SIMCHA FISHER, FOR MOTHER'S DAY.

"THE CHILDREN'S SUBLIME." My piece on Maurice Sendak. The New York Times obituary was also quite good. RIP.

SPEAKING OF LATE LINKS: Make your Easter eggs look like your dad in the '70s! Via Unequally Yoked.

"YOU'RE NO BOTHER TO ME AT ALL." Via Jesse Walker.

REMEMBER, YOU DON'T HAVE SUFFERING ESP.

IT'S A WISE CHILD...: Saturday night I watched The Return (Возврашение), a recent Russian flick in which two boys go on a camping trip with their recently-returned, long-estranged father and his dark secrets. It's a small movie which punches far above its weight class due to the very true-to-life performances of the two boys, whose relationship undergoes multiple shifts in power dynamics over the course of the movie, and to the color-drenched cinematography. Russia looks just gorgeous here, alive and young and scary. The movie is shot in a way I realized I associate with contemporary horror movies: Everything is bleached or drenched, lots of sickly yellows and drained grays and deep, plush blues. The textures are so finely-notched that you can feel them under your fingertips.

I WOULD RATHER NOT GO BACK TO THE OLD HOUSE: I have a post at the spoilerous blog, comparing the endings of Silent House and Veronica Mars season one.

"WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?"

...Because the expected answer to this question is always a type of job, it reinforces the idea that the way to find identity and value is through career. Our society is already saturated with messages that the title on your business card is directly connected to your worth as a human being. When kids are bombarded by the questions about which job they’ll eventually hold, it trains them to view adult life through the lens of their place in the workforce.

Similarly, it undermines the concept of vocation. Recently I saw a coloring book where kids could choose to decorate the picture that represented what they wanted to be when they grew up. Among the options were a nurse, a lawyer, a veterinarian, a police officer, a firefighter, and a mom. It was disturbing to see the fruits of a worldview that has no understanding of the difference between a vocation and a job, with motherhood listed alongside ways to get a paycheck. And when a child is constantly encouraged ponder her future career—with the issue posed, as it often is, as one that will define her life—it channels her discernment efforts toward whether she wants to be a musician or a teacher, rather than the more important question of whether she’s called to married life or religious life.

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ETA: I like this comment!

I’m all for abolishing “what do you do?” from the grown-up lexicon. When an adult find themselves unemployed, underemployed or in a dead-end job, or even someone who owns their own business and severely struggling, it’s a very uncomfortable conversation stopper.
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but for kids? Why that would wipe out the beautiful opportunities for children to respond to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with, “An octopus!” or “A dinosaur.”
We can’t have that!

COLOR PHOTOS OF AMERICAN CHILDREN, 1940S. Via Flavorwire. Last one is my favorite.

"THE SECRET OF NIMH": A Kindertrauma tribute!

"HOW I GOT GOOD CATHOLIC BOOKS INTO MY LOCAL LIBRARY SYSTEM (AND HOW YOU CAN TOO!)" Via... maybe Simcha Fisher?

I immediately thought of Wesley Hill's book (not Catholic but we will overlook that for the moment) and less-immediately thought of two kids' books I loved, The Satanic Mill and The Wicked Enchantment. I wrote about them in an old piece which is very flawed but with whose basic thesis I still agree, here. (The 2009 date is when it was reprinted--I'm pretty sure it was originally written in 2002.) Other books I'd push: Kathy Shaidle's Lobotomy Magnificat, Tim Powers's Declare, and Alan Bray's The Friend. You guys doubtless have your own candidates!

INSEPARABLE: I review A Separation for First Things. Please take their headline lightly (otherwise it's pushier than I intended), and I should have proofread this piece better! But the main thing is that this is a terrific movie which you all should see if you get a chance... if you like depressing familial naturalism, I guess. Yours 'til the kitchen sinks etc etc.

MY AMCONMAG ARTICLE ABOUT THE CULTURE OF FEAR OF DIVORCE is online! Like I said, I'm basically happy with how this turned out.

If America has endured a “divorce revolution” since California passed no-fault divorce in 1969, we’ve now entered the counterrevolutionary phase. Divorce rates have fallen from their peak in the early ’80s, the deep pain often felt by children of divorce is openly acknowledged, and young Americans typically express both fear and a moral horror at divorce. They are determined not to repeat the mistakes of previous generations; avoiding divorce is a constant anxiety, even obsession.

But as with most purely reactionary cultural movements, the revolt against divorce has been much better at targeting what it rejects than figuring out what it’s for. In a strange, sad twist, the divorce counterrevolution has only weakened our marriage culture more.

Here are three things we’ve ignored as we make divorce (and divorced people) the scapegoat for broader problems of family breakdown.

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IT'S A LONG ROAD FOR A BOX OF CHOCOLATES: Words from a champion... skier? Possibly a skier. I don't sport.

...All of this means it’s the ideal occasion for the “Long Road” speech. As in, it’s a long road we’re traveling, people. As parents cheering from the sidelines we can’t help but want our kids to succeed at everything they do, on every outing. We understand that real progress is often a barely perceptible crawl, and that what we really want for our kids is long term success in life, not in a silly sporting event. But still, we secretly hope for success every time. Wouldn’t it be easier to just have the good days and put off the agony of defeat indefinitely, or at least until adulthood?

I can say from experience that the fantasy of child stardom is not all its cracked up to be. The pros are, of course, an early sniff of glory and an instant endorphin hit of success. Up into my early teens I won every ski race I entered. I fell and got up, and won. My boots got stolen from the car so I borrowed a friend’s mother’s boots, and won. A big kid in ski boots stepped on my bare toes and broke them the day before a race, and the next day I won. You get the picture. Yay me.

But then one day, I didn’t win. And I kept not winning, like it was my new job, until it felt my world had crumbled. I had three close friends who resided solidly in my rear view mirror during my young days of untrammeled fabulousness. All three of them scooted past me and made their ways on to the US Ski Team while I ground my gears. They were teaching me the lesson I had taught them long ago—that sooner or later you’ll get your butt kicked, so you’d better know how to deal with it. I did not appreciate the lesson. ...

Not that true success has anything to do with “making it” in a sport or not. There is no “it”, no achievement that confers success on you. It really is all about finding what matters to you and going after it with all you’ve got. How often do we get to do that?

The long-term view is a very tough perspective for a young person to have. One kid going through an exceptionally frustrating bout of character building summed it to his parents as follows: “I know that this is making me a better person. But right now it sort of sucks.”

He’s right. And there’s no way around it. Dwelling on disappointment is neither healthy nor productive, but disappointment in itself isn’t such a bad thing. It means you have some skin in the game. Coaches and parents may seem to be discrediting the right to be disappointed, and diluting the value of a competitive spirit with default comments like “just have fun,” and “keep smiling.” I still cringe a bit when I interpret those words as admonishments. But as a quasi grown up, I get the broader intent, the reminder to keep your eye on the bigger prize, on enjoying the process. Enjoy the things you get from having the dream, making the effort and going out each day with a goal to get just a little better.

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CHILDREN'S LONGING FOR GENDER: I basically agree with this email from a friend. I'd add that, as she says, parents can and should meet kids' longing for gender in some ways... while resisting kids' tendency toward really rigid and sometimes destructive ideas about gender (for example, the tendency to mark out some activities which are generally fruitful for both sexes, like crying or art, as the territory of only one sex). As I indicated here, a unisex world would lack some necessary beauty--but so would a rigidly-gendered, stereotype-affirming world. Parents can teach flexibility while modeling adult life as man and woman. At least, I think they can...!

Hi Eve, this is a bit late but I have been thinking about your post about whether we can have gender roles without reducing them to functions. It's been a quandary to me for a long time, so I don't have the answer, but your opener about young kids' clothes reminded me of taking developmental psych as an undergrad. A common refrain I heard, in my feminist-leaning college, was, "I thought gender roles were something society imposed on kids, until I actually had kids." One person who had a revelation along those lines was the psychologist Vivian Paley, not so much from having kids as teaching kindergarten, which inspired her to write an entire book about how her kindergarteners tried to define themselves as male and female. Since they were years away from the business end of gender, they tended to latch on to secondary and sometimes arbitrary things. I don't remember many details after 20 years, but sometimes the kids would make up rules like "Boys skip, girls hop." So when you're looking at little kids' clothes -- at least if they aren't too little to talk -- keep in mind that a lot of these choices may have been insisted upon by the kids themselves. (It helps, of course, that there's a whole industry of children's products happy to pander to this.)

Many people outgrow that sort of thing, but still, 'the child is the father of the man,' especially when you're talking about a physical discipline like figure skating that people have to start in childhood to get really good at. But that's also all the more reason for kids to have strong adult figures of both sexes in their lives -- like, say, parents -- because otherwise the random rules their peers make up can end up defining gender for them. At five, a child isn't going to understand abstract concepts like 'icon' and 'genre', but they can look at an adult and say, 'I want to be like that,' and grow into understanding by imitation. If I do end up going to grad school in psych, it will be very interesting to find out what's happened in the last 20 years on this front. Once you've realized 'OMG gender differences are probably innate!' the next issue is, 'Now what do we do about it?'

DUBNER VS. DUBNER:

...First, the Dubner story is a reminder of the critical importance of how we – as Christians, and as humans – understand death. For both Stephen and his mother, the spark that led to their respective rejections of their families’ religious views and their own conversions was the way in which death was dealt with by these families. As a child, Florence Greenglass wanted to understand why her family feared death so deeply that they never talked about it – indeed, never told her that her own grandfather had died – while their Catholic neighbors marked the house of the dead with a ribbon and their children freely discussed whether the newly deceased had gone to heaven or purgatory. In becoming a Catholic, she embraced Christ’s victory of death, pinning her hopes on the joys of heaven: death no longer needed to be feared. But ironically, it was a very similar frustration that led Florence’s reflective and intelligent son away from Catholicism. When his father died, the ten-year-old Stephen was deeply uncomfortable with the way in which his death was treated almost as a joyful occasion in the family, with much talk of the happiness of the deceased in Heaven – and little room for the living to grieve on earth.

It’s worth noting that Stephen did not know – at the time – that his father had been profoundly depressed, struggling for days to get out of bed; he thus could not understand what must have been very genuine feelings on his mother’s part that the long-suffering Paul was indeed in a better place. At the same time, his Catholic household failed in the same way that Florence’s secular Jewish one did: forgetting – in the adults’ resolute decision that death was, respectively, either a terrifying evil or almost a non-event – to make room for a child to make inquiry of the reality of death and to come to terms with it.

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"TO THE MOTHER WITH ONLY ONE CHILD." Beautiful, and fairly raw:

Dear Mother of Only One Child,

Don’t say it. Before the words can even pass your lips, let me beg you: don’t say, “Wow, you have nine kids? I thought it was hard with just my one!”

My dear, it is hard. You’re not being a wuss or a whiner when you feel like your life is hard. I know, because I remember having “only one child.” You may not even believe how many times I stop and reflect on how much easier my life is, now that I have nine children.

All right, so there is a lot more laundry. Keeping up with each child’s needs, and making sure they all get enough attention, is a constant worry. And a stomach bug is pretty much the end of the world, when nine digestive tracts are afflicted.

But I remember having only one child, and it was hard—so very hard. Some of the difficulties were just practical: I didn’t know what I was doing, had to learn everything. People pushed me around because I was young and inexperienced. But even worse were the emotional struggles of learning to be a mother.

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He used to pretend that pencils were long cigarette holders and would glide around rooms flicking ashes into flowerpots, saying things like, "Daddy, don't be droll."
--Christopher Coe, I Look Divine

IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN: A genuinely illuminating interview with Maurice Sendak. I was wary at first, thinking he might come across as self-impressed, but that really didn't happen (in my opinion):

...At 83, Sendak is still enraged by almost everything that crosses his landscape. In the first 10 minutes of our meeting, he gets through:

Ebooks: "I hate them. It's like making believe there's another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of book! A book is a book is a book." ...

The term "children's illustrator" annoys him, since it seems to belittle his talent. "I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can't do that. I'm in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person." He and Eugene never considered bringing up children themselves, he says. He's sure he would have messed it up. His brother felt the same way: after their childhood, they were too dysfunctional. "They led desperate lives," he says of his parents. "They should have been crazy. And we – making fun of them. I remember when my brother was dying, he looked at me and his eyes were all teary. And he said, 'Why were we so unkind to Mama?' And I said, 'Don't do that. We were kids, we didn't understand. We didn't know she was crazy.'"

There was a partial reconciliation with his parents, a moment of understanding. They never made much of his work except once, when he was asked to illustrate a set of stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1978. They were proud of that, he says. For the illustrations, Sendak went back to the family album. "There were the photographs my father had of his younger brothers, all handsome and interesting-looking, and the women with long hair and flowers. And I went through the album and picked some of my mother's relatives and some of my father's and drew them very acutely. And they cried. And I cried. So there was that. And there still is that."

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EDGE OF FIFTEEN: On a recommendation from Kindertrauma, I watched the 1969 suspense flick I Start Counting--and found a melancholic, adolescent movie, all elbows and knees and awkward longing for what used to be and what is still to come.

The basic story: In a small English town where the old houses are being torn down for redevelopment, a Catholic schoolgirl begins to suspect that her (adoptive? step-?) older brother, on whom she has a severe crush, is the local serial killer. The movie portrays England as a culture in its awkward adolescence, childishly trying on big-girl sexy clothes, unaware that its panties are showing. The mystery moves quickly and yet the movie itself feels quiet and lingering, with the girl going back to her ruined childhood home and swaying back and forth in the backyard swing, or bumping her way down the staircase on her bottom after her first encounter with pale ale.

The movie's portrayal of adolescent girls' sexuality is surprisingly sensitive, maybe because it's based on a novel by a woman. Wynne and her friend Corinne skitter nervously from tarting themselves up and enjoying boys' and men's attention to pulling away when masculine aggression goes from thrilling to scary. The movie shows, quickly and fairly subtly, how often men pass off their threats as "only protecting you." These teenage girls' skins prickle when they're around certain older men, but they're also still the kind of foolish virgins who brag about how many men they've slept with.

The movie's flaws pretty much all come in the actual suspense/killer narrative. The two twists are both handled somewhat clumsily, the main villain's Big Villain Speech is wrong-footed in several different ways (although his final line is unexpected and good), and the pacing is strange. I didn't feel much suspense by the time we start finding out what really happened. That's fine (and anyway Kindertrauma disagrees, so you might as well), since I was so invested in the characters and their emotional journeys, but just know that this is a thriller in which a shot of a bulldozer plowing over a sewing machine is much more intense than the reveal of the killer.