for now," he said.  I wondered what that meant.  "Well, practices are three or four days a week.  My daughter was on a soccer team, but it got to be too much. You know how it is, Silicon Valley--everything's competitive."

Six year old kids, already practicing a sport at least four times a week?  But this is getting to be the norm.

What's wrong with that? I hear some parents say.  But there must be a reason why so many teens in this area are stressed to the point of considering or committing suicide...could it be, perhaps, that their lives are simply way out of balance?  And have been, not just for a few years, but since they were five or six?

Now I sound like I'm preaching, or ranting...I suppose I am.  It's late and the weather's been brutal (close to 100 degrees the last three days), so I'm turning in on this grumpy note.

Cheetah Mom Part 2

Most of the moms at my school make sure that their 6-year-olds are involved in at least two or three after-school activities--and often four or five:  swimming, soccer, tennis, music, martial arts, math, art, chess club, golf, 4H, ice skating, Cub Scouts, Brownies, coding, fencing, archery, knight training, rugby, street-cleaning...just kidding at the end there...

I understand the impulse to provide, provide, provide...all the opportunities possible...give your kid a leg up, feed his/her natural interests, make sure they are up to snuff, make sure they are socially well-adjusted; make sure that they're not cussing you out at the age of fifteen:  "Why didn't you let me take ballet when I was three and a half; now it's too late!  I hate you!"

I understand the impulse, but...I also see the dangers of overscheduling at this age.  My son loves to let his mind wander.  He tells me long, elaborate stories about subjects that interest him (penguins, dragons, and dinosaurs, good guys and bad guys).  He loves to goof around at home on the computer--we've bought him a couple online computer programming courses for kids and he's tearing through them.  I've encouraged him to start private music or art lessons but haven't pushed too hard; maybe in another six months.  He's involved in a baseball league two-month training program that's meeting once a week this fall, through October, though he's a reluctant participant at this point so I don't know how long that will last.  He reads pretty well, maybe on a 2nd or 3rd grade level, though the amount of time he spends reading at home is far below the time he spends playing internet video games (my husband and I are striving to limit his iPad time to no more than an hour a day).  I'm interested in signing him up for either Cub Scouts or 4H, mostly to get him out in nature with kids his age and let him experience certain activities--woodworking, for instance, or rowing--that he's not likely to pick up by hanging out with his mom and dad.  I want to take him camping.

But all in good time.  For one thing, he's just three weeks into first grade.  Time enough for after-school activities in another month or so, after he's really settled into the school routine and the homework routine (so far, no homework, but I believe the teacher said he'll start getting weekly homework assignments at the end of this week).

On the other hand...maybe I should encourage him to pursue a select handful of activities just a little more vigorously, even now...make him work straight through the difficult phases of those activities, the plateaus where progress seems impossible, until he gets to the other side and shines at them. Cheetah moms find ways to get their kids to "work," don't they?  To move fast, without making it feel like work--they turn it into play.  At least that's my image of the average cheetah mom.

On the other hand--he's six.  I'm overthinking this.  I've been joking with the "Cheetah Mom" idea--but in that last paragraph I almost took it seriously.

I need to let him dream, to vegetate.  One scheduled activity a week is okay.

So much unspoken yet constant pressure in this area (San Francisco Bay Area) to get our kids to "perform" in various ways...to make the grade.  And why?  What are the brass rings we're offering them?  Doctors overwhelmed with bureaucratic paperwork; university professors completely obsessed about getting tenure or keeping up with impossible course loads; software developers working sixteen hours a day to release a product so full of bugs it never sells...I'm sorry but the futility of much of our busywork is only too apparent.

Can we let our children dream and have fun, and not freak out about winning all the time?

I hearby renounce the "Cheetah Mom" title, even as a joke.

Cheetah Mom

Last May marked the approximate one-year anniversary of a knee problem--Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome (PFPS), my doctor labelled it, when I saw her in November of 2014.  I think it might have been caused by a combination of my very big five-year-old slamming his body down on my knee on a regular basis (sitting down forcefully on it, in other words), and my constant ascent/descent of the stairway in our house, at least twenty times a day.  

My doctor demonstrated one very feeble exercise I could try to treat this condition, swinging her leg slowly back and forth about 24 inches.  This did absolutely nothing for me.  I researched the condition online, and found some very useful exercises at the Kaiser web site, a series of four moves which, when I tried them, did seem to help ease the pain to some degree.

For several months after that, I would do the exercises for a few days, then drop them, then pick them up again for another few days, then forget about them for a week.  I wasn't taking them very seriously, and (surprise surprise) my knee wasn't improving.  The pain would subside, then for no apparent reason, flare up--moderate pain, not excruciating, but bad enough that I couldn't run without feeling pain with every step of my left leg; stairs were also difficult for me.

Finally, last May, something in me snapped.  Would I live like this for the rest of my life?  How could I hope to remain healthy if I couldn't exercise?  My body felt horrible and I was always tired.

I decided to exercise at least 25 minutes a day, every single day, without fail, for at least a year.  I decided one day--in tears, feeling nearly hopeless.  "Well if it's going to hurt with every other step I take, I just don't care; I'm still going jogging today."  And it did hurt, those first few runs.  Every other step.  But the encouraging part was--after I'd jogged about five times, the pain would subside during the run, about halfway into it.

I didn't jog every day.  That would have been crazy...the stress on my knee would have caused further injury; of that I have little doubt.  I ran about twice a week, and on the other days, I swam, biked or walked.  All at a slow-to-moderate pace.  I also did yoga, the knee exercises, and free weights; about five minutes' worth of each, every day.

About a month into it, I announced to my husband that I was going to do a triathlon sometime in the near future.  I've always loved all three components of the triathlon:  swimming, biking, jogging; I want to see how it feels to do all three in a race.  I have no illusions of greatness--I'm much too slow for that.  My swimming is pretty good, but not stellar; ditto for my biking; and my running times are god-awful.

But none of that matters; I want to do a triathlon, with a smile on my face at least half the time; I want to have fun with it.

I've selected what seems like a good sprint triathlon for beginners, the Marin County Triathlon, held November 7-8 in San Rafael.

Having made up my mind to do it, I've started training for it--training hard sometimes--and after three months, I'm happy to say that my knee is doing much, much better.  And (nice side benefit) I feel healthy in a way that I haven't felt since my son was born.

Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome is one of the most poorly-understood joint conditions I've ever heard about or read about.  They know what it is, more or less--the back of the kneecap rubbing against the thighbone, an absence of sufficient cartilage in that area--but there is no clear understanding in the medical community about how to treat it (as evidenced by my own doctor).

My own unscientific experiment has convinced me, however, that exercise, even vigorous at times, has a wonderful effect on this condition.  I've read somewhere that exercising the knee can actually build cartilage, and therefore aids in healing PFPS.  I certainly hope it's true; and judging from the much-reduced, nearly-nonexistent pain in my knee, even when climbing stairs or jogging 3 miles, I am growing more and more convinced that this has happened for me.

My regular exercise routine has had a beneficial effect on my child as well; he is suddenly interested in running a road race.  Starting two weeks ago, we've gone jog-walking at least three times a week.  I wish it were a little less walking, a little more jogging--but it's a start.

Instead of a tiger mom, I aspire to become a cheetah mom.  I want to move fast and well, and teach my son to move fast and well--in every domain that interests him.  Not because I want him to win; I just want him to see how fun life can be when you can move that way.