“Welcome to life.” So said President Sebastian Pinera today to Victor Segvia, who had spent 69 days underground, and was the 15th miner lifted up from Chile’s San Jose mine. Such perfect words. Such a profound sight, watching these men emerge alive, healthy, grateful, transformed. And I don’t want to mar the tremendous occasion. But I feel compelled to recall another rescue operation, for another soul trapped deep underground, where such a welcome wasn’t, in the end, possible. For this other story—yes, even at a time like this—needs to reach more people. It’s about parents and children. Great effort and loss.

The Chilean miner rescue operation, as President Pinera said, “has been so marvelous, so clean, so emotional.” What follows is a story that is highly emotional, but not marvelous or clean in result. It’s a reworking of a post that originally appeared in connection to the Balloon Boy news event last fall. The link being that the world watched a child in danger, allegedly in Falcon Heene’s case, until the hoax was revealed. The child in danger I meant was a little girl named Kathy Fiscus. The time: 1949. The place: San Marino, California.

The Kathy Fiscus story was one of the first live televised events ever, the blow-by-blow account of a mammoth rescue effort to save a 3-year-old who fell down a well.  ”Kathy’s story grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let me go,” says William Deverell, a father of two, a professor of history at the University of Southern California and the director of the Huntington­ USC Institute on California and the West. “I’d always kind of known about it for decades, but my real interest—scholarly and emotionally, too—began to accelerate precisely when my daughter was the same age as Kathy.”

Professor Deverell gave a lecture on the Kathy Fiscus story in 2008; please, go listen to his podcast or read his article. They are illuminating, devastating. What follows here are mostly some highlights from the podcast lecture; I’m grateful for the fine, thorough work he’s done.

So there are many ways to come at this story; it is prismatic with themes and insights into what this country was like then, postwar, pre-rock-and-roll. You could go with the history of California terrain and politics and note that the area’s wells were dug by railroad magnate Henry Huntington or George Patton Sr., the father of the WWII general. Or you could plumb the early history of television news (see KTLA’s Stan Chambers go into this topic here, scoot up to about 10:50-14 minutes into it).

Or you could investigate the history of labor; many of the men who tried to rescue Kathy were former Seabees or underwater demolition experts in the war; one, Bill Yancey, had rescued a little girl from a cave at Okinawa. These men were now miners, like the Chilean men trapped at the San Jose mine 51 years in the future. They were also well diggers, sewer workers, or cesspool workers.

You could talk about the tangible impact of the story; one month after the event, Governor Earl Warren signed a bill to tighten safety requirements for abandoned wells. And more than $43,000 poured in from strangers to pay the 132 volunteers who led the rescue effort. Many of the men pooled their shares for a Kathy Fiscus scholarship at Pomona College.

But let’s just start, simply, with a mother making dinner. It is around 5 pm on April 8, 1949, Good Friday. Kathy and her 9-year-old sister, Barbara, and their cousins Stanley and Gus are playing out in the field behind the Fiscus’s house. There’s an old well there. It’s small-only 14 inches around-and it had been capped, but somehow the cap had become dislodged, perhaps by a disking machine cutting down the meadow grass. Kathy’s father, David Fiscus, is district superintendent of the California Water & Telephone Co., which had drilled the well in 1903. Stranger than fiction; that self same day, he was testifying before the state legislature in Sacramento for a measure that called for old wells to be sealed up with cement.

From the kitchen window Alice, Kathy’s mother, can see the kids running around in the grass. At one point, she looks up, and she can’t spy Kathy. She leaves the house and hustles out to ask the other children where Kathy is. They don’t know. She piles them in the car and drives toward the school nearby, thinking her younger daughter has wandered off. They can’t find her and they all return to the field. And that’s when Gus hears Kathy’s cries. She’s in the well.

Alice and her sister and brother-in-law, who happen to be visiting that day, drop down a length of telephone cord. It becomes evident that the well is very deep. They phone the San Marino fire department and police, and they call down to the little girl to see if she can hear them, dropping a rope with a slipknot to try and haul her up.

Here’s Time Magazine on what happens next:

“Trying to pierce the darkness of the well, Kathy’s mother called: “Are you all right, honey?” Faintly, from the dark hole, Kathy’s voice quavered: “Yes.”

The Rope Went Slack. Down the dark opening, her mother heard Kathy crying, tried to find out her position. “Kathy, Kathy, is your head up?” she called. “Yes, it is,” Kathy sobbed. “Is your head down?” her mother asked. “Yes, it is,” came Kathy’s voice, thin and frightened. Then there was only the dismayed crying of a child beginning to realize that her mother was not going to make everything all right.”

Her cries cease after an hour and everyone hopes she’s fallen asleep. As word gets out, people start volunteering to go down the well to lift her to the surface. It is 90 feet down, and as I mentioned, only 14 inches in circumference. You needed someone skinny and small. Efforts are made to round up jockeys from the Santa Anita race track, or Johnny Roventini, the diminutive Philip Morris bellboy from the ads, or the thin man from Clyde Beatty’s circus. Kathy’s father, David Fiscus, is reluctant to let another person go down the well, not wanting to endanger a second life. And they can’t get anyone to fit anyway.

So different rescue possibilities are considered. Someone suggests you could use a giant vacuum to suction her out. Someone else wonders if could pour water into the well and float her up. Finally, it’s decided to dig a parallel well, the idea being to get down to where she is and cut across horizontally from the bottom of the new hole to the bottom of the old one. Derricks and bulldozers are brought in.

Within hours, a mile of parked cars line the road, as people surge forward to watch the rescue get underway. Crowd estimates will eventually vary from 5,000 to 10,000. Vendors show up selling “liquor and carnival snacks,” to quote Deverell. Twentieth Century Fox loans floodlights for the night work.

And soon California TV newsmen are there doing live broadcasts-a rarity for the time-their equipment powered by generators. The progress, the stops and starts, the difficulties of the workers’ attempts, are given ubiquitous coverage. Television set sales spike over the 27 hours the spectacle lasts. Some hours in, it becomes clear this is television history.

Indeed, at the end of 1949, the New York Times will pronounce this the most photographed scene of the year. Californians watched on TV (the signal couldn’t go nationwide at that point) and the rest of the country tuned in by radio or shortly thereafter saw the footage in newsreels. As Stan Chambers, the esteemed on-air newsman at KTLA who covered the event, reminisces, “People didn’t have sets. They watched in furniture store windows or a neighborhood bar or at their neighbors. And it went on and on… You were carried away by the whole emotion of the thing.”  Something we take for granted now, as one tragedy/scandal/story pins our attention, each of us able to follow it through images on a screen. But this kind of mass connection, forged partly though rolling pictures seen at the same time? This was new.

Outside the well, David Fiscus walks in circles, chain-smoking. Back in the house, Alice’s sister and minister try to comfort her.

Five of the workers—the ones lowered down the new well hole by jury—rigged elevators to dig the sideways shaft-will become semi-famous for their work, their bravery. The men’s wartime service is part of their mystique. “They are working class heroes,” says Deverell. “They were patriots abroad and now patriots at home.” There are partial cave-ins, sand falls on them, nearly buries them. The cross-tunnel has to be re-dug and more timbers laid to shore up the walls. It is painstaking, frustrating work. At some points, they have to dig by hand, in two-hour shifts, until they don’t have any strength left.

Finally, on Easter Sunday morning, they reach Kathy. Bill Yancey, 90 feet down, wraps her in a blanket; it takes the workers an hour to lift up both of them. The official cause of death will be suffocation. She probably died before the rescue efforts began.

The news of her passing is kept from the crowd for two hours but her parents are told immediately. Later, David and Alice Fiscus will make a statement, expressing their appreciation for everyone’s telegrams and notes, and they ask for donations to be sent to the children’s hospital in Los Angeles:

“Flowers last such a short time. If an equivalent amount of money were sent to the children’s hospital … we feel that our little Kathy’s untimely death might be the cause of saving other children to live a useful life.”

Kathy Fiscus is buried in her white Easter dress holding her favorite doll. Her grave can be found at Glen Abbey Memorial Park in Bonita, California. The inscription reads, “One Little Girl Who United the World for a Moment.”

Pause. Think. Remember. Pray. Whatever works for you.

Now: what does it mean to unite the world for a moment? I suppose the glass-half-empty part of me zeroes in on the brevity. Certainly, we crave the dramatic feeling of sorrowing en masse. But this concentrated grief dissipates, of course, interests turn elsewhere. It’s no one’s fault. It’s how we’re made.  And Deverell says notes and letters arrived at the Fiscus’s house long after the story ended, so the concern lasted in some ways.

There is obvious Christian imagery in the event, framed chronologically as it was between Good Friday and Easter morning, though there is no redemption in the death of a child. And it had its American angle; a country tied together with shared worry for an innocent child, the newspapers running a drawing of Uncle Sam, broken-hearted, offering Kathy’s body up to heaven. Oh, and of course there were spinoffs: country singer Jimmie Osborne recorded a song called “The Death of Little Kathy Fiscus,” which sold a million copies.

But I just want to sweep away all of this, really, and bring it round to parents and children. Alice Fiscus didn’t speak publicly much about Kathy over the years, but what she said is very moving. Deverell relates that Mrs. Fiscus says that the only way she could wrestle with the event was by way of this: her faith that her daughter’s death had saved many a child’s life as a result of the “Kathy Fiscus Safety Laws” passed later. “It always astounds me when I think of all the wonderful things everyone did, giving of their time and hearts,” she said. “I always hope in telling this story again, it might help other children.”

David Fiscus died in 1975. Alice Fiscus died not too long ago, May 23, 2008. (Their daughter Barbara is still living.) In her obituary, it said “she was active in hospital auxiliaries and served as president of three, including the Pomerado Hospital Auxiliary, where she set up the office when it first opened.” So she spent her life as a mother to her daughter Barbara, a wife, and a help to the sick and dying. The family suggested donations be sent to a local hospice.

There are some scratchy-sounding cassettes taped a few decades ago, in which Mrs. Fiscus was interviewed about the event. At one point, she recalled that she’d had surgery six months before that Easter weekend, and doctor’s orders forbade her to pick Kathy up, though presumably holding her on her lap was fine. The morning of April 8, she’d taken Kathy with her to the train station to pick up her sister and brother-in-law. The sound of the train had scared Kathy and she’d leapt into her mother’s arms. Mrs. Fiscus held her close, forget doctor’s orders, and calmed her little girl’s fears.

This train station memory from that morning, Mrs. Fiscus said, has been important to her.

Chilean Miner photo by commondreams.org

Kathy Fiscus Story Photos by askville.amazon.com, findagrave.com, latimesblogs.latimes.com

We’re not really mall people, my family and I. At first, it was because the kids were too young and squirrelly to harness in the crowds. Then because they had a grisly case of the galloping greedy gimmies, to quote the Berenstain Bears (I do things like that now, quote the Bears, because I’m waterboarded into reading them so many nights). And then because we were worried I’d lose my job, and so were trying to be frugal. And now because I have lost my job. And places like Toys R Us are Not Fr Us.

But the other day, I took mallish pity on my smallish daughter. All Tess’s friends were out of town on vacation, and there was no one, no one, to play with, and her dear face and big dark eyes were turning mournful as a velvet painting, and she spied an ad on TV for Build-A-Bear, and she’d saved up her allowance, and now the only thing she wanted in the whole wide world was to go to one of the stores at the mall and lovingly construct a cub of her own, thereby enacting classic transitional object feelings of empathy and identification, thus assuaging the insecurity of the latency period she, at age 7, is about to enter, and so reach that state Jung called Apocatastasis, which means a resurrection or restoration of an original wholeness.

Or, in her words, she was trying to decide between Peace & Hugs Bear or Li’l Coconut Cub.

So I caved. We drove to the mall. My, oh my, it had been so long since I’d felt that kind of retail overload. What to call this mall mood destabilizer? Mall de Mer? Mallschmerz? At any rate, there were the sunlit uplands of The Christmas Tree Shops. Big old J.C. Penney and Sears. The Gap. Silver chrome mannequins decked in on-sale bathing suits. Acres of mid-aisle booths of men’s cologne, zircon earrings, cell phone covers. Iphone 4 slogans everywhere (“Hold Different.” Huh?) The Cinnabon aroma. The spangle and neon of the food court.

Eventually we bivouacked our way to Build-a-Bear: Where Best Friends Are Made. (The company was founded in 1996 in St. Louis, has sold some 50 million bears from some 400 outlets, and posted total revenue of 394.4 million in fiscal 2009. In case you were wondering.) I’d never been to one of these stores before. It is such an alarmingly well-calibrated case study in children’s marketing. Few kids could resist this kind of retail riptide. First of all, the place is tricked up in beckoning primary colors, yolk yellow mostly, with blue-colored puns written all over the walls (CeleBEARate Your Birthday With Us, Pawfectly Huggy, Be Beariffic, You’re Pawsome, Beary Best Regards, Satisfaction Bearanteed.) Then there are these bright red stools on Dr. Seuss-ish-whimsical coiled springs where kids can sit to dress their bears (you buy outfits here too) or enter their bear’s particulars on screens in order to print out its birth certificate. Seriously.

The shopping kids all look excited, feverish almost, and intent, though also cross-eyed by the possibilities. There’s an ursine for every mood and occasion (“a bear fur all seasons,” as yet another store pun puts it). You can choose a Hanukkah Hugs Li’l Chocolate Cub with a blue Star of David t-shirt, a Holy Communion Bear, an Irish Dancing Curly Teddy, bears garbed in Philadelphia Phillies or Tampa Bay Rays shirts, seemingly every sports team, a Hello Kitty Bear, an IHeart ICarly Bear, a Jedi Knight Bear, bears in business suits, fairy wings, chef’s toques. Others in the mammalian kingdom are for sale too. Dogs, ponies, bunnies, kitties. I see they’ve capitalized on the Bo phenomenon, and now offer an American Pride Portuguese Water Dog.

So what about the Build-a part? Well, I don’t think Jacob Riis would find gritty tableaux here for his portfolio. Child labor is minimal; this “building” is to sweatshop manufacturing as cake mix is to scratch baking. Which is to say the kid does a perfunctory, near-symbolic amount, the rest is done for them. At home later, Tess would tell me she felt like the experience didn’t live up to the way the company describes it. To wit: “You can choose, stuff, stitch, fluff and dress your new furry friend.” Yeah, not really.

How it actually works is the kid goes to these bins full of the unstuffed outside part—what to call it? skin, husk, furry exterior enclosure? Then she carries this limp suit to a smiling teenager (Seventeen Magazine says Build-a-Bear is one of the 10 best places to work for teens. I can see why; sure beats swabbing behind the fryolator at Arby’s).

Anyway, Tess weighed her anthropomorphic options for a long time, and finally settled on Brown Sugar Puppy, price point $12. Smart girl; it was one of the cheaper ones, and with the $25 budget I’d given her, she could still afford two outfits. She brought the still-hollow pup over to one appointed teen, who clearly had been given talking points and asked her if she was ready to meet her beary best friend, or something like that, and Tess nodded solemnly. Then Miss Teen asks her to pick out a little red cloth heart from a bin (this was the creepiest part for me, bar none), and make a wish before she implants the heart inside the animal. The teen then intones this litany in which the child is asked to press the cloth heart to her own heart, and her own head, there’s something vaguely Eucharistic about it, and make a wish for the soul and future of Brown Sugar Puppy.

Tess obeyed, and the bear’s heart safely stented within, she was then instructed to kind of gently impale the creature-to-be’s abdomen on a big dowel. Next, the stuffing was jetted into its insides from this giant glass-windowed machine that looks like a cotton candy maker, supersized. The stuffie now stuffed, Miss Teen took the almost-finished creature, flipped it face down as if to burp it, and pulled the stitching together to seal its back. And hello, Brown Sugar Puppy.

I feel sort of bad, sort of callow, saying how all this affected me—meaning not well. Because it was clear Tess was happy, her sadness temporarily stayed by whatever she’d projected onto Emma, as Brown Sugar Puppy came to be named. Writing this in the days that followed, I found myself getting all Seymour Hersh-y, googling the company and trying to dig up dirt. It’s there but it’s minor; in 1999, the owners of the Brown Bear Factory in San Francisco sued Build-A-Bear for misappropriating trade secrets, copyright infringement, etc. It was settled out of court. In 2003, a product named Founding Bear had to be recalled since it posed a choking hazard, when it became clear a child could twist off its nose. A toy chair was recently recalled too. Fairly standard corporate misbehavior, nothing too serious.

I tried tracking down conditions in the Chinese factories where the bear materials are made. Couldn’t find much, but even if they’re stellar, there’s the obvious and even painful discrepancy, as I’d later say to Tess (she’s used to my fight-the-power world view) between the poor people in China who make the materials for rich people like us in America. (Even if I’m jobless, I’m still rich compared to most of the world). And that makes me uncomfortable. Then again, it doesn’t seem like there’s anything egregious going on here. This is from Build-A-Bear’s corporate web site: “Our supplier factories are compliant with the International Council of Toy Industries (ICTI) CARE (Caring, Awareness, Responsible, Ethical) certification, a program to promote ethical manufacturing, in the form of fair labor treatment, as well as employee health and safety, in the toy industry supply chain worldwide.” Okay. I decided to also tell Tess that it was probably true that Chinese moms and dads making the bear materials could support their family on their wages. Yet, I said, I still didn’t feel good. “But I think the Chinese people are really nice to make the bears,” Tess said, in reaction to her downer mom. “And they must like us because they want to make us happy. Because Emma makes me happy.”

Okay, point taken. And really I’m kind of blowing smoke here. Because if I’m really honest with myself, I have to admit to now having a real PTSD relationship with any corporation, any large retail outfit, that sells products to children. This is because I worked for the magazine group of the Walt Disney company for eight years, at the excellent parenting magazines FamilyFun and Wondertime, and have had way more than my fair share of labored puns and forced corporate cheer. I love both magazines and am proud to have worked for them. And since we were based in Massachusetts, we were always an outer colony to Orlando or Burbank, and so weren’t as enmeshed in the Disney corporate culture. I will also add that there were a number of people I admired in the company at large. On top of that, I totally acknowledge that Disney shines at things it doesn’t get enough credit for; judiciously welcoming gay employees, for instance, and helping every single sick child who has a dream of coming to the parks through their Make-a-Wish foundation.

That said, the Build-A-Bear visit was a big fat trigger for me. As became apparent when Tess printed out her bear’s birth certificate: July 17, 2010. It was July 17, 2000 when I signed on to The Mouse. The similarities seemed all too much. At Disney, it wasn’t Satisfaction Bearanteed, but it was the Big Idears program (a play on Mickey Mouse’s ears). It wasn’t Be Pawsitive, but it was “Have a Magical Day,” which is said without irony when you talk to someone at the parks or even HR. You didn’t work in corbearate sales, but you were called a “cast member” instead of an employee.

So what’s my problem? Well, I’m not naïve. All corporations have to make money, all reinforce morale in their own way, with their own biz school patois. But there’s something really distressing and unseemly when that rah-rah culture, with the childlike overlay, slaps up against cold economic reality. Believe me, when I was laid off in 2009 along with all of my colleagues at Wondertime magazine, which Disney owned and folded, there were no magical days or big idears. No circle of life, no colors in the wind, no spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. Suddenly, the reigning euphemism was anything but chirpy. “Our separation,” they kept calling it. There was a lot of talk about our separation, how it would go, how we’d separate. Hey, you can’t break up with me, I wanted to holler,  I’m breaking up with you!

What I’m trying to say is that, once you’ve looked behind the scenes at the creation of a children’s product, lived the corporate culture that produces such a product, assessed the mark-up on the profit, felt the deep disconnect between image and reality, gotten dizzy from the marketing spin—but also noted happiness on your kid’s face, and then realized it wasn’t enough to keep you from falling, falling, like the silhouetted man in the Mad Men credits—it’s hard to claw your way back up to any remote state of innocence.

So that’s the story of my existential crisis at the Build-A-Bear workshop. Tess, Emma, and I would like to thank you fur bearing with us.

Photo from popham elementary school

Photo from the bentall shopping centre

Photo from Build-a-Bear

I began my clockwise loop of Silverlake reservoir in the late afternoon, when the traffic is thin and the sun is low.  Hugging the perimeter on the dirt path, I ran past a few leisurely joggers, a teenaged couple holding hands, and a guy smoking a cigarette.

One mile in, I reached the only substantial uphill and found myself on a collision course with a small family – two sporty-looking parents, one red stroller, and a muscular short-haired mutt.

Both parents’ eyes were obscured by sunglasses.  Were they looking at me or not?  Their body language was clear—bold forward marching despite the steep downhill—they would not be moving aside.  I tried not to take it personally.  I’ve been the tired parent pushing the stroller and it is easier for the unencumbered runner to make way.  I stepped onto the grass.

As I passed, their dog went for me.

The mom’s arm jerked with the leash, the warning bark sounded, the dog shot across the path, its jaws open.

My impulse was to react like any sensible veteran runner:  I would kick the dog in the head.

In my reactive youth I kicked a few dogs – pets being walked by bohemian couples and guard dogs that escaped from their lots and expressed unwelcome interest in me.  There were plenty of strays moseying along my old running route in Brooklyn and not half of them were friendly.  I kicked out of fear and in self-defense.

But it’s been years since I felt the need to protect myself on a run, or control the impulse to.  Not since I had children.  Now that I’m a mother, I give stern lectures and have one-sided discussions about impulse control every day.

“Just because he grabbed from you, doesn’t mean you can punch him.  And you—don’t antagonize your brother,” I say to my four- and six-year-old sons.

The boys have plenty of peaceful, meditative pursuits—they read, they draw, they sing—but above all else they love to throw, kick, and shoot things.  Among their peers, they experience aggression as a way of righting wrongs and gaining power.

“For my fifth birthday, I want a skateboard with a shotgun mounted on the front.”

Inspired by their literary heroes in The Swiss Family Robinson, The Great Brain, and Danny Champion of the World, my sons build catapults, slingshots, and booby traps.  When they are involved in their projects they don’t want to listen to my boring practical concerns, such as homework, dinner, bath, and bed.

I’m engaged in the struggle to model good behavior, to use the parlance of our neighborhood nursery school, and also set the limits.  That means keeping my road rage, ill-considered battles, and rough judgments in check.

One evening last year my older son’s disregard for my instructions so infuriated me that I spiked the telephone on the floor to emphasize my point, a point I no longer remember.  The receiver shattered, spraying AA batteries beneath the dining table.  My ferocious reaction terrified all of us.

I don’t want to frighten my children, or alienate them, or irrevocably damage their psyches.  But I do need them to listen, to follow directions, to grant my reasonable requests.

“You don’t have to take out the gasoline and matches; a strong word will suffice,” my husband said, privately in the kitchen.

The new mother couldn’t control the powerful dog.  I gasped and jumped further away from the path.  I have learned to accept the fact that none of us gets to move unimpeded through the world.  I stumbled, but I kept my feet to myself.

No apologies ensued.  Instead both parents hollered, not at their dog but at me, “Can’t you get out of our way?”

I thought about kicking the mother instead.  I could see the allure of a skateboard with a mounted weapon, not to mention gasoline and matches.  But cruelty is not edifying, no matter how we may remember it from the playground.

I didn’t even yell, “I hate you!”  As my sons do, in frustration.

I kept running.  I teach my family to use reason and empathy to resolve their differences and grievances.  If they slip, they still get a pass.  But if I kick a dog, I’m a jerk.  The second chances don’t come so easily.

“Remember that time you threw the phone as hard as you could and it broke?” My son brings it up whenever we talk about anger, vulnerability, rivalry, competition, or any of my shortcomings.

“I’m sorry I did that.  That was a mistake.”  I owe my kids the straight talk I expect from them.

“It’s okay, Mom.  I frustrated you because I wasn’t listening.”  He’s still got second chances for me.

I don’t want to be a woman who kicks dogs-or even a woman who yells at strangers.  It’s best to keep the gasoline and matches on a high shelf, safely out of reach.  Right beside the lethal skateboard.

Photo from tvtropes.org

“God bless my mother; all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her.” So said Abraham Lincoln of his beloved mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, whom he lost to milk sickness—she drank milk from a cow who’d grazed on white snakeroot, it’s poisonous—when she was 34 and her son age nine, old enough to help his father plane pine boards and carve wooden pegs to make the coffin they buried her in. She died two weeks after drinking the blighted milk, as did several others in their village of Little Pigeon Creek, Indiana. It was October 5, 1818. Dennis Hanks, Nancy’s cousin, paints the death scene: Nancy called Abraham and his sister Sarah to her bedside and asked them “to be good and kind to their father, to each other, and to the world.”

I love to read about Lincoln, his genius, his flaws—right now I’m absorbed in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s marvelous Team of Rivals—and my husband is a civil war buff, but we’re not reenactor types starving ourselves to look like hungry Confederate troops dressed in uniforms dyed with butternut squash, since they’d run out of grey dye by the end of the war. (Cool fact, no?) Please not to worry, please to read on.

Anyway, if you’re already interested in Lincoln, you’ve probably come across this “all that I am or ever hope to be” quotation. It justifiably adorns (with some variation in the wording) most of the books and compendiums on this greatest of men. How beautifully kind, I used to think each time I lit upon it. What a statement of indebtedness. How heartbreaking.

But in honor of Mother’s Day—for certainly motherhood is kind and indebted and heartbreaking, but also infinitely, raggedly complex to the mother and mothered—I want to dig a bit deeper here.

Because this quote isn’t what it seems.

To understand why, it’s probably best to start by explaining that much of what we know about Lincoln’s early life shakes out to us through William Herndon, his law partner and confidante in Springfield, Illinois. It was Herndon who told scholars a few years after the president died—Lincoln asked he wait to reveal it posthumously—that Nancy Hanks was an illegitimate child. Nancy’s birthfather, Lincoln told Herndon, was a “Virginia nabob” or “well-bred gentleman” who took advantage of “his poor credulous grandmother.”

To give you some context, realize that the phrase “well-bred gentleman” here packs a substantial punch. Lincoln’s biological grandfather was an educated man, presumably, a cultured man. A man vastly different from Lincoln’s own parents; Nancy and Thomas Lincoln, Lincoln’s father, could barely write. Nancy could read fairly well—just listen to the Gettysburg Address to see how Abraham Lincoln absorbed the Biblical cadences from the passages she continually recited to her children.

But Thomas Lincoln could only read rudimentarily and saw less worth in his son’s love of books; he was known to strike him to get him to stop reading and get back to his chores. Nancy and Thomas came from decidedly humble stock. (There is no known photo of her, the painting above is a composite attempt.) In other words, they were anything but a gentleman and gentlewoman.

Here’s how Herndon describes Nancy Hanks, a bit patronizingly if you ask me. And of course, he’d never met her, so keep that in mind. Consider his description as Lincoln’s own, with Herndon’s prejudices interwoven:

“Nancy Hanks Lincoln was a woman of a very fine mind, an excellent heart, quick in sympathy, a natural lady, a good neighbor, a firm friend; good cheer and hilarity generally accompanied her, and had she been raised at all, she must have flourished anywhere, but as it was, she was rude, tough, breaking and having difficulty through all forms, conditions, customs, habits, etiquette of society.  She could not be held to forms and methods of things, and yet she was a fine woman naturally. It is quite probable that a knowledge of her origin made her defiant and desperate; she was very sensitive, sad, sometimes gloomy; who will tell me the amount and influence of her feelings, in this matter, caused by the consciousness of her origin?  Let the world forgive her and bless her, is my constant prayer.”

Abraham Lincoln often tried to puzzle out where his own intelligence, ambition, and talent sprang from. He was so different from his parents; why? Over time, it seems he narrowed down the source to his mother’s early devotion to him—and how she encouraged his learning in spite of her own lack—but even more to these alleged noble bloodlines of her father. Her unknown, un-named father. This break in his family tree pained Lincoln and tantalized him. “I can’t bear to think that I don’t know who my grandfather was,” he reportedly told his stepnephew John J. Hall.

In other words, that “all that I am or ever hope to be” part of Lincoln’s touching quote? Not so touching. Rather, it is mostly this: a genealogical gratitude. Hey, thanks for the genes.

What the? It’s hard, as a mother, not to feel deflated here. To put it in modern parenting-speak, Lincoln feels most beholden to his mother for her nature, less her nurture. And that nature (thank you, patriarchal system!) comes from this mystery man. As if his mother was a mere conduit. (See David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln, page 23, for confirmation.)

By the way, that mystery man created a minor industry of speculation after Herndon’s revelation of Nancy Hanks’s illegitimacy surfaced. Many tried to track down who this father was. Various names were offered up. The Planter-Grandfather Legend, it was called. The most amazing story came to focus on John C. Calhoun as most likely to be Lincoln’s grandfather. This would’ve been a shocker, the ultimate tabloid story of its day. Remember who Calhoun was? Only one of the South’s greatest proponents of slavery and states’ rights of all time, a U.S. Senator from South Carolina, on a par with Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, and our nation’s seventh vice president.

A great man, in other words, certainly a well-bred gentleman—but utterly on the opposite side of Lincoln politically. (That’s him above, glowering.) I thought this was rather a crackpot theory. Until I came across the fact that Nancy Hanks’ mother was a barmaid at a tavern that Calhoun frequented in his early days as a lawyer. You want to go down the rabbit hole of speculation? Be my guest and click here.

But let’s leave aside the grandfather issue for a moment. For if you read even harder between the lines of Lincoln’s homage-to-his-mother quotation, you may just deflate altogether. For let us zero in on the “ALL that I ever am.” This is an insult, conscious or unconscious, to Lincoln’s father. Think about it; how would you, as a father, like to read your son say “All that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her”? Um, all? Didn’t I have anything to do with it? Easy and I suppose obvious to take the oedipal route here. Lincoln rejected his father in favor of his mother. Rejected his alive and troublesome father for his sainted and perfect-in-memory dead mother. Rejected the Lincoln heritage, in favor of the Hanks alleged strain of aristocratic DNA.

Lincoln was not close to his father; he considered him crude, lacking in ambition. According to the eminent Lincoln scholar David Herbert Donald, in all of Lincoln’s writings and speech, “he had not one favorable word to say about his father.” Much has been made of the fact that Lincoln didn’t attend his father’s funeral. He did go to Thomas’s sickbed the winter before, and Thomas did die just when Abraham’s wife Mary Todd Lincoln had given birth to their third son, Willie. So maybe that was a legitimate excuse. Or maybe not.

It must be said that Lincoln did name his fourth son Thomas (thenceforth called Tad, pictured with Lincoln at the bottom of this post), presumably in honor of Thomas Lincoln. It took him four sons to get there, but he got there. By the way, Abraham is named for Thomas’s father Abraham, who was killed by Indians in Kentucky in 1786 and basically broke up Thomas’s family. Thomas had great hardship in his own childhood. (That’s him above in the side-by-side photo, next to his second wife, Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln.)

You’d think Abraham might have had more sympathy for his father, or honored some of the values he handed down. Thomas Lincoln was an ardent anti-slavery man, a great teller of stories, both qualities that elevated his son. The lack of empathy is even more curious when you consider the man who “now belongs to the ages,” as Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton said at the president’s deathbed. See how Doris Kearns Goodwin writes of the Great Emancipator who so empathized with an entire race he set them free. “He possessed extraordinary empathy—the gift or curse of putting himself in the place of another, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires… Lincoln’s remarkable empathy was inevitably a source of pain. His sensibilities were not only acute, they were raw.”

But that empathy seemed to short out with his father. Is that so unusual? Well, hardly; how much slack do you cut your own parents? As opposed to your sympathies for those less close to you, with less history entangled with your own…

So. Is the “all that I ever am or hope to be” quote utterly tainted? Utterly lacking in true feeling for his mother as a person unto herself? You know, I don’t think so. But (you’re used to this by now, thanks for staying with me!) you have to dig deeper yet again to come out the other side. One has to wonder if Lincoln was latching on to what Freud called “Family Romance,” the idealizing of one’s “real” origins, rather than the unfortunate or banal circumstances of one’s actual existence. The particulars of Lincoln’s story don’t fit the Family Romance parameters exactly: he’s focused on a grandfather, rather than the father. But I think there’s something here. I’ll quote from the International Dictionary of Pscychoanalysis:

“The family romance is a conscious fantasy, later repressed, in which a child imagines that their birth parents are not actual but adoptive parents, or that their birth was the outcome of maternal infidelity. Typically, the fantasy parents are of noble lineage, or at least of a higher social class than the real parents…The family romance fantasy has several possible aims and sources: revenge against frustrating parents; rivalry with the parent of the same sex…”

Here, I can only feel sympathy for Abraham Lincoln engaging in some “family romance.” He was grief stricken, he was traumatized. The boy lost his mother at age 9—his mother whom he would later refer to as his “angel mother,” not because she was an angel in temperament so much as an angel because she was not of this earth. This, because he got a new mother, a stepmother shortly thereafter. The  ”angel” was his way of distinguishing the two, for he would call his stepmother (Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln) Mother for the rest of his life.

A little bit more Lincoln family history, just to clarify and broaden: not long after Nancy Hanks died, Thomas went back to Kentucky to procure a new wife and mother for his children, as was the custom in those hard pioneer days. Sarah Bush Johnston, an old acquaintance of his, had not only been recently widowed, but her husband Daniel Johnston had left her with three children of her own and a load of debt. A mutual aid package was presumably put forth. Thomas proposed marriage to Sarah, whom everyone called Sally, and offered to pay off her debts if she’d come back and live with him, Abraham, and his daughter Sarah, in Indiana.

A friend of mine, one who enjoys botany, once said that some children are like a tropism. The word comes from the Greek “to turn” and simply means that a biological organism is wired to turn to the source of stimulus, and thus survival. My favorite tropism is heliotropism, how sunflowers turn their shaggy heads to the sun as it arcs through the sky toward evening.

Abraham Lincoln had the gift of, oh call it emotional heliotropism. He turned to any source of light and warmth he could find. His angel mother, of course. And his much beloved older sister Sarah—who at the age of 12 cared for and protected him alone in their cabin for many months when Thomas left to bring Sally from Kentucky back to Indiana. And even before that, Sarah behaved “as a little mother” to him, as you’ll see from this quotation from the schoolmaster’s daughter from the Kentucky one-room schoolhouse the Lincoln children attended in 1815-1816:

“I remember his big sister bringing him to school the first day. Oh, she was fond of him, she also attended school there; and all day long, whether at lessons or at play, her careful eye was constantly watching him. She was a regular little mother to him. I have seen her on rainy days, or when the roads were muddy, carrying him in her arms to and from the school house. At playtime she would always insist that he play with her and the girls, telling him to keep away from the big boys, as they were likely to hurt him in their rough play.”

Just as Lincoln lost his mother too soon, so he would lose his sister. Sarah Lincoln Grigsby (as was her married name) would die in childbirth at age 19. In Goodwin’s book, she quotes a neighbor who was there when Lincoln got this news: “He sat down on a log and hid his face in his hands while the tears rolled down through his long bony fingers. Those present turned away in pity and left him to his grief.”

So many tragedies. Still, Lincoln had Sally, who came into his life when he was 10—bringing along books to the household such as Robinson Crusoe, which awed him—and by all accounts loved and encouraged Abraham and Sarah as much as her own three children. He was devoted to Sally, and visited her off and on the rest of his life. She would in fact outlive him. David Herbert Donald calls her “one of the most powerful influences in his life.” She herself said Abraham was “a Boy of uncommon natural Talents.” She added that “His mind & mine—what little I had seemed to run together—moved in the same channel.”

Apparently this “same channel” included much humor and practical jokes. There’s a famous story of Sally teasing Lincoln—who at age 18 already stood 6’4″—that he was so tall now he’d soon leave footprints on the ceiling. (Highlights magazine even got mileage out of this story. See the cornball illustration below.) One day, when Sally was out, Lincoln corralled a bunch of younger boys and had them dip their feet in mud outside the house. Then he picked up each boy, one by one, held him upside down, and had each “walk” across the kitchen ceiling, tracking muddy footprints.  When Sally Lincoln spied the muddy footprints there above, Lincoln recalled, she “took a broom to my head, but I could tell she was very amused by it.”

As this Sunday, May 9, 2010 nears, let us think about the footprints we leave behind, and read “God bless my mother; all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her” and come to our own conclusions. Our own ever-thorny, complex conclusions as mothers and daughters, as fathers and sons. I supposed the point is to ever re-realize that our children won’t get “all that they are or ever hope to be” from us. That they become who they are in part from their parents, but only in part. That they must turn to the light where they find it. And that the greatest man our country has ever produced had, really, three mothers, who helped make him what he was. To the memory of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Sarah Lincoln Grigsby, Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln, and to all the mothers and children out there, now, before, and beyond: Happy Mother’s Day.

Nancy Hanks photo from barstory@blogspot.com

Thomas Lincoln and Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln photos from artintheage.com

John C. Calhoun photo from wpcontent.com

Muddy footprints photo from highlightskids.com

“‘I’ll take all 68,” was my favorite quotation in last Sunday’s New York Times, really quite a thrilling one, all the better for its terseness. It comes from a whopping front page piece headlined “The Long Road Back: Tactics, Perserverance and Luck Resurrected a Bill,” and it was tossed off by Nancy Pelosi. Here’s the dramatic buildup:

Last week, with a vote drawing near and dozens of House Democrats still wavering—many terrified a vote for the bill would cost them their jobs—House leadership aides arrived at Ms. Pelosi’s office with a list of 68 lawmakers to lobby, turn or bolster. The aides presumed the Democratic leadership would divvy up the names.

“I’ll take all 68,” Ms. Pelosi declared.

And as you can see from the historic, wildly messy, yet-again-back-on-the-defibrillator trajectory of the health insurance bill, Pelosi didn’t delegate when common sense told others as much. As our kids say, I do it myself. She out-LBJ’d LBJ and arm-twisted those reluctant 68 to get those votes, and enough were twisted to secure the 216 needed (the final vote was 222 Dems, 203 GOP). That same Times piece reports that, at the suggestion of Rahm Emanuel, President Obama had been toying with the idea of diluting the bill further to edge it through, perhaps lariat in a Republican or two.

Pelosi would have none of it.

“We’re in the majority,” she’d told the president, not bothering with bipartisanship since it has so glaringly become a non-starter. Republicans: Yeah, talk about the elephant in the room. “We’ll never have a better majority in your presidency in numbers than we’ve got right now,” Pelosi went on. “We can make this work.” Many Democrats stressed that “her upbeat, unflappable attitude buoyed them through the darkest days after Massachusetts [i.e. Scott Brown's election]. But faced with a member she considered intransigent, she could be scary tough.”

Let us now praise “scary tough” women, pushy women, a group I never really included myself in until I became a mom. (Some years back, when corporations could still afford career-building workshops—mine was a treacly but interesting-in-spite-of-itself event called “Management Journey”—it was determined my personality type officially fell into the category of Amiable. Amiables were scorned by Leaders, or Take Chargers, or whatever the alpha category was called. We Amiables politely thought most of them were Louts.)

What of Pelosi’s management journey? Well, I won’t draw the mother cub analogy too tight; you don’t have to be a mom to be a pushy woman. And God knows, she’d fall into the Leader category. And honestly, I’m not sure I’d want to have a beer summit with her. But let us recall that the woman who stated that “being a woman will no longer be a preexisting condition” (what a great Helen Reddy moment!) gave birth to five kids in six years. (“I was pregnant for a good portion the Sixties,” she has said.).

And let us trumpet the fact that parenting involves a whole lotta advocacy. You advocate for your kids with their teachers, their doctors, their frenemies, and on it goes.  I currently have a mom friend pushing relentlessly for our school district to admit and repair it’s 43 areas of neglect of special needs services, another who’s been pressing several pediatricians to get to the bottom of her daughter’s leg injury, which isn’t healing right, another knocking on every single retail door in town—such a Willy Loman exercise, in this economy!—to sweet-talk contributions for our school fundraiser.  

And to drill down to an even more personal level, there are the infinitely gray (oyster, slate, granite, iron, cinereal!) shades to this pushing business. You can’t, and shouldn’t, push on all fronts, and those fronts change like the March winds, and it can be painfully hard to know when to leave well enough alone. Every single day, we make dozens of calculations on the fly, from should he pour his own damn juice to should she work on her Science Fair project with minimal or medium help (and why must the subject be friggin’ pop rocks again?), to getting him to his piano lesson or deciding oh hell, it’s spring, and he wants to play nerf football with the other guys, and forget about Für Elise für now.

The thing is, everyone pushes hard (i.e., takes all 68) on certain things. I am a stickler about bringing my children to Sunday school, no matter what level of protest. Setting the table, saying please and thank you, weekday screen time limits. But I am a defeatist quisling when it comes to pressing my daughter to clean her room. Get my son to try new foods? Pass the angel hair, no sauce.

Nancy Pelosi raised her family (four daughters, one son) and didn’t plunge into legislative politics until the youngest one hit high school. Before then, she held many volunteer positions in the Democratic party establishment in northern California. Politics is in her DNA; she is the only daughter (she has five brothers) of Thomas and Anunciata d’Alesandro (see below for an old family photo). Her father was a U.S. congressman from Maryland and mayor of Baltimore. She was raised on politics, and she has now been a representative for 33 years. She knows her stuff.

As you know, she is also much-hated on the right. They call her a hag. They use the word Botox a lot. Rush Limbaugh likens her to a terrorist, calls her a mullah. 

Not at all to lean toward that camp, but here is the part where I do the on-the-other-hand thing. As an Amiable, and thus a diplomatic Ban Ki-moon sort, I have a hard time with her blunter statements because I think they can unnecessarily alienate. (She publicly called George Bush “a jerk” and “incompetent.” In the Times piece, it was revealed that she talked down to President Obama so much that he snapped, “I am not a stupid man.” )

I’ll also point out the fact Pelosi doesn’t have to worry about her seat or her income, and therefore can get away with tossing around fiery words. Her San Francisco district votes 85% Democrat—the woman represents Haight-Asbury, for God’s sake—so she doesn’t have to court Independents and moderates like most of her House colleagues. Her husband is an investment banker with many real estate holdings (including a Napa Valley vineyard, sweet!) and their worth is estimated at upward of $12.5 million. Thus she can devote herself to fundraising for others—which I’ll wager sweetened the pot for some of the more recalcitrant 68.

None of this takes away my respect for her grindingly hard work, her epic level of coaxing, her pedal-to-the-medal politicking for what I believe is a great cause—one that will nurture my family and so many other families I know, and you millions out there. We owe her our bottomless thanks because she’s taken that parent-as-advocate paradigm to its broadest level. “To me, the center of my life will always be raising my family. It is the complete joy of my life,” Pelosi once said. “To me, working in Congress is a continuation of that.”


I won’t 86 “I’ll take all 68″ as my favorite quote. But you know what? This one hits home too.  

Photo by Life

I remember I could only manage the Fishing Channel. Any sitcom, no matter how chuckleheaded—why did that lady knock on that door? why is that guy laughing?—was like reading Heidegger. The news, PBS, movie channels, all seemed to be in some sort of cuneiform, unfathomable. But the Fishing Channel? A line is thrown out, a pretty fish is caught, people look happy, there’s sun and spangled water; that I could handle. This was when I was pregnant and had hyperemesis gravidarum: hyper means excessive, emesis means vomiting, gravidarum means during pregnancy. It’s morning sickness, in a class by itself.

For a long, long time—months—I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t parse sitcoms, because I couldn’t keep any food down. Hell, I couldn’t keep a sip of water down. My throat got scarred from constant vomiting. I had to go on i.v. fluids. I went on serious anti-nausea drugs, pumped through the i.v. (because I couldn’t swallow them). No one wants to read about pregnant women throwing up, trust me, so I’ll spare you more details. Let’s just say that I went to the emergency room often, and I got to the point where I couldn’t function. Just think of how you feel when you have the worst stomach flu of your life, or food poisoning. Then think of feeling that way for months at a time. It was true hell.

Anyway, with little nutrition, and not thinking straight, I cried a lot, I was in despair, and so I lay on a mattress my husband had dragged out to the living room where the tv was, and he (my hero) told me we’d get through this, cleaned me up, and changed my i.v. tubes, as he’d been taught by the visiting nurse, while I lay in my Fishing Channel stupor. One day the nurse visited, and I managed to form a coherent question. I asked her who else she saw on her rounds. “Pregnant women like you,” she said. “And chemotherapy patients.”

That put things in perspective. I was one of the lucky ones; I knew my sickness would end. And I knew (I prayed) there would be a healthy baby at the close of it. The sickness did end. The baby is now 10 years old and strapping—for God’s sake, he weighed 10 pounds, 4 ounces when he was born. (The doctors joked that he helped himself to everything from the buffet table of Mom, leaving none left over.) I should add that the exact same scenario unfolded when I was pregnant with our (9 pounds, 3 ounces) daughter three years after our son. I was just as sick, there were i.v. and drugs again, and she came into the world healthy too.

What does all this have to do with Parenting Ethics? Well, I will say that I have my own dark nights of the soul here. I took drugs—Reglan, Zofran, Compazine, Phenergan suppositories, and low-dose Prozac—when I was pregnant. No one really knows if they might have affected my children in utero. In retrospect, we didn’t ask enough questions. We were so desperate. We did what the doctors said. But now, when I see my kids struggle with something, with anxiety issues, especially, I think—My God, is it something I took? Should I have toughed it out? Did I think more of myself than of them? What do you do when there isn’t enough research, enough data to make a good decision?

So I was heartened to see that, finally, there is some significant research launching on the root causes of HG, as hyperemesis gravidarum is known in shorthand. It is being partly funded by the wonderful HER Foundation, which stands for Hyperemesis Education & Research and was founded by a registered nurse named Kimber Wakefield MacGibbon, in 2000. Like me, like all of us who’ve suffered from HG, MacGibbon was appalled at how little is known about severe morning sickness (much less standard morning sickness) and set out to right that wrong.

Thus this HER Foundation collaboration with the University of Southern California and UCLA, the study conducted by Marlena Schoenberg Fejzo, PhD. Fejzo is trying to get saliva samples from thousands who’ve had HG, to test for epidemiological and predisposing genetic factors. You don’t have to live in California, or actually visit her lab. She’ll send you a kit and you can spit into a cup and send it back to her. Check out this video in which Fejzo explains what she’s trying to accomplish in her research—she suffered through epic HG herself—and click here to help participate in the study. (And if you didn’t have HG, but know someone who did, do a mitzvah and forward them the link. Thank you.)

I can’t stress enough how important this is. When I was pregnant in 1999 and 2002, no one really knew what to do with people like me. How many of us are there, actually? According to the HER Foundation, the “total incidence of the disease is unknown, in part to inconsistent diagnostic criteria; however, .05 to 2 percent of US pregnant women are hospitalized for HG each year. International studies report an incidence of HG as high as 10 percent.” Nowhere near the number of women who had typical morning sickness—but if you’re one of them, I suspect you have an inkling of what HG sufferers endured. 

The HER Foundation’s web site is also helpful in cutting down canards about hyperemesis: The condition was once thought to have a physiological cause—toxins, ulcerations, or infections. But that has hardly been the case of most HG victims (at best guess, it’s something to do with the hormonal shifts in pregnancy). HG has also, and this is just so thoroughly maddening, been thought to be psychosomatic. I cannot tell you how infuriating it was, when I was sick, to have someone suggest meditation, or ask about my worries about becoming a mom, or inquire about stress in my life—I’m pregnant and throwing up like a frat boy on grain alcohol every day, yes I’m stressed out!—or recommend ginger candy, sea bands, raspberry leaf tea, or saltines, thinking they were being helpful. I know, they meant well. But we were so, so beyond that.

Certain illnesses become the pivot points of your life. Ever since my kids have been born, whenever I have a bad day, I think it’s all relative—because nothing has been as bad as my pregnancies. It’s a kind of kryptonite, really. I am made of stronger stuff now. My marriage is made of stronger stuff. And so far in our life together, this has been our greatest trial (the stress on the spouse is colossal) and we survived. 

As it is with all illnesses, start researching and you always find someone worse off than yourself. Among my friends, I’m the cautionary tale, the most extreme case in their outer circle. But each seeming-eon of my sickness ended after three months or so. There are women who were—who are now, God help them—gravely ill for all nine months, women who suffer the medical and psychological repercussions long after the baby arrives, women who have to terminate their pregnancies,

I often wondered—why me? My mother had standard morning sickness, nothing like this. Both of us get severely seasick, though; is there some problem with balance brought on by hormonal changes? Who knows. At any rate, I’m signing up for the study, and I’m proud to spit for science. (It beats throwing up for science, that’s for sure.) And I’m going to update you on what Fejzo finds out. In the meantime, this goes out to my HG sisters, whether they fell under the charms (the lures?) of the Fishing Channel or not. Let’s reel in the cause, let’s troll for the cure. Because we wouldn’t wish this on anyone, anywhere, ever.

So lately I’ve been driving in our messy van with my kids and their buddies, first graders to fourth, and they’ve been browbeating me into punching the radio until we land on a song they like. It’s all very loud. Loud, funny, and kind of unsettling. At each station, with each blaze of notes, they blast the back of my head with group yells of “No!” or “Yes!” and an occasional wintry mix of “No/Yes!” This experience is very Margaret-Mead-in-Samoa for me; the tribe has its ethno-ways, sky-blue obvious to them, but cloud cover to a scorned elder like myself, trying to understand the anthropology of, in this case, their burgeoning musical tastes.

Or maybe it’s not so much Margaret Mead. Maybe it’s more like Shirley Jackson, author of that chilling short story “The Lottery.” Because punishment comes from the majority and it is merciless. If a station plays even a hint of acoustic anything, from Dylan to Travis Tritt, they yell cruelly “No Country!” And I must stone the song to death. If there’s a certain mustiness of sound, they chant “No ’80s Music!” which appears to be a catchall for everything from maybe 1957 to 1999. When I asked one car crew how they knew what was “’80s Music,” my daughter’s friend Adele, age 7, kind of tilted her head, and said in this lugubrious, hokey tone, “It goes Dah. Ta Dah. Dah. Ta Dah. Dah.” All the other kids nodded in agreement. Loser: couldn’t I tell? 

Here are some songs that get the “Yes!” shouts (these are all youtube links, g’wan and have a dance party!): Katy Perry’s “Hot N Cold” (sounds like a pounding Pilates class), “Replay” by Sean Kingston (actually quite sweet), Rihanna’s “Live Your Life,” (kind of turgid), Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours” (I admit it, I love it) and Owl City’s “Fireflies.” (Ubiquitous ear candy and, as the New York Times damns with faint praise  ”mom-friendly.” Ouch. But true. These are lyrics Tipper Gore could love.)

And then there are a bunch of other songs that filter in and out of my brain that I can only vaguely recreate. The kids know the titles, artists, and lyrics much better than I do, naturally. And my twentysomething friends are probably now laughing at the Old News quality of this post. Um, yeah, we know all these songs. We hear their ringtones like every second. Where have you been? It reminds me of the time my mom, then 65-ish, fresh from a senior citizen exercise class, asked me if I’d heard of this fun group called “The Beach Men.”

Anyway, the blunt truth? I had to google lyrics just now to even pin down the titles of the songs I knowingly, blithely cited in that info-heavy paragraph before last. (Like “Replay”: Is it “Shiny’s Got a Melody?” Or “Chinese?” Oh, it says “Shawty.” Uh, oops.) Then I checked out youtube and wikipedia to make sure I had the artists’ names right. So I will now confess that I never even heard of Jason Mraz or Sean Kingston until twenty minutes ago. I’d heard of Rihanna, vaguely—a supermodel? A star of Lost, which I don’t watch? A one-named chef like Emeril?—but didn’t know who she was until I caught her 2009 New Year’s Eve show.

But, you know, I’m okay with my ignorance. More than okay. In fact, I’m here to sing the praises of my ignorance, my embarrassing lack of knowledge, my paucity of hip. Because, the more I think about it, this lack is another necessary, even classic, role in my life as a parent. My kids need my irrelevance. And this goes out to all you parents out there, even the ones who may know all these songs and are like a dime. (“Like a dime.” It means you’re perfect, a 10. It’s in that song “Replay.” I just looked it up. Margaret Mead in Samoa, remember?)

What was I saying? Oh, yes, this goes out to all you parent people: really, how can our children define themselves without us as foils? They need the generation gap to connect with their friends, have songs to crank at their weddings when everyone is tipsy and past caring, and we must help dig that gap. That gap is part of their infrastructure, a path, a road (block that metaphor, I know!) to their independence, their search for identity. Mom likes Rosanne Cash singing “Heartaches by the Number.” Daughter Likes “If We Were a Movie,” by Miley Cyrus. Dad likes The Doors singing “Break On Through.” Son likes “The Final Countdown,” which for God’s sake is ’80s music, and he and his friends belt it out oaf-in-the-bleacher-seats style, their t-shirts on their heads like pharoah headdressses at sleepovers after they watch Weird Al Yankovic’s “Trapped in the Drive-Thru” on youtube and eat so much pizza they get stomach aches and have to go home.) 

But I digress. What I’m trying to say is this: One of the ways we can best raise our kids is to fail, at the right time, in the right way, to be part of their world. Fail in a way that hopefully amuses them as much as it pains them. This allows the next generation that lovely feeling of healthy contempt. It’s the same contempt I felt as my parents listened to those chirpy, soul-wrecking Sing Along with Mitch LPs, when any sane person would have been in tangerine trees with marmalade skies.

Twas ever thus: While I was laundering onesies, and then helping toddlers go up the down slide and then urging my pissed-off preschoolers to Use Their Words, and then teaching them how to pump on a swing, and then reading Bread and Jam for Frances to my kindergartner and then having third-grade teacher conferences and then teaching my son the give-and-go for his rec league basketball team (score!), I’ve missed about a decade of popular culture: 1999-2009, personally, artistically speaking, RIP.  

And I missed it all because of you, my sweethearts. So, to my son and daughter, with love:  You go on and be “real worldwide, breakin’ all the rules,” like Sean Kingston sings. As for me, I’ll cultivate my cluelessness, while surreptitiously singing one of your Yes! radio songs. Because, to quote Jason Mraz, oh wise young man: “I reckon it’s again my turn to win some or learn some.”

Photo by glogster.com

Photo by mihaivilcubv.glogster.com

When my son, our firstborn, was a few weeks old, and I was a porridge of hormones, I remember gazing out our car window on Mass Ave in Boston, the busy intersection near the old Tower Records and the Berklee School of Music. My husband was driving, and maybe the revelation that hit me then was because I hadn’t really looked out of car windows for weeks, or at least registered what I was seeing, since my world had crystallized and attenuated to the back seat where I sat with my little boy, sturdy and Charlie-Brown-bald, in his rear-facing car seat, with a blanket even then he kicked off in fury. Mostly I scanned his face. This, as my mind shuttled between blank exhaustion, anxiety at my inexperience, and trying to translate New Baby. Was that an eye rub? So he was sleepy? A bored cry or a hungry cry? Could he suck on my pinky a few minutes before we have to pull over? Look at those eyes. I wonder what color—then dark as shale, alarmingly candid—they’ll turn.

Anyway, he must’ve fallen asleep and I dimly remembered there was something else beyond the window and I looked up. It was shocking. So much life on the streets! They teemed with students with scruffy hair and guitar cases on their backs. Businessmen. Shoppers. Moms with strollers. Tourists. Homeless vets with cardboard signs. And it hit me: Every single person I see was once a baby. Every single one had a mother. This bedrock universality, this fact that I was now a mother of a child, like all these people who’d been children and had mothers who’d likely stared down at them, too, anxious and trying to read their faces too—I started weeping quietly and didn’t stop for blocks.

I realize this sounds ridiculously obvious: as a preschooler once told my friend Susan, in amazement, “My birthday is the same day I was born!” But when you become a parent, certain faded truths seem fresh—we are all connected, yes!—whether their freshness is chemically arranged by hormones or not.  This feeling is, as Van Morrison sings, really, really, really, real. Because somehow you re-enlist in the human race, your heart is permanently changed, and all I can say is that it’s beautiful and also unbearable.

This car window moment, the unbearableness of it, came back to me last week—no polite segue here, I’m afraid—when the news broke that they’d arrested a local young man for setting the run of fires that shocked my town of Northampton, Massachusetts to its core on December 27. (We moved out here in 2000). Arson stories don’t always make the national press, but this one did, largely because of where it took place. The incongruity of it, undoubtedly. Northampton, population 30,000, is a groovy sort of small city, a lesser Portland, Oregon, or Cambridge, Mass., or Madison, Wisconsin, part of what’s known as the five-college area, full of well-educated people, decent restaurants, potters and therapists, a thriving gay community, venues where Shawn Colvin and Rufus Wainwright have played. People come to Paradise City (yes, that’s actually the nickname) for the strong community, the natural beauty, the easy lifestyle. “Shake it and it snows,” as Tracy Kidder wrote in Hometown, comparing the place to a tidy scene in a snow globe.

If you saw the story in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the wire services, you know the basic details. But just to recap: starting around 2:00 in the morning, in a cold rain, 15 fires—houses and cars—were set in the city’s Ward 3 neighborhood within a 75-minute period. On youtube, you can listen to the dispatcher—admirably, remarkably, steady—field all these new reports of flames breaking out, they just keep coming, it’s absurd, and redirecting the local fire trucks and then calling in more engines from a dozen other towns to fill in.

Several families lost their homes and two people died: Paul Yeskie, 81, and his son Paul Yeskie, Jr., 39, a high functioning autistic man who was a sander at the Florence Casket Company. Paul Sr. had told his wife to get out of the house; he’d see to their son. The two men succumbed to smoke asphyxiation, trying to escape through a window.

The Yeskies are an old Northampton family, who can remember when Woolworth’s was on Main Street, and historic condo complexes were still grammar schools, and this was more of a farm town than Paradise City. Paul Sr. was known for his garden, and the fact that he gave much of the surplus vegetables to local charities and nursing homes. Paul Jr. had a routine: dinner at homey Roberto’s Restaurant three nights a week, always served by the same waitress. He went to polka events on the weekends. He loved Cracker Jacks; 117 package wrappers adorn his work area. He’d labored hard to make a life for himself. The piece about him in the local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, will break your heart. (That’s Paul Yeskie Jr. in the above photo in middle school, and below as an adult.)

Tony Baye, 25, the man arrested for starting the fires, is also from an old family here. The Bayes had a potato farm down by the Connecticut River many years ago. Paul Sr.’s brother picked the crop there in his youth. Debra Baye, Tony’s mother, works in the property office at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He was attending Holyoke Community College, and worked as a line cook at a sleek downtown restaurant called Sierra Grille. (The photo below is Baye cooking, taken from his Facebook page. The one at the top of this post is taken at his arraignment.)

Police found Tony Baye driving in the neighborhood around 3:25 a.m. that night, soaking wet, and smelling of alcohol. His alibi—he claimed to be visiting a girlfriend—would turn out to be false. Earlier that evening, he’d been at a Northampton high school reunion event at the Deuce (the World War II Club). His friends are shocked at his arrest; Tony’s a gregarious guy, they said, not a loner, didn’t seem upset. But people in Ward 3 wonder if he set other unsolved arsons from years before; Baye lived in the neighborhood and, chillingly, even joined the Friends of Northampton Arson Victims Facebook page. 

Only 1 in 10 arson case is solved, according to officials who worked on the case. So it’s some excellent police work that located the suspect. That said, of course Baye hasn’t been tried, as we must all keep reminding ourselves. But the evidence has been piling up.

At this stage, we don’t know Baye’s motivations; speculation abounds on the Friends of Northampton Arson Victims Facebook page and in the local paper. Fire-starters can be trying to compensate for childhood abuse, but no one’s coming forward to say this is the case with him. Rumors were flying before Baye was arrested. The neighborhood is right near the I-91 exit; maybe some gang members from grittier places like Springfield or Holyoke came up and set the fires (initiation rites, people said) then slipped back on the highway.

But no. As the Gazette‘s headline said: “A City’s Dread: Malice By One of Its Own?” Bob Flaherty, the excellent reporter who wrote this piece on Baye and the shock over his arrest, coached Baye in Little League. Old-timers knew his family; some forty years ago, I hear, some of the extended Baye family had been killed in a car crash on the way to Boston and, again I hear, the family had never been the same. Tony Baye was a Northampton High grad, class of ’03. A bunch of former students of my husband, who is a high school tutor, are/were friends on Baye’s Facebook page. It all hits close to home.

Last week, I was in immersion mode, reading everything I could about Baye, the Yeskies, the fires, the community, the benefits planned for the victims, the investigation. At this point, I should say that I live on the western edge of town and the fires took place on the eastern edge. This is significant; my family could pretend to distance, to a lesser circle of fear, to a separation of sorts. My friends in Ward 3, though, weren’t sleeping. Every porch light blazed.

It felt creepy, but I went onto the wall on Baye’s Facebook page—which had counted more than 400 friends before the arrest, and steadily inched down in number as they unfriended him, in part to avoid reporters trolling for sources—and looked for clues. I’d quote directly, but his page has now been taken down. Mostly, it was banal: “I aced my accounting quiz,” “I hope the Broncos win,” that kind of thing. But of course, in light of what’s happened, you re-examine typical twentysomething bits of angst like this, written on December 11: “I don’t understand why life has to be so cruel.”

Neither do I. I suppose since this is a post under the page name of Parenting Ethics, it comes down to the fact that empathy is the core of ethics. Because how can we teach our children the right thing, the nuances of their actions and their affect on others, unless they try to comprehend the hearts and minds of those others? Google “empathy and ethics” and you can click to a 1994 academic paper by one Kathleen M. Haney, a professor at the University of Houston. She writes: “Empathy functions to deliver the lived worlds of others, private worlds no longer.” 

Lived worlds of others, yes. That makes sense to me. Private worlds no longer, though, no. Because I can’t breach Baye’s privacy and know what failure of empathy may have motivated him to set those fires. And I can’t know what it’s like to be Elaine Yeskie, mourning the senseless death of her husband and son. I can’t know what it’s like to be Peter and Debra Baye, stunned at what their son has brought down on himself and his neighbors. 

I guess in the end, we all have our own way of identifying with everyone affected by this tragedy. For me, it’s the window I saw through differently when I became a parent. And now, after a decade of parenting, when news like this hits? Well, I suppose I understand less, but I feel more.

Photos from Daily Hampshire Gazette

Photo from Baye’s Facebook page

Photo from Daily Hampshire Gazette